From #Endian=little to #Endian=big: BIG, VERY BIG difference

[Al.Kamala]

I baught a brand new MacPro six months ago and during a very long time I had much deceptions about that: Leopard was still in his infancy and I had to endure many bugs for a certain time, and it was the same with LogicPro 8, all these problems are solved now but I still had a problem: the most of my Zebra patches didn't sound as good as they where sounding on my good old PC. I've been thinking a long time that this was due to my sound card; at the same time some patches seemed to induce irrational CPU peaks, with the result that my sound card had a strange behavior: changing, for example, from a frequency of 96KHz to 95,595Hz.

The things drastically changed today, when I've been reading in the u-he Tech Net that there where two kinds of .h2p patches: the ones with the #Endian=little script line and the other ones with the #Endian=big script line.

This should have to be written in red in the manual: when you use .h2p patches on a MacPro with Leopard and LogicPro8 (I don't now for other big computers and configurations) they MUST have the #Endian line set to =big. The difference in sound quality and in CPU efficiency is simply and completely amazing, particularly with the patches that make an extensive use of the modulation possibilities of Zebra (actually I didn't test this with the other u-he plug-ins), I must say that all this pushed me to buy a new sound card in between, but I don't blame anybody and have no regrets: it will improve my sounds anyway. I just wrote this for the ones who would be angry about their Macpro or Logic or their sound card: take a look to your patch scripts!!!

Have fun with all your u-he toys, whatever they are.

Cheers,

Al Kamala

[Urs]

Uhm, patches on PowerPC are saved as big endian, patches on Intel-compatible prcessors are saved as little endian. When patches are loaded, the endianness is automatically detected. The info is put there mostly for debugging reasons. You can just erase these lines and the patches will still load fine on either platform.

[Urs]

Actually, I went through the code again and can now say for sure that this line is not used at all. I guess I once wanted to use the endian info for something but then decided to make the engine automtically detect the endianness of the binary part (the gibberish on the bottom of a preset). Hence...phewww... it doesn't matter whether Endian is little or big.

[Al.Kamala]

I apologize: you're right, I received my new sound card two days ago, took a bit time to make it work and test it with Core Audio an must conclude that everything works fine now: good sound, no CPU peaks anymore, I'm just a happy man.

Al Kamala