Sample Combiner Synth X4

[BobF]

BobsCombinedSamplesX4.fsm

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Waves.rar

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Hello Gang,
Sometimes simple is better, at least for a friend I made this for. It’s called a “Sample Combiner Synth X4”! He thinks it’s the best Synth ever, as it provides all his needs. Hope you find it as interesting and useful as he does. I find it does have some noise sometimes on key press, like key clicks or static. Greatly appreciated if someone can find where it is coming from. Believe me, I have tried to know end. I sent my friend an EXE copy and he says he has NO noise and I find the same, but within my DAW (FL Studio) I do hear it.
It is really pretty simple in its design and use. Basically it’s 4 wave recorders where you can set the beginning and end of waveform, the key (base), loop it, follow pitch (the norm), and reverse (best only on short waveforms). Also are 4 delays and 4 ADSR’s each with velocity control. The ADSR’s do NOT come into play a lot and again depends a lot on the waveforms used. Works best for modifying attacks. Between the Sample players and ADSR’s are in / out buttons, green is enabled output.
The real ideal is to use the “start and end” waveform select along with the delay sample controls to produce new sounds. That is say the attack of a Piano and the decay of a Bell. I know most of you will be upset with me as I am providing only one preset. After playing with this for sometime myself and also a few friends, we all decided this strictly is a user thing in that everyone will find and make their own unique sounds.
Last is the effects, a delay with feedback, reverse effect (useful on some wave forms) , a nice reverb, Stereo field select, and last a Vocoder. There is a LFO that can modulate both the Vocoders band select ranges for a nice effect. For samples 3 and 4 there is also a Ring Modulator. Volume and clip indicator led are there too, and for displays there is a scope and a Lissajous display just for fun.
Just take the time to experiment with it and you will find you can make some really cool sounds, some very useful and some more for strange sound effects.
PLEASE enjoy and do comment!
Cheers, BobF…..

[wlangfor@uoguelph.ca]

Thanks Bob, It's nice to look over how You do things too

[Phil Thalasso]

Hello Bob,
today is the first time since last week-end that I get to look at the forums and i would like to use this occasion to thank you for all the interesting things that you posted in the past and also for this post. Experimenting with flowstone, your stuff is great guidance for me.

Best Regards
Phil

[kortezzzz]

Hi,

It crashed here on 3.0.6. What version is needed for this?

[BobF]

Very sorry to hear that kortezzzz,

I am using 3.07 with no problems. Another thing might be the pc itself. I have a fast pc, an I7, with 16 gigs of ram, and Windows 10, 64 bit. Also make sure you do not have a lot of other programs open. I can upload the exe also if you would like to try it! Let me know and good luck in getting it working.

Later then, BobF......

To Phil,

Hi Phil and thank you very much for the nice comments. Hope to see some cool stuff from you also.

Cheers......

[kortezzzz]

I did opened it with the newer Alfa version and the noise you are talking about was investigated few weeks a go, since it occurs with the multisample format as well. It most liklely apears when too many voices are generated at the same time. Seems like flowstone can not handle at this point too many sample voices and once the limit is passed, some nasty high pitched noise comes out (10-17 khz).

[Spogg]

Another interesting idea Bob!

I’ve made some changes and comments:

When you select the start and end points for the clips you’ll rarely hit zero crossings so the start and end points will very likely create clicks. This means you need to be very careful to match the envelope to the selected portion. The multistage env you used can be set for a timed delay before attack onset and can also be set for a more gentle fade-in and out. I added a 2 sample average module which will reduce the clicks a little but the only proper solution is to set the envelopes correctly.

When you press a note a channel will open, and stay open until after the longest delay on any of the envs has elapsed. With long times set (as in your preset) you will quickly run out of polyphony, the CPU will rocket and note-stealing will start. I’ve adjusted the envs in the preset to be no longer than the clip lengths. Additionally I’ve set the “Re-trigger new” to TRUE in the MIDI module so note stealing can work.

