Official Serum thread!

[Ingonator]

In all CPU discussions and comparisons, sample buffer size in the DAW must be mentioned, otherwise comparisons are totally useless. Expecting Serum to play complex unison patches with 2 oscs and a sub with 4 x oversampling at a 64 sample buffer, is of course a lost cause. In comparison to other higher CPU-synths I use like Spectral and Diversion, I find Serum to be not more demanding than these two.

Have tried with 1024 samples and 2 x Oversampling setting and could hardly layer 2 pads with playing 3-4 notes with the Serum demo.
For example with the same setup using Waldorf Largo (two layered pads with long release + 6 voice Unison) i could not even reach 10% in the CPU display of Live 9 64-bit.

[Kinh]

People will always blame what ever is the most lazy solution. In this case it's "Oh look Steve totally did not optimise the code enough" without them having any idea what they are talking about.

- sample buffer
- How does the DAW speak with the VST plugin? In FL Studio sometimes the fixed buffer options fixed cracks in the sound and sometimes it cause huge issues with other plugins
- Is multithreading on for the plugins.
- Any other host activity going on.


etc etc etc etc.

If the "pro's" here tell me they see a tiny bit better CPU usage then Massive with better quality and when I see the exact same thing nobody can convince me that Serum is badly optimised ... because it's not and it's easy to use that as an excuse without actually figuring out what exactly is going on on your computer. Computers are incredibly complex and no two computers in the world have the same configuration.

Are there some issues with Serum? Ofcourse, it's brand new. But nothing that is a deal breaking and is not going to be fixed in the future. That takes time, especially when you only have one programmer.

Well clearly you dont know what you're talking about cause Im on Protools 11 which is AAX 64 bit and is supposed to utilize CPU resources better than any DAW out there....in my case, all 12 threads! But it doesnt in this case with Serum yet every CPU hungry plugin I own runs smoothly including Omnisphere.

Its got nothing to do with computer configuration, mine is optimized to work perfectly and its does, whats more Ive got a mega powerful computer with one of the best CPUs on the market for audio. So, long story short...I dont particularly care if you're not convinced. Ive already contacted Xfer on this and hopefully they'll look into it other wise there's is no way in hell Ill invest in this product. I do HUGE session. And this plugin is completely useless right now.

[Kain]

You don't know what you are talking about when you compare a super advance rompler with some synth capabilities like Omnisphere with a wavetable soft synth like Serum.

To bad this plugin is useless for you but luckily you have Protool 11 wih AAX in 64 bit, a real killer music making machine. I don't think you need this plugin. I think you got it all! Maybe try out some more patches in Omnisphere, did you ever find that "commercial sound" in omnipshere that you bitched about two years ago on KVR? I have been using Omnisphere since day one and have not even listened to 10% of the sounds in there.

You also should realize there is a limit to parallelisation of code that is being executed in a near real time environment. So a system that can hyperthread with 16 threads does not necessarily speed up an application like this 16 times. It depends on a whole range of factors. Sure, OSC A and B can probably be split off in two different routines and have their code executed in parallel but in what extend that also is workable in practise is out of my league. I'm not a programmer. Steve probably already parallelized whatever is worth doing and spreads out the biggest portion of the workload over different threads. (but I only see one ilbridge thread in FL studio, although I can see all four threads working)

Omnisphere is from 2008, singlethread applications are not being speed up much more by proccessors. And I think Steve was aiming more for quality without to much of a limit on what is possible with the processors. But that's okay. Serum is definatelly workable but not when you load it once and say, oh yeah does not work. I would not have bought it if I thought that way because I loaded the 64 bit version in FL studio and it did not work at all, only cracks. Then I tried the 32 bit version and it worked fine and now the 64 bit verison works to but that one is useless for me, I only have 4 GB of RAM anyway. To bad though, I will probably never produce the quality of the 8GB and over guys.

[Kinh]

Just got word from Steve. The new Serum 1.01 demo will be out next week with improvement to CPU use for AAX.
@Kain..Sorry bout my tone. Just frustrated at this more because the sounds are outstanding and I really want it to work. Obviously this CPU thing is just an AAX issue. Probably works flawlessly in every DAW but Protools.

