KNIFONIUM synth released

[vurt]

quantum is way off for consumers
have you seen the size of them and the cooling required?
there's a reason theres about 20 at most in the hands of various big tech companies.

it's like standing next to a giant alien altar, with a huge thunderous heartbeat.

[wagtunes]

quantum is way off for consumers
have you seen the size of them and the cooling required?
there's a reason theres about 20 at most in the hands of various big tech companies.

it's like standing next to a giant alien altar, with a huge thunderous heartbeat.

I don't think we're talking about VSTs here.

[vurt]

quantum is way off for consumers
have you seen the size of them and the cooling required?
there's a reason theres about 20 at most in the hands of various big tech companies.

it's like standing next to a giant alien altar, with a huge thunderous heartbeat.

I don't think we're talking about VSTs here.

you need a quantum computer to run 200 instances of knifonium.


(tbh i dont know why quantum even came up, i don't think it's useful for the majority of home uses)

[simmo75]

I'm selling Knifonium for $35, PM if you're interested.

[Dasheesh]

first off, quantum came up because this thread went way off track into other territory before it was mentioned, and if you want to have that discussion i'll be happy to, in the quantum thread i pointed to. i also think sales should be kept to the market section. there is a reason it exists, but who am i?

i will not be selling this piece, it is a virtual analog masterpiece. loving it.

[Dasheesh]

also, i think it costs 50$ to sell the thing. pa has one of those resale contracts. last i heard it was 50$ for the first three plug-ins, something like that, i don't remember exactly.

[PatchAdamz]

i will not be selling this piece, it is a virtual analog masterpiece. loving it.

Here is a short tune done 100% with KNIFONIUM:

https://soundcloud.com/vintage-synth-pa ... -knifonium

[chk071]

also, i think it costs 50$ to sell the thing. pa has one of those resale contracts. last i heard it was 50$ for the first three plug-ins, something like that, i don't remember exactly.

It's stated pretty clearly on their website: https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/support.html

You can transfer the plugins to other accounts after a period of 30 days after receiving your license. This period is to prevent fraudulent activities, so we ask for your understanding.
[...]
The fee to activate the plugin is $20 per license and has to be paid by the buyer.

Dynamic Discounts will apply, so if you activate 2 or more plugins you will get a discount of 20% to 60% (with 6 or more items in the cart).

[BONES]

Sure, but dismissing the sound of tube distortion is just more your philosophical stance than anything concrete or logical.

I'm not dismissing anything, I'm just saying that's not how I look at things. I have a more pragmatic approach. Where the distortion happens in the signal path is far more important to me, for example, than what kind of distortion it is. Knifonium seems to let you overdrive anything into anything and that's what I like about it. Same with Trueno and that's all analogue ICs, no tubes or algorithms in sight. It's what I think of as saturation, rather than distortion, and it works a treat most of the time. But, as I said, sometimes a bit of wavefolding works even better, depending where it sits in the signal path. e.g. Some of the wavefolding you can do with Pigment's wavetable oscillators is really good but trying to use wavefolding distortion on vocals generally sounds awful.

So while you thrash around, complaining that nobody emulates tube distortion well enough, I don't care because I'm not wedded to the notion that anyone needs to. I have all the beautiful, brilliant distortion I could ever need.

I bought it the other day without demoing it, (internet was out when it was on sale), and mostly because people rave about it sounding close to what it's modeling. I figured the quality of the built in FX would make it at least worth $39.

That's interesting because the bx_oberhausen thread is full of complaints about how ordinary the effects are, although I find them useful enough. Same with Knifonium, they do the job but I wouldn't think of them as a highlight.

"misdirection and lies" about show? well you probably don't advertise a sci-fi show as a romcom.

Why not? You could certainly find enough grabs in any episode of The Expanse to make a 20 second promo that made it look like a rom-com. And that's the kind of thing we do all the time - misrepresent a show to get people to watch it, emphasise an angle that's not really what the show is about, because someone thinks it will get more people watching it.

Knifonium is not "a valve distortion", it's a software replica of a very specific synth with very specific distortion. It's supposed to sound like that.

Again, anyone could make 100 different presets that sounded identical on both and for most people that would be enough. But, in the end, the emulation is just a marketing hook, something to use to promote your synth in a sea of other synths, all vying for attention. How many prospective customers would ever have heard the hardware, much less had the opportunity to use it and make any kind of detailed comparison? Id suggest almost none, so you can say whatever you like when you're promoting it and no-one will know. I bet you don't, you just have expectations that you don't feel have been met.

