Brian and Chris, you were so kind to react to my post about MOD-UI … some days before.
It was pointed out to me that everything that is possible in MOD-UI is also possible in a Zynthian audio chain, which would be great
Unfortunately I a zynthian chain I am NOT able to load:
1 Neural models in X-AIDA and other amp simulators
2 IR’s for amp cabinets or convolution reverbs
And, I cannot switch on/off the individual plugins (at least not on every plugin). (This is an old discussion…)
You can load the files using VNC-Engines. The GUI for AIDA-X comes up when you add it to a chain. Then save presets on the Zynthian so you can access them later without VNC. That’s what I do. There is an IR loader in MOD-UI that doesn’t seem to have a working GUI outside of that system but there is another one (LSP Impulse Responses) that works. AIDA-X also loads IRs.
Also, many of the effects have a wet/dry control of some sort, so you can work around the lack of a bypass switch by turning down the effect all the way and saving as a preset or ZS3.
Indeed! We discussed this in zynthclub last night. There is a dev branch I am working on that allows bypassing plugins but it uses jack routing which may have adverse effect. There may be clicks when operating. I need to investigate further. Ideally, the LV2 host would support this and mod-host does, but there are some reasons why we don’t want to use this. I aspire to providing a bypass feature but it is not there yet.
Yeah, something like that - hopefully. We are still knocking ideas around.
BTW in my mixer dev branch I implemented audio effect bypass using a zynthian controller object to drive jack routing and the effect is very similar to mod-host bypass. They both exhibit a small click due to the discontinuity at switch time but it is no worse than a real (simple) hardware bypass switch. It works nicely with the ability to map a MIDI CC to drive it. This dev branch needs a lot more work so it won’t be ready for test for a while and I recommend saying away until then but this is good news for our future bypass options.
It is a pain at the moment that amp model and IR need to be set by vnc aida-x interface.
However you do it only once and save as aida-x preset. Once you load all your favourite amp models and IRs and save them as aida-c presets you can switch off vnc and use zynthian native ui to create patch that combines aida-x amp preset with pre and post fxs.
The only thing that is not optimal is that we still can’t switch on/off effects if they don’t have that as lv2 option (that @riban is working on) that can be assigned to midi cc command. To overcome this what I do is that I simple copy already configure chain into multiple chains and make e.g. clean, crunch, high gain chains and set effects slightly different to achieve this. Then I save multiple zs3 (e.g. clean crunch, high gain) with all chains muted apart from one that I want to play. Switching zs3 like this is extremely fast and no clicks. I also save one zs3 with all muted so that I can quickly mute everything between songs.
Finally we are discussing at the moment development of a single fx management friendly screen with all fxs as boxes where user can move them around, add into empty slots, enable/disable them and when selected show only their parameters on the right. This in nutshell would combine current two screens: one for adding and moving fxs and another for controlling their parameters.
