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Scott Wheeler

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Posts posted by Scott Wheeler

  1. On 12/21/2023 at 7:51 PM, Ezekyle36 said:

    The edited samples are literally vanished (the original are still in my drive tho).

    Are they still in the same location on your drive?  i.e. you're sure that you haven't reorganized your samples (renamed folders, moved them to a  different drive, etc.) since you created your Cakewalk project?  Is this Sitala 1 or 2?

  2. 1 hour ago, Noel Borthwick said:

    Good. Hopefully the developer knows how to debug using dump files. It's always surprising to me but many plugin developers don't even know how.

    We do, but the symbols file for the VST managed to not get checked into our repo for build artefacts (just the standalone symbols got checked in, which isn't useful here), so don't have function names.  We sent the user a debug build from the same tag, but didn't hear back.

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  3. On 9/26/2022 at 10:50 PM, GCizza said:

    Many thanks. I've sent the developer the dump file. 

    One of the Sitala developers here:  unfortunately the crash log didn't contain enough information to be useful; we sent @GCizza a debug build a couple weeks ago to see if we could help diagnose what was happening here, but haven't heard back, so there's unfortunately not much more we can do.

    On 9/26/2022 at 1:41 PM, Michael Vogel said:

    Still a new and possibly immature plug-in at V1.09

    Sitala's actually been around for 5 years and has had 7 public releases in that time (and more than 150,000 downloads).  On KVR it's the most popular drum sampler after the Native Instruments ones, and MT Power Drum Kit:

    https://www.kvraudio.com/plugins/drum-sampler/most-popular

    • Like 1
  4. 2 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

    When I called this project up, I was using a kit I made using Oberheim DMX samples. The project loaded, and the name of the Cakewalk patch showed up in the Plug-in Properties UI , but of course Sitala couldn't find my custom kits on the new system. It threw up dialogs saying that it couldn't find the sample, so with each one I painstakingly found each sample and rebuilt the drum kit. This worked, as far as being able to play the song back, and I could save what I had put together using Cakewalk's native patch system, but when I went to save the restored kit using Sitala's preset/kit storing systems, it threw up this error. No amount of saving to a different name or location would pacify it.

    So the error message is dumb there.  I just pulled up the code for that and it shows that message any time the kit saving fails, but there's another case where it can fail that isn't obvious from the error message:  it can't find some of the samples referenced in the kit.  I assume that's what you're hitting:  there are still some samples in that kit that can't be found (I'm still too much in just-woke-up-on-Saturday-morning mode to try to reproduce it by creating a project and moving things around myself, but I added a to-do list item for our next release).  Can you go through and see if every pad can currently play its sample?  If there are any that can't, even if you're not using that pad in your project, saving will fail.  Just clearing said pad should get it to work.

    2 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

    Which raises another question: let's say that for whatever reason, I save a couple of new kits in different directories, with a Save Kit As... or whatever. At this point those kits should both show up in Sitala's kit browser, right? I presume so. But then let's say I want to copy all of my Sitala kits over to another system. Sitala will probably show me the last folder I used to save a kit, but where the other(s) will be is a mystery. Is there some way to find out where Sitala thinks the various kits in its browser are?

    There are two different lists of kits there:  one just recently used, and the second is "User Kits".  If you have things in your user kits, Sitala does look in your user kits directory if it can't find something referenced.  You can find the actual folder for that by clicking on the little icon next to "User Kits" in Sitala:870959381_ScreenShot2022-08-06at09_37_52.png.732043afd6da5c8ff676e7c64c97da9e.png

    There if something was in the user kits on the old machine, and is still in the user kits on the new machine, Sitala should find it there.  But again, that only works for whole kits, not individual samples.

    Does that make any sense?

    • Like 1
  5. 20 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

    If you tell me the file locations that Sitala writes to when saving kits, I might be able to remember if any of them were ones where I had to apply tough love. I know that at one point I had to remind C:\Program Files who is in charge (as in take ownership and give myself full control). Whenever I get one of those UAC messages saying that I need to give administrator privileges for a simple file copy or delete or replace, I just go to the top level folder and wrench on the permissions.

    I'm not sure I understand the question:

    Sitala doesn't use any extra directories to save info about kits -- everything is either included in the data saved into the Cakewalk project, or is in a .sitala kit (and our kits are just a zip file with a bunch of wav files and an XML description).
     

    Quote

    I hope that will be optional. I usually prefer being prompted to search for them manually when I know where I moved them to. Otherwise the program might snag a file from a temporary location and then we'd do the dance all over again.

    Having a suggested locations probably won't be optional, but you won't be forced to accept our suggestion.  We'll also have some logic in there to try to avoid temporary locations.  And yeah, assuming that all of the other samples (at least checking for them) are in the same place as one specified manually is something we intend to do.  I even have some vague memory of us having already written that code, though my brain's a bit fuzzy on that since we've been working on the iOS version for the last few months.