And Jonte Knif confirms that it sounds and behaves just like the real thing. Brainworx engineers modeled the complete circuits of the original hardware, including all 26 tubes, applying their patented Tolerance Modelling Technology (TMT, US Patent No. 10,725,727) to recreate the natural variations in envelope parameters, pitch, LFO speed, and so many other characteristics to make this digital recreation sound as realistically analog and natural as possible.

Marketing BS. As I said, who can argue when so few people actually have the hardware to confirm the hypothesis?

As i said, realistically analog is an antithesis of synth changing parameter response when you change sampling rate.

No, it's not. There is zero correlation between those things. All you can say is that analogue is the antithesis of sampling rates.

On the other hand, a good product will be exactly as advertised.

Why? Look at the current Corolla TV ad in Australia -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8bhsVNzew0
They are advertising it as a driver's car, something anyone will enjoy for the driving experience. Clearly that's nonsense, if you're after a great driving experience you will buy a Focus. The ad is basically bullshit but that doesn't make Corolla a bad car. Quite the opposite, Corolla is a terrific little all-rounder and should be at or near the top of everyone's shopping list when looking for a small car. All Toyota are trying to do is to get people who may have dismissed the car's driving dynamics to maybe have another look at this new model. If they buy it, it probably won't be on the strength of what's being advertised but if that gets them into the showroom, it's done its job.

It's the same here, if advertising that Knifonium is a perfect replica of the hardware gets people to download the demo, then that marketing has done its job. After that it is up to each of us to decide whether or not they want the product.

Of course, that doesn't work on me. I have less than no interest in how accurate an emulation is, I judge every instrument on its merits. Most of my favourite softsynths happen to be emulations but I like them because they sound great and are easy to use, not because they mimic the sound of some ancient piece of krap. That's why I use MonoFury all the time but never use Korg's own emulation of MonoPoly. The Korg might sound more like the original but MonoFury sounds great and that's all I care about.

u-he advertisements promise exactly what they deliver.
Even the hyper-corpo Apple's M1 advertisements turned out to be performing exactly as advertised.

Up to a point. Do Apple bother to show that the M1 chip's multicore performance is only about the same as a 9th gen Core i7? No, they push the specs that make it look good and ignore the rest. They lie by omission or they push a feature that their competitors also have in such a way as to make you think only their products can do it. e.g. The current iPhone TV ads are all about the camera performance. They make it seem as though the iPhone's camera is better than anyone else's, yet no comparison reviews pick the iPhone's cameras as the best available. It's not a straight lie but it is certainly misleading, yet people lap it up. One of my neighbours was duped -spent Au$2000 and had to have the phone replaced after a few months because the lenses went out of alignment. That, of course, involved an entire weekend of jumping through hoops like a well-trained lap-dog and being made to feel like it was all his fault and Apple were doing him a favour by complying with Consumer Law.

So the quantity is not about what you have now, but how much of it you use?
Bunch of pop/mainstream has tens of tracks and plugins and sounds amazing tho.

But maybe it doesn't need that much? Maybe it could sound just as good, maybe even better, with less? But if you make things seem too simple, then anyone would think they could do it. Professional producers would be out of work.

Link me one of those tracks if you will, you can over DM.

When they are ready, you will be able to listen to them on Bandcamp. But I'll give you an example of what I mean. The last cover I worked up was Just Can't Get Enough and I ended up combining four different parts from the original MIDI file into one. The sounds were similar enough that I'd probably have ended up using the same synth on them anyway, so it was just easier to use one. Where one part needs to be a bit quieter, I just reduce the velocity of those notes and set up the velocity modulation in the synth to give me the result I want. In the end, it makes it much easier to get a good, balanced mix. It's more work at the start of the process but it ends up making the back end a lot easier. In the end, I reduced the 15 tracks of the downloaded MIDI file to just 6 and I may end up folding one of those into another before I'm done.

apple has historically gone back and forth between arm and intel. it's what they have always done.

No, they have only ever done it once. They won't go back this time because the reason they have moved away is to make their own lives easier. iOS is where they make all their money so they are keen to make Mac just a branch of that code base Therefore moving Mac to ARM makes sense for them. I don't see where it makes sense for you, the consumer, but Apple relies on the well established fact that most of you idiots will just lap it up.

