PeerLFO forcing Note Off in VSTi?

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River Cricket
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PeerLFO forcing Note Off in VSTi?

Post by River Cricket »

Hello Buzzers!

Strange issue I'm having that's hopefully just a matter of a configuration setting.

I have a synth loaded in Polac VSTi 1.1, using PeerLFO 1.3.

I assign PeerLFO to Param Value, and set the Param accordingly. PeerLFO is definitely manipulating the correct control, I can see it wiggle on the GUI.

However, it causes sustained notes to suddenly cut off, in an unpredictable fashion.

I've tried this with multiple VSTs from different programmers, so I don't think the problem is particular to any one VST, so it should be easily reproducible. Just set PeerLFO to wiggle filter cutoff (or whatever), hold a note - either though the PC keyboard with the VST GUI active, MIDI, or via a pattern, it doesn't matter - and it will abruptly cut off at some point.

I've tried different update frequencies in PeerLFO, and tried turning off quantization, as well as unchecking "quantize note off", "record note off", and "raw quantize" and "record note off" in the PXP MIDI section, of Polac VSTi.

Any ideas how to solve this?
River Cricket
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Re: PeerLFO forcing Note Off in VSTi?

Post by River Cricket »

I had some more time to mess around with it, and I've found a workaround - if you send PeerLFO to a PeerCtrl, and assign PeerCtrl to the VST control you wish to affect, it works fine.

Would still be interested to see what's causing PeerLFO to interrupt the notes, but I suppose it's less than critical now :mrgreen:
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IXix
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Re: PeerLFO forcing Note Off in VSTi?

Post by IXix »

Doesn't happen here. I tried modulating Synth1 filter cutoff and played notes on the virtual keyboard. Everything is as expected.

Please post a bmx that will reproduce the problem.
River Cricket
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Re: PeerLFO forcing Note Off in VSTi?

Post by River Cricket »

IXix wrote:Doesn't happen here. I tried modulating Synth1 filter cutoff and played notes on the virtual keyboard. Everything is as expected.

Please post a bmx that will reproduce the problem.
Sorry for the delay, been a bit busy here.

Here's a quick BMX I threw together using the Oatmeal VSTi (http://www.groovelastig.de/files/fuzzpilz/buzz.htm).

Just let it play for a bit and you should hear the dropouts eventually.

https://we.tl/t-xZx5Bbudqh

(looks like trying to add it as an attachment gives an HTTP-500 error)
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IXix
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Re: PeerLFO forcing Note Off in VSTi?

Post by IXix »

River Cricket wrote:Here's a quick BMX I threw together...
Thanks I'll check it out when I get a moment. Bit too busy here too!
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IXix
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Re: PeerLFO forcing Note Off in VSTi?

Post by IXix »

Tried your bmx and I'm not getting any dropouts. Everything appears to be working as it should. How long should it take before the problem occurs?
River Cricket
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Re: PeerLFO forcing Note Off in VSTi?

Post by River Cricket »

IXix wrote:Tried your bmx and I'm not getting any dropouts. Everything appears to be working as it should. How long should it take before the problem occurs?
Jealous...

Here's an mp3, for me it happens within a minute - in this case, only took about 7.5 seconds from a fresh load of Buzz.

https://we.tl/t-uhxyvPbSw7

I'm using Polac ASIO as my sound engine. If there's any settings that come to mind that you think might be impacting it, I'd be happy to tweak / send screenshots of various config pages.
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IXix
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Re: PeerLFO forcing Note Off in VSTi?

Post by IXix »

River Cricket wrote:Here's an mp3...
Are you certain it only happens when PeerLFO is involved? The mp3 sounds more like an audio system problem to me. If you run another sustained sound alongside the Oatmeal, do both sounds cut out or just the Oatmeal?

What OS are you using and are you 32 or 64bit?
River Cricket
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Re: PeerLFO forcing Note Off in VSTi?

Post by River Cricket »

IXix wrote:
River Cricket wrote:Here's an mp3...
Are you certain it only happens when PeerLFO is involved? The mp3 sounds more like an audio system problem to me. If you run another sustained sound alongside the Oatmeal, do both sounds cut out or just the Oatmeal?

What OS are you using and are you 32 or 64bit?
Positive it's just PeerLFO - I can get up to some pretty heavy shenanigans, wouldn't make sense that dual-wavetable Serum with 16 voices on each osc goes fine but a single note on a reasonably light VSTi (even lighter than Oatmeal) would glitch out so badly. It's also the MIDI itself, not the sound engine - the way I stumbled upon this bug originally was holding a note on an external MIDI keyboard while PeerLFO wiggled the knobs for me. The reason the sample file sounds more like "dropouts" is because it's continuously retriggering notes - if I slowed the tempo down it might be more obvious that once the sound cuts out, it's gone for good until a new note is triggered.

I'm on Windows 7, 64 bit OS, 32 bit Buzz, can use either the 32 or 64 bit Polac VST with the same results. Audio interface is a Behringer UMC404HD.

Here's another bmx/mp3 pair. This is exactly the same as before, but now there's two Oatmeals. One of them is just getting its cutoff from the PeerLFO as before, the other one is getting its cutoff by a PeerCtrl whose value is being set by the same PeerLFO.

https://we.tl/t-ytt8fUJ6Fl (mp3)
https://we.tl/t-ztTz11U0pE (bmx)

This behavior made me suspect for a little bit that somehow PeerLFO itself was updating too fast, and somehow overflowing the MIDI engine - but no matter what I set the update rate to in the PeerLFO parameters, the glitches still occur.
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IXix
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Re: PeerLFO forcing Note Off in VSTi?

Post by IXix »

Hmmm, that's strange. I'll try to compare the code for LFO and Ctrl, see if there might be any clues but I'm up to my ears in DIY so it might take a while.
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Re: PeerLFO forcing Note Off in VSTi?

Post by polac »

Cannot reproduce it here, i tried it with Oatmeal modulating the cutoff via Peerlfo(win10 x64).
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UNZ
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Re: PeerLFO forcing Note Off in VSTi?

Post by UNZ »

just a guess, but could be influenced by multithreading on/off or subticktiming on/off
River Cricket
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Re: PeerLFO forcing Note Off in VSTi?

Post by River Cricket »

UNZ wrote:just a guess, but could be influenced by multithreading on/off or subticktiming on/off
Both of these have been "True"/On.

Turning multithreading off seemed to make the problem worse, but that's just a gut reaction after thirty seconds. Definitely no positive effect, at least.

Turning subtick timing off was similar - maybe improved matters slightly, but since the root issue is sort of unpredictable it could just be luck.

I still can't get over how sending it through PeerCtrl "cleans" things up - is there a version of Venmo for free time? Would definitely be making a contribution or two if there was :D
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