New rompler/synth on the way - "Pure Synth Platinum" from GospelMusicians

[kbaccki]

The technical background is that the UVI Workstation won't let us browse directories on the user's system from the scripted interface. Everything has to be saved within the patch, including the entire preset system code. That has advantages, though, because it saves less experienced users from hunting around for folder paths, and enabled us to make a great-looking semi-transparent overlay for preset selection in Neo-Soul Keys. (Kontakt doesn't support anything like that!)

I think you made the right engineering decision here. The downside is that you can only load patches as fast as the engine will allow you to load and init each patch. The upside is that your software architecture is not burdened by locking yourself into a proprietary patch system -- this would translate to substantial maintenance overhead in bug fixing corrupt patch saves and the like, adding new patch ave functionality as UVI enhances patch capability, etc., etc. Not to mention: I actually want individual m5p files so I can move them around, categorize them at will, email to my buddy, etc. With your own patch system you'd need some way export individual patches, which would require filesystem access, which you don't have. Anyway... I think sticking with m5p is the right way to go, perhaps unless you were dealing with a lightweight, simpler type of synth, where saving a whole monolithic patch matrix would be fast and lightweight.

So I convinced myself a week ago that I'm going to pass on PSP for one very specific reason: patch management is limited to saving multis. That's not good enough for me: I need to create/tweak an individual part/patch, and save that part/patch as it's own thing. At some point later I want to be able to combine my individually saved parts/patches into multis. From what I can tell, UVI Workstation only allows you save all parts at once, which is great if all you want to do is save multi's. Presumably, if I save a FXP from DAW/host it's saving the whole state of UVI Workstation... which again is a multi, not an individual part.

Do I have this right?

So... as much as I love the sound and functionality and simplicity of PSP, I have to pass, unfortunately.

And no, I'm not laying out $250-$300 more on top of $150 to be able to save individual patches in Mach5. PSP sounds great and works great on UVI Workstation, but when all is said and done I don't think UVI Workstation was intended as a general purpose hybrid engine for the likes of PSP. If it were, then one could save individual patches (i.e., parts), not just multis.

Yes? No? Am I missing something here?

[GospelMusicians]

So I convinced myself a week ago that I'm going to pass on PSP for one very specific reason: patch management is limited to saving multis. That's not good enough for me: I need to create/tweak an individual part/patch, and save that part/patch as it's own thing. At some point later I want to be able to combine my individually saved parts/patches into multis. From what I can tell, UVI Workstation only allows you save all parts at once, which is great if all you want to do is save multi's. Presumably, if I save a FXP from DAW/host it's saving the whole state of UVI Workstation... which again is a multi, not an individual part.

Do I have this right?

So... as much as I love the sound and functionality and simplicity of PSP, I have to pass, unfortunately.

And no, I'm not laying out $250-$300 more on top of $150 to be able to save individual patches in Mach5. PSP sounds great and works great on UVI Workstation, but when all is said and done I don't think UVI Workstation was intended as a general purpose hybrid engine for the likes of PSP. If it were, then one could save individual patches (i.e., parts), not just multis.

Yes? No? Am I missing something here?

No, you are not missing anything. You are right. I submitted this type of request about a year ago. I've been with the UVI guys for a while now, and so far they have always answered my requests as a developer.

Let's just hope something comes soon .

In the meantime, we will honor the sales price, if an update comes after the sale is over. Thanks for giving it a try. We really appreciate it!

[EvilDragon]

Have you ever booted up the newest hardware workstations? Those things take a while

Only Kronos takes a bit over 2 minutes to load its samples while booting up, but patch changes from that point onwards are instantaneous.

and enabled us to make a great-looking semi-transparent overlay for preset selection in Neo-Soul Keys. (Kontakt doesn't support anything like that!)

Well, it IS possible in Kontakt, but granted, it's a bit more work. There are libraries out there effectively using this kind of semitransparent overlay browsing for quite some time now.