[Super Piano Hater 64]

If Apple keeps on trashing everyone’s software every year, sooner or later the third party developers will notice that the Mac platform is the same endless money sink for them that it is for their users. At that point they’ll make the obvious move of dropping Mac support and telling everyone to switch to Windows/Linux.

In the meantime, though, it seems to me that this whole Apple/Intel debate is a giant distraction from the original topic of this thread.

Anyway, should I get this, or Synth1?

[BONES]

Get both.

[Ploki]

Up to a point. Do Apple bother to show that the M1 chip's multicore performance is only about the same as a 9th gen Core i7? No, they push the specs that make it look good and ignore the rest.

What are you talking about?
In raw benchmarks, a 15W M1 (including GPU) is as good as 65W desktop i7 8th gen (6-core).
In real world usage i did, it smoked it via rosetta.
In Logic benchmarks, it performs about 30% better, while running cooler.
M1 GPU vs intel's UHD series is an absolute no-contest.
M1 entry MacBook Pro is better than i9-9880H (mostly because you can't cool the i9)
M1 GPU is better than the 5300M...
So 45W CPU + 35W GPU in a 16" performs WORSE across the board than a 15W SoC.
M1 is better than the 9th gen i7 when running rosetta.

But maybe it doesn't need that much? Maybe it could sound just as good, maybe even better, with less? But if you make things seem too simple, then anyone would think they could do it. Professional producers would be out of work.

Everyone does think they can do it in 2021. and then it just doesn't sound as good as professional stuff does.

When they are ready, you will be able to listen to them on Bandcamp. But I'll give you an example of what I mean. The last cover I worked up was Just Can't Get Enough and I ended up combining four different parts from the original MIDI file into one. The sounds were similar enough that I'd probably have ended up using the same synth on them anyway, so it was just easier to use one. Where one part needs to be a bit quieter, I just reduce the velocity of those notes and set up the velocity modulation in the synth to give me the result I want. In the end, it makes it much easier to get a good, balanced mix. It's more work at the start of the process but it ends up making the back end a lot easier. In the end, I reduced the 15 tracks of the downloaded MIDI file to just 6 and I may end up folding one of those into another before I'm done.

Depending on what you're off to achieve, i'm not disagreeing here at all. A good arrangement is foundation of a good mix. Sometimes 6 tracks is plenty

No, they have only ever done it once. They won't go back this time because the reason they have moved away is to make their own lives easier. iOS is where they make all their money so they are keen to make Mac just a branch of that code base Therefore moving Mac to ARM makes sense for them. I don't see where it makes sense for you, the consumer, but Apple relies on the well established fact that most of you idiots will just lap it up.

they were using motorola 68000 (CISC like x86 and back then competitor) , switched to PowerPC (RISC like ARM), then to intel x86 (CISC) in 2005, then back to ARM (RISC) recently.
iOS was always a branch of the same codebase as macOS.
Where it makes sense for me is that M1 via rosetta works better as a desktop i7 6-core chip, and that my M1 replaced two intel macs, works better than both, is cooler than both, quieter than both and I ended up with 1000€ extra after selling said intel macs.
(I could buy 5 years of PA subscription with that! :O whooo)

If Apple keeps on trashing everyone’s software every year, sooner or later the third party developers will notice that the Mac platform is the same endless money sink for them that it is for their users. At that point they’ll make the obvious move of dropping Mac support and telling everyone to switch to Windows/Linux.

Lol, in your dreams.
Even Melda who promoted switch to windows a while ago was among the first to offer native arm builds.
Decent devs with a healthy codebase always work from the get go. I'm cautious of what plugins i buy, so switching to catalina was a non-issue for me, switching to big sur was a non issue in october, and by the time i got my Arm mac, 4 devs already had native builds ready, 3 have announced it, and 2 sent me a native arm beta.

Also, i vote for Synth1.

[Aloysius]

Mine opens at 100% with a white bar (about a quarter the size of the GUI) under the main GUI. If I hit the 'show fx' button and 'hide fx' again, the white bar disappears.

If I close the plugin and open it again, the white bar reappears. Etc...

I've written to support.

Reply ...

thanks for the documentation! We have gathered some reports and were also able to reproduce this on our end. I have informed QA of your case and added your findings to our bug report. The developers will need to take a look at this.

You will soon receive an automated email, saying that your issue was resolved, as there is nothing we can do for you from the Tech Desk at the moment. However, your bug report is indeed active and will be investigated by QA and the developers. We might contact you for further questions, and you can still follow up on this email for 72 hours. We will of course also contact you, as soon as there is a workaround, bugfix or update available.

