Description
Interaction with any Kaivo plugin UI controls is extremely sluggish, controls often take 0.5-1.0+ seconds to react. Turning off animation provides minor improvement but the UI updates are still too slow to make the plugin usable. Futher as long at the plugin UI is open clicking/dragging in menus or other parts of the host application suffers (menus don't update, respond clicking, and clicks often miss the intended target).
Virta plugin UI it much better but still a touch slow (however it is usable)
Aalto plugin UI is the best performing, with generally smooth interaction.
Environment
- macOS 10.14.6
- Mac Pro 2013 (D700, 3.0Ghz 8-core, 64GB RAM) + LG UltraFine 5K monitor
- Logic 10.5.1
- Live 10.1.30, Live 11 beta 25
- Kaivo 1.9.4 AU.64 (or VST both behave similarly)
Steps to reproduce
- Launch Logic 10.5 or Live 11
- Insert Kaivo plugin on track, open UI
- Scrub
Levelcontrol with mouse - Within Live in particular grabbing the plugin UI title bar and moving the window results in a 0.5-2 second delay in the windows moving. It snaps to the mouse cursor and then tracks the cursor smoothly until released.
For me the sluggish UI happens all the time. Within Logic in particular interacting with Logic's menus is glitchy. Menus drop down slowly, selection lags.
Expected result
Interactive plugin UI with update rates in the 10 Hz range at a minimum, preferably much faster than that. Historically the Kaivo UI was usable on this machine but the plugin hasn't seen limited use in the last 2-4 years so it isn't clear when this change might have occured.
Evidence
I can attempt to capture video if desired.
Thanks for the clear description. A really stellar bug report, I have to say. I wish they were all this helpful.
I'm very sorry to hear you're having trouble. I've also heard from other users about slowdowns in Logic. for example here: https://madronalabs.com/topics/8040-extremely-slow-ui-for-all-the-plugins
I can't reproduce these issues here, or I would have put out an update by now. And oddly, it happens on a variety of machines including a setup very similar to my daily driver (MacBook Pro with Mojave). I'm going to look again at what all these setups might have in common and hopefully I can come up with a test to try.
I can also make a version that would collect usage data on the affected systems for debugging. If you have time to try beta versions specifically aimed at fixing this please let me know and I'll be in touch.
Happy to run debug builds to collect data.
Kaivo is not the only plug-in which is suffering on this system but it is unique in how unstable the host UI becomes. Sonnox plugins have similarly sluggish UIs in recent Live/Logic versions yet u-he plugins seem more responsive in later versions of these hosts.
What strikes me as unusual is that I would expect similar behavior across Kaivo, Virta, and Aalto but they are behaving very differently.
FWIW, i'm using the same OS and versions of Live (10, 11 beta) as ngwese on my mac – all Madrona plugins working well, no sluggishness on 4k monitor (2560x1440 setting OS Display prefs) with AMD RX580 gfx card (Metal enabled)
I had wondered if Retina/HiDPI support added in Live might be a contributor on my particular hardware. Lowering the screen resolution did not have an appreciable effect.
Regardless the differences across the Madrona Labs plugins seems interesting to me considering that they are in theory using a common UI framework.
UPDATE: I did some more experimentation.
Kaivo 1.3.2 (apparently I hadn't updated the laptop) on late 2016 MBP running Catalina and Live 11b26 was as smooth UI wise as I can remember across the Madrona plugings.
Updated that machine to Kaivo 1.9.4 and while still very usable there was a small but detectable drop in refresh rate. Running Kaivo 1.3.2 on the main Mac Pro system outlined above was slightly more sluggish than Kaivo 1.9.4 on that system.
I captured video of 1.9.4 behaving poorly on the Mac Pro and can forward that via another channel if desired.
Thanks for the additional info. This situation looks a bit complicated.
Interestingly, on my M1 Macbook Air here, Kaivo's interface is definitely slower than it should be, while Aalto's is fine—and all the audio processing is very fast. The presence of the emulator definitely complicates things further, however this setup might be a basis for figuring out what's going wrong here where I have a development environment.