[LAU] zynaddsubfx / yoshimi... beginner's questions

[Hartmut Noack]

Am 08.04.2012 09:25, schrieb david:
> On 04/07/2012 11:35 AM, Renato wrote:
>> On Sat, 7 Apr 2012 21:48:42 +0200
>> "Victor A. Stoichita"<vicsto at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi everybody,
>>>
>>> I'd like to learn more about how to use zynaddsubfx. I know the basic
>>> setup and I understand the most obvious parameters, but is there
>>> something like a manual or an "advanced" tutorial somewhere?
>>
>> Hi, this
>> http://wiki.linuxmusicians.com/doku.php?id=zynaddsubfx_manual
>> was a good read for me; it gives an overview of zyn/yoshimi's internal
>> workings and proceeds to explain pretty much every knob.
>>
>>> From my limited understanding there are some *major* improvements
>> yoshimi brought in performance over zynaddsubfx, and I don't think
>> there is any reason why you should be using zyn instead of yoshimi.
>
> One reason I switched to using Yoshimi instead of Zyn was because Zyn
> would frequently simply hang, unresponsive,

Did not see such hangs for neither Zyn nor Yoshimi. A few years ago Zyn 
used to crash alltogether from time to time and it *can* cause extreme 
CPU-load accompanied with lots of xruns. But whenever I saw such 
problems it was kind of "intentional" -- some patches can become quite 
demanding in Zynadd. That goes for complex multitimbral pads and the 
like especially if SUBsynth is strongly involved but also for some 
combinations of ADSR, White noise and filters as used for percussive sounds.
I managed to make a mere snardrum, that made Zynadd raise the CPU-load 
on a quadcore Intel by approx. 40-50% ;-)

Yoshimi never crashed on me but I did not see a big difference when 
running demanding patches...


>  when running JACK at what I
> considered low latencies (8-16ms). (Other folk on the list probably
> don't consider that low latency at all.)

Well, but it is ;-) At least 8ms are perfectly OK for every situation I 
ever have seen or heared of ;-)


> Yoshimi didn't have that problem.

I also have the whatsoever "feeling", that Yoshimi runs a bit more 
stable. But Zynadd does not run bad for me either...

>
> I THINK Yoshimi uses more CPU than Zyn, never checked to measure.
>
> The Yoshimi UI is cleaner than Zyn's, more readable.

There are some improvements to the GUI introduced by Yoshimi indeed. But 
the GUI of Zynadd is much better than its bad nimbus -- this synth 
allows do do very complex things with sounds and I think, it would be 
hard to make the GUI for such a complex, feature-rich application a lot 
simpler whithout dumbing it down....


> I think both of
> them would benefit by realizing that the typical graphics UI now is much
> higher resolution than the cramped little spaces the UI seems to be
> designed for, but that's could be just my opinion.
>