From the original SynthMaker forum (2004–2014), with its members’ names and dates.
dutchound ·
hello, i have been using reaktor since 2003 and synthmaker for one day...
i really really like it! but the ticker is a problem i need at least 200hz for changing audible effects in a vst without actually hopping all the way 44.1 hkz which would be abit over kill . i was thinking surely some people have made some tick rate LFOs for their ensebles and that there were some models available, i have found one that seems to work with an array, i ll check it out away from the cybercafe, any others in that style are available?
so i made a lfo with a counter going trough a cos module, it goes through an acos module to make a triangle wave... and through a compare module to make a pulse signal, then the sync phase of the lfo can be decided by the start value of the counter...
i ll just perfect it and ill post it online when it's done. i dont know how to make pulswidth info from a counter going through a cos, so if you have any ideas that would be welcome. thanks!
do you think that if i make a master ticker from a oscillator and convert it to a gate / trigger type ticker it would be possible?
would it also be reasonable to try to make a double speed ticker making a second tick somehow in between the ticks of the main ticker.
Mainly i was going to make a ticker based lfo because it seems cpu heavy to use audio oscillators as lfos and because i want to use the lfos to regulate scanner and would have to convert from audio to float to integer etc and i dunno what it seems abit tricky...
i love SM so far it seems very well designed. i take it i can sell synths made with it? do i need to buy a seller license or something like that to do so?
trogluddite ·
Welcome to the forum,
A nice CPU light sample rate oscillator is definitely the way to do what you want, even though green-stream-green conversions can be a pain.
The reason is that SMs tickers are in fact just windows timers, and are subject to Windows' thread priorities and CPU load. Many people have tried to make faster tickers (and also sequencers etc. using only 'green') - but, sadly, it is very limited for two main reasons...
1) Maximum tick rate is actually well below 100Hz even for the tick100. All tick100 are also sync'ed to the same timer, and there is no way to generate a sub-10ms green delay - so no possibility of interleaving ticks to raise the rate.
2) The intervals between ticks are not in any way accurate - tick100 can be anywhere from 25Hz to 60Hz depending on CPU load, background tasks, screen refresh etc. so tick based LFOs and sequencers have lousy timing.
If you want to investigate further, there is a little 'timing tester' available as part of my 'scope download HERE
The good news is that SM is written to be extremely efficient at sample rate porcessing, and will also intelligently lower CPU load for modules which are switched 'out of the circuit' - once you also allow for the CPU load that the 'green' trigger system uses, sample rate LFOs really aren't a bad deal at all.
Andrew J ·
If you want rock solid timing, then you need to use streams. For lower rates than sample rate, you can use hop to avoid unneccessary computation. Take a look at MichaelBenjamin's tutorial here, and TomC's dynamic hop.
Andrew J ·
dutchound wrote: i love SM so far it seems very well designed. i take it i can sell synths made with it? do i need to buy a seller license or something like that to do so?
The standard edition allows for commercial use, while the personal edition does not. See here.
dutchound ·
Hi thanks, i will try those SM files asap...
I ran into some road blocks on my second day of the tick-LFO thing... It seems the LFO i made is only in mono floating point so when i tried to attach it to the midi gate, which is poly, it was no go... and i couldnt find any way to make the LFO poly or to make the gate monophonic...
as the counter is mono only also , it means i could only make a mono LFO?
trogluddite ·
Only the white 'poly' connections/modules/primitives are ever polyphonic - so using poly stream LFOs will be essential if they must be independent per voice.
dutchound ·
thankyou Trogluddite, that is excellent information, i will try to understand the green trigger system and also the hop thing... hop sounds ideal, if i can actually hop 32 samples for example that would make 32 lfo's for the same processing amount.
for reference to begginers, here is info on the green trigger system from the smwiki
[old link]
trogluddite ·
dutchound wrote: if i can actually hop 32 samples for example that would make 32 lfo's for the same processing amount.
Was that just a lucky guess? 😉 - the code hop() architecture in code does only allow powers of two (2,4,8,16,32...).
Experimentation is the key with hopping. For example, some filters can be modulated by an LFO hopped by 128 without it being too audible. However, if modulating an oscillator frequency, distortion of the waveform might be audible at much lower hop values (then again, if you like 'vintage' 8bit sound generators, you might rather like that).
As ever, trust your ears - a few extra CPU % is worth it if it gets you the sound you want.
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