[EvilDragon]

which is AAX 64 bit and is supposed to utilize CPU resources better than any DAW out there....in

Except Reaper...

[Kain]

Just got word from Steve. The new Serum 1.01 demo will be out next week with improvement to CPU use for AAX.
@Kain..Sorry bout my tone. Just frustrated at this more because the sounds are outstanding and I really want it to work. Obviously this CPU thing is just an AAX issue. Probably works flawlessly in every DAW but Protools.

Accepted. Like I said, Steve can not ship something that is a 100% compatible with everything right out of the box. All these things take some time. I would say the majority of people experimenting with Serum (that's the stage we are at) don't use Pro Tools as their host using AAX plugins. He can't test every combination of factors himself, that's why software goes through stages like alpha, beta and that's why test users are so important.

[ljpro1]

[Kain]

[Ah_Dziz]

So does this thing have a quality setting (adjustable oversampling)? I'm not really having cup issues but sometimes I like the sound of lower quality settings for certain patches.

JJ

[Sampleconstruct]

It's in the global preferences, saved per patch.

[zvenx]

It isnt what one may think. Only comes into play in patches that have warp mode activated. (Its warp mode right?)
Rsp

[Sequent]

I've read some complaints about Serum being too "cold" or whatever, and while I do not completely agree with this on the one hand, on the other hand I also like that the "sharpness" and clarity of the sound. It makes Serum especially nice if you want to go really deep into the verb.

I do have one thing immediately that would be very useful, especially for those of use who are not running 50,000 instances and do not have the latest and greatest cpu. I'm finding that I do not really need all the polyphony that a lot of the patches are set up for and a lot of the time I'm fine if I just reduce the polyphony. I was wondering whether it might be possible to override the programmed settings by somehow "locking" my preferred settings similarly to what one can do in U=he products. This would also go for the oversampling settings under the Global menu. Ideally, it would be nice to have something like what is available in Aether and the other reverbs from Galbanum, which is that you can set a "draft" or whatever mode for normal usage, but have things automatically switch to the highest quality upon rendering.

Perhaps this is already do-able and I missed it in the manual. Though I don't believe so.

[V0RT3X]

I've been thinking that if there was a way to route the distortion or saturation module so it could show up right after the oscillator output, that it would help in "warming" the sound up quite a lot.

[bitcrusher]

For every person saying Serum doesn't sound warm (which oddly or not, I only see here on KVR), there's also at least one person telling me Serum has the best sounding oscillators. This stuff is *measurable* with an analyzer, and doesn't have to be talked about in ambiguous terminology like "warm":

1) Some other WT synths which have audible+visible aliasing, which I don't believe is a warm thing at all (it's an ugly inharmonic ringing sound, like you get from using SR Reduction effects). Play a 1Khz sine and look for the reflections. Serum has the lowest aliasing around for any WT synth I'm aware of.

2) Another factor in other WT synths the lack of highs, this is very noticeable on some WT synths where they lack the upper harmonics. This is going to happen if you use a shorter window size (e.g. 512 samples) for wavetables. For instance if you play a low note saw (say 50 Hz) and listen or look at the highs, Serum will be very bright and cutting in the highs where some others will be dull (LPF sound). I see no benefit in having a dull sound, but maybe some people prefer that (seems silly to me, as it's easy to remove highs but impossible to add them properly).

3) Lastly would be a filter imparting some sort of harmonic quality, but then of course this isn't even talking about the oscillators at all, but rather the filter - obviously worthy of discussion, but it's good not to confuse the two topics. Serum has a variety of filters of course, some filter types more colored-sounding than others, but I have ideas for expanding this greatly to impart additional tonal characteristics in the future!

Global oversampling and polyphony are something I'd like to add to the preferences section. I'm going to release 1.01 with (mostly) bugfixes and some minor enhancements this week, then I'll certainly try to get these in v1.1!

Steve
Serum | Xfer Records

[Ah_Dziz]

It's in the global preferences, saved per patch.

Thanks!
JJ