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  4. Repetition Threshold.. what am I doing wrong, BUG probably

  • Repetition Threshold.. what am I doing wrong, BUG probably

    Dewdman42D
    Dewdman42D
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    I am running into a weird problem with VIPro and it must be something I'm doing wrong, but I just want to make sure that is the case, learn why, or if perhaps this is a problem in ViPro.

    Basically for this example, I am working with one of the example MIDI files from VSL music demo site, specifically , the E.T. Score that was mocked up by Jay Bacal some years ago.

    So take the first Horn part, called "Horn Essemble 8A", from that project, Its using a custom ViPro Preset, which I have attached to this post. At bar 125, a lot of notes start cutting out a lot on that track. I couldn't figure out why.

    When I open ViPro to have a look, I eventually found that the Repetition Threshold on the legato patch was set to 200ms, which I guess shouldn't really be a problem, but when I set it to 50ms, it stops cutting out notes. But why did this even matter? The patch being used for that Legato cell is "01 HO-8_perf-legato".

    When I play the instrument from the midi keyboard, I find that fast repetitions are cutting out. If I pause 200ms, nothing cuts out. Furthermore, I don't see the repetitons indicator advancing through the 2nd and 3rd reps as I would have expected them to. It plays the first note, then any fast repeititions are not heard at all until I pause 200ms to wait for the first one again.

    That seems like it must be a bug in either ViPro or the instrument configuration in some way, but maybe there is something about this ViPro preset that I don't understand that I need to change in this case?

    to add to the wierdness, the particular part that is having notes cut out, is not even having any repeated notes in the phrase...so something about the repetition engine is causing it to cut out...even though there aren't even any repeated notes. That makes me wonder if somehow it doesn't always start out on the first repetition...and in this case because there is something wrong with repetition 2 and 3, the notes are cutting out. I don't know.. weird and I don't understand it.

    Any ideas?

    HornU0020EnsembleU00208A.vipreset.zip-1696283993690-piaz3.zip AdventuresU0020onU0020EarthU0020-U0020JohnU0020WilliamsU0020-U002010_1_09.mid.zip-1696283993690-f3bqn.zip
  • P
    P

    I can observe what you describe with the preset you uploaded. 

    As a diagnostic, load the VSL's packaged preset: 65 Horns - a8 > 01 HO-8 Preset VIPRO. When I repeatedly hit the pLeg cell ( in this case, assigned to D#1 on the X-axis and CC1 on the Y axis ), I hear it behaving without note cut-offs. Admittedly, it doesn't sound very good because perf-leg patches are not built for rapid repetition. But the last two repetitions do alternate ( a classic machine gun ), and there is no voice drop-out. 

    In the preset you uploaded, the pLeg cell has in slots 1a and b the Epic Horns and the Orchestral Horns (01 HO-8_perf-legato and 01 HO-4_perf-legato_fa respectively) playing at the same time. I'm not sure why it's set that way. Twelve horns? "It goes to eleven." I don't know if Jay's sequence uses it for fast-rep work ( I looked at the preset but did not upload the song ).

    There may be a preset-specific issue here. If you load the standard issue preset, hopefully you'll hear the performance different that I observed. 
  • Dewdman42D
    Dewdman42D
    I removed Epic orch from my system because I own all vi instruments. But I would have thought that would cause jay’s preset to show a red cell if any underlying patches or samples were missing. I can’t just use a factory preset for his work because things like keyswitches and controller assignments may not be the same. But if we can figure out exactly what is broken maybe I can fix his preset
  • P
    P

    "I would have thought that would cause jay’s preset to show a red cell if any underlying patches or samples were missing."

    If they play, you own them. You bought them in the Brass II bundle (or you bought them separately). I don't use the Epic Orchestra either. (Yes, "Epic" in this sense is confusing.)

