KVR Audio

theorize · Post by **theorize** » Sat Jan 10, 2015 5:46 am

I've recently been getting back into music again, and I've always loosely followed this synth and liked it a lot, but it's never blown me away like it does now. The implementation of the effects is awesome even if unfinished, I really like the insert effect paradigm it uses, it's really laying the groundwork for the best subtractive synth ever. As is I would easily pay $50 for it, when it reaches 1.0 status I'd love to pay $100 for this synth.

Am I the only one who feels this way about this synth? I'd just like to know if people are using this synth and what people's thoughts are on it.

If you are using this synth please get active on the author's forum on his site, maybe we can inspire him to finish it and get a 1.0 release? I'm working on a sample set to donate for it's 1.0 release, some voices for it that have been created by means of software, analog and recording. I've been looking for something like this for a looooooonnnnnnnnnggg time, the lack of an xhip is actually what drove me away from the vst world in the first place and made me go analog. Now I just have to find a suitable host to use xhip in that is attractive looking but more importantly fast to use. I'd hate to say it but I'll probably have to do the bulk of my composing in energyXT with Xhip and reVisit and MIDI out to my gear and then bounce it out and mix it in Audition.

crimsonwarlock · Post by **crimsonwarlock** » Sat Jan 10, 2015 8:46 am

I've always like Xhip and see it as one of the better (or best) free synthesizers around. I have it in my 'attic' folder where everything resides that I like but not really use; somehow Xhip always got passed by in my selection of instruments for a track because of the several very good alternatives there are around. It's a great synth, but also a bit of a 'basic' VA synth. Although I haven't looked at recent versions lately so that view might be totally wrong now

DrewDale · Post by **DrewDale** » Sat Jan 10, 2015 9:18 am

I like it a lot, I like the fact that you can load up wav for your oscillators, it has some great modulation capabilities and nice snappy envelopes, plus it is all laid out on a easy to read GUI.

llze · Post by **llze** » Sat Jan 10, 2015 9:25 am

i really enjoyed it on windows, was using it for bass. Now on mac there is no option for me anymore, too bad..it was really nice.

Whats up aciddose? Does the mac port come along?

RunBeerRun · Post by **RunBeerRun** » Sat Jan 10, 2015 3:29 pm

I like it a lot, but use the older build that don't take an installer for the graphics.

Mutant · Post by **Mutant** » Sat Jan 10, 2015 7:09 pm

+1 Xhip user here.

theorize · Post by **theorize** » Sun Jan 11, 2015 7:56 am

@ WarIock: It's core capabilities haven't changed much that I remember, but I'm glad it doesn't have a million funtions that I don't really use all that much, that's part of why I like it; it doesn't get in your way. If I wan't to do something more complex then I have plenty of synths for that, but I won't use those ones half as much as I'll be using Xhip. One really awesome change that's been made is the included effects. I always really like including effects IN the patch if I can, because I usually do sound design seperately, I like breaking it up like that.

Drew that about sums it up for me too. I LOVE using samples as oscillators, especially when I'm experimenting. And it's regular oscillators are great too, they have a very... umm... crisp sound I guess I would call it. Agreed that the envelopes are good, I think this synth excels at aggressive sounds. I remember the first time I used it and thought it had some very powerful single osc sounds, like basses and such.

Yes Suloo it's bass capabilities are great. Stong, clear bass. Especially now with the compressor and limiter built in

For me it fills a gap in my setup, I needed a good, general purpose synth and one that doesn't try to be analog, I've already got a couple of real analogs that I use all the time and love them, actually for the past few months all I've been doing is making samples from them to throw in a tracker and have some fun. But I do need a good solid synth that I can use for everything else (well I still use DUNE for pads, that'll never change I'm pretty sure) and I think I've found it. And the fact that I can throw my PADsynth samples into it makes it that much better.

crimsonwarlock · Post by **crimsonwarlock** » Sun Jan 11, 2015 11:15 am

theorize wrote:@ WarIock: It's core capabilities haven't changed much that I remember, but I'm glad it doesn't have a million funtions that I don't really use all that much, that's part of why I like it; it doesn't get in your way. If I wan't to do something more complex then I have plenty of synths for that, but I won't use those ones half as much as I'll be using Xhip. One really awesome change that's been made is the included effects. I always really like including effects IN the patch if I can, because I usually do sound design seperately, I like breaking it up like that.

I'm not that big on FX inside a synth (like delay, reverb, etc.) unless it's adding to the basic sound of a patch (chorus, flanger, distortion). As a 'general purpose synth' (and I agree it shines there), I don't see it adding that much (if anything) to Synth1 and Oatmeal that have that spot in my setup.

