Topic: Feedback

Hi,

Firstly, thank you very much, Frits, for Podium Free. I spent several days this week looking for a good free digital audio workstation so I could get into recording to improve my musicianship, and I finally stumbled across Podium Free. I definitely think it’s the best free one available!

I have been very happy with Podium Free, but I have also experienced a number of crashes and some flaws in the application. The main reason I’m posting is to document the following issues that I experienced in case they haven’t already been documented or fixed in the commercial version of the product.

Missing features:

1. There appears to be no shared clipboard across application instances. For example, I can’t copy a track from one running instance of Podium Free and paste it into another.

Issues

1. There are no MIDI outputs available in imported midi files. When you import a MIDI file, it seems that each track in the file is converted to a master in Podium Free. Although these masters’ audio outputs default to the application-configured MIDI outputs, when you try to set the outputs, you can only set them to the audio outputs; you don’t have all of the options you normally have for non-imported MIDI tracks.
2. You can’t use VST instruments for imported MIDI file tracks. If you assign a VST instrument to one of these tracks or anywhere else in the arrangement, the background colour of the instrument name turns red, and the tooltip text reads, “The device produces audio but there is no parent track device that processes audio.”. I have not found any way to produce such a “parent track device that processes audio”. The only solution I have found is to copy the track or its contents into a new arrangement so that it becomes a child of the new arrangement’s master. Perhaps a solution to this problem is to import the MIDI tracks as children of a standard master track. (However, I figure that the current implementation works the way it does for a good reason, so excuse my ignorance in this area.)
3. I found it difficult to understand and use the “Adjust tempo” context menu commands. The descriptions in the manual where kind of hard to follow, and I couldn’t figure out how to actually use the commands, since the instructions in the manual didn’t seem to make sense. I eventually figured out what the first one does by searching on these forums. I still don’t understand what the second one does. Part of the reason this has been difficult is the commands are almost always unavailable. I eventually figured out that you have to disable the “Snap” option for them to work, but I have found that they are still sometimes not available. For example, I have one project in which the commands are absolutely never available no matter what I have tried.

Bugs:

1. I found a reproducable way to make Podium freeze using one of the adjust tempo context menu commands.

   1. Download this Flight of the Bumblebee MIDI file and import it.
   2. Execute the “Adjust Tempo and Stretch to Align Grid at Cursor” command anywhere on the timeline. Podium should freeze.

2. I found another way to crash Podium, this time using the SampleTank Free VST.

   1. Set any track’s source to SampleTank.
   2. Play the arrangement containing the track.
   3. Open Preferences and change the value of “Bypass processing when detecting CPU overload”.
   4. OR change audio settings such as sample rate or ASIO driver’s buffer size.
   5. Click OK or Apply. Podium should crash.

   I don’t know if SampleTank is at fault here or not. I have tried doing the same sort of thing while running the VST in MiniHost, and I didn’t experience any problems. I observed that MiniHost seems to stop all of its audio processing while the audio settings and ASIO settings windows are open.

3. Bounced tracks appear to be corrupted in certain situations.

   1. Bounce a non-empty MIDI track.
   2. Make a new track and record some audio (not MIDI) into it until the recording passes the length of the bounced track.
   3. Delete the audio recording you just made (not the track or arrangement).
   4. Turn off bounce playback for the bounced track.
   5. Increase the tempo significantly (this makes the bug more noticeable). For example, increase it by 50%.
   6. Bounce the track you originally bounced.
   7. Repeated step 2, except re-use the same track rather than creating a new one. Once the recording passes the length of the bounced track, the previous bounced track at the previous tempo should start being appended to the bounced track.

I’m new to digital audio workstations and Podium Free, so please excuse any user errors that may be apparent. The program has crashed many times for me, but unfortunately, the above are the only ones that I can reproduce.

Despite the instability problems, I am a happy user of the software; the lesson learned was to save frequently! Thanks again for this great free program.