(Not) another virus vs. VST thread

[MBTC]

Do you mean use the Virus as the sound card? I tried that, made no difference in latency.

However, today using a device unrelated to music, I discovered that there may be some issues with USB and Win7-64 bit on my system. I have no idea what at this point or if it's isolated to a specific port, hub, related to mobo firmware or what, but if it turns out to be my system it would mean that once resolved there could be a Virus in my future again at some point at least.

[sacredgeometry]

Its all about sound design for me to be honest, I would love nothing more to have albino/predator, sylenth, gladiator, ace or massive in a hardware synth it would allow me to get the most out of them which is hard even with the amount of control surfaces i have.

There is something special the virus though sound-wise, it really does make my excited when i make sounds on it I have had this experience with vsts too but of different flavours and in different places. Seriously though "Sound Quality" wise hardware has next to nothing to offer and all the sounds on any digital hardware could be recreated using pretty much identical algorithms on computers as thats all that they are in the end bar a few differences.

And the only reason we choose it over software is as a preference to that particular sound. Not because its any better or worse but because we prefer it.

I think alot of people enter into it expecting all their sound design problems to disappear. They think that because they have x synth and y multi effects module that they will be able to create Z sound. These are the people that tend to get disappointed. When they realise that all the sounds they make are exactly as limited as their own motivation to learn and that those synths they initially listed as useless were actually more capable then they were I can imagine its quite upsetting looking at an expensive lesson in patience.

[MBTC]

I agree with you, and this is why to some extent, in terms of pursuing a particular sound at least, it's better to be a master of one good synth, and know it backward and forward, than it is to have a huge variety of synths. Note I did say "good" synth.. something like Zebra2 comes to mind. It has a learning curve, but if you know it well, the limitations of sound design are pretty much removed.

[HUROLURA]

Much of the various synth available either as software or hardware have similar structure (each with their own special tricks or add-on).

Let's say oscillators (with or without extra waveshpae features) mixed/routed to filters then processed by amplifier + mod matrix.
This layout has been used for the very beginning based on the early Minimoog/Prophet 5/Odyssey ...

Some do provide some more advanced/flexibility but here we enter in the modular spirit gears/softsynths. This liberty has a cost regarding the learning curve.
My own way of using sound is not really attempting to get a special type of sound but more about man to machine interaction by twicking some parameters from a start sound basis and let thing progress iteratively. Hardware control is more comfortable/necessary for that purpose. I also use this process with softsynth but I miss the quick interaction possible with well thought and layout control hardware. Using the mouse is slowing down the process.

[MBTC]

Originally Posted by HUROLURA

My own way of using sound is not really attempting to get a special type of sound but more about man to machine interaction by twicking some parameters from a start sound basis and let thing progress iteratively. Hardware control is more comfortable/necessary for that purpose. I also use this process with softsynth but I miss the quick interaction possible with well thought and layout control hardware. Using the mouse is slowing down the process.

Have you ever looked into the Novation Automap software? It basically brings what you've mentioned above to the soft synth world, although it does require a Novation controller (not a bad thing since they are great hardware anyway). If you can imagine all of your soft synths being controlled using the same knobs/buttons for the same functions (i.e. cutoff is always in the same place etc) you get the idea. This could of course be accomplished with most midi controllers / soft synths anyway, with some tweaking and set up, but there are hassles that go with most of those approaches that Automap makes a lot easier, for example it has built in templates for all the popular soft synths and it just detects it when you load it and maps it for you (assuming that's what you want it to do). Its basically designed to keep your hands on the knobs more than the mouse.

Even though I have the software and use the controller, I tend not to use Automap much, but that's just a matter of my own workflow. I tend to use the mouse and software UI to navigate and tweak the main things, like finding a sound or fiddling with the range of a knob to see how it will sound while automated. Then at some point, once I've already integrated the sound into part of a track / a loop or whatever, I will manually link the mod wheel and one or two of the knobs along the top to whatever I plan to tweak in real time (that's when the part of the hardware interaction you spoke of happens in my workflow).

Now that I formally think about it like this, 99% of the time, as part of the music creation (not sound design) process I am only going to be tweaking 1 or 2 values in realtime, so depending on the sound I almost always map the mod wheel to either cutoff or a vibrato/pitch warble, and one other knob across the top to maybe one other parameter. When I am creating new sounds or dramatically tweaking existing sounds, I'm much more mouse oriented. There are some things with sound design that are just extremely limited by most hardware control surfaces. Even 20+ years ago, with certain hardware synths I prefered a computer based editor for some things, because it just takes too many steps to get to some functions with a limited set of buttons/knobs / readouts. When I think about a modular synth like Zebra, even attempting to make all of the same functionality available on a hardware device without a mouse, typing keyboard and decent sized screen would be a nightmare.

[HUROLURA]

I just spent a few hours today remote controlling my NOAH from a Prodyssey ASB and this is just the most efficient way of designing sounds on that plug.
I still just love this kind of synth providing dircet acces to the sound and I tend to collect some of them.
The most efficient I ever experineced are:
- the Creamware/soniccore ASB range (Minimax, Pro12, Prodyssey,B4000)
- my brand new Virus A
- the Novation KS series

The Waldorf low cost MicroQ is also well-thought and easy to program but not as straightforward.
I also made some MIDI templates to remote control hard or soft synth from BCR2000 or X-Station ...
I just love to play music without being forced o switch on the computer !!!

