AXP's Forum Page

Hi Tele, I think I’m onto something.. I’ll get back to you with an update tomorrow, stay tuned!

/AXP

Hi Tele,

I’m kinda used to the time difference, because the company I work for has an HQ in the U.S.
After reading about you having good and bad news I thought you were going to say the interface worked fine, but the sound sucks 🙂
Glad to hear that you like it. In fact it’s based on the generally acclaimed tube modeling approach, but the real trick is that it’s very computationally efficient. Plus I’ve got a very fast oversampling engine, which I’ve spent a lot of time on perfecting it out. It takes about 230 CPU cycles to process a single mono sample without oversampling and less than 3500 samples with 16x oversampling, which includes 16 executions of the triode processing loop as well as 2 passess of the antialiasing filter, making it sub-linear in performance.

I would definitely like to see the screenshots. There are contact details in the plugin’s ‘about’ page (just click the logo). I am still not able to reproduce it. Reaper’s “clear cache and rescan” completes perfectly, on 5 different PC I’ve got. It works even through the remote desktop session! I’ve also got a trial version of Cantabile 2.0 and it works just fine as well. I think I’ve got Ableton Live bundled with my audio interface, so I’m going to test it too. Moreover, I’ve tested it with some audio editors – Audition 2.0 and Ocenaudio 2.0 with both working without a glitch. It even works through a wrapper in the Foobar player. There must be something very specific about your configuration that escapes me.
May I ask you to run ‘msinfo32’ on your PC and then save and mail me its output? (alternatively it’s in Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->System Information)

About the clicks when changing the parameters. Actualy it was even worse in the beginning, but I’ve implemented a quick workaround in 1.0.1 that somewhat alleviated the issue. Well, it still sounds better than swapping real-life tubes would 🙂 The reason for clicks is that different tube models will have different bias points and circuit capacitors need some time to settle on a new one. If you look at the output signal in the editor, you’ll see that such transients look exacly like they would in the real life.

Pushed by your report though I’ve just spend an evening working on the proper solution and now I can say that it’s resolved completely. I’ll release the new version shortly.

I smiled while reading that the Gain knob is causing pops too. In fact ‘leds’ have nothing to do with the actual value. The knob has 100 internal steps from 0.0 to 1.0. The value is truncated for display, but the full precision is used for controlling the DSP part. What you’ve actually encountered I think is that the gain is very sensitive to mouse movement and each pixel of vertical movement causes a significant dB change. You can check if it’s smooth enough by using the automation input.

I would be grateful if you could spread this piece of software around, but let’s iron out those bugs first 🙂
Meanwhile I’m working on some more stuff, because obviously this one is going to be just a building block for more serious things which you might be also interested in.

So yeah, send me your screenshots and system info log, and keep looking for updates.

Thanks again,
/AXP

Hi Tele,

I am surprised and pleased to get a detailed response like this. Thank you for your time. I’d like to keep the discussion public unless the board admins find it off topic.

Thank you for the kind words about the plugin concept. I hope that eventually you’ll be able to see it in action as well.

The plugin was tested on the following platforms:
WinXP/32
Win7/32
Win7/64 (Reaper x64, plugin in bridged 32-bit mode)
As well as with some other hosts, including Podium, Cubase SX5, and LiveProfessor.

So I’m a bit surprised you have problems in Reaper, especially considering that it was my main DAW for testing and your HW/SW setup is pretty close to what I’m using.
Trying to reproduce your issue, I’ve installed the RadoVOX skin too, but still couldn’t manage to make it crash like yours.

I can hardly imagine how it can have such a spectacularly awful behavior. The things I can currently think of are:
– You are using old version of the plugin, which had a floating point underflow issue that may cause a 100% CPU load when being fed with absolute silent input. In theory that may cause the DAW to go crazy, however I haven’t seen that. Please verify that you have version 1.0.2 of Softamp 3OD.
– Your desktop has 16bit color depth. The plugin requires 32bit color. Also note that things such as remote desktop or virtual machines could also reduce the screen color depth to increase performance.

After you rule out those two things, I would like to try to localize the issue to UI or DSP plugin parts. For that I could send you a private GUI-less version of the plugin. Please let me know if you are comfortable with that. What you can also try is to switch off the UI in your version to see if DSP part works at all, Reaper can do that. But since you are cautious about your
PC, I would understand if you don’t want to risk it crashing again.

Meanwhile I’ll try harder to reproduce it on my side.

Looking forward for you reply,
/AXP