Blue Cat's PatchWork 2.1 Released, with Built-in Audio Effects and GUI zoom! [Now 2.11]

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:tu:

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I sent an email to Satyatunes to update his gorgeous skins for Patchwork.

As they are right now, the menus don’t seem to support loading the new built-in effects in 2.1 and up.

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Indeed, the skin has to be updated. Maybe we'll give a bit of help to do it (should not be a big deal).

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Two issues, both under the final release of SONAR Platinum 2017.10: (everything x64)

First: The UI for Stillwell Audio's VST3 "Bitter" bit-analyzer plugin is non-draggable when run inside of Patchwork 2.11. It can be minimized & maximized, but not dragged. Meanwhile, the UI for Melda Productions' MNoiseGenerator plugin doesn't show up at all.

http://www.stillwellaudio.com/plugins/bitter/ (http://www.stillwellaudio.com/plugins/bitter/)

Second: Bitter reveals that Patchwork truncates 64-bit floating-point streams to 32-bit. This defeats the purpose of running using Patchwork as a holder for 64-bit mastering plugins and retaining bit fidelity. Can we get 64-bit support, please? Is this true of all BlueCat plugins in general, or just Patchwork?

-djh

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First: The UI for Stillwell Audio's VST3 "Bitter" bit-analyzer plugin is non-draggable when run inside of Patchwork 2.11. It can be minimized & maximized, but not dragged. Meanwhile, the UI for Melda Productions' MNoiseGenerator plugin doesn't show up at all.
What do you exactly mean by "non draggable"? The window cannot be moved?
For the Melda plug-in, do you have the latest version? I remember they used to have a bug in their VST3 versions with the GUI and it was fixed some time ago. BTW, we still recommend using VST2 when possible.

All our plug-ins internally process audio with 64-bit precision. They however only accept 32-bit floating point streams: the reason is that it makes absolutely no difference in terms of sound (this is floating point, not fixed point), and most hosts actually do not provide this feature (if I remember well this is only available for VST plug-ins in Cubase or Sonar - Pro Tools or Logic use 32-bit for example).
Also, a master will get truncated to 24 or 16-bit (fixed point) anyway, so the most important step in this case is dithering at the end of the chain. The idea of using floating point in the processing chain is to avoid rounding and clipping issues at every step, but double precision (64-bit) only makes a real difference for recursive computations, where 32-bit rounding may affect the output. That's why most plug-ins now use 64-bit numbers in their processing loop.

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1) Right - by "non draggable", the window cannot be moved.

2) Definitely not using the latest version of Melda. Do need to upgrade there.

3) I routinely bounce to 64-bit floating point as it is SONAR & Sound Forge's native internal precision so it serves as my lossless archival premaster format (the way some might use DSD.) I reduce to 24-bit or 16-bit only at mastering time (with dither of course) and recommend my clients do the same. If the internal signal processing path in Patchwork already uses double floats, supporting 64-bit streams should be trivial at the API level - it's just one more stream type to support. Certainly SONAR's plug-in chainer supports this.

I suspect you may not have considered this issue before, as I may be the first customer to bring it up. There is no technical reason to unnecessarily throw away bit precision in The Year Of Our Lord 2018, particularly since (like most) you're not designing for the fixed-point DSP realm where limited bit precision is a hardware concern. Slate's plugins support 64-bit, as to Cakewalk's and I suspect all will moving forward as there's no good reason not to at this point.

-djh

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I noticed Studio One has 64-bit processing support now too.

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Since 2.11 (or possibly earlier, don't remember) Cubase has been crashing when I close projects. The crash logs point to PatchWork VST3. I've sent an email to Blue Cat support with more details and some crash logs attached.

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for (1) I suspect the plug-in is hacking its parent window in some way. I don't see any other reason for such a strange behavior (you do not have the same problem for any other plug-in, right?).

For 64-bit streams support, it is actually not so trivial, especially for plug-ins that can host other plug-ins (most of which will not process 64-bit streams). It will be probably added in the future, but this is definitely not a high priority for the moment, for the reasons explained above, as well as performance considerations.

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Blue Cat Audio wrote:I suspect the plug-in is hacking its parent window in some way. I don't see any other reason for such a strange behavior (you do not have the same problem for any other plug-in, right?).
After a couple hours of testing, it seems like it's potentially a Play bug (or at least Play does not like being hosted in PatchWork, or PatchWork doesn't like Play - either way.) The crashes happen when you have Play inserted directly on an instrument track in Cubase, and also have a PatchWork containing a Play instance, then enable/disable the tracks or close the project and poof.

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I too miss the Satyatunes skin!

Is it possible to have a 'Master' OFF switch on the App, I know each Plugin Insert has one, as I use it for testing new VST and left it Off for a few hours, only to find it had maxed out my laptops CPU: it still is in Run/Play, even when switched Off, this just turns the sound off: SaviHosts OFF is off, some other Standalones have ON/OFF & Play/Stop.

Cheers, Paul

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The current button is indeed only for bypass. Maybe we should just replace it with a true power button.

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Funny thing: I got PatchWork as a "freebie", being part of the AxePack bundle. It was the plugin that I was least interested in and now it's probably the one I use the most. Ha! :tu:

I would love to see one addition (or maybe it's in there already and I'm too stupid to find it?) an optional simple meter on the output of every slot would make things so much easier when trying to do proper gain staging with a somewhat temperamental fx chain. (Maybe with a gain button on it, too)

Additionally, a panic button for the audio engine in the standalone version would be fab. I was playing a bit with it yesterday with very low samples and at some point it just went silent. I tried changing the buffer size, but it stayed quiet. Only closing and opening again would bring it back to life.
(Same goes for the standalone Axiom, btw)

But great work. Really happy!

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A warning message when closing the standalone would be great :tu:
I'm using PW as a VST-host on my touchscreen-PC and it has happened more than once that I've accidentally closed my session with my fat fingers...

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