New stable version is almost here: Staging-2210

Software Updates
9

Great !

I’m downloading the image right now :blush:

10

Congratulations ! Thanks to all for this tough work !

Only knew the testing version which I use since I finished my build this summer (mostly because of the mixer and “chain” concept which I find easyer to understand).

I wish I will find some time to contribute on the next evolutions as I find this project amazing !

Thanks for your dedication and really hard work !

1 Like
11

Heya, I’m running the new image in a touch-only configuration with just an RPi3 - I have an RPi4, but for whatever reason it doesn’t work with this screen, which is otherwise pretty great for this purpose in terms of size and features. I’m only using this for keys at the moment so I’m not overly concerned about the lack of power, and I’m interviewing for an awesome job later this month so probably I can get a kit pretty soon.

Anyways, I’ve got “Enable Onscreen Buttons” checked in the web config, but there appear to be no onscreen buttons. On the current stable they appear across the bottom of the screen. I tried checking and unchecking the box with a save between, I saw the UI reload on the screen but nothing changed.

Possibly this is due to the weird resolution (1024x600)? Anyways, lemme know if I can send some logs, or alternatively, it’s Saturday, give me a hint where to look to fix it myself and maybe I’ll have a go. Who knows, might even work. :>

12

Hi @jtode

We changed this behaviour somewhat. The buttons only appear if there is not already a method of performing the button actions for the view with the touch screen. You should see the buttons on the chain control view.

13

3.) Audio Player Engine
Now you can play more than one audio track. And you can use it as a basic sampler, recording and using midi notes to play the recorder audio at different “speeds”. And you will see the wave. Yessss!

oh yeah, this is really really a feature i’ll use a lot in the coming future (studio remake in progress)

Many thanks for the awesome continuous progress on Zynthian, which is now coming closer and closer to competing with some branded workstations … well probably even outstanding these !

1 Like
14

7 posts were split to a new topic: Staging-2210 Snapshot Loading

15

Hey. Really awesome work. This thing is getting better than I hoped for, when I bought it.

I’m really interested in 9.) Customized GUI Widgets
In particular for Pianoteq and Surge. Do these support that feature? I, being a designer, am interested and ready to develop custom GUIs for those engines. How can I start? Do you have any documentation about it?

16

When the control page is displayed it checks if there is a custom gui available for the engine and shows it, otherwise it shows the list of control pages. You can use an existing custom widget as a template and develop for any engine. There isn’t specific documentation for this but the use of existing code as a base plate will get you far.

2 Likes
17

Great! Looking forward to try it out and test the new features!

Thanks for the hard work!

1 Like
18

I am a newbie on linux architecture, where do we find the widgets templates and templates for the list of controls ? Thanks !

19

have a look here:

and implementation here:

1 Like
20

Very Impresive work. The new face of the mixer looks very nice :smiley:

As a guy that has complained about channels before, I must say that I think channels are very useful, the limitation is on some controllers that makes the life very difficult if you want to change channel in the middle of a song. In other words, the problem are not the channels but the implementation in some midi controllers.

Anyway, I want to thank you for the really great job on the zynthian os.

21

I’ve been using testing for some time, so I’ve got a fair amount of lv2 patches saved as well as snapshots. Is there a ‘best practice’ way to transition to the new release candidate? Like doing backups on testing and then restore with the release candidate?

22

I would recommend some or all of these steps:

  • Use webconf to backup the Zynthian configuration which will backup:
    • Captures
    • Custom presets (including favourites flags)
    • Snapshots
    • Custom soundfonts
  • Ideally use a different SD card for the migration:
    • Power off Zynthian
    • Remove SD Card
    • Write new image to a new / different SD Card
    • Insert new SD Card in Zynthian, power on and wait for initialisation to complete (several minutes) - main menu will be displayed
  • If not using a fresh image:
    • Use webconf to change the repositories to Staging 2210
  • Run update
  • If using a fresh image:
    • Use webconf to restore the Zynthian configuration
    • Use webconf to search for new plugins and presets

You should have your user data backed up in case you need to restore it. An alternative to using a new SD Card may be to backup the whole SD Card image but that requires some technical knowledge and quite some time. I wouldn’t recommend it.