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    Please please allow for color customization of the UI, or better still, custom skinning? I suspect that your REAPER pals might already have made that request. I'd love to get my theming hands on it, it looks like you're not using that many images to build the UI (compared to Cakewalk, I mean). It's a nice, sleek-looking UI, but the grey looks....kinda dowdy. At least, having a choice of a dark theme would be cool.

    Full skinability is very unlikely (honestly, both me and the other Sitala developer are huge skinning haters), but there is a dark mode that just made it into our last release of the iOS version that will also make it into our next desktop release.   There's a screenshot of that here:

    https://twitter.com/decomposermusic/status/1544777181187932160

     

  6. On 7/20/2022 at 2:41 AM, Starship Krupa said:

    There are some pains in the neck (and other areas) regarding moving presets over. Basically, I need to figure out where they are on the Optiplex and copy them to a similar location on the new system. One plug-in so far is a failure in this regard: Sitala. It won't let me save custom kits on the new system (yes, I tried running CbB as Administrator, checked permissions on the folder, yada yada), and since it links to sample locations rather than copying them, I needed to rebuild some custom kits. No go with their preset system, so I kludged it together using Cakewalk's internal preset system and will be creating all new kits with Speedrum Lite. What this means is that any existing projects that use Sitala for drums are going to need to be somewhat retooled in that department. Pain.

    Do you have the same issue with saving with the Sitala standalone?  Sitala kits are self-contained -- i.e. they contain the samples they use -- but the state used inside of a saved Cakewalk project isn't.  We tried embedding the samples into the saved state, but it caused problems with a number of DAWs.

    The next update to Sitala (later this year) will include an automagic sample finder that uses the Windows Search functions in the background to find missing samples quickly.  (We store enough info about the files in the stream to know if we've found the same one, even if it's been moved.)

    • Like 1
  7. On 1/28/2021 at 6:44 PM, solarlux said:

    @Scott Wheeler Hello! Will be also available single-sample instrument  sampler version of Sitala in future?

    It would be very great because all single samplers big size and Sitala is perfect size and comfortable.

    We don't have any plans to make a melodic sampler at the moment.  That doesn't mean that it won't ever happen, but there's almost no chance it'll happen in the next couple years.

  8. On 12/4/2020 at 10:46 AM, Will_Kaydo said:

    @Noel Borthwick Would you be interested in reaching out? 

    I thought I'd go ahead and drop in slightly more technical details in case @Noel Borthwick or others are interested.

    The API for this is very small -- basically the 4 functions that have to be implemented.  I just posted the current version (which we're using for Reaper at the moment) in a Github Gist:

    https://gist.github.com/scotchi/4066f56b71b7b3b112b05df26d52034c

    There are a couple core ideas here:

    • We want create several very small interfaces, so that DAWs can pick and choose which extensions to implement
    • We want to keep the interfaces very generic so they can be implemented frictionlessly by other plugins
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  9. 15 hours ago, chris.r said:

    Didn't know that so thanks for clearing that up. For me it was always that if something is loaded up with Windows session then it takes the resources.

    There are various ways that a poorly written service could take resources even when doing nothing, but a well-written service won't.  It will however take a little bit of CPU time when the system is started up.  What's confusing in the Windows system monitor is that it shows which resources have been allocated; that's only part of the picture though:  system memory can be swapped out to disk when it's not in use, and that will usually happen for a service that's not doing anything.

  10. 56 minutes ago, Will_Kaydo said:

    Original installation - no-nara! you have a clean install.

    The problem comes in with 3rd party websites that creates their own install with some free vsts - with an advertising link to an App they offer that you have to install first, before you can install the actual product. 

    I think you have to include this on the site. 

    I don't quite understand what you're suggesting here, so  to be clear:  in our first couple of alphas, there was a background service that ran and didn't actively do anything.  (Being pedantic, a background service that isn't doing anything doesn't actually consume system resources:  its memory will be swapped out, and it doesn't take CPU time.)  When you start up Sitala, then and now, it checks for updates.  You can't upgrade an app from inside the app itself, so you have to start a second process to perform the upgrade.  In our first couple of alphas, we did that with a background service.  Now it just temporarily starts a second upgrader process that automatically exits when the upgrade is finished (and upgrading automatically removed that service).  There was never anything nefarious or advertising related, just some inexperience with Windows programming (the two of us that work on Sitala primarily come from macOS and Linux backgrounds).

  11. On 12/4/2020 at 5:23 PM, chris.r said:

    Among many good points of Sitala, one thing I didn't like was that it forces us to install some hidden service, not sure what it is, probably something to check for updates I assume. But it starts with Windows and takes resources, something that I always try to stay away from, so I simply didn't install it on my production desktop in an attempt of keeping the least amount of 'necessary garbage'.

    That went away ... I think after the second alpha?  Anyway, hasn't been the case for more than a year at least.

  12. On 12/4/2020 at 1:00 PM, Starship Krupa said:

    Thanks for checking in and telling us about this, @Scott Wheeler. The developers will be alerted, and unless they've already started work on their own sampler, I can't imagine that they wouldn't be interested in talking with you on your API.

