LS Windows, polyphony and virtual organs

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moonskin
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LS Windows, polyphony and virtual organs

Post by moonskin » Tue Apr 01, 2008 9:48 am

Hi everyone

I've just discovered Linuxsampler for Windows and it very exciting. I'm using it to run Miditzer (http://www.virtualorgan.com) a virtual theatre pipe organ on Windows XP.

It seems to run successfully and I'm very happy with my initial experiments but I have some questions if someone is prepared to give me a few answers.

How important is RAM to polyphony? (currently 1Gb) I am dropping notes at the moment when I have a big registration. I think I have seen somewhere that the Windows version is limited to 64 notes. Is this the case? If it is, is there any way of increasing this?

Secondly, the samples I have are stereo. Is there any way of sending both L and R of a single channel to just one channel of the sound card; either L or R? (I know it seems like a stupid question but is relevant in the Theatre Organ context when using headphones.)

Thirdly (sorry) is there a (low latency) way of getting the output of LS to Reaper so I can add reverb?

Cheers
Graham

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Re: LS Windows, polyphony and virtual organs

Post by bartonbrass » Wed Apr 02, 2008 3:50 am

I wonder how easy or hard it would be to create a program like Virtual audio cable? Running two soundcards, I wish I could have MidiTzer-LinuxSampler play through one card, and have a reverb vst or whatever recieve the audio from line in of the other card. Is there any idea when the new sampler will be finished? ( :

Glad to see another MidiTzer user.

Jake C.

moonskin
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Re: LS Windows, polyphony and virtual organs

Post by moonskin » Wed Apr 02, 2008 7:31 am

Hi Jake

I have VAC4 and it works quite well except there is too much latency for playing real-time.

I've done some more searching and found some of my own answers. If I can get jackdmp going on Windows, that should solve the audio problem.

I want to use Reaper because it hosts the FREEVERB3 IMPULSER VST which works well for me. Once LS hosts VST (?) I won't need Reaper. If ever LS does convolution then I will be ecstatic because I can do all I need to do in LS.

The stereo issue can be solved be using gigedit to change the panning within the instrument.

I still don't know about polyphony yet.

If you want the reverb to go to surround channels, Reaper can do that with a little setting up but you will have to have a capable machine to run it all together. Another alternative is RaySpace VST which will do all the work for you of calculating the surround channels. You just have to design the space correctly.

Cheers
Graham

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dahnielson
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Re: LS Windows, polyphony and virtual organs

Post by dahnielson » Wed Apr 02, 2008 12:46 pm

Aaah, you guys don't know what you are missing. On Linux we have JACK that solves all problems being a sort of virtual patch cord/cable. LS don't do convolution itself but JConv is easily patched in. As I said, you don't know what you're missing. ;)

(Apologies in advance for my smugness. :D )

BTW, ganging two sound cards is a big no-no without sample exact sync. The cards either need to be word clock enabled (so you can use them in a master/slave configuration) or have syncing capabilities built into them.
Anders Dahnielson

Ardour2, Qtractor, Linuxsampler, M-AUDIO Delta 1010, Axiom 61, Korg D12, AKAI S2000, E-MU Proteus 2k, Roland R-5, Roland HP 1300e, Zoom RFX-1000, 4GB RAM x86_64 Intel Pentium Dual 1.80GHz Gentoo Linux

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dahnielson
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Re: LS Windows, polyphony and virtual organs

Post by dahnielson » Wed Apr 02, 2008 4:27 pm

moonskin wrote:How important is RAM to polyphony? (currently 1Gb) I am dropping notes at the moment when I have a big registration. I think I have seen somewhere that the Windows version is limited to 64 notes. Is this the case? If it is, is there any way of increasing this?
Yes. RAM is important to polyphony since the sampler need to cache the star of each disk stream (to make sure the disk can keep up). There's currently at least two threads, I think, on the forum that try to explain it in detail.