[infraction]

Originally Posted by sacredgeometry

There is something special the virus though sound-wise, it really does make my excited when i make sounds on it I have had this experience with vsts too but of different flavours and in different places. Seriously though "Sound Quality" wise hardware has next to nothing to offer and all the sounds on any digital hardware could be recreated using pretty much identical algorithms on computers as thats all that they are in the end bar a few differences.

When I had my poco version, up against sylenth it wasn't that bright and didn't stand out in the mix more, but sylenth still sounded cheapish quality wise (now my TI eats both for breakfast ).

A lot of native vst plugin developers (especially the best synth ones at the moment like u-he and lennard digital) seem to be one or two man teams unlike access which is something like a 20 strong team and IMO not a fat lot of research gets put into the vst synths. If a say twenty strong team of native plugin developers got together and decided to make a more professional product than no doubt it would easily compete or maybe surpass the virus sound.

But that isn't happening, even novation who seem to be very pro software keep their best algos in hardware these days. Maybe the fear of warez is to blame for the lack of really good quality softsynths that can match their hardware counterparts?

[MBTC]

Originally Posted by infraction

If a say twenty strong team of native plugin developers got together and decided to make a more professional product than no doubt it would easily compete or maybe surpass the virus sound.

But that isn't happening, even novation who seem to be very pro software keep their best algos in hardware these days. Maybe the fear of warez is to blame for the lack of really good quality softsynths that can match their hardware counterparts?

I would definately agree that piracy fear holds back VST progression, but I couldn't agree that there aren't some soft synths taking it to the next level with large teams of talent. Take a look at something like Omnisphere or Alchemy. Especially with Omnisphere, you can browse around it and immediately see that there were a lot of folks involved in it's making. Granted, we are talking $500 softsynths at this point, but they are out there.

If I could try to identify one item that contributes to the widespread mediocrity of so many "regular" soft synths, it may be the availability and use of open-source algorithms to do much of the processing or filter work. I think many of these VSTs are based off the same common library that provides much of of the math functionality so the developer can focus on the creation of the instrument. The instrument itself may turn out unique, but that uniqueness is defined by the UI, the range of parameters, the included patches, etc.

At this point, the VST developer has made the choice of not re-inventing the wheel... this is typically a good idea in software development, finding ways to re-use work others have done, but when creating virtual instruments or similar, it can be enormously stifling to creativity and uniqueness to have a common foundation of re-use across projects.

Some of the most famous synthesizers were created by one or two guys, and what often gave the synth their unique sound was really a flaw or bug in the design that manifested in ways that was recognized as character. If we saw more of that in soft-synth creation, the end result would be better, but there is a resistance to recreate all algorithms from scratch (first because it's really damn hard work and not everyone has the math skills to do it, second because its a means to an end and most synth creators would prefer to work at the end).

Back to the subject of piracy for a minute, although as a developer of business software I am not up to date on embedded systems / DSP programming, I am unaware of anything that would prevent the code that powers the Virus from being completely reverse-engineerable. In fact I'll step out on a limb and say that someone has surely done it already. Furthermore, the fact that they offer a pure software solution that requires only powercore tells me that there is nothing necessarily magical about the algorithms in the Virus, someone has surely already dissected them.

I think hardware has a bit of sound advantage simply due to power of dedicated processing. By that I mean the DSP in the virus is doing one thing and one thing only -- producing sounds. The actual power of the unit is rather pathetic compared to a modern CPU, but the difference is that it is not producing sounds for multiple, disparate instruments on top of all the executing code for the host software which is running atop a gazillion services, which is running atop the OS kernal itself which is of course way more general purpose than a synth DSP. Multi-threading / multi-core helps with this problem but it's only as beneficial as the software is designed to take advantage of it, and since multi-threaded code is hard and limited by the presence of any serial-execution tasks, there is a seriously limiting lowest common denominator here.

So by adding a hardware to the arsenal, you are guaranteed a certain sound output. It doesn't matter how many other pieces of kit make up the studio, each one always produces constant output. I can't say that for a VST environment on my current PC, even though its a nicely powered CPU. I can add a VST, whip up a sound, and compare that side by side with a Virus and be amazed that the VST sounds as good or in some cases better. But once I've built out the mix such that there is A LOT going on, the sounds coming from that VST can be muddied up or lagged by other things -- in some cases the entire DAW starts wigging out from just too many instruments, effects, etc all bogging down the same chip that is also running regular OS services. Meanwhile the Virus is able to do it's sole job, producing a consistent sound that doesn't change as you add more hardware synths (it could of course as you add more effects or somethign to the virus sound itself, which may affect polyphony etc).

But despite all that, and the elegant simplicity we should get from just plugging in another piece of hardware kit, it seems we are still plagued with timing / latency issues, integration problems in general. Now we are at the core of why I am remaining software based at the moment.

[FSTZ]

I think that one thing that discoraged me is the learning curve on the virus is pretty steep. took me a while to get the hang of it, whereas synths like Albino and the Novation Vstation came pretty easily.

but after some help from friends, and the helpful people on this forum, I am starting to get the hang and learn my way around the my virus ti

but as far as sounds, the TI cannot be beat

[HUROLURA]

More flexible, more complex ... so not that easy to learn in detail.
Direct access through front panel should ease a "quick edit" mode, no ?