Vember Audio Surge is now open-source

[baconpaul]

I’ve been thinking about making an upsampled copy of all the 64-sample wavetables up to 512 to solve that problem. I wasn’t planning on it for 1.6.2 but it’s easy enough to do. The alternative (which is change the interpolation mechanism) would make a pretty big difference in the sound.

Thanks for the report on reaper shrinking and giving a scroll bar. It looks like an off-by-one type error (namely I resize to 804.32 and I say 805 and reaper thins 804) type thing kicks on the bars since it looks like it would fit otherwise. I’ll open an issue this weekend and see if I can figure out a fix for 1.6.2. You are using the VST2 or VST3?

[maxym.srpl]

Yeah, I forgot to mention: VST2
thank you

[baconpaul]

Great

Issue for upsampling: https://github.com/surge-synthesizer/surge/issues/877
Issue for that zoom problem: https://github.com/surge-synthesizer/surge/issues/1084

If you subscribe to them you can get notification when they are closed. They will only be closed when it is fixed in the nightly. The upsampling one was originally on my 1.6.2 list and I’ll re-add it (basically each wavetable will get a side-by-side upsampling version so “Sine FM2” and “Sine FM2 Hires” will both be present). Will go nicely with some of the other content expansions we are planning for 1.6.2

Thanks for the accurate bug report!

[Saffran]

The zoom problem could have to do with vst3 behaviour.
Noel Borthwick, staff member at Cakewalk by Bandlab gives an explanation.
https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php? ... ming-soon/

[maxym.srpl]

Playing with new vocoder I found it might get stuck on settings which reproduces undesirable sound.
It happens to me twice during half an hour. The first time, I moved High Band to almost max. Since then vocoder was generating crackle at sound beginning and nothing more. Worse is, that moving the slider back didn't help. What helped was Undo (Reaper).
Similar issue I encountered playing with Mod Xpand. Effect stuck with some characteristics and the only way how to make it working again was the use of Undo.

My theory is, that effect slider stops to update vocoder parameters while undo pushes previous preset values directly to the plugin.

Hope it helps

[RunBeerRun]

Surge is awesome, thanks for the x86 build. Now I need to locate enough AA batteries for my rock band keyboard keytar.

[baconpaul]

Playing with new vocoder I found it might get stuck on settings which reproduces undesirable sound.
It happens to me twice during half an hour. The first time, I moved High Band to almost max. Since then vocoder was generating crackle at sound beginning and nothing more. Worse is, that moving the slider back didn't help. What helped was Undo (Reaper).
Similar issue I encountered playing with Mod Xpand. Effect stuck with some characteristics and the only way how to make it working again was the use of Undo.

My theory is, that effect slider stops to update vocoder parameters while undo pushes previous preset values directly to the plugin.

Hope it helps
 

Thanks. Is that the vocoder in surge the synth or the vocoder in surge the standalone FX unit? I think I need to check the ranges i show on those sliders anyway... but I'm not sure why moving the slider back wouldn't fix the problem.

Also: Windows or mac, and VST2 or 3?

On the other issue you reported: I pushed a high-res version of the 64 sample generated wavetables (or many of them) removing that high frequency noise. I kept the old ones there though. And I can repro the reaper scroll bar problem. Debugging it. Both should ship with 162.

[baconpaul]

The zoom problem could have to do with vst3 behaviour.
Noel Borthwick, staff member at Cakewalk by Bandlab gives an explanation.
https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php? ... ming-soon/

The zoom problem in cakewalk is definitely to do with the vst3 api giving me messages I don't expect; but it's not in the API point from that blog post. But perhaps I'll write it up and send a message over to that blog since the devs seem super responsive (as folks have mentioned here before).

Thanks!

[baconpaul]

1. Reaper occasional displays VST container window scrollbars, probably considering VSTi doesn't fit a container.

OK I figured out the problem here, and the answer is "use the surge VST3 not the VST2".

There's a deeper reason than that (VST2 API doesn't actually support resize so resizing is pretty touch and go in the hosts) but that reason leads the the following which is

1. When you shrink Reaper thinks that you are "using" the shrunk part of the "full" rectangle
2. That rectangle API is a bit static. I could change it to return a shrunken version but that breaks several other hosts. If you are really interested in this, and are a dev, I can show you the code path.
3. VST3 has a full blown resize API which Reaper supports in a way which works with Surge and doesn't show this problem.