Delays in the poly section are to be avoided unless the max length is very short (e.g. for dynamically tuned delays like comb filters etc). The reason is that if you have more than 4 notes sounding, the software dynamically allocates more delay memory for the additional notes (in multiples of 4) and this will introduce stream interruptions as clicks and gaps. So I placed the 4 delays in the mono stream and, since you are only using 1 channel, I also deleted a delay in each one. This means the delay code always runs, with no new allocations being made.

I removed the all the interpolation modules except linear and removed the menu items. The 3 options other than linear sounded dreadful, and it also means fewer connections to the Mems.

For you to do:
The 4 delays’ readouts aren’t in seconds.
The labels for Delays 3 and 4 are labelled 1 and 2.
There are a few duplicate preset parameter names. I’ve included a document with them highlighted; just scroll down to see them.

I hope this helps!

Cheers

Spogg

[Phil Thalasso]

Hello you all, hi Bob,

I actually would like to produce cool stuff, however, just hardly ever have any time anymore to tinker with flowstone.
My projects somehow never get finished with all the long periods of inactivity between days off or vacations. I'm also lacking routine and have to confess that I'm over 50, which in my case equates to forget just about everything, even about schematics I constructed myself (utilizing loads and loads of good things people post here on flowstone). There's also a benevolent alien on this forum who patiently helps me out whenever I turn to him

Now, I got a somewhat awkward question to ask. You, Bob, wrote:

"I am using 3.07 with no problems. Another thing might be the pc itself. I have a fast pc, an I7, with 16 gigs of ram, and Windows 10, 64 bit. Also make sure you do not have a lot of other programs open."
My last project (not posted) frequently hits 100% CPU load (Flowstone Indication), which cannot really be the case - or can it?? - as I am running it on a somewhat decently equipped machine with 2 eight core xeons and task manager saying something a lot less than max. I really don't know, but could it be, that flowstone is - I don't even know what to call it - inherently limited in what it can do? Could someone please comment on that? Thank you.

I wouldn't even dare to post a max-CPU project like that, as folks in this esteemed forum are discussing bringing cpu-load down by half percent steps.

Enjoy father's day tomorrow!

Best regards
Phil

[trogluddite]

Yes, there are a couple of limitations that restrict FlowStone's power.

The main one in your case, is that all audio streams are executed in a single thread - which means that all audio DSP can only use a single core of one of your processors. So FlowStone's 100% CPU reading is really only 1/16 of your PC's total power. MIDI, Ruby, green, and graphics will run in separated threads, so might use different CPU cores, but obviously the audio is the biggest CPU hog, so that doesn't always help a great deal. For multiple small plugins in a DAW, this is usually OK, as each plugin instance could use a different CPU core, but it imposes a fundamental limit on what you can do with a single, very large, plugin.

The second one is FlowStones cool "one-sample-at-a-time" paradigm for coding audio streams. In reality, audio is always processed in blocks matching the soundcard buffer size, so the single-sample-at-a-time is done by inserting all of the DSP processing inside a loop which will fill the soundcard buffer. The price for this is that what's inside the loop can't be as efficient as if it was coded natively to work in whole buffer chunks in the first place (e.g. as you might do if coding VSTs in C++.) Actually, you can do it that way too in FS, but only if you use Ruby Frames or the DLL component, which do use whole-buffer processing. But I think that the "one-sample" system is a fair trade for the ease of use which it gives us - things would be much more complex if we had to handle the buffer size logic ourselves.

[Phil Thalasso]

Hi Trogluddite,
thank you for that detailed explanation. I assume I then should reconsider some of my plans for building whopper projects. Ever since I started with modular synths, I'm just fascinated with what you can do acoustically when deviating from the linear VCO>VCF>ADSR>Effect scheme. That said, I'll still enjoy flowstone very much and leave experimenting to hardware and reaktor & company.
Best Regards
Phil