This looks like an interesting product, I wish you luck with it, guys.

[GospelMusicians]

Have you ever booted up the newest hardware workstations? Those things take a while

Only Kronos takes a bit over 2 minutes to load its samples while booting up, but patch changes from that point onwards are instantaneous.

This is true...I guess my main point is that even though it's 2014, technology still takes some work. Even hardware is not instantaneous, even if it's upon boot-up

[iain_morland]

and enabled us to make a great-looking semi-transparent overlay for preset selection in Neo-Soul Keys. (Kontakt doesn't support anything like that!)

Well, it IS possible in Kontakt, but granted, it's a bit more work. There are libraries out there effectively using this kind of semitransparent overlay browsing for quite some time now.

Sure, but in MachFive/UVI we could do it very efficiently in the script engine without needing to pre-render any graphics at all.

AFAIK Kontakt still can't adjust the alpha of any widgets, can it? Happy to be corrected if that feature has now been added.

[kbaccki]

No, you are not missing anything. You are right. I submitted this type of request about a year ago. I've been with the UVI guys for a while now, and so far they have always answered my requests as a developer.

Let's just hope something comes soon .

In the meantime, we will honor the sales price, if an update comes after the sale is over. Thanks for giving it a try. We really appreciate it!

Jamal, thanks for being upfront and generous and all. Whatever does happen with UVI, I do have to say that I think you and your team have done a fantastic job with PSP. It's just that one little engine feature that's missing, IMO. It pains me to not be able to buy it now cuz I think the sound and features and overall quality are fantastic, but I know the patch management just won't fit into my workflow. If I was just using your stock patches it wouldn't be a problem, but as soon as I got into tweaking and building I knew the stock patches were only the tip.

Was going to also provide some specific feedback, mainly on a few select waveforms (grand pianos, trumpet, alto/tenor sax).

Piano waveforms. My overall impression of the piano waveforms was that they range from somewhat dull grands to "classic 20MB piano ROM sproingy". Of course, some of those bandlimited piano waveforms, like house piano, are on purpose. I think what might be missing is a top notch, general purpose (C7?) piano sample with lots of body and dept. Like what I hear when I listen to Yamaha S90 or similar. Perhaps that would increase your ROM footprint by 750MB or 1GB, so maybe something you don't want to consider, not sure. Certainly for high end piano, I go for a dedicated library or product.

Trumpet, alto sax, tenor sax waveforms. Have to listen again, but overall I recall these being a little wheezy and dimensionless. Perhaps for a few specific, common instruments like these adding a few articulation/variation waveforms... subtones, growls, staccato, whatever. Like piano, if I want something dedicated to sax or trumpet, I wouldn't go to a general purpose workstation, but I also think small room for improvement in your stock ROM.

Other than those specific things that sorta stood out to me... I absolutely love a lot of everything else in there, just from raw waveform ROM standpoint (of course, samples are only one part of PSP). The string ensembles are fantastic and full, same with the horns, pads, guitars are good overall, basses are good overall, EPs (of course!), vox pads, various synth waves, etc. Here and there I would find small oddities, like a big string ensemble waveform would start out kinda mono-ish then after 1 second or so expand out to wide stereo. But overall even just layering sample playback OSC's, with some basic filtering, you can get some fantastic layered pianos and pads and whatnot. Many many many of the raw waveforms sound great on their own, without even FX enabled. Or when I did use FX I generally kept it simple like pong delay + bit of verb for a lead, or just a bit of stereo widening on pads and strings, etc.

Anyhoo... will keep my eyes on what comes out of UVI. If they can do something with part/patch management, it'll be a really really really nice general purpose hybrid engine. Cuz, you know, those sorts of things are kinda hard to build yourself.

[GospelMusicians]

Anyhoo... will keep my eyes on what comes out of UVI. If they can do something with part/patch management, it'll be a really really really nice general purpose hybrid engine. Cuz, you know, those sorts of things are kinda hard to build yourself.

