Vital Synth by Matt Tytel

We’re aware, we’ve been discussing it in this thread over here Vital Synth by Matt Tytel - #23 by daz.is

Oops

No worries :laughing:

I’ve started looking at how to convert vital presets to LV2 presets. Not there yet.

Beware that Vitalium will fail if you have VNC server or other GUI forwarding enabled.

[Edit] I’ve got something working but not figured out the format for the wavetables yet.

I have managed to compile a version of the LV2 on a x86_64 Linux VM from this fork which launches the GUI without crashing. I was able to import this patch and then save as a LV2 preset. I transferred it the Zynthian, manipulated it a bit and was able to play it from the Zynthian. This is a step forward. We may be able to get a version of Vitalium running with UI on Zynthian but for now I have the missing link I needed for the conversion script which I will look at over the weekend. For now here is a taster of what it sounds like:

I have reported the UI crash issue here.

[Edit] Not so easy! The wavetables and associated metadata is encoded into a blob which I don’t yet know how to encode. I will try to create and share some LV2 presets but the VM is rather slow.

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To work around the crash when loading UI we can comment out the following lines in /usr/lib/lv2/vitalium.lv2/vitalium.ttl:

    ui:ui <urn:distrho:vitalium#ExternalUI> ,
          <urn:distrho:vitalium#ParentUI> ;

The generic UI opens. which is of little use but it allows the plugin to run.

I have added PlainOldCheese bank of Vital patches which gives us something to play with. Removed due to licensing concerns. Clarity requested from author.

It does show Zynthian is a bit underpowered for some (many) of these patches.

  • Update
  • webconf Software->>LV2-Plugins
  • Search for new Plugins & Presets
  • Wait for button to turn back from red to black
  • Remove Vital layers
  • Add Vital layer
  • Enjoy / endure

@jofemodo I couldn’t find any licencing information on plainoldcheese github page. You may wish to identify what needs to be accredited and how.

This took a long time, especially in a slightly underpowered VM so I doubt I will have time to do many more in the near future. Unfortunately my effort to create a conversion script only got as far as converting the adjustable parameters and not the wavetables that are essential for each preset.

[Edit] I have made a start on instatetragrammaton patches so if you were inclinded to add some, avoid these.
I have now added (Patches/Matt Tytel Vital at master · instatetragrammaton/Patches · GitHub) presets so you should now have two banks. I have not changed any of the names (tempted as I was). There are some nice and interesting sounds in here! . These have been taken down due to inconsistent licensing compliance. Instatetragrammaton has kindly updated their repository to resolve this but I need to recreate the LV2 library to ensure compliance which I will do some point in the near future.

[Edit] I have added another CPU to the VM and things are faster so I will work through the muted presets next.

[Edit] muted presets are now added so that is three banks of Vitalium sounds we have. I need to stop and do something else… Sorry - I have removed the muted.io patches due to rights permissions. We do not have the right to distribute these patches. They are free to download from muted.io but those files are not converted to LV2.

[Edit] Okay - last one for today I think. (That shed really does need to be fixed!!!) gBeat’s bank from Vital Repository added. Removed due to licensing concerns. Clarity requested from author.

Maybe we should be organising these in banks based on their type rather than their author??? (But that adds new challenges of an artistic and hence controversial nature.) The more I do this the more I like the idea of a LV2 patch library that we can pull into Zynthian as required. I did this exercise so that Vitalium as useful, i.e. there were patches we could play with out-of-the-box. We probably have enough of those now. I look forward to getting the LV2 UI working so that we can enjoy its true potential although the poor RPi4 may (will) struggle with some patches. Thanks @MaxMaxis for your research which allowed me to grab presets and convert to LV2 format.

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Please be aware that the presets provided with Vital, including those with the free edition may not be distributed so we cannot add these to Zynthian. Matt explained that content is his business model. We do not have the right to this content.

Sorry for the confusion and backtracking on presets. I have been investigating licensing and realised that we either do not have permission to redistribute some of these patches or that the licensing is ambiguous. I have removed any that are note explicitly redistributable and requested clarification from the authors of the ambiguous ones. This leaves just those from instatetragrammaton but that is still 31 patches to give you a taste of what Vital can do and what its limitations on a Zynthian may be. Vital really benefits from user interaction with the GUI which is really well thought out so when we get access to that we will start to feel the benefit. Of course we may find that we can’t do much useful with the limited resources of our little box but I suspect there will be quite a bit that it will do quite nicely.

