[LAU] yoshimi, zyn and Ardour (was: Re: How to compile Yoshimi)

[jonetsu at teksavvy.com]

On Sat, 17 Sep 2016 10:03:41 +0100
Bill Purvis <bill at billp.org> wrote:

> I tried using Yoshimi because it got frequent mentions on this list,
> and was available from the
> Mint repositories. I've since downloaded and compiled the latest
> version and think that it's a
> nice piece of work. If I ever get time to try out Zyn I may switch to 
> preferring that, but for
> the moment, Yoshimi sound good, though I also use the Calf plugins as 
> they support a decent
> General Midi patches.

I compiled yoshimi because I thought zyn was no longer supported.  So I
tried zyn yesterday.  First of all I must say I do not program synth
sounds, at least not yet.  I will adjust some parameters to fit a piece
but I'm certainly not creating sounds.  I use synths as in using a
guitar.  I am not making guitars, I am playing instead.

Because of this, I found the sound selections provided with zyn quite
interesting.  Especially the Italian sounds, but also others.  The rest
I find is identical to yoshimi.  So because of this broader choice of
sounds I will use zyn.  

It also seems they are working on a major 3.0 update, which brings the
next two comments.  Yesterday I played zyn for about 45 minutes,
improvising.  During those times I might record ideas as they
spontaneously happen, or I might just forget about then and enjoy the
spur of the moment.  This means I run the synth inside a host, Bitwig
or Ardour (Mixbus 32C) (1). The keyboard can be any, this time it was a
Novation mini Launchkey.

While playing it happened about 3 times that the audio output simply
vanished.  I look at Ardour's screen, nothing happens, move the mouse
here and there, and then the sound comes back.  In those times what I
described yesterday using yoshimi happened: when the audio came back,
the track's VU meter did not show anything while the master bus VU
showed the audio.  Then it came back to normal, with all VUs showing
the audio being played.

The other thing is that by 2-3 times I recorded some audio.  This went
fine but, when the recording was stopped and I wanted to quickly get rid
of what was just recorded - as I always do using other synths in Ardour
- by pressing spacebar to stop the recording, then quickly pressing
Ctrl-z to get rid of the recorded region, followed by quickly hitting
the 'home' key to get back at the beginning, ready to record again,
Ardour stalled, for seconds.

This means that zyn has the ability to stall Ardour, for any reason.
Which is not looking good.  Such an application should not have the
capability to do this by any means.  Having recently lost a complex
project in Bitwig due to Bitwig crashing, I am wary about this kind of
suspicious interaction.

The last time the audio stopped was because Ardour has vanished from
CPU existence.

All in all, zyn has a nice set of sounds, which makes me prefer it
but, it has problems at the systemic level which I hope will be
addressed in the upcoming major version.  Strange thing though, to know
about this upcoming version one has to register on the web site.  Why
isn't it public ?

(1) When improvising, one nice feature I found was in Pianoteq's
ability to memorize the keys being played at all times, available for
recall if one wishes it.  I see that zyn has a record option that
surely 'sounds' the same, although it has to be enabled and it asks for
a wav file which means it is not about recording MIDI data.  Using MIDI
data would be lightweight.

Cheers.