Waking up this thread because I happened to have VNC running, loaded up a ZynAddSubFX chain, and was shocked to see the really old user interface for ZynAddSubFX come up. I thought the versioning had gone haywire, but after some experimentation it seems like a fairly recent version, as it responds to the maximum number of voices parameter (which is not available in the old UI BTW).
I’m not complaining though, because I can understand that Zyn-Fusion is painful over VNC, and if one wants to use the newer GUI, it’s easy enough to build on a PC and start as a standalone application, connecting to Zynthian via the network.
Zynaddsubfx can be operated with both interfaces, the classic-gui is actually theoretically even more up-to-date than zyn-fusion. Whereby zyn-fusion is still the ‘please pay for it’ version. However, it is not only the case that editing via VNC is faster. With the classic-gui, Zynaddsubfx is unbeatably fast and powerful. I can run songs with 16 midi channels on my Raspi4 without overclocking.
Interesting, I wonder if that’s simply because Zyn-Fusion uses more CPU, or if it also actually makes the audio engine run slower.
Building Zynaddsubfx in order to run Zyn-Fusion standalone is actually quite easy, IIRC, because Zynaddsubfx fetches all the required libraries automatically when building instead of complaining at build time and requiring the user to install numerous required packages manually. So if one is going to run Zynaddsubfx over VNC, for very little extra work one can run Zyn-Fusion directly.
I am not a specialist, as far as I know the complete audio calculation is the same, only the user interface is different. Originally I only asked for it to be compatible with my PC version. But the increase in speed after changing to the Classic Gui made me decide to work exclusively with Zynaddsubfx and Sfizz for samples.
I have compiled few times zynfusion ui few years ago but although UI is nicer it was not easy to use as classic ui. Maybe it is because there was less information and tutorials how to use it at that time compared to classic ui. Maybe things are changed now. What I remember is that default compile parameters compiled it to trial version. If you want to compile it to a fully working version you need to set appropriate parameters. Easy to do. Zynfusion make sense running on a desktop daw but I am not sure if it is really necessary for zynthian over vnc.
