B-5 Organ: some comments

[gruust]

Hello!

First of all, thx a lot for the free V3 update!

Here are some comments that I think might help.

1. A lot of sound "cracks" appear to happen because of UI activity/updates. It seems that UVI Workstation has not properly decoupled its UI thread from the audio processing thread(s). For example, when making adjustments to the swell pedal, sound tends to get "cracked" for a millisecond. This does NOT happen when the UVI WS is embedded into my DAW and there is no plugin UI open. This also happens on the arpeggiator page when switching between arpeggiator presets -- something that obviously should have NO such effect on sound because only MIDI events should get changed in the process. Maybe file a bug report with UVI?

2. Multithreaded operation would be great. And it's also needed if you guys keep trying to push the boundaries of what's possible. Just look at how sad the per core speed development for CPUs has been in the last decade. Top notch CPUs are only about 100% faster now than my current decade old (then mid-tier!) CPU.

3. UVI workstation seems to be a bit combersome regarding DAW integration. My load times are always quite large. Even the simplest UVI apps take like 15+ seconds to load. I had very good experience with JUCE. If you already have a C++ codebase, putting out VST plugins would probably be a breeze.

Keep up the good work!

[rasmusklump]

Most of my 30+ UVI libraries load instantly. Only two or three have a loading time of 3-4 seconds. That time depends on the gui size.

[thysm00]

Hello!

First of all, thx a lot for the free V3 update!

You're welcome!

1. A lot of sound "cracks" appear to happen because of UI activity/updates. It seems that UVI Workstation has not properly decoupled its UI thread from the audio processing thread(s). For example, when making adjustments to the swell pedal, sound tends to get "cracked" for a millisecond. This does NOT happen when the UVI WS is embedded into my DAW and there is no plugin UI open. This also happens on the arpeggiator page when switching between arpeggiator presets -- something that obviously should have NO such effect on sound because only MIDI events should get changed in the process. Maybe file a bug report with UVI?

There is no bug here, the UI isn't in fact decoupled from the audio, but that's by design unfortunately, and they are aware of this. It turns out that it's also kind of our fault here. The UI isn't supposed to handle buttons that large or have a spinning leslie. Maybe we should just have a switch somewhere to turn off the fancy UI stuff...

2. Multithreaded operation would be great. And it's also needed if you guys keep trying to push the boundaries of what's possible. Just look at how sad the per core speed development for CPUs has been in the last decade. Top notch CPUs are only about 100% faster now than my current decade old (then mid-tier!) CPU.

I don't know about this, but yep, i would love for it to happen at some point. And i also would love some progress on the single core speeds, it looks like macs are doing something for that, but the rest just isn't...

3. UVI workstation seems to be a bit combersome regarding DAW integration. My load times are always quite large. Even the simplest UVI apps take like 15+ seconds to load. I had very good experience with JUCE. If you already have a C++ codebase, putting out VST plugins would probably be a breeze.

That's the only thing i don't agree with. The loading times are quite fast now, but first that depends on the library you use, if it's big, it will take time. If you look at other instruments, it's the same. Kontakt seems different, but it's a trick, the UI is loaded but it still loads the samples in the background and you can't play until everything is loaded, so in the end, you also need to wait the 15 seconds.
That being said, for the B5 for example, even when not on an SSD, it loads in 5 seconds over here.

Keep up the good work!

Oh we will

[EvilDragon]

Maybe we should just have a switch somewhere to turn off the fancy UI stuff...

Yes, that would be nice and quite welcomed!

Kontakt seems different, but it's a trick, the UI is loaded but it still loads the samples in the background and you can't play until everything is loaded, so in the end, you also need to wait the 15 seconds.

Incorrect. You CAN play before everything is loaded, Kontakt attempts to load requested samples (those that you just played) just-in-time and with a fast enough drive (SSD) it can actually work really well.

But the main thing here is - DAW GUI is not blocked from operation while loading continues in the background with Kontakt. That is what people really appreciate. I know this one is not on you but on UVI, but that's the state of things.

That being said, for the B5 for example, even when not on an SSD, it loads in 5 seconds over here.

I timed it over here. SSD (Samsung EVO 850), opened Falcon after cold boot, loading time until GUI showed up and was playable was around 8-9 seconds here.

[EvilDragon]

Oh and a minor comment UX wise: I am not a fan of the tabs at the bottom (Speaker, MIDI, etc.) opening up a popup that completely obstructs the tabs themselves, so you cannot really use them as tabs to jump from one page to another. Slows down workflow because every time you have to move your mouse to upper left to X out...

[thysm00]

Kontakt seems different, but it's a trick, the UI is loaded but it still loads the samples in the background and you can't play until everything is loaded, so in the end, you also need to wait the 15 seconds.

Incorrect. You CAN play before everything is loaded, Kontakt attempts to load requested samples (those that you just played) just-in-time and with a fast enough drive (SSD) it can actually work really well.

Yeah, that never worked for me (and i've been using Kontakt since Kontakt 2, so i know it well). It does in fact put the samples that need to be loaded up in the queue, so it works if the library is simple enough and plays one sample, if it was the B5 that plays many things at the same time, it just would not and crackle on the first note until everything is loaded.
I do agree though that it's a more elegant solution and that it would be cooler to have it load in the background of the session, but it just does not work that way, they actually had it working a while ago, but since it wasn't designed this way, it created other problems so they went back to blocking the UI.

That being said, for the B5 for example, even when not on an SSD, it loads in 5 seconds over here.

I timed it over here. SSD (Samsung EVO 850), opened Falcon after cold boot, loading time until GUI showed up and was playable was around 8-9 seconds here.

I guess it depends on the computer, i timed it over here when i wrote the first message and it was 5.9 seconds, and that's on a western digital 7200Rpm HD.

[thysm00]

Oh and a minor comment UX wise: I am not a fan of the tabs at the bottom (Speaker, MIDI, etc.) opening up a popup that completely obstructs the tabs themselves, so you cannot really use them as tabs to jump from one page to another. Slows down workflow because every time you have to move your mouse to upper left to X out...

Well, i don't know what to say, but we could not put everything on one tab, so we had to do things a different way.
It was actually different in the V2, you could just click on the same button to open and close or access other tabs while another one was open and we got MANY complains, so we just did like most software do and just used tabs. Sometimes trying to be too smart just confuses everyone...

[EvilDragon]

It was actually different in the V2, you could just click on the same button to open and close or access other tabs while another one was open and we got MANY complains

Wow, I can't believe that!

[thysm00]

Wow, I can't believe that!

Me neither... well, i can understand the train of thoughts though, they were clicking on the tab to display the panel and then could not figure out how to close it.
Anyway, i agree it takes one more click, but at least it's easy and straight forward and it turns out that it's often the best solution

[DMG68]

If there was room on the open tab to show the other tabs still so we could select another one without closing - that’d work nicely. It could be small.

[EvilDragon]

Yeah the tabs can still sorta be seen below some of those panels. If they just remain clickable I'd be fine with that!

[thysm00]

I guess that could be arranged

[thysm00]

Annnnnnnd DONE Just install it again, (same link)

[EvilDragon]

Much appreciated!

[musicman691]

Been reading the manual such as it is. Is there a possibility to set a default MIDI control scheme? The default one uses cc11 for volume and I want to use the more or less standard cc7 for that control. As it stands now cc7 is used for the volume rocker switch which is useless to me. I don't want to have to load a saved MIDI control scheme each time I open B-5.