randy's Recent Posts

You can send a MIDI program change message to Aalto, and then it will pick a preset from in the "MIDI Programs" directory inside the Presets directory. The MIDI message just has a number and picks from those presets in alphabetical order. I don't remember the Max/MSP side of things—either there's a special message to the vstplugin host object or you can just send the right sequence of MIDI bytes raw.

Please keep me posted. If it happens again, you can note if the output oscilloscope is still working. it shows the signal coming out of the plugin, so if there's any signal visible the problem is likely to be with the host somehow.

Re: Virta, some of the presets only work with audio input and some also work just with MIDI. You may know this, but it's the first thing I would check.

Sorry you're having trouble. I can't say I've heard of this problem before. I still test in Live 9 and I have not run into anything similar.

Does it happen every time?

How are you changing the patch, with the menu / arrows on the plugin or something else?

Very happy to hear, thanks for posting.

Hi there, thanks for the kind comments and for your patience. I appreciate the reminder and will give this request a bump.

Meanwhile you could put some scales you use a lot into the "Scales" folder directly if you like. Then they won't be in a second menu and if you star the names w/ a digit or "+" or something they will be at the top of the main menu (after 12-equal). This will save you at least a little menu diving.

I remember it well. I'd call it a learning experience for me. :-) It wasn't a lot of effort, but a few people sort of freaked out about the idea of their synths having some intentional randomness that was out of their control and wanted to know things like, can I turn it off? does someone else have a better sounding one?

The differences were all very subtle, and probably not audible unless you knew what you were listening for.

There's a deeper lesson somewhere about the contradiction between peoples' desire for control with digital instruments and their embrace of analog flaws and restrictions.

Thank you for posting again with the fix! I hope this helps someone in the future. I'll make a note and see if there's anything I can do about this in the installers.

Sounds like you are on Windows—Scales will be in C:/AppData/Roaming/Madrona Labs/Scales. But this shouldn't be empty, the installer should put the scales there. This is how the popup menu gets filed.

I have some new voice allocation code in the works that should fix this issue. Thanks for the feedback.

I don't have a fix yet. I haven't forgotten about it.

Yup, that makes sense. I'll see if I can make unison / MPE do something reasonable!

Sorry, the manual is not up to date on MPE outputs.

in MPE mode x is mapped to cc#73, as I answered in more detail here: https://madronalabs.com/topics/7440-aalto-s-key-module-outputs-in-mpe-mode-and-linnstrument

I'll investigate unison mode in MPE and at least make it try to do something reasonable. I don't think this was ever tested, because why would you use unison mode with MPE?

I'll check out Kaivo and see about changing it. Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks for the feedback.

Here is 1.8.5: https://madronalabs.com/media/aalto/Aalto1.8.5.pkg

I'm on the trail of this bug and should have an update available soon.

Some people contributed a few sounds that just went into the "Kaivo percussion" folders etc. It could have been some of those. I can't remember for sure.

Thanks for the report, I'll try to reproduce here.

Sorry to hear about this. Please go back to 1.8.5 for now. You can find the 1.8.5 installer here: https://madronalabs.com/media/aalto/AaltoInstaller1.8.5.exe

You may have to remove the 1.9.0 DLLs manually first.

Hi, I don't do a summer sale every year, this year I did an Aaltoverb release and announced the Simple bundle. I'm always trying new things. That said you can count on a year-end sale this year. Thanks for the good words.

I'm just one programmer with big ideas and limited resources, and I'm often overly optimistic. I'm sorry this results in bad time estimates sometimes, I'm working on it.

OK, thanks for the clear video—I'm having a look at this.

Sorry for the confusion with the installer. I had hoped to restrict it to require Metal but that's not working.

Don't worry, there's grief and suffering in developing the software too! :-)

I think this issue can come up seemingly randomly, which is one reason it has been hard for me to track down. I think I've fixed it but in reality I've just moved the code around so that it happens in a different set of circumstances.

Now that Aaltoverb is shipped I'm going to take another look. Thanks for your patience.

After installing Aalto 1.8.5 and then running it for the first time, sometimes Aalto's UI will come up "blank"—with no cables, preset text or dial indicators. This looks bad, but fortunately the fix is easy: just relaunch the application. The next time Aalto is launched it should have all of its UI.

Thanks for the report. I'll look into it. Meanwhile do you have any other DAWs on your machine you can try? I'm not saying you should switch what you are using but just to diagnose this problem. FL is kind of notoriously weird with VST plugin handling.

@plexus I'm definitely going to sympathize with you. I wish Apple had just decided to make a fast implementation of OpenGL on their new hardware instead of killing it.

On the other hand I'm liking the performance boost from Metal.

I'm going to take a look at adding a runtime switch that would let me bring up an OpenGL interface to support older computers

I'm using JUCE but not for drawing. Mainly just for low-level plugin support.

Drawing in Aaltoverb is all done on the GPU and not really optimized at all yet. So I'm not surprised to see a lot of GPU activity. I don't know what the CPU activity would be about. I'll be doing some profiling in the future, meanwhile I hope it still works OK for you.

@toumpouris I think we sorted this out by email. I'm sorry Aaltoverb can't work for you right now. Please stay tuned. I do plan to add support for older Macs to the framework if possible.

Nice to hear from all of you. We’ve been in this together a while now :-)

Wait @tikitpok how did you even end up with a 2015 MPB with 10.10? ... Oh, I see 10.11 was released mid-2015.

@muki I hear the feedback about the dragging being coarse! And yeah I forgot to do a section on "dials, general" in the manual—have to fix that

Enjoy your Sunday!

Thanks for the thoughts and nice feedback!

Shift-drag does do a much higher precision drag than the numbers are capable of showing in some cases.

I've thought about more modulation options in the future.

Please send me an email if you want to pay by PayPal and I'll send you a funds request.

Metal: I'm truly sorry to leave anyone out of the fun, for now. Apple is going to be requiring Metal in the near future and I'm looking towards that future with new products. After all this time I'm still just one person coding, with a limited capacity to support different APIs that come down the road and multiple ones at once.

Having said that I will look at adding OpenGL support for older Macs when I have a chance. It shouldn't be too difficult, but I do need a break first!

If anyone wants to purchase by PayPal, just send me an email and I'll send you a money request.

If you were used to PayPal, all you see from your end now that we've moved to Stripe is "PayPal’s gone!" But from my end, things are much easier with Stripe because having a credit card is a much more common thing in the world than having a PayPal account. And I saw many many requests on my end from people who didn't want to or were unable to make PayPal accounts. Ideal would be to support both, but, that is more complicated.

@fernando carvalho can you please send me an email about this bug with a few more details including your OS and Live versions? Thank you.