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