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

[David Jones]

On Sep 17, 2016 02:45, jonetsu at teksavvy.com wrote:
>
> 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. 

Yoshimi can record audio, too. I prefer to record MIDI in Rosegarden, tho.

My experience was first with Zyn. Years ago. Zyn and RT didn't get along. Yoshimi did from the first time I used it.

I have both installed. Yoshi can use Zyn's sounds.

I think both need a UI overhaul. ;)

David W. Jones
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://dancingtreefrog.com