    Great, thanks!

    On 12/4/2020 at 1:00 PM, Starship Krupa said:

    As with ARA (which Cakewalk has always been toward the front of the herd with), the more companies that buy into these non-Steinberg standards and extensions the better.

    I'm very interested in what form the integration with REAPER has taken, so I guess in a few days I should download the latest builds of both Sitala and REAPER and check it out.

    Reaper has a pretty extensive (though a bit craptastic) API, so it makes deeper integration possible in a lot of ways.  The things we have in the upcoming release are automatic multi-out routing, and synchronized track names (so the pad name is automatically reflected in the pad name).  We already had note names working in Reaper in our last release.

    On 12/4/2020 at 1:00 PM, Starship Krupa said:

    For me, the minimum is dragging audio clips from Cakewalk tracks to the sampler's pads with no intermediate steps or conversions or leaving the app. If I could just do that, life would be so much simpler. If your API allows that, host applications transferring audio directly to Sitala, and it's something that others might start using, it would make for a happy land indeed.

    The planned API doesn't do that at the moment, but interestingly, you don't need to have an extension to the VST API to do that.  Reaper has a modifier that you can hold when dragging things like that that simply creates a temp file for a few seconds with that content.  I even think it should be possible to simply correctly set the encoding of the dragged content to PCM and it should be possible to get it working without any real magic (just using normal desktop drag and drop protocols), but when I went spelunking a year or two back to see if any DAWs actually did that, I didn't find any.  But that's something I'm open to exploring for future releases if we get more DAWs on board.

    • Great Idea 2
  13. On 11/20/2020 at 11:27 PM, Will_Kaydo said:

    Why not go in a brand product promotion contract with Sitala? It's a free sampler.

    While that's something that we're definitely open to (and say so explicitly on our website), there's also a middle path:  in a release that's coming out in a couple of days we've got tighter integration specifically with Reaper, and that's something that we're very open to expanding out to other DAWs.

    If there are any Cakewalk developers that happen to be reading this and find it interesting, please get in touch with us at info@decomposer.de.  We've got an API that we're planning on opening soon that will make it possible for other hosts to integrate more deeply to Sitala (or any other plugin -- we're planning on open sourcing the code) that papers over a lot of the shortcomings of the VST format.

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  14. 3 hours ago, scook said:

    AFAIK, only two other plug-ins support this feature (Cakewalk Session Drummer and FXpansion BFD3) and both only change the notes mapped to the instruments in the plug-ins. They leave the rest of alone. They show up as MIDI note numbers.

     

    Yeah, I'd noticed that that was the default when we don't set a value (in the screenshot above I'm actually setting the names to a single space), and found that a bit ugly (note names would have been less so), but it's probably worth doing what the others do just for consistency.  I assume that they (at least BFD3) have the same issue of things not updating in the step sequencer?

  15. On 6/16/2020 at 10:04 PM, Scott Wheeler said:

    It's on our tentative to-do list for the next release, but we haven't actually messed around with it yet.  Basically, if it ends up being straightforward, it'll almost certainly be included in the next release.

    We did get this implemented in Sitala, and it'll be part of the release we have coming up in a few weeks.  A couple of quick questions:

    • Right now we're blanking out the notes that aren't support by Sitala.  Anyone have a strong preference to that vs. showing simply note names for the unassigned notes?
    • Anyone happen to know of any other hosts that support effGetMidiKeyName?  It'd be nice to test to see if it's working in other hosts.

    Unfortunately there's a little bit of a lag for Cakewalk pulling in the updated note names into the piano roll, and in the step sequencer, it seems to never update the note names once the step sequencer has been activated.

    sitala-notes-in-cakewalk.png

    • Like 1
  16. 22 hours ago, scook said:

    Based on a recent thread, Sitala may be adding support for this feature too.

    It's on our tentative to-do list for the next release, but we haven't actually messed around with it yet.  Basically, if it ends up being straightforward, it'll almost certainly be included in the next release.

  17. 5 hours ago, Stephen Ajewole said:

    I think it would be awesome if cakewalk collaborated with the guys that made sitala. [...]

    I'm one of the Sitala devs, so I thought it might be useful to chime in here.

    We are right now working with tighter integration with one other DAW at the moment (mainly syncing things up so that note names show our pad names in the sequencer, and that in multi-track mode the tracks are created automatically) and we're willing to do that with more DAWs in the future.  Even before I saw this thread I'd been thinking of doing some contact spelunking to see who I might know that I could get in touch with at BandLab since we've seen a real uptick in Cakewalk usage in the past couple of months.

    The current stuff we're doing is basically just a proof of concept, but effectively what we're shooting for is to create a very small API (i.e. something DAWs can implement) that extends the VST interface in a way that makes these things possible.

    So, yes, this is something we're interested in.  You can go a long way with the VST interface, but there are just some things that aren't possible without adding some extensions, and that's what we're looking at for a few of the hosts that Sitala is more popular with.

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