So the solution for this issue is one of two things

1. Set your default zoom small and only zoom up. Then no scrollbars. Or
2. Set your default zoom to whatever you want but still only zoom up. Or
3. When you get a scrollbar grow your window or
4. Use the VST3 instead of the VST2.

I'll paste this in the GitHub issue also and close it.

Thanks

[maxym.srpl]

Thanks. Is that the vocoder in surge the synth or the vocoder in surge the standalone FX unit? I think I need to check the ranges i show on those sliders anyway... but I'm not sure why moving the slider back wouldn't fix the problem.

Also: Windows or mac, and VST2 or 3?

I'm using VST2 in Reaper on Windows 10.
I'm not sure I understand your (underlined) question. I'm using single instance of Surge as carrier (synth) and vocoder fx (in effect chain). Modulator (voice) is routed from other Reaper's track.

I don't want to make you scary more, but I encountered similar issue playing with wavetable settings (I think sync or so). At some point vocoder did lock to some "sound character" making not possible to change it back. Strange...

On the other issue you reported: I pushed a high-res version of the 64 sample generated wavetables (or many of them) removing that high frequency noise. I kept the old ones there though. And I can repro the reaper scroll bar problem. Debugging it. Both should ship with 162.

Thank you very much!
In the meantime I found some presets based on other wavetables which suffers from the same issue. Maybe it would be worth to consider development of more general solution (ie optionally enabled oversampling or so). Just an idea.

OK I figured out the problem here, and the answer is "use the surge VST3 not the VST2".

Fair enough. Personally, it's not a problem to me, since I'm not changing the GUI size any time. I did it this time to provide feedback for recent build. So reported it.
Anyway good to know that VST3 is free of this issue, so maybe I'll change it. Usualy I stay away from vst3 in favour or vst2 due to negative comments spread over internet about vst3.

Again thank you for your hard work.

[maxym.srpl]

ignore: dup

[baconpaul]

I'm not sure I understand your (underlined) question. .

I don't want to make you scary more, but I encountered similar issue playing with wavetable settings (I think sync or so). At some point vocoder did lock to some "sound character" making not possible to change it back. Strange...

With 1.6.2 we have a completely separate plugin which is just the FX which can be used as an FX. This allows you to vocode non-surge vs non-surge and also just use that nice delay as a standalone.

I’ll see if I can make it stick in extremas. Thanks for the bug report. The band adjustment parameters are all new so there may be a pathological case I’m missing (like if you transiently have hi = low or something it could make a value unstable for remainder). Will peek.

Thank you very much!
In the meantime I found some presets based on other wavetables which suffers from the same issue. Maybe it would be worth to consider development of more general solution (ie optionally enabled oversampling or so). Just an idea.

So the reason for the aliasing is really interesting and deep. If you want hop onto our slack and grab me one day and I can explain but: the aliasing is on purpose because with small sample sets (64 samples per wave) the wave is continued as an (approximate) constant so you get an overlay. My original thought was to fix this.

But we decided not to for two reasons. First, at non-low frequencies it sounds both great and super reminiscent of earlier digital synths. It’s actually oversampled 2x from your sampling rate now, and uses all those oversamples to fill in the harmonic distortion you hear on purpose!

But second one of the hard and fast rules we’ve tried to stick to is: if you have a preset and load it in a new version of surge, it sounds exactly the same. I think this is important for all the users of the synth. So that leads us to solutions like “keep the small wavetables but make side by side large equivalents”. Curious how you’ve seen other soft synth manufacturers deal with that kind of thing.

Anyway good to know that VST3 is free of this issue, so maybe I'll change it. Usualy I stay away from vst3 in favour or vst2 due to negative comments spread over internet about vst3.

Well I won’t add to those comments, but I gotta say it doesn’t seem like it has been the smoothest transition for the soft synth industry. But in surge’s case, with the exception of cubase (ironically) the VST3 is equivalent to or better than the vst2 on mac and windows (and in reaper should be the preferred version all platforms).

