tutorials 3 and 5 don't work on MacOS

User avatar
TheGarnet
Posts: 36
Joined: Mon Aug 22, 2022 1:55 pm

Re: tutorials 3 and 5 don't work on MacOS

Post by TheGarnet »

zipb wrote: Sun Aug 15, 2021 4:44 pm I was taught electronic music using modular systems in the late seventies.
Hi Zip!

I wish someone would have exposed me to modular or electronic music back then.

When I was ten years old, I had three transistors in a Radio Shack 100-in-1 electronics kit, and I made every sound making project the kit offered. Then I would add in every spare component in the kit into the circuits in various ways, making the sounds wilder and wilder.

I was trying to figure out a transistor circuit that could remember a series of numbers, iterate through them, and turn the numbers into voltages and then into tones. I didnt know that was called a sequencer. No one had exposed me to IC chips yet, that didnt come until about four years later with Byte Magazine. In grade school, I was trying to draw a transistor circuit of the modern day musical greeting card!

I wish someone had connected all that to music for me. I hated music class taught with recorders and singing right along with all my friends.

Other than Reason, and a handful of synths bought over the years, I never got hooked enough to learn to play, and I totally missed all this modular stuff until last summer. Dont know how I missed it all for so long, but am now hooked.

- Garnet
UrbanCyborg
Posts: 616
Joined: Mon Nov 15, 2021 9:23 pm

Re: tutorials 3 and 5 don't work on MacOS

Post by UrbanCyborg »

Still, sounds like you had a great hand-on introduction to the circuits behind the music. My introduction to electronic music in Vladimir Ussachevsky's Electronic Music class (mostly taught by Tracy Petersen) had us doing tape editing. I mean, editing by slicing up tape with razor blades. For example, an envelope generator was a piece of pre-recorded audio tape sliced the long way into the shape of an envelope, then carefully glued onto a piece of blank tape so it would feed through the tape heads. I suppose you can get more low-tech than that, but it's hard to see how. :D There was a modular synth in the lab, built especially to Ussachevsky's specification.

My exposure to computer music was in Dr. Ercolino Ferretti's seminar over in the CS department. I wrote a Music V work-alike in C from written descriptions of the original platform for that one.

Reid
Cyberwerks Heavy Industries -- viewforum.php?f=76
Schville
Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Jul 30, 2022 7:57 am

Re: tutorials 3 and 5 don't work on MacOS

Post by Schville »

Hi Colin,

did all your tutorials on your website and everything is working that far, wonderful detailed information. Wished other manufacturers would do the same instead of saying "this modules does that, this are the controls".

But somehow I get errors when loading the tuorial 5b preset. Tried both the Mac and Win files (I'm on Win11); while the Mac preset doesn't load VM vut generate no error notification, loading the Win preset I get "The plugin didn't load. Location at {C:\Program Files\VST\Voltage Modular\Voltage Modular.dll}". Can't exactly tell you why I get this error, everything else (including tuorial 3) was working as expected and the fader test generated the exact same waves in cv watcher as in your screenshot. Could it be you used VST2? If yes, could you send the subpatches as presets which I can load manually?


Best regards
Schville
ColinP
Posts: 978
Joined: Mon Aug 03, 2020 7:46 pm

Re: tutorials 3 and 5 don't work on MacOS

Post by ColinP »

Hi Schville, sorry about the problem. Tutorial 5 causes a lot of problems either because the VST version of VM isn't in the expected location or the CPU load is too high.

On Windows the three instances of Mini Plugin Host are looking for C:\Program Files\VST\Voltage Modular\Voltage Modular.dll. My guess is that you have it stored elsewhere (possibly in C:\Program Files\Common Files\). A quick fix might be to just copy the .dll file from wherever it is on your machine to that location.

Alternatively here are the three sub-patches in left to right order...

left-sub-patch.voltagepreset
(47.05 KiB) Downloaded 11 times
middle-sub-patch.voltagepreset
(50.4 KiB) Downloaded 12 times
right-sub-patch.voltagepreset
(55.63 KiB) Downloaded 11 times

If neither approach works then I'll try and figure out another strategy.
Schville
Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Jul 30, 2022 7:57 am

Re: tutorials 3 and 5 don't work on MacOS

Post by Schville »

Hey Colin,

thanks for the quick reply and especially thanks for the sub-presets, I've loaded them into each plugin host and I finally hear music! Saved them and tried reloading the main patch, everything works as expected now! Luckily I have no issues with CPU yet.