The option to load waves might be interesting though, although I tend to work with what's 'on board' in a synth

The big throwdown that keeps me from revisiting Xhip is that the latest version needs an installer and uses the registry to store stuff. My setup is highly portable, main reason I don't use commercial stuff which stores keys and such in strange places. I can sinply move the one directory that holds my full studio to another machine and have it up and running in minutes without re-installing anything.

penguinfromdeep · Post by **penguinfromdeep** » Sun Jan 11, 2015 11:19 am

I'm not using it because it's not available for OS X, otherwise I might.

AutoMotto · Post by **AutoMotto** » Sun Jan 11, 2015 8:25 pm

Never heard of it until now, thanks for the heads up, will install and check it out.

t/y
Patrick.

aciddose · Post by **aciddose** » Sun Jan 11, 2015 8:42 pm

Suloo wrote:Whats up aciddose? Does the mac port come along?

This will definitely happen soon... just that I've been busy with other things these past years and Xhip has been severely neglected

I've done a working mac VST and AU now and it is just a matter of actually sitting down and spending the time to make Xhip work.

The major pain will be doing the obj-c stuff for windowing/graphics on OSX but otherwise everything already works fine on both linux and OSX.

Not so much a matter of me motivating myself at the moment rather than simply having time to invest toward it. I'll soon benefit greatly from the motivation though, possibly in the next month or two.

aciddose · Post by **aciddose** » Sun Jan 11, 2015 8:49 pm

crimsonwarlock wrote:The big throwdown that keeps me from revisiting Xhip is that the latest version needs an installer and uses the registry to store stuff.

No it doesn't, and no it doesn't.

The older version uses an installer although does not need one.

The older version (7) also uses the application data folder (not the registry) to store some files for the skin but again does not need it.

In the future the banks will be stored in application data as well as skin files, configuration and lots of other stuff. You won't need those files and they'll be automatically created there when you move system, but you will need to export/import that data if you want to "clone" an instance of Xhip on a new system.

Take a look at the alpha version at http://xhip.net/alpha/ which does not use an installer and does not need the application data directory for anything. In version (7), I unfortunately jumped ahead of things and started to work on skin support and banks (a list of banks you can load instead of just one bank in memory) before I was actually ready to use that in the release.

The current version corrects this by including the skin/bank data directly in the plugin. If I put more effort toward it, the next step will be to automatically write those files to application data if they don't exist.

The reason you will want application data files in the future is so you can override the default skin bitmaps (like the background) and banks (like the default bank) and init preset, reset preset values, default configuration and so on.

In the next release (8) if you don't override anything it'll just default to the built-in stuff and you'll never need to worry about it.

crimsonwarlock · Post by **crimsonwarlock** » Mon Jan 12, 2015 8:05 am

aciddose wrote:
crimsonwarlock wrote:The big throwdown that keeps me from revisiting Xhip is that the latest version needs an installer and uses the registry to store stuff.
No it doesn't, and no it doesn't.

Thanks for the reply. I somehow got the installer notion from reading the webpage (quickly).

I still don't like the whole idea of the windows registry, for any software. I rather would use my own subdirectory to store stuff and configs (as I used to do years back when I developed business software for the windows platform).

aciddose wrote:In the next release (8) if you don't override anything it'll just default to the built-in stuff and you'll never need to worry about it.

That's acceptable to keep my installation portable. I will certainly keep an eye out for the next version and try it out again to see where it's going

aciddose · Post by **aciddose** » Mon Jan 12, 2015 9:50 am

It does use an installer, but you can copy the files manually if you want to.

The registry is not used.

Files are stored in ~/appdata/local/xhip/synthesizer/ in the current version. This is a "custom" directory, but Windows requires like OSX that you write files to a specific place, not just anywhere. ~ = home/user directory.

If you just copy the (7) dll it'll still work, although the bitmaps will be missing and so most of the GUI will be empty. You need to also copy the files from the /local/xhip/ directory to your new machine or just run the installer to do so automatically.

edit: I forgot to mention it uses the "allusers" directory. This is obsolete on newer OSes already so if you can't find the files check in C:\ProgramData\xhip for example.

Here are the skin files the (7) version stored there:
http://xhip.net/temp/xhip_programdata.zip

aciddose · Post by **aciddose** » Thu Jan 29, 2015 9:56 am

Might be interesting to check out the alpha page at http://xhip.net/alpha/

I need a few more weekends invested to get things really working well, but the latest version is a lot better.

who is using xhip?