Please do buy content from Matt if you like the synth. It is a brilliant sequel to Helm and he deserves some recognition for his efforts.

If there are any budding sound designers out there then please create new patches using original content, e.g. wavetables that work well within the Zynthian so that we can build up a library of patches that showcase how Vital can work within Zynthian.

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22 posts were split to a new topic: About presets, licensing and copyrights: friendly but hot! :wink:

Sorry guys but I am going to have to take down the last bank. Some patches may be okay but we can’t leave anything we know is not redistributable. The good news is that Vital is a lot of fun so we may find patches being created from scratch. I created a simple sawtooth preset with control of the filter from modulation wheel and channel aftertouch. I think this is the first time I have managed to get Zynthian to behave nicely with aftertouch so I am very happy. The patch was thrown together in 5 minutes and isn’t perfect so I won’t share just yet. Also we should consider a better way to share patches.

Absolutely !!!

If just so we could have a test set to prove it all works !!

Ooh ooh ooh! I am so excited… The latest KXStudio vitalium works with GUI. @jofemodo please add this version (2021-03-06) to Zynthian. I now have vitalium running with native GUI in VNC and it is so cool. I love love love it! There goes the rest of my week :smile: :blush: . I may even create some presets… but no promises.

[Edit] If you want to get to know Vital then defo check out this video. This guy steams through the whole interface in about 30 minutes detailing pretty much everything you need to know. It is fast paced but that really works well. You don’t get bored whilst he labours a point and can easily pause and go back to various chapters which are marked up. I have watched it a couple of times and feel quite confident with this beast of an instrument. I feel like my teenage self with a brand new toy. Oh! did I mention I was excited?

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It would be good to be able to map LV2 controllers to specific Zynthian pages / encoders, e.g. bringing Vitalium Macro 1-4 to the first page would be useful. @jofemodo is this already possible or should I submit a feature request?

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Thanks to Instatetragrammaton for validating which patches in their repository are redistributable I have now converted these to LV2 and added to Zynthian. Update and enjoy. Of course some of them do tend to splat and pop because Zynthian isn’t powerful enough for some of the processing but hopefully it will give you a flavour of what this excellent synth engine is capable of and maybe there will be some that work okay for you.

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Call it ‘Charactor’ like the detuning of oscillators in the 70s

When you consider how much of the sounds of the 60’s and 70’s were the result of equipment frequently pushed into regions that were often well outside the original designers brief, it’s rather sad that the modern digital world breaks up in such a generally unpleasant way . . .

Has the possibility of an end user import/convert utility been looked into?

@wyleu
Overdriven analog circuits :heart:
Overdriven digital signals :robot:

Apparently electromagnetic field microhones are a thing that the kids are getting down with to experiment with sound. To me this is picking up all the unwanted noise we strive so hard to design out of our electronic audio devices!

On a subject sligthly more relevant to the topic heading… I did some tests with a fairly simple sawtooth based pach in vitalium and found that it was quite stable (no xruns) when run without the UI but with UI running it started to xrun when more than one note is played so to get best experience, enable GUI to do your sound design (it is a fantastic interface) then disable it for performance. I hope we might find a way to do this dynamically but have not yet found a way to connect and disconnect the GUI - but I continue to investigate…

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This reminds me of the time I told a guitarist his audio was heavily distorted coming into the mixing desk and he might want to back off the amp a bit. He wasn’t happy.

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@jofemodo please add this version (2021-03-06) to Zynthian. I now have vitalium running with native GUI in VNC and it is so cool. I love love love it! There goes the rest of my week :smile: :blush: . I may even create some presets… but no promises.

How is this coming along, do we have a build recipe for this??

It would be good to be able to map LV2 controllers to specific Zynthian pages / encoders, e.g. bringing Vitalium Macro 1-4 to the first page would be useful. @jofemodo is this already possible or should I submit a feature request?

I’m also very interested in this, as i’d like to do the same for some helm parameters and obxd