[Dasheesh]

Sure, but dismissing the sound of tube distortion is just more your philosophical stance than anything concrete or logical.

I'm not dismissing anything, I'm just saying that's not how I look at things. I have a more pragmatic approach. Where the distortion happens in the signal path is far more important to me, for example, than what kind of distortion it is. Knifonium seems to let you overdrive anything into anything and that's what I like about it. Same with Trueno and that's all analogue ICs, no tubes or algorithms in sight. It's what I think of as saturation, rather than distortion, and it works a treat most of the time. But, as I said, sometimes a bit of wavefolding works even better, depending where it sits in the signal path. e.g. Some of the wavefolding you can do with Pigment's wavetable oscillators is really good but trying to use wavefolding distortion on vocals generally sounds awful.

So while you thrash around, complaining that nobody emulates tube distortion well enough, I don't care because I'm not wedded to the notion that anyone needs to. I have all the beautiful, brilliant distortion I could ever need.

I bought it the other day without demoing it, (internet was out when it was on sale), and mostly because people rave about it sounding close to what it's modeling. I figured the quality of the built in FX would make it at least worth $39.

That's interesting because the bx_oberhausen thread is full of complaints about how ordinary the effects are, although I find them useful enough. Same with Knifonium, they do the job but I wouldn't think of them as a highlight.

"misdirection and lies" about show? well you probably don't advertise a sci-fi show as a romcom.

Why not? You could certainly find enough grabs in any episode of The Expanse to make a 20 second promo that made it look like a rom-com. And that's the kind of thing we do all the time - misrepresent a show to get people to watch it, emphasise an angle that's not really what the show is about, because someone thinks it will get more people watching it.

Knifonium is not "a valve distortion", it's a software replica of a very specific synth with very specific distortion. It's supposed to sound like that.

Again, anyone could make 100 different presets that sounded identical on both and for most people that would be enough. But, in the end, the emulation is just a marketing hook, something to use to promote your synth in a sea of other synths, all vying for attention. How many prospective customers would ever have heard the hardware, much less had the opportunity to use it and make any kind of detailed comparison? Id suggest almost none, so you can say whatever you like when you're promoting it and no-one will know. I bet you don't, you just have expectations that you don't feel have been met.

And Jonte Knif confirms that it sounds and behaves just like the real thing. Brainworx engineers modeled the complete circuits of the original hardware, including all 26 tubes, applying their patented Tolerance Modelling Technology (TMT, US Patent No. 10,725,727) to recreate the natural variations in envelope parameters, pitch, LFO speed, and so many other characteristics to make this digital recreation sound as realistically analog and natural as possible.

Marketing BS. As I said, who can argue when so few people actually have the hardware to confirm the hypothesis?

As i said, realistically analog is an antithesis of synth changing parameter response when you change sampling rate.

No, it's not. There is zero correlation between those things. All you can say is that analogue is the antithesis of sampling rates.

On the other hand, a good product will be exactly as advertised.

Why? Look at the current Corolla TV ad in Australia -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8bhsVNzew0
They are advertising it as a driver's car, something anyone will enjoy for the driving experience. Clearly that's nonsense, if you're after a great driving experience you will buy a Focus. The ad is basically bullshit but that doesn't make Corolla a bad car. Quite the opposite, Corolla is a terrific little all-rounder and should be at or near the top of everyone's shopping list when looking for a small car. All Toyota are trying to do is to get people who may have dismissed the car's driving dynamics to maybe have another look at this new model. If they buy it, it probably won't be on the strength of what's being advertised but if that gets them into the showroom, it's done its job.

It's the same here, if advertising that Knifonium is a perfect replica of the hardware gets people to download the demo, then that marketing has done its job. After that it is up to each of us to decide whether or not they want the product.

Of course, that doesn't work on me. I have less than no interest in how accurate an emulation is, I judge every instrument on its merits. Most of my favourite softsynths happen to be emulations but I like them because they sound great and are easy to use, not because they mimic the sound of some ancient piece of krap. That's why I use MonoFury all the time but never use Korg's own emulation of MonoPoly. The Korg might sound more like the original but MonoFury sounds great and that's all I care about.

u-he advertisements promise exactly what they deliver.
Even the hyper-corpo Apple's M1 advertisements turned out to be performing exactly as advertised.