Again thank you for your hard work.

Thanks for saying thanks!

[planetearth]

I just finished installing the Sept. 1 nightly build, but I haven't tried it yet. One thing I noticed is that the installer still has problems, in that it still doesn't keep the "uninstall" files together. I use a custom VST3 folder (as many others do), and while I can point the installer to this folder, it still puts the uninstall files the default VST3 folder. In Windows, this is not easy to get to (which is why many of us use a custom folder). I know the uninstall routine should find them wherever the installer put them, so this isn't a big deal, just an observation.

Also, I've been following this thread and testing Surge for about a year, and one thing I've noticed is that the installer file size keeps changing. The Sept. 1 nightly build was roughly 19 MB, down from the 33 MB of the June 6 (1.6.1.1) build and the nightly build from June 6. Both were roughly 33 MB. I'm not asking for a list of what's different, mind you--I'm just wondering if I should expect anything different. (@baconpaul, we talked about this briefly back in June, when I noticed that installer was considerably larger than January's. Again, this isn't a big deal, just an observation.)

Thanks again @baconpaul and everyone else who's been working on this! I'm looking forward to locking in the zoom (using the new feature) so that I can get back to playing with this in Sonar!

Steve

EDIT: I just pulled the 64-bit, VST3 version of Surge up in Sonar, and the new "Set default zoom to..." worked as designed, with a few of the tested sizes (120%, 140%, 150%) looking nice and sharp. Thanks again for your efforts on this!

[baconpaul]

On the installer size: One of the things I did for 1.6.2 is strip out all the bitmap assets we no longer use since we are all svg now. This makes the resource bundle (mac) and the dll (windows) smaller. I also removed some other shipped-but-no-longer-used cruft. Before 1.6.2 though the installer will grow again by about 8mb since once member of the surge team is working on mapping the VSCO cc-0 orchestra to a set of wavetables for surge.

I do know about that uninstalled problem but I have really no idea how to fix it. The innosetup installer maker was written by Claes and we’ve basically not screwed with it.

https://github.com/surge-synthesizer/surge/issues/901

My research showed that maybe the change on that issue would solve it, but changing the install order had some other consequences when I tried it that i didn’t like. If anyone here has innosetup experience some advice would be great.

And wonderful about the default zoom. Glad to hear that!

[planetearth]

On the installer size: One of the things I did for 1.6.2 is strip out all the bitmap assets we no longer use since we are all svg now. This makes the resource bundle (mac) and the dll (windows) smaller. I also removed some other shipped-but-no-longer-used cruft. Before 1.6.2 though the installer will grow again by about 8mb since once member of the surge team is working on mapping the VSCO cc-0 orchestra to a set of wavetables for surge.

I do know about that uninstalled problem but I have really no idea how to fix it. The innosetup installer maker was written by Claes and we’ve basically not screwed with it.

https://github.com/surge-synthesizer/surge/issues/901

My research showed that maybe the change on that issue would solve it, but changing the install order had some other consequences when I tried it that i didn’t like. If anyone here has innosetup experience some advice would be great.

And wonderful about the default zoom. Glad to hear that!

@baconpaul, you mention version 1.6.2, but I'm talking about 1.6.1.1, though it sounds as if we're talking about the same file, and what you're saying here explains the file size difference. Thank you for cleaning up the installer and code, I wish more devs would do that!

That said, the nightly build and current version on the site both refer to version 1.6.1.1, which is the same version I downloaded back in June. I don't know how many updates have been released since then, but it might be time to move the counter forward a decimal point. (And for what it's worth, many of us downloaded a version 1.6.2 back in January, before it was deprecated to 1.6.1 for some reason. So if there will be a "new" 1.6.2, I'll be on the lookout for it.)

The uninstall issue isn't a big deal; I thought you were using a standard installer, where it would be an easy fix. But as long as people can uninstall it (should they want to), I guess it doesn't matter. I use Revo Uninstaller to remove most things, so I haven't tried the Surge uninstaller directly. Revo tries to use the uninstaller that came with the app, but failing that, it takes care of the uninstall itself, so I don't really know if the uninstaller works if you move the VST3 plug-in. I'll try it tonight and let you know.

Thanks again for the work on this!

Steve