If you have added effects to the main mixbus you may find these don’t work after the migration to 2210. You will have to:

  • Write down the main mixbus effects chain including each effect’s parameter settings
    • You may be able to use webconf to show this detail which may save some effort (copy and paste to a text editor)
  • Remove the effects from the main mixbus
  • Save snapshot
  • Clean All
  • Load snapshot
  • Add effects to main mixbus
  • Manually apply customisation to effects

This issue was observed late in the development and testing cycle and deemed an acceptable manual fix because we felt that few users will have added effects to the main mixbus of Testing branch and to fix within code would have been messy, time consuming and prone to error.

[Edit] I removed some of the steps above as backup will do many things. I have also just partially fixed the webconf backup/restore so you may have to update webconf to get that working. (This could prove to be a catch-22 - you want to backup before updating but may need to update to backup!)

1 Like
23

Congratulations

It’s been a while I didn’t play with my Zynthians. So I’ve decided to burn a fresh SD card with the new baby.
And I have played a bit these last few days with the new staging image: Wouaouh it’s really really nice. What I appreciate:

  • The huge software improvement with a lot of new features
  • Workflow is excellent even with no physical controllers.
  • The provided snapshots with associated sequences are fun for making directly some noise without any hassel. Maybe it could be an idea to load on the very first boot one of them by default so that a new user can play immediately.

I’ve noticed some little bugs that are aleady reported on Zynthian issue tracker.

And I think enabling hotspot mode by default when no network is available could be an enhancement during the setup process (ie: configuring Zynthian hardware with webconf).

2 Likes
24

So I loaded up the Staging-2210 image, after first doing a Backup from Testing, and then a Restore when the new image started up. A couple of initial things:

  • Tried to load up a snapshot saved from Testing. First I just got a grey screen, then after fiddling around and doing a reboot, I got up the snapshot partly: The ZynAddSubFX, OB-Xd and NoiseMaker chains where there but with no patches loaded. The Pianoteq and Dexed chains were missing entirely.
  • For NoiseMaker, I could press Back and select a new patch which played fine.
  • For OB-Xd, initially I could select a patch, but it wouldn’t play. Pressing Back when the parameter pages were up did not go the patch selection screen, but just removed all OB-Xd parameters entirely.
  • After removing the OB-Xd chain and creating a new one all was well.
  • None of my own OB-Xd patches can be found in the GUI; I can see them in /zynthian/zynthian-my-data/presets/lv2 though, and I can also see the bank (directory) in webconf using Library → Presets & Soundfonts…
  • Creating a new Dexed chain went fine, but the custom banks I’d uploaded in Testing can’t be found, despite them being visibly present in /zynthian/zynthian-my-data/presets/lv2 . The banks are visible in the webconf when accessed using Library → Presets & Soundfonts.

I haven’t reported this as bugs yet as I’m not sure its even supposed to work to load a snapshot from Testing, given the issues I’ve experienced. But I still think that my custom patches / banks should be visible for for instance OB-Xd and Dexed. For ZynAddSubFX they do exist though. I seem to recall having the same problem on Testing, but eventually it got resolved during an update and suddenly all my previously uploaded banks were there.

EDIT: My custom patches and banks are back. Note sure what I did as I’ve been fiddling about quite a bit; one thing I have done is stop and start the zynthian service a couple of times. So can’t really give any specific actions here.

BTW, it’s a pity the ZynAddSubFX version is so old (3.0.5). There are a number of nice features in newer versions that Zynthian would benefit from. It’s easy enough to build from source; not sure how hard it would be to create a distributable image.

