Hello. I created an LV2 plugin that has been included on the PiStomp V3. It’s called Hex Forge and Hex Chain. Hex Forge is an all-in-one solution of amps(Nam A2 is built-in as an amp mode and also for the drive and fuzz blocks), drives, fuzzes, cabinets, modulation, delays, and reverbs. Hex Chain are individual plugins that cover all of these grounds instead of committing to an all-in-one plugin. This plugin is available at Patch Storage. Let me know if it needs another build to work on Zynthian. I figured that the architecture would be similar, and I was hoping to reach out to this community to share it. I’ve found myself less interested in real devices while developing this suite of effects. It was inspired by seeing bands in live settings with expensive amps not working and having to settle for the back line. This particular instance was a JCM800 crapping out and a Boss Katana filling in for it. My goal has been to create software that is open source and able to run on inexpensive devices that a venue could have on hand.
Note: I have a patch storage author page and GitHub repo for this project that I can’t share as a new member.
Welcome @rpowell5064 to our wonderful community. Thanks for telling us about your plugin. I found it here and tried to install the package using zynthian’s LV2 installer mechanism in webconf but it seems like only Hex Chain Octave v1.27 was installed until I manually ran Scan for Engines. Maybe someone else might like to retest this incase I was mistaken.)
Now that I see them all (you must manually enable the ones you want to use in webconf or UI) I will give them a play later. (A bit early to play guitar here…)
Some initial (meta) observations:
Hex Chain Octave and Hex Chain Input Trim appear in the “Other” category. Consider whether there is an appropriate category for these.
Hex Chain Cabinet appears in the “Filter & EQ” category. Would this be better in “Simulator”?
All the “Chain” plugins have “Chain” in their title which is kinda confusing and superfluous. These are effects one may want to add to a chain but so are almost all other effects. I would recommend losing “Chain” from the title of these plugins. On smaller screens they may all appear as “Hex Chain…”!
The all-in-one Hex Forge plugin has hundreds of parameters without hints (that zynthian can read) of how to arrange them so we end up with 107 pages of parameters. This will make it pretty much impossible for anyone to find the parameter they want. In practice we may find that users will use the individual “Chain” plugins to build their own chains but to make this monolithic beast more useful, consider adding hint parameters to group them into named sections.
The same point about each plugin - consider categorising the parameters.
I like that you have added descriptions to each plugin that zynthian picks up and displays in its info pane. Excellent!
Switching Hex Chain Modulation to “Uni-Verse” triggers temporary xruns. You may want to look at what causes that.
I look forward to actually hearing these - maybe later today.