New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

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John Bowen
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by John Bowen »

M-Prod,

Yes, I have a priority based on internal feedback from users...I just was curious how these aligned with those who are watching this topic.
amongstmyselves
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by amongstmyselves »

Personally I'd like the midi clock sync to work solidly and sample playback.
M-Prod
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by M-Prod »

Ok I understand now. My 3:
Sync issues
Sustain / voice stealing issues
Freeze on boot
Last edited by M-Prod on Wed Feb 08, 2017 11:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
John Bowen
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by John Bowen »

M-Prod wrote:Ok I understand now. My 3:
Sync issues
Sustain / voice stealing issues
Freeze on boot
The freeze on boot is pretty much eliminated...I’d say 99% of the time I boot up, there’s no freeze.
Sustain pedal is causing the most investigation because the behavior is different depending on if you have a front panel with regular or detented encoders. I find that it is related to the CF card being polled all the time when in Preset Mode, and this is where you are seeing an issue (and this for non-detented encoder panels only).
Sync issues - if you mean External MIDI clock, this is getting an extensive rewrite, as the older code is not handling external clocks at all, just using the incoming BPM at the start to set the internal Solaris clock. (I was quite surprised to find this out!) But be assured, work is really finally under way on this!
John Bowen
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by John Bowen »

Dear Solaris Owners,

There are a number of you out there with units that use detented encoders (generally from production round 4). You know who you are (if there’s a question, check your front panel knobs - if you can feel a slight ‘bump’ as you turn the knob, you have a detented encoder).

We are getting close to having our first bug fix release in a long time, but it’s going to be limited initially to those with detented encoders. I am still seeing some odd issues with the update in non-detented encoder units, and until we can figure out why, we will have to restrict the release to those with detented encoder panels.
The current beta OS is v1.2.12.2, which will be renumbered to something shorter I expect, once it gets the official nod. Here’s what’s fixed:

1) The Solaris now responds to the following over MIDI: sustain (CC64), sostenuto (CC66), channel aftertouch, joystick X (CC16) and joystick Y (CC17).
2) Program and Bank Select are now transmitted and received.
3) Sustain pedal no longer shuts off held notes when released.
4) If you are using a sustain pedal, the delay noted in earlier versions when playing in Preset Mode is greatly reduced.
5) The boot routine is streamlined and slightly quicker, and should no longer ‘freeze’ at the Waldorf credits screen.
6) In the FX Delay, the left and right delay times are now on the correct sides. This applies to both internal and external MIDI clock settings. This should not affect the sound of existing presets---it only swaps the UI.
7) Fixed the "File is no preset" error that sometimes appeared when scrolling through presets.

Many thanks to Jim Hewes, who has done these in 5 days!
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by jgale »

WOW! This is great news!

You nailed most of my top items - Channel Aftertouch / sustain / joystick midi recognition and fixing the sustain pedal.

I have one small request if it is easy - if not it can wait. When I am using a patch with a long sustain and scroll through the presets with the data wheel (no need to select a new preset) - the notes start to get cutoff like the Solaris only has 5 notes polyphony. The same thing happens in 10 preset display mode. Also when scrolling in 10 preset mode - multiple presets gets highlighted. To get around this I only use the up and down buttons when selecting presets (pretty slow!).

Longer term I would like to see:
- Ribbon controller - the ability to send and receive Midi messages
- NRPNs transmitted and received correctly - many times a knob will send a NRPN value but when you send the same NRPN value back to the Solaris, it selects a different value on the screen of the Soaris.
- Buttons sending NRPNs

Getting really excited about a new update!

John
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by John Bowen »

jgale,
Yes, the main thing slowing the system down is having to scan the CF card for preset names. It doesn’t look like the code was really well-thought out for card interactions when they planned the system (I had not specified to have a CF card for data storage, but left that to the Sonic Core engineers). When you scroll through the presets, or fetch ten preset names at a time, the system gets ‘bogged down’, and affects the screen highlighting and other things, such as sustain pedal action and apparently voice handling if you are getting notes cut off.
The solution I believe we should try is to set aside some of the internal memory for either preset name storage or even entire preset data storage (which would obviously take up a lot more space). With these things already loaded into memory, you shouldn’t see any latency in the process of scrolling through preset names; the question is, how big a preset buffer should be used. You might want ideally to have a full bank of 128 presets stored in the buffer, but then you’ll have to wait the first time to get all of them transferred over...and when do you do that? Whenever you first select a new Bank and Program? Or perhaps we can say just load in 10 names at a time, and as you scroll, there’s a slight bump as the next 10 get loaded (or load 50, or some such number).