25

I missed a step in my procedure (which I have just added above): Use webconf to search for new plugins and presets. This will update the Zynthian’s cache that is uses to optimise access to the vast quantity of plugins and presets.

We aspire to ensuring seamless migration from previous Stable to next Stable (staging-2210 is being used to validate this). There may be some (small) issues with migrating from some previous testing versions but what you describe sounds bad. I will try to figure out what the issues are. Will you please provide some broken snapshots?

You could submit a feature request to update ZynAddSubFX.

26

Ah, this is probably what fixed it for me. While trying out different things, I was going to try and see what would happen if I added one of the Dexed banks that had seemingly gone missing, but mistakingly went to the ‘Search for new plugins and presets’ page and clicked on it. After half a minute or so of inactivity (just the progress indicator spinning), I realized my mistake and went to another page (or possibly restarted the whole zynthian service, can’t remember).

Is this something which should be intrinsic to the restore operation then? It’s not really intuitive.

Will do (on both accounts).

BTW, am I supposed to tag bug reports in the issue tracker which relate to the Staging-2210 release? I see that some issues have a Milestone associated with them but it seems something that only administrators can do?

27

No, leave the tagging to us. The milestone tag is used to define what we feel should be resolved by the next release. It isn’t necessarily what the user wants :wink:. We need to be pragmatic and hence some things may need to wait for a later update.

The search for plugins and presets is a bit clunky. The upstream library has some issues which makes this a difficult process (either slow or prone to excessive use of resources). It isn’t something that is easily incorporated into a timely process. It is run during a fresh install but not during an update because of the time it takes to run. We could possibly run it as a background task in its own thread… but not today!

28

Sure, no problem, I was just thinking if there was something I should have done that I’d missed.

I did some more experiments with snapshots. The problem seems to be with snapshots that contain a Pianoteq (lv2) layer/channel . Basically, I can report the following.

  • On my Testing SD I have a Pianoreq PRO license. Some of the snapshots written using this image contain an LV2 Pianoteq layer (LV2 because I wanted access to all the parameters from the Zynthian UI).
  • I initially hadn’t transferred Pianoteq to the Staging-2210 version.
  • When loading these snapshots into the Staging-2210 version (as yet still with the default trial Pianoteq version), I end up with a blank mixer (blank as in all grey - no chains/layers - not even a main strip!).
  • So, I uploaded the Pianoteq binary to Staging-2210, and supplied the license key, which worked fine, although the webconf listed it as STANDARD (I think, at least it was neither TRIAL nor PRO) rather than PRO, until I rebooted the Zynthian, and it then showed PRO.
  • Setting up a layer/chain with the standalone Pianoteq works fine.
  • Setting up a layer/chain with the LV2 Pianoteq doesn’t work. After pressing Select when selecting the MIDI channel for the chain, the Zynthian logo animation runs for a couple of seconds, then stops, and the same screen (channel select) remains.
  • Trying to load a snapshot containing an LV2 Pianoteq chain has the same effect as before: all-grey mixer and no sounds.

An additional artifact after having failed to load a snapshot with an LV2 Pianoteq chain, is that when loading (valid/working) snapshots subsequently, the Main strip in the mixer is muted. It’s easy enough to unmute, but a bit surprising. Perhaps Zynthain does this as a safety precaution after having failed to load a snapshot (to protect users’ ears?)? This only happens after having tried to load a snapshot with an LV2 Pianoteq chain. If I reboot Zynthian and load a (valid)
snapshot, Main is not muted.

I’ve attached two snapshots containing LV2 Pianoteq layers, which fail to load in Staging-2210:
029-Pianoteq.zss (25.7 KB)
030-220922.zss (47.6 KB)

Apart from the snapshots with Pianoteq, other snapshots loaded fine. I’m not 100% convinced that the channel volumes were right, because some of them had a large spread from chain to chain, but I didn’t A-B-test against the original snapshots so can’t say for sure.