And yes. It is possibly to increase it. However, it's currently an compile time option, so you need to compile it yourself. The above mentioned threads also discuss this.
moonskin wrote: Secondly, the samples I have are stereo. Is there any way of sending both L and R of a single channel to just one channel of the sound card; either L or R? (I know it seems like a stupid question but is relevant in the Theatre Organ context when using headphones.)
From the top of my head: try to create a audio device in LS with only one channel, or does that output on both L/R? On Linux this kind of routing is simply solved by the use of JACK.
Anders Dahnielson

Ardour2, Qtractor, Linuxsampler, M-AUDIO Delta 1010, Axiom 61, Korg D12, AKAI S2000, E-MU Proteus 2k, Roland R-5, Roland HP 1300e, Zoom RFX-1000, 4GB RAM x86_64 Intel Pentium Dual 1.80GHz Gentoo Linux

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cuse
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Re: LS Windows, polyphony and virtual organs

Post by cuse » Wed Apr 02, 2008 5:50 pm

moonskin, seems your question are already answered. Just some more few notes:

Yes, you can mix those audio channels into one, simply change the audio routing of the respective sampler channel. E.g. with QSampler klick on the respective channel strips "Channel" button on the left, then you find the audio routing settings at the bottom of the appearing dialog.

Internal effect support is planned, I already wanted to work on it, but unfortunately im totally busy ATM until May 1st, due to my diploma thesis. Looking forward to may for finally being able to hack some more LS features ...

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dahnielson
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Re: LS Windows, polyphony and virtual organs

Post by dahnielson » Wed Apr 02, 2008 7:25 pm

cuse wrote:Internal effect support is planned, I already wanted to work on it, but unfortunately im totally busy ATM until May 1st, due to my diploma thesis. Looking forward to may for finally being able to hack some more LS features ...
Überkool.
Anders Dahnielson

Ardour2, Qtractor, Linuxsampler, M-AUDIO Delta 1010, Axiom 61, Korg D12, AKAI S2000, E-MU Proteus 2k, Roland R-5, Roland HP 1300e, Zoom RFX-1000, 4GB RAM x86_64 Intel Pentium Dual 1.80GHz Gentoo Linux

sbenno
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Re: LS Windows, polyphony and virtual organs

Post by sbenno » Wed Apr 02, 2008 10:59 pm

Hi,
currently LinuxSampler on Windows is compiled with a maximum polyphony of 200 voices and a preload of 64k sample points (per mono sample).
You can recompile LinuxSampler on Windows altering these parameter and thus optimizing the performance but its currently not a task for the fainthearted as
it requires to install several development packages. (Yes, we should write a LinuxSampler Windows compile HOWTO :) )

We plan to remove some compile times values in the next LS release, so that you can specify polyphony and buffer parameters at runtime allowing
to achieve optimal performance and memory usage on all systems.

The solution to FX routing on Windows will be VSTi support in LinuxSampler. Probably it will be released around summer.
About windows ASIO routing (in absence of a VSTi interface) in theory LinuxSampler audio outs can be routed into the sequencer on audio cards
that provide ASIO loopback routing. AFAIK cards from RME allow this.
There are software based virtual cables, like in ReaRoute Reaper but an user reported that routing LS outs into Reaper leads to a crash.
The LS ASIO driver is still young so it may still experience some problems in some cases like routing via virtual audio cable applications.
BTW, I tried to route LinuxSampler ASIO using the virtual ASIO driver provided by jackd for Windows and in this case it seems to work.
(but ASIO clients piped into jackd on windows using ASIO4ALL as audio output driver does not give me satisfactory results, lots of dropouts).

moonskin
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Re: LS Windows, polyphony and virtual organs

Post by moonskin » Thu Apr 03, 2008 1:31 am

Thanks so much for this great info. I'm more than happy to wait for the VST support and other things to happen. It's quite playable at the moment and I've a lot of work to do midifying my console.

I'll also reinstall the latest version of Reaper and try the ReaRoute drivers in the meantime. I'll let you know how it goes.

I may also try a Linux install and run Miditzer under Wine. ;)

Cheers
Graham

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Re: LS Windows, polyphony and virtual organs

Post by moonskin » Thu Apr 03, 2008 8:06 am

Further to my previous post...

I successfully used ReaRoute to take the output from LS into Reaper and then through Freeverb3. Sounds great and latency is so low as to be unnoticeable in this application.

The sound card uses a 3rd-party WDM driver which seems to be working well.

I still run out of notes at time when playing big chords with a large number of stops but generally it's not a problem.

Thanks all for your help. I'm a happy man!

Cheers
graham

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