    Keyswitch-specific sequences. I understand. That's why my suggestion was a diagnostic, not a solution. As such, it still may be helpful for you to load 65 Horns - a8 > 01 HO-8 Preset VIPRO and compare behaviors.

    But when I looked, I could find no setting that caused one to behave and the other to mis-fire. To my ears, the "bad" cell sounded like it was running out of voices -- but how can that be when it's using so few voices?

    Does Jay's sequence use the cell in question for repetition?
  • Dewdman42D
    Dewdman42D
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    I'm at my computer now...a little more detail.  See the screenshot below.  That is one example where notes are cutting out.  Note that none of them are repeats actually.  But at least 30% of the notes trigger no sound.  It must have to do with Legato phrasing, means that there is no space to allow the repetition threshold to pass...so its stuck on the 2nd and 3rd repeat sounds...which aren't sounding.  I guess?

    @Another User said:

    Does Jay's sequence use the cell in question for repetition?

    See example midi below.  No repeated notes really.  But they are legato overlapped...
  • P
    P
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    Thanks for the screen shot. Nearly all legato notes -- only one repetition. 

    Hey Dewdman, an interesting behavior here: copy the matrix that we're working on ( unnamed, D6 ), create a new instance, paste that matrix into the new instance. It works.

    I hope you witness the same. It argues for either A. a corrupted preset or B. some kind of instance setting that a new, default instance does not have.  To be honest, that whole original preset seems finicky to me. 

    But when it works in the new instance, wow -- twelve horns sound pretty good.

    Berlioz' Requiem. 😃
  • Dewdman42D
    Dewdman42D

    I tried copying the matrix, didn't change anything for me...notes still getting dropped.
  • P
    P

    Hmm. Did you create a fresh instance, create a VI channel in the fresh instance, and then paste the copied matrix into the new channel? Here the difference was night and day. 
  • Dewdman42D
    Dewdman42D
    No I didn’t I will try that later. I should add that this preset from jay was not provided by jay as an actual vipropreset. He provided a vepro frame file and I went into the vipro instance and saved the preset, and that was done recently with recent versions of vipro and vepro. Not sure that matters but just being precise. I will try your suggestion but if that works then the next question is what settings in vipro are not overwritten in a blank default preset when you copy and paste a matrix? We need to get to the bottom of the reason
  • Dewdman42D
    Dewdman42D
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    @plowman said:

    Hmm. Did you create a fresh instance, create a VI channel in the fresh instance, and then paste the copied matrix into the new channel? Here the difference was night and day. 

    Yep, I get the same thing here.  But why?  
  • P
    P

    I threw another fifteen minutes at this. I reduced the offending matrix down to the one cell in question and saved the instance / project. It appears whenever that's reloaded, the bug continues. It's only when the matrix is separately copied and then pasted to a new instance that it's fixed.

    I've also observed that the broken instance / project is still broken if you load it into Vienna Instruments Standalone.

    I've scoured the instance for a unique setting to affect its playback, and I can't find anything to differentiate it from any other instance. And dragging fresh, identical patches into the slots does nothing. 

    I also copy and pasted a customized Flute channel of my own into the bad instance, and immediately it acted up -- there was the same interrupted or unperforming notes. 

    I know "a corrupted file" can be a very unsatisfying answer. But I'm out of ideas. 
  • Dewdman42D
    Dewdman42D
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    another interesting test would be to try out the original VePro frame made by Jay. Attached. I will check that out right now too.

    AdventuresU0020onU0020EarthU0020-U0020JohnU0020Williams.viframe64.zip-1696283996324-fy8io.zip
  • Dewdman42D
    Dewdman42D

    problem seems to exist in the original viframe file provided by Jay also.  So...  nothing I did in saving the preset caused it.  Its encoded into the viframe in some way for ViPro settings.  However, that was made years ago and undoubtedly viFrame files have changed since then...so who knows...  I'm going to call this a "bug" related to opening old viframe's in newer ViPro or VePro...not sure which or why....

