AAS Chromaphone 3 : ???

[chris.r]

36 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

If A|A|S Player would only allow me to turn off reverb, I'd have much less interest in Chromaphone, which is probably why they don't allow it.

In my opinion they should allow us at least control the internal fx dry/wet balance and sync on/off for any timebased fx, including the arp, in Player. I for example, stopped buying more soundbanks because of lack of these

Wanted Chromaphone for full control so I did buy v2 and that's it for now.

Edited December 27, 2021 by chris.r

[Zo]

1 hour ago, Starship Krupa said:

Blew the dust off!

I did some experimenting with turning off layer 2. Since you can "solo" them, I found that in the incredibly dense sounds Chromaphone is capable of, the second layer wasn't contributing that much. Their sound designers create these sculptures using everything available, and sometimes in the context of a piece, they're too dense.

I was following the conventional wisdom on that for a long time, then tried enabling it and my processor clock shot up to 3.8 GHz (stock is 3.4) and stays there. This is on a Dell, which are notoriously clock blocked. So I'd encourage folks to experiment with that setting, monitor it with HWInfo, see what you get. The trick was to turn on the turbo boost, but keep the power saving one off.

Must confess at this point: I'm not (at this point anyway) much of a "synthesist." I call myself a "preset jockey." Mostly I turn off synths' internal reverb so I can replace it with R4 or Nimbus. My compositional process often involves browsing patches, finding an inspiring sound, then building the piece around that sound. It used to cause me a bit of shame, like "real" synthesists dive in and create their own unique sounds, blah blah. But then it struck me: some of my favorite composers' keyboards only had one "preset," and it couldn't be tweaked at all. 😄

If A|A|S Player would only allow me to turn off reverb, I'd have much less interest in Chromaphone, which is probably why they don't allow it.

Hybrid 3 (great arps and sequences) is actually my most-used synth, and Vacuum Pro is up there too (some nice basses in there). XPand!2 is great for the kind of workflow you describe, and of course has sounds that can stand up to being used in a final mix (basses, arps, and pads).

As Cakewalk itself has gotten more nimble and resource-friendly over the last few years, I guess plug-ins have gone the other direction. AIR will probably never develop my favorite workhorses into the resource hog zone.😄

Yep Erik , i do find that one layer (2 resonator) is even better to have solid sound before it becomes to vulgarous ... os old libraries are great to play with and 2 resonator is enougth , sometime i want fx on one not theother , the second layer comes handy there , but it really increase the cpu even if only 2 resonnator are use at all , witch leads me to think that the framework design isn't optimised ...

As for the cpu turbo boost it's not the thortelling , but heat  i'm on a passiv cooling configuration , system is exellent like this , as soon as turbo is enabled , i start going in areas i don't want  (but even like that i'm under 75 c while no turbo i'm under 60 on heavy projects , system is exellent most of the time i'm near 50  )

Actually producing here's my temps  

[Starship Krupa]

5 minutes ago, Zo said:

a Chromaphone 3 instance can only run on one core of a multi-core system

I wonder if there's some way to shuffle core affinities around so that Chromaphone, when running as a plug-in, could have one mostly to itself.

Someone told me that VSTi's were not included in Cakewalk's plug-in load balancing.

[Zo]

Just now, Starship Krupa said:

I wonder if there's some way to shuffle core affinities around so that Chromaphone, when running as a plug-in, could have one mostly to itself.

Someone told me that VSTi's were not included in Cakewalk's plug-in load balancing.

loading theml in something like komplete kontrol or a 3rd party vst could make a diff , but really i ain't tripping , upgraded for chromaphone , rediscovering String studio 3 

[abacab]

16 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I wonder if there's some way to shuffle core affinities around so that Chromaphone, when running as a plug-in, could have one mostly to itself.

Someone told me that VSTi's were not included in Cakewalk's plug-in load balancing.

It was mentioned by Noel elsewhere on the forum that instruments are not included in Cakewalk's plug-in balancing. I understand the reasoning to be that instruments are logically a single-threaded signal path. But I think that each instance could be assigned to separate cores/threads, as far as is practical.

My observations with Chromaphone 3 when run as standalone, it appears to use a single core. With a plug-in host such as a DAW, it may vary somewhat, but it appears to me that the virtual instrument took a core to itself, with the other cores running the other DAW threads.

I tried an experiment in Studio One where I could display the host performance monitor showing CPU use on a per plug-in basis. My PC has 6 cores/6 threads.

So I inserted 6 instances of Chromaphone 3 VST3, assigned a pad preset to each, and played and held a tried chord. So 18 notes polyphony.

My overall CPU use was 30% as shown on S1's monitor, and that roughly mirrored the same as Windows Task Manager, but you can see that each instance of Chromaphone had it's own per-plug-in CPU load.

Edited December 27, 2021 by abacab

[fret_man]

Very nice. Thank you for doing this. Do you think all layers of a given instance still uses the same core?

[abacab]

2 hours ago, fret_man said:

Very nice. Thank you for doing this. Do you think all layers of a given instance still uses the same core?

Apparently. All of the presets used were from the Chromaphone 3 collection, so assumed to be dual layer, which was the intent.

I watched the Windows Task Manager, as well as the S1 Performance monitor, as I added the instances And it appeared to increment 1:1.

[Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann]

If you run into CPU issues with VSTi's you may want to look into something like discoDSP Bliss

(currently on sale https://www.adsrsounds.com/product/software/discodsp-bliss-sampler-instrument/)

Also, it's very interesting to see that Studio One does a good job balancing the processing across threads. For DAWs that don't do it (or, to use as a performance host), there's always pluginguru's Unify

[abacab]

7 hours ago, Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann said:

Also, it's very interesting to see that Studio One does a good job balancing the processing across threads. For DAWs that don't do it (or, to use as a performance host), there's always pluginguru's Unify

I only used Studio One for this example, as it is the only DAW/host that I have with an internal Performance Monitor that displays CPU use on a per-plugin basis.

I'm not sure I would describe it as actually "balancing", as that implies a bit more active processing. Each instance of Chromaphone simply took a separate core. I believe the same happens in Cakewalk, but you have to reference it using Windows Task Manager showing each core activity to scope it out.