(What happens now, by the way, is that once you select and load a Preset, either by Inc/Dec or pressing Enter, the cf card is accessed and the data is copied over in the Preset Mode buffer. That’s why you can play the last preset loaded even if you remove the cf card. If you make any edits to the sound, there is a second buffer allocated where the same data plus the changes is copied. The Compare button switches between these 2 buffers.)

Another thing that we need to consider is the future application of MultiMode. Here you need a new object class, and a large buffer that contains all of the data from each of the 4 presets loaded, plus all of the data needed per part, such as MIDI channel, level, panning, velocity and key windowing, etc.. Since creation of a MultiMode object will require looking through a large number of presets, it seems that it would be necessary to have a large number pre-loaded into memory. I just have to see what is feasible there.
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by John Bowen »

jgale wrote:Longer term I would like to see:
- Ribbon controller - the ability to send and receive Midi messages
- NRPNs transmitted and received correctly - many times a knob will send a NRPN value but when you send the same NRPN value back to the Solaris, it selects a different value on the screen of the Solaris.
- Buttons sending NRPNs
So, all these things are on the list. The ribbon controller has its own PCB and controller, so generating MIDI from this will need some deeper investigation, but I also want to have this sent and received over MIDI.

The buttons are on the list to get added to the NRPN messages. One of the things we finally found is that the fellow who did the NRPN code way back when never fully implemented the receiving of them, so for many of the Solaris parameters, you will get a reset to a value of 0 when a parameter change comes over. In the cases where there is proper reception of numbers, it’s always been that the slaved unit is not exactly tracking the master, and I have had this on my list since the beginning. It may be an issue of round off, or some other scheme. Jim will be looking into everything NRPN-related very soon, and he has already spent a good bit of time with it for his earlier solarium editor project.
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by jgale »

Thanks for the response John. Glad to see that you are making progress.

John
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by John Bowen »

jgale wrote:When I am using a patch with a long sustain and scroll through the presets with the data wheel (no need to select a new preset) - the notes start to get cutoff like the Solaris only has 5 notes polyphony. The same thing happens in 10 preset display mode. Also when scrolling in 10 preset mode - multiple presets gets highlighted. To get around this I only use the up and down buttons when selecting presets (pretty slow!).
I tried a setting of 20 seconds for the EG6 Release time - played 10 voice chord, then scroll via the Preset Mode page 1 or page 3 (where all 10 are listed), and did not get any notes cut off. The display redraw is not that fast, so sometimes the letters are not fully there right away, and the multiple highlighting is still there in the page 3 display (as expected), but I’m not finding that notes are stopped. I tested for about 10 minutes.

Perhaps you have some specific presets where this is noticed that you can send me to try?
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by jgale »

John - try these steps to reproduce:

- Select Bank 0 Patch 25 "JB 4 OSC String Pad"
- Starting on the highest key of the keyboard, play a fast descending C scale
- You should hear all of the notes sustaining normally

- Spin the data wheel quickly up and down to display different patch names and then stop
- Play the same C scale
- You should hear some of the notes getting cut off as if the Solaris was half in mono mode

It seems to affect every sustaining patch for me. The only way I found to get the Solaris working correctly again is by rebooting.

John
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by John Bowen »

jgale,

Ah, that did it! Thanks for the report!! It seems a voice or two gets “lost” - there’s no way to recall it to the voice pool unless you reboot.
Will add to the bug List....
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by synthwalker »

Same as Chapolin for me, but you already know...
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by F5D »

Great to hear about the new progress! I support the idea of speeding up scrolling through presets on the card. The idea of John about copying the bank of a card to internal memory sounds good, if it can be done. The list of things that I would like to have addressed:

-Speedup browsing sounds from the CF card
-Avoid the random hangup during boot (according to John earlier, this should be already better)
-Using modulation wheel to control filter cutoff sometimes jumps / stutters through a few values, especially in slow filter sweeps with the wheel. Some filter types may be more sensitive to this, need to re-check.
-In random cases, some of my previously saved sounds get an additional modulator routing that appears after a reboot. Very often this is one of the LFOs modulating filter cutoff, even though I have saved the sound without such a routing. The problem does not appear during the same boot, but after reboot. I still need to investigate how to reproduce this, could also be due to me manually copying sounds between banks on the card on my computer.

In general, to me the most important thing is to have an OS that is optimized to run the synth engine and browsing of sounds as efficiently and smoothly as possible in a typical mono-timbral mode. Then, possibly extend some features in a later bigger update.
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Re: New version of the OS ? Soon or not ?

Post by Patate le mgae »

Ho! I'm so happy you eventually find the cause for the midi sync issue, i now can have hope to use the powerfull arpeggiator or the motion sequencer in my music.
By the way i'm still in love with my solaris after those years.
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