Interested in Usine

[chacka]

Hi there,

I'm currently looking for software to enhance my workflow and to give me new possibilities in various ways of music related things.

I wrote down a small list of things that I think Usine could possibly be able to do for me. It would be very nice if you could answer these questions to help me with my decision about Usine.

- the Usine sequencer has to run in time and stable when used as a vst inside Reaper
- I want a stepsequencer that switches the midi channel
- a midi in note counter that triggers the next step step of a step seq, I wanna e.g. determine to which midi channel the next note goes
- vst parameter randomization, I wanna randomize certain parameters to create variations of presets, create a set of parameters and determine for every param a percentage of deviation. Then I wanna press a button to do all the desired randomizations to get a new sound. Would be nice of this randomization could be triggered inside a tune, too.
- The Usine vst plugin can load vsts and therfor be used to store presets of vst chains, right?

Sorry if these are too many questions. Usine is very deep and I would like to get such questions cleared beforehand to know what I can expect. As a whole and from the videos I saw Usine looks extremely cool and is very exciting to me.

Thanx for your help!

[nay-seven]

- the Usine sequencer has to run in time and stable when used as a vst inside Reaper

yes( of course about stability, some parameters depends of you machine, not only Usine)

- I want a stepsequencer that switches the midi channel

easy :

- a midi in note counter that triggers the next step step of a step seq, I wanna e.g. determine to which midi channel the next note goes

- vst parameter randomization, I wanna randomize certain parameters to create variations of presets, create a set of parameters and determine for every param a percentage of deviation. Then I wanna press a button to do all the desired randomizations to get a new sound.

Use several randomizor script with th same name :

The Usine vst plugin can load vsts and therfor be used to store presets of vst chains, right?

yes

[chacka]

Wow, I'm blown away. I didn't expect to get how-tos with the answers! Thanx a lot!:D

[chacka]

- the Usine sequencer has to run in time and stable when used as a vst inside Reaper

yes( of course about stability, some parameters depends of you machine, not only Usine)

Hi nay-seven,

I just bought Usine and loaded it as a VST-i into Reaper.
Unfortunately Usine's audio is delayed. I loaded the demo project with Sergio Slicer III and with the default loop loaded or with one simple kick four to the flour loop the sound is delayed.

How do I get rid of that?

Thanx for your help.

[nay-seven]

several reasons possible here
settings in you asio driver ( soundcard or asio4all )
you can check you bloc size in the global setup/vst in Usine VST
i also remember a latency compensation in Reaper..?

[chacka]

Usine doesn't report any latency to Reaper. So Reaper can't automatically compensate any delay.
How much latency does Usine produce? Is it buffer dependant? If so it couldn't be a problem with the ASIO settings as they would only change the latency but not compensate it.

[nay-seven]

have you test several different bloc size in Usine..?

[chacka]

Yes, that didn't change a thing.

[chacka]

Does Usine produce a fixed latency or is it buffer dependant?

[chacka]

I did some more tests. Right now it looks even worse here: I tried to manually compensate Usine's latency in Reaper with a plugin named time adjustment. Then I found out that the timing of Usine in this confguration is very bad right now. It's sometimes before the beat sometimes on the beat and sometimes behind the beat. It's changing constantly. Are Usine's sound events actually sample accurate? Or does Usine give out it's sound events based on the start time of buffers?

[senso]

The latency is set by Reaper itself, and there is no way to adjust it in Usine.
You ca try to reduce the sound card latency (to reduce the BLOC size in Reaper). Or As I can remember there is somewhere in the setup a way to adjust the VST buffer size in Reaper (but I'm not sure...).

[chacka]

The latency is set by Reaper itself, and there is no way to adjust it in Usine.
You ca try to reduce the sound card latency (to reduce the BLOC size in Reaper). Or As I can remember there is somewhere in the setup a way to adjust the VST buffer size in Reaper (but I'm not sure...).

I know what the latency of a soundcard's buffer is, I wasn't talking about that.
I'm interested in the delay compensation of Usine's delay inside Reaper. Just as a lot of other plugins are creating a delay that has to be compensated inside a DAW to keep all tracks of the DAW in time to each other.

So what is the delay of Usine that Reaper would have to compensate for (automatically or manually)?

Am I doing something wrong when I get a bad timing with Usine as a VSTi? I was using the Sergio slicer III. I got incosistent timing as if the timing isn't sample accurate. Is that correct? If not, how do I have to set up my host and the Usine VSTi to get sample accurate timing?

[senso]

The delay depends on many factors:
- the current bloc size (see setup)
- the patch itself,
- buses: a bus add a latency of one BLOC

So the answer is not simple in the general case

[chacka]

The delay depends on many factors:
- the current bloc size (see setup)
- the patch itself,
- buses: a bus add a latency of one BLOC

So the answer is not simple in the general case

So how do I determine the delay? Is there a display which tells me the delay?

What about my timing issues?

[chacka]

Is this forum the official way of getting product support?

[nay-seven]

yes actually it's a good way,. Ask around we always answer and generally faster than everywhere. I'm sorry for your issues but in this case, as said Senso there's too many parameters possible to give you an answer actually. Any chance to test on an other machine to check..?

Maybe others Reaper users here can help you here but you know...end of the year , holidays...

[chacka]

Does anybody use Usine as a VSTi?
In which hosts did you test it as VSTi and VST?
Does it work without unexpected delays in other hosts?
Are these timing problems specific to Reaper or did they appear in other hosts, too?