Thanks kbaccki for the honest feedback. You nailed it: If we increase the grand piano sound then it adds to the loading. The cool thing is that we can swap better samples if we get enough requests for a particular sample.

What I like most is that you get the concept. After working with M5 for a while now, I would think to myself: "Man, it has to be possible to do a hybrid synth." So thanks to my developer, the UVI team, and my graphics guy, it all came out great. It'll take you weeks to explore all of those Wavetables.

We are still waiting for feedback, because it still can be used as a pure Rompler player as well if you have guys that just want sounds. It's very modular and we are already working on a TGX-85. You may be able to guess what that will be .

[kbaccki]

For anybody else out there thinking about PSP, but maybe you have an issue with only being able to save your PSP creations as UVI multis... It occurred to me last night that the individual program/part data is readily accessible in the .uviws files. I've proven that I can manually create a .uviws by taking program data from two unrelated .uviws files (two different UFS products, BTW, digital synsations + acousticsamples piano), and merging them into an empty .uviws.

So... long story short: the precious part/patch info is not locked away forever in a .uviws files, you can extract parts (albeit manually, or with a tool, whatever) to use wherever you want. The only real limitation is simply that UVI workstation custom patch browsing and loading can only happen with the .uviws files. To build a custom multi (let's say for a new multi-MIDI project), you first poke around stock patches/multis + your own custom multis to find the individual parts you want to include in the new multi. Next, extract the relevant part programs from respective existing multis, and merge those parts into the new multi. Once you've created that new multi, obviously, any tweaks to individual parts can only be saved into that new multi (or to a copy of that multi, etc.)... At that point you'd probably want to re-extract the tweaked part(s) into their own multis for later reuse. Make sense? Yes, some extra steps, and workstation itself doesn't help the process in any way, but bottom line is the data for individual parts is readily accessible if you really need it to be.

Next I want to see if I manually change a .uviws file on disk if workstation can reload automatically, or if it simply needs to be reloaded manually. My guess is manual reload required, but here's hoping...

Still, UVI needs another customer request to have explicit management of individual parts outside of multis. Then none of the extract/merge jiggery pokery is necessary.

So I may be back on board with PSP. Which is good news for me. But probably the rest of you don't care.

[Saukar30]

The older version of UVI Workstation (1.1.7) allowed for saving of individual parts. Maybe UVI can re-implement this again.

Those files are called UVIWP files which were used for individual parts and not whole multis. I have both the 2.5ish version and 1.1.7 working side by side.

The old version 1.1.7 allowed for a lot of other functions as well that were taken out.

[kbaccki]

Thanks for the info. Do you have a .uviwp file that you could try to load into UVI 2.x? If 2.x can load them, that would be a big help for me...

[Saukar30]

I tried KBacci. Uvi 2.x sees them but cants load them. I tried a couple that were just simple wave files. I'm gonna try the demo soundset in a few minutes to see the result.

[kbaccki]

I tried KBacci. Uvi 2.x sees them but cants load them. I tried a couple that were just simple wave files. I'm gonna try the demo soundset in a few minutes to see the result.

Yeah, based on other conversations and your info, I'm convinced UVI 2.x is specifically interested in .uviws files only. But thanks for the additional info nonetheless...

[Saukar30]

It definitely sees them though. I don know why UVI would take this feature out. Granted, I haven't used it except for recently, but it could definitely help with all of the rest of their products as well. Again.. since it was in the old version, maybe they can just add it back in.

[kbaccki]

FYI, if you missed Jamal's announcement post in the samples forum, existing GM instrument owners get 66% off... so $99. (until Sept 12th)

[Saukar30]

I really wish I could get on that!! I'm definitely interested in PSP but I'm saving up for an engagement ring right now. (Priorities first). I'll have to wait it out a little bit. Hopefully it will be my Christmas present to myself