Up to a point. Do Apple bother to show that the M1 chip's multicore performance is only about the same as a 9th gen Core i7? No, they push the specs that make it look good and ignore the rest. They lie by omission or they push a feature that their competitors also have in such a way as to make you think only their products can do it. e.g. The current iPhone TV ads are all about the camera performance. They make it seem as though the iPhone's camera is better than anyone else's, yet no comparison reviews pick the iPhone's cameras as the best available. It's not a straight lie but it is certainly misleading, yet people lap it up. One of my neighbours was duped -spent Au$2000 and had to have the phone replaced after a few months because the lenses went out of alignment. That, of course, involved an entire weekend of jumping through hoops like a well-trained lap-dog and being made to feel like it was all his fault and Apple were doing him a favour by complying with Consumer Law.

So the quantity is not about what you have now, but how much of it you use?
Bunch of pop/mainstream has tens of tracks and plugins and sounds amazing tho.

But maybe it doesn't need that much? Maybe it could sound just as good, maybe even better, with less? But if you make things seem too simple, then anyone would think they could do it. Professional producers would be out of work.

Link me one of those tracks if you will, you can over DM.

When they are ready, you will be able to listen to them on Bandcamp. But I'll give you an example of what I mean. The last cover I worked up was Just Can't Get Enough and I ended up combining four different parts from the original MIDI file into one. The sounds were similar enough that I'd probably have ended up using the same synth on them anyway, so it was just easier to use one. Where one part needs to be a bit quieter, I just reduce the velocity of those notes and set up the velocity modulation in the synth to give me the result I want. In the end, it makes it much easier to get a good, balanced mix. It's more work at the start of the process but it ends up making the back end a lot easier. In the end, I reduced the 15 tracks of the downloaded MIDI file to just 6 and I may end up folding one of those into another before I'm done.

apple has historically gone back and forth between arm and intel. it's what they have always done.

No, they have only ever done it once. They won't go back this time because the reason they have moved away is to make their own lives easier. iOS is where they make all their money so they are keen to make Mac just a branch of that code base Therefore moving Mac to ARM makes sense for them. I don't see where it makes sense for you, the consumer, but Apple relies on the well established fact that most of you idiots will just lap it up.

that might be the longest thing i've ever seen typed. no way im reading that.

if you guys want to keep denying quantum feel free to head on over to the appropriate thread. i pointed it out to you, they are flat telling you this is what is happening.

[BONES]

It's fairly well established that quantum computing is not going to find its way to consumer hardware for many, many years. 20 years seems to be the soonest most experts predict, with 30 years being seen as more realistic.

What are you talking about?
In raw benchmarks, a 15W M1 (including GPU) is as good as 65W desktop i7 8th gen (6-core).
In real world usage i did, it smoked it via rosetta.

Right, and your testing would be far more scientific than anyone else's. I've seen the benchmarks, the M1 is really good at single thread benchmarks but not so good when it comes to multi-threading scores.

M1 entry MacBook Pro is better than i9-9880H

Wait on, you just said it was on par with an older i7.

So 45W CPU + 35W GPU in a 16" performs WORSE across the board than a 15W SoC.

What 16"? According to Apple's website, the 16" MB Pros are still shipping with Intel and AMD guts. You can only get the M1 in a 13" chassis. So at this stage I have to call BS on your whole post.

M1 is better than the 9th gen i7 when running rosetta.

But not better than my laptop's 6 core desktop i7 and RTX 2060 combo, which was less than half the price of the cheapest 16" MB Pro you can buy (and it has a 17"display).

I ended up with 1000€ extra after selling said intel macs. (I could buy 5 years of PA subscription with that! :O whooo)

Imagine how much more you could have saved if you'd spent less than 1000 Euros on a gaming PC laptop like mine! I've seen several bands who needed two MB Pros to do what we've always done with one PC laptop. KMFDM and VNV Nation being two that come to mind.

I'm cautious of what plugins i buy, so switching to catalina was a non-issue for me, switching to big sur was a non issue in october, and by the time i got my Arm mac, 4 devs already had native builds ready, 3 have announced it, and 2 sent me a native arm beta.

Do you honestly not see the utter stupidity of that? Basically you are allowing your operating system to decide what musical tools you will use. Don't you think it makes a lot more sense to choose the tools first, then find the OS that best supports them? What you're doing is akin to buying a Lamborghini to drive around the streets of Mumbai.