    Actually though, even after doing the copy matrix and paste to a clean ViPro preset...  The midi that was originally recorded by Jay still does not play correctly.  So doing this copy/paste matrix clearly results in a different preset in some way and does respond better, but it still must not be the original ViPro preset that Jay used, because it still doesn't play the phrase right.
  • Dewdman42D
    Dewdman42D
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    I made some more progress on testing today.

    First, I am running into two seperate issues, which may or may not be related.

    1. Fast repeated notes are not working right with presets that were saved in a viframe from 2014 by Jay Bacal. We can't figure out why. I am attaching to this post that preset, along with a new preset where I built it up from scratch using the same underlying patch (HO-8_perf_legato) (in mono legato mode). The version I build from scratch handles fast repeats fine, the one that came from Jay Bacal's viframe of the ET score tutorial, does not. I can't see any difference etween the two presets in the GUI, but obviously something under the covers is different.

    2. Midi phrase playback of at least one phrase in particular is not happening correctly, from LogicPro. This happens with or without VePro. I am attaching to this post a small LogicPro project that has just two tracks, one with the Horn part and one with nothing on it. When the Horn track is selected (in live mode), the phrase plays back exactly as expected. When the other track is selected (before hitting PLAY), the Horn track is no longer in live mode...and ViPro starts dropping notes all over the place. This happens both with and without VePro, so the problem must be ViPro and/or something about LogicPro live mode. I also get this problem even if I create a new preset from scratch as mentioned above, the problem persists either way.

    I think those are most likely two seperate issues. I can't seem to get the phrase note dropping (issue #2) to happen in Cubase so far. But I might not konw what I'm doing in Cubase to avoid live mode. I do get the note repetition problem (issue #1) in both Cubase and LogicPro, regardless of whether VePro is being used.

    If anyone has any other thoughts about these, especially issue#2 above, please advise.

    HornTestSingleVipro.logicx.zip-1696283996569-kdexm.zip HornPresets.zip-1696283996569-bq7jp.zip
  • pkreter_30363P
    pkreter_30363P

    To solve the initial problem you described, try turning Optimize off in VI Pro.  Optimize keeps the used samples in RAM, all other samples will be discarded.  Due to some slight difference in sequencer or system it's possible that what was an unused sample when Jay saved the file is a used sample on your system.

    I had a similar problem of a few notes not sounding when playing one of Jay's other tutorials.  Turning off Optimize and resaving the project solved this for me.  Good luck.
  • Dewdman42D
    Dewdman42D
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    @pkreter_30363 said:

    To solve the initial problem you described, try turning Optimize off in VI Pro.  Optimize keeps the used samples in RAM, all other samples will be discarded.  Due to some slight difference in sequencer or system it's possible that what was an unused sample when Jay saved the file is a used sample on your system.

    I had a similar problem of a few notes not sounding when playing one of Jay's other tutorials.  Turning off Optimize and resaving the project solved this for me.  Good luck.

    I tried turning off Optimize and resaving the preset.  

    This did appear to resolve issue#1 above, the repetition notes.  It did not solve issue#2.

    I wonder about this optimize feature exactly why that have caused that problem?  When I loaded the preset initially, all cells were enabled.  But it seems like somehow some internal stuff was not loaded into ram with optimize enabled...and playing notes doesn't seem to load them either.  Can anyone comment more about that optimize feature, what its supposed to do and why it would cause that?
  • Dewdman42D
    Dewdman42D

    I can also say, even after trying to turn off optimize, I am finding some notes have a note dropping problem, intermittently, while trying to play legato.  With this preset, I find the top few notes of the keyrange for the instrument exhibit this problem 30% of the time while playing legato transitions manually on the keyboard.  The second played note cuts off the first (as expected), but makes no sound itself.  But it doesn't do this all the time, just intermittantly.  

    Also.  It appears that none of these problerms are happening when I use ViPro inside Cubase.  Somehow this is related to LogicPro.