Suggestions and Bug reports

[Xavier]

I have another bug to report Xavier: If you lower the amount of voices an instrument can have to 0 (why is that a thing) while it's playing something, you can get the pfm3 to crash pretty reliably. I always do this by accident

0 voice is a thing, because it disable the instrument. Instruments  with 0 voice are grayed in the mixer.
No CPU is spent on free running LFO and FX for them.
If you use less than 6 instruments it's better to have the ones you don't use set to 0 voice.

Can you share a mix that crash with 0 voice (DFL.MIX) ? And let me know what you send to the instrument ?
Notes only ? CC ? NRPN ?
I just give a quick try, and no crash on my side.

[UltraBlack]

oh yeah you are correct, it's  not as easy as I thought. I always trigger it by accident, and pretty reliably at that, but I can't reproduce it as easily as I thought. I'll tell you when I find out what setup you need

[UltraBlack]

I just had another thought: If parameter locks were a thing, you could also merge instruments. If you had some tool that could merge sequences (where they don't overlap) and then uses parameter locks to change one patch to another, you could shrink down for example two percussion tracks (seq: 1 .. 2 .. 1 .. 2) to one, that just modulates between patches. It might come at increased cpu usage, but it shouldn't be a ton more resource intensive than running two patches at the same time.

Is that possible?

Edit: I'm also thinking that being able to record pitch bend could be really useful for some more funky stuff

[UltraBlack]

I'm also once again coming across some issues.

I have attached a bank that I'm having issues with. The first patch has all envelopes coming down to 0, but for some weird reason, OP5 does not do that. I have checked everything I could come up with, but it just does not mute completely. What remains is always it's waveform.

The second patch has another issue, that I've recently come across too. I can't find a solution for it. It's a kind of click (volume suddenly drops for a short moment) in the sound, where there should not be any. Yet again I have checked everything I could come up with, but found nothing. It's seemingly not an issue with resonance.

Here is the bank (patches are named in a way that should make it a bit more obvious what the issue is: https://chonkyrabbit.eu/files/_share/ZBUG.BNK

Any idea about those?

Edit: I just noticed that I found the button combo that takes screenshots of the display. Interesting.

Edit 2: WAT a restart fixed both of the issues I mentioned above... Still worth investigating. It's not nice that patches can just break at random

[Xavier]

Yes that's weird.
I'll take a look at the first 2 patches to see if I see something.
It's possible that some temporary variable were not recalculated is they should after some parameter changes.
Everything is reset and clean after a patch reload which is why it was back on track later on.

Your other points, recording parameters in the seq would require a change of the seq file format and a bit rewrite of how it works. It's unlikely i make some change like this in the near future.

[UltraBlack]

I have another suggestion: I often run into clipping and I don't know where it's coming from. Instead of always showing "CLIPPING 1" it should instead use the number for showing which instrument is clipping.

In my case, the volume bar is seemingly always below even the white level, and yet it's still clipping (is it the global reverb maybe?)

[Xavier]

Hi,
I had to check because i implemented that a long time ago.
"Clipping" is for the sum output before sending the data to the DAC.
So value can it can be
. "1"  - for output 1/2
. "2"  - for output 3/4
. "3" - for output 5/6
It does not mean an instrument is clipping. That can be the sum of the instruments that use this output.

[UltraBlack]

I think it would make much more sense if it was on a per-instrument and not per-output basis. I only use 1-2 currently because I have no pedals or need to change my audio routing.
And even if I had that, I would just use 1-2 to dump out everything that does not need further processing. I don't think it makes much sense to show the output pair

[matrix12x]

I think the output pair makes the most sense. Because two non clipping instruments can cause a clipping output.  Edit: fixed poor spelling

[UltraBlack]

The issue is that it's very unclear what actually causes the clipping. You can have all six instruments output a >50% volume signal, but none of which cause clipping, even together.

Now there is one signal that really just gets up to 50% and that suddenly causes clipping.

It's hard to predict when something causes clipping. And when you have clipping, it's unclear what causes it in the first place. It's very frustrating.

[Xavier]

Have you tried to turn on Compressor on some instruments ?
That was my first motivation to add the compressor : to control clipping.

Some FX, especially LP/HP with high resonance, can have unpredictable impact on volume.

[UltraBlack]

Yes I did try the compressor. It does not always help though.

It would be a bit less annoying to deal with clipping if there was a way to change the volume of all instruments simultaneously (just allowing you to keep the mix ratio but enabling you to decrease the combined volume until all clipping is gone.

[Xavier]

That could work.
MENU + encoder would modify all instruments volume linked to the same Output pair.

[Xavier]

Firmware 1.01.
You can use MENU + Encoder in the mixer volume page to change other linked instruments at the same time.
"Linked" = output on same DAC.

1.01 also have a bug fix that corrupted the preset name when using with the PC/MAC editor.

[matrix12x]

@Xavier does this version include the optimizations from p3_timefx_9.bin ?