I'm a little "shocked" that such simple questions as the ones that I have asked about these issues can't be simple answered. That doesn't give me any confidence in this product.

[nay-seven]

i will say that around 90% of our users use Usine as a standalone application or build their own VST with and since we've add this feature , we did not have bad feeedback with Reaper. So we gone to investigate, but remember Sensomusic is a small company and Usine has only one developer . And it's the end of the year, so please take it easy.

[chacka]

i will say that around 90% of our users use Usine as a standalone application or build their own VST with and since we've add this feature , we did not have bad feeedback with Reaper. So we gone to investigate, but remember Sensomusic is a small company and Usine has only one developer . And it's the end of the year, so please take it easy.

Thanx for the infos.
I have a great understanding for a lot of things. It's just that I asked a few rather simple questions and while you answered several times only now you come to the core that you don't have solutions to my problems. This could have been the answer right from the beginning. Would have been much cooler.

[senso]

You can calculate precisely the latency of Usine:
Take the buffer size shown in the setup of Usine ie. 128
Multiply by 3 and divide by the sampling rate.

Code: Select all

ie: 128*3/44100 = 0.008707 in seconds, so 8.707 milliseconds

note that audio buses (aux's, etc..) add one buffer latency ie 128

[fisto]

I've also noticed that Usine as VST inside Reaperis producing latency which is not fixed at all. It changes from loop iteration to loop iteration...

I can confirm that Reaper always compensates for Latency if the plug-in reports it.
And I have to admit that such a program as Usine should have latency-reporting as VST otherwise the purpose is totally defeated.

I don't want to come across as an asshole but most of the reasons I bought Usine dont work anymore (multi I/O in VST-version, cloning of instances - and the cloning is still in the wiki and mentioned in a tutorial on the homepage here).

I think the dev should really expand the VST-version of Usine as this is one of the advertisings here, no? It says: if you want Usine and your normal way of working, load Usine as VST into your host. But where does this help if you loose features and have no letency compensation?

Somehow I'm very disapoointed about that

I hope that letency-comp, mutli I/O (or cloning) comes to Usine, otherwise I think I burned my money for nothing (as I'm no patcher at all, I just wanted to extend my workflow in a cool manner but now I don't have any use for usine really)

[chacka]

You can calculate precisely the latency of Usine:
Take the buffer size shown in the setup of Usine ie. 128
Multiply by 3 and divide by the sampling rate.

Code: Select all

ie: 128*3/44100 = 0.008707 in seconds, so 8.707 milliseconds

note that audio buses (aux's, etc..) add one buffer latency ie 128

Thanx Olivier!

Happy 2012 and I wish you great success for you personally, your family and Usine.

To the above: Wouldn't it be totally cool if Usine would calculate it's latency and report it to the host? I think that is the normal and modern way of doing this.
But hey, it would be acceptable to calculate the latency as a one time thing when I loaded Usine into my host.
At least until that basic feature would have been hopefully added to Usine soon.

Do you have an answer to my timing problems, too?

I bought Usine for one way of using it ONLY: To use it as a plugin inside my host.
I clearly asked as the first question in this thread before I bought Usine ...

- the Usine sequencer has to run in time and stable when used as a vst inside Reaper

nay-seven's answer was:

yes( of course about stability, some parameters depends of you machine, not only Usine)

As I thought the answer of an administrator here is solid and that I can depend on that I bought Usine.

Right now it does not work like I asked for. I think it's easily understandable that I'm not happy about that to say the least.
And I'm not happy to have to ask simple questions over and over in the hope to finally get a simple answer:

I've got timing problems. Usine is unusable for me this way.
Am I doing something wrong?
Is there a setting I don't know of or how to set it correctly?
Will these problems be solved in a short amount of time?
I hope so as Usine is very cool in many way and that's the reason why I bought it.
If it will stay unusable to me or no reasonable promise for to fix these problems will be made I will have to reverse my purchase.

Thanx for your understanding and I really really hope that this will turn out happy for us all!

[senso]

To the above: Wouldn't it be totally cool if Usine would calculate it's latency and report it to the host?

Ok,
The latency will be reported to the host next release, at the end of the week.

I have also discover that the right formula is:

Code: Select all

Multiply by 4 and divide by the sampling rate.
ie: 128*4/44100 = 0.01124 in seconds, so 11.24 milliseconds

[chacka]

Cool Olivier. Any answer to my timing problem?

[senso]

I finally understood your pb.
In the next release the synchro will be more accurate between Usine VST and Hosts.
This will probably solves all your issues.

[fisto]

oh yeah, this is awesome. Looking forward to the next update .
Thank you senso!

[chacka]

I finally understood your pb.
In the next release the synchro will be more accurate between Usine VST and Hosts.
This will probably solves all your issues.

Great! Are you still talking about the next release at the end of this week?

What is "more" accurate? How accurate? Sample accurate?

[senso]

Yes this week.
It's internal stuff (I mean, not the place to discuss about that) but there will be the same synchro precision in the VST version than in the StandAlone.
If a patch works in the stand alone it will work the same way in the VST.

[chacka]

Wonderful!!! Looking forward to that!

[chacka]

Yes this week.
It's internal stuff (I mean, not the place to discuss about that) but there will be the same synchro precision in the VST version than in the StandAlone.
If a patch works in the stand alone it will work the same way in the VST.

Hi,

any news on that?