Well, I switched to VST3-only some time ago and don't really want to risk to mess up the configuration of VM. So your patch is alright and the failure is on my side. Shame on me...

Anyway, do you plan to create more tutorials in the future?


Best regards
Schville
ColinP
Posts: 978
Joined: Mon Aug 03, 2020 7:46 pm

Re: tutorials 3 and 5 don't work on MacOS

Post by ColinP »

That's great news. :D

My bad for not mentioning that the patch uses the VST 2 plugin version of VM rather than the VST 3 one. I can't remember why I used the older format - maybe something to do with wider compatibility or it might have just been the first thing I came across.

On further LSSP tutorials I'm afraid there's nothing imminent. It's all a matter of finding time and recently I've had virtually no time available (other than to provide support) as I've had to do loads of work on the boat that I live on and have had to take on lots of non-Adroit work to pay for things. The joke goes that BOAT stands for bring out another thousand. I also suffered an eye injury but that is thankfully fully healed now.

I still have some flooring to replace but then my next priority is to finally finish and document Custom Control which adds advanced morphing and sequencing facilities to Adroit Custom. I'm also thinking about how to interface LSSP and Adroit Custom to provide a more unified compositional framework and this will involve further tutorials.

I expound some of my thinking on this here...
viewtopic.php?t=3256

I'm a bit embarrassed that it's taking so long to finish Custom Control but life keeps throwing up things to slow me down. I've had the bulk of the functionality running for ages but want to get it right. Plus, like LSSP, it's a bit left-field so requires high quality documentation and this takes a great deal of time to create.
Schville
Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Jul 30, 2022 7:57 am

Re: tutorials 3 and 5 don't work on MacOS

Post by Schville »

Hey Colin,

don't worry about that. If I was aware of that VST3 has .vst3 and VST2 .dll as file type I would have known the incompability when the error message first popped up. Sometimes one kinda blind :D

I see, glad your eye injury is better now! Currently I'm working on a detailed Beginner's Guide to Voltage Modular with the very basics and fundamentals to get things done, I could imagine further guides with more specific modules (such as LSSP XL, Granular Synth or others), would you be up to answer some questions if I get stuck? The documentation of your modules is awesome, as I said I wished more manufurers would put the effort into their documentations as well.

Just saying, haven't bought the Custom Bundle yet but what I have read so far sounds pretty dope! Especially to be able to design own controls, helpers and displays such as a simple led to understand better how complex patches work together (or which part is playing right now) and having a better signal flow. Also expanding the limited Performance Knobs is awesome and to have a small scope to use space more efficient. I could also think of VM as an instance in itself to to clean up the patch further (as you showed in your example "building a mono-synth"). Looking forward to have some money aside to dig into that, maybe I could help you with some tutorials and/or documentation so you have more time and don't have to deal with everything alone. But hey, take your time. Better it lasts longer than expected but everything works, instead of rushing through and making more mistakes than necessary which need to be found and fixed.
ColinP
Posts: 978
Joined: Mon Aug 03, 2020 7:46 pm

Re: tutorials 3 and 5 don't work on MacOS

Post by ColinP »

Thanks for your interesting comments Schville.

A detailed beginner's guide to Voltage Modular sounds like a great idea. CA has done a reasonable job on basic description and there are generic modular synthesis guides available but something that specifically guides beginners through basic synthesis using VM would be a valuable resource.

If you need any help then I, and I'm sure other developers here, will be glad to assist in any way we can.

On documentation, it's understandable that a lot of devs don't spend much time on it. For simple modules it's often easy enough to discover a module's functionality with a short description and experimentation anyway. I think many users like this approach - as they can absorb information in nice bite-size chunks.

But this approach doesn't work well with more complex stuff like LSSP, Granular Synth, N-Step and Custom. So I often end up spending several months per project on documentation rather than coding. But that fits my style as I view documentation as an integral part of the design process.

Some might look at the documentation for bundles like the Granular Synth and turn away saying TLDR so I try to make things as intuitive as possible to accommodate them but such people will never get to a deep understanding of GS or its interaction with the companion modules like GS MIDI X and GS Multiplex.

I'm always up for collaboration and will PM you later today.
Post Reply

Return to “Adroit Synthesis”