Swam Engine instruments results on receptor 2+

[danmack]

Thanks to Emanuele at Swam and a little more time I have some answers to this question. First off, The Swam clarinet and Bass Clarinet and I would then assume the Saxophones will load and work on the muse Receptor platform. My unit was a standard Receptor 2+ which is the lowest end of the version 2 receptors, pre VIP Trio and Quattro models which have significantly faster processors and a different software interface. On my receptor I was able to load and use them and the manual license process worked very well. Initially I found I was really over driving the CPU and getting a lot of breaking up which I was able to correct by adjusting the sample rate. At 256 samples I was able to play at 96K resolutions with moderate CPU load and reasonably low latency... The only downside for me has been how the swam engine interacts with the receptor software interface. I can not load these into a mixer channel with other plug-ins and switch them in and out via program changes in snapshot mode. On the receptor there is a bypass button which allows the plugin to remain instantiated but bypasses its output and also its CPU load. With the Swam instrument trying to use this button results in a total reboot of the receptor to its last state. There were issues in removing the instruments from their channel position because it would do the same thing and reboot and reload it. My big lesson was to have to manually recreate the mixer bank to its previous state and delete the entire bank with the swam voice in it. The swam instruments can exist and operate on their own mixer bank and can work with snapshots which can toggle the mute buttons but this maintains the CPU load of all the loaded instruments whether they are being played or not. This also means that any other plugin banks will have to re-load which can be time consuming with large libraries like Trumpet and Sax Brothers. I re-iterate that this is on a Receptor 2+ which is being phased out and the newer models use a different software structure so this sort of thing may or may not be a problem with their new software interface. The processor on the new VIP (base model) also runs at 3.0GB so it should handle the instruments more effectively. Oh, by the way, they do sound great and are very expressive too.

Dan