For the win! Cheers everyone for your help! Time to play.
I had the C Tabletop back in 2003 and the Virus B Rack and this thing is holding it down.
Right?! (forgot all about that @micabeza) I have had a Ti for a decade and was really struggling to downsize my tabletops to have some space to actually spread out and this has sent the hardware to the corner as much as I love the layout of the hardware for patch design.
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Micabeza had the right sudo code! So happy to use this!
First steps to emulate the TI have been taken as it seems. Would be a great addition to my TI2 Desktop, considering that Kemper is not supporting recent Mac versions anymore.
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EDIT: Found the thread and edited some things. Added links below.
Thereās a thread on another forum where one of the devās is somewhat active. Iām paraphrasing and going off memory, so take what Iām saying as the general gist of things and not word for word. I could have some inaccuracies.
Theyāve already got one of the Waldorf synths working enough (Micro Q) to where they actually brought it to Waldorf and let them use it in an attempt to do an official collaboration. Unfortunately, Waldorf wasnāt happy enough with the resource usage compared to a native VST synth, but itās not apples to apples either. Waldorf could help them optimize it quite a bit by giving them insight on where to concentrate their efforts in the emulator, because they could have access to the source code. Right now, theyāre completely blind and just making best effort guesses, so itās not as optimized as it could be.
While Waldorf said no for now, I guess they werenāt completely opposed to the idea or at least until the performance met their expectation, so the dev team are afraid of continuing on it anyway and likely burning that bridge forever or possibly worse like legal intervention. I and others gave the idea to pursue Access instead for now, since that bridge is already basically burnt anyway, and they already have a lot of progress. Access doesnāt have any native VST synths theyāre developing and selling, so they might be keener on it, especially knowing the TI2 has a limited life expectancy at this point. Thereās really nothing to lose vs. spending a lot of time and effort on Waldorf where they may never reconsider.
There are also many other synths to explore like Nord and Novation that used that same Motorola chip.
Their post about it: Motorola DSP563xx Emulator (BETA) (Access Virus, Nord Lead, Waldorf MWā¦) - Page 66 - Instruments Forum - KVR Audio
Their message about the Micro Q and Waldorf:
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Largo is very similar architecture to the Micro Q but with more wavetables in my experience, thereās not so much to gain with a software version compared to the Virus. The Micro Q did sound beefier than Largo (& the Blofeld) to me, but thatās possibly down to the hardware more than the DSP.
do you know which Novation synths used that chip? Supernova?
EDIT: Anything that has more than one CPU is harder and more resource intensive to emulate, so the SuperNova would be a stretch and require a very high-end machine to run if it can be done at all right now.
Both the Nova and SuperNova. I had a SuperNova and would love to have that again.
This is a list of synths the devās are already considering that use the same DSP from their FAQ:
| Device | DSP | Quantity | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Waldorf MW2/XT | Motorola 56303 | x1 | |
| Waldorf microQ | Motorola 56362 | x1 | dev (test console) |
| Waldorf Q | 3x Motorola 56303 | ||
| (2x synth, 1x FX) | x3 | ||
| Clavia Micro Modular | Motorola 56303 | x1 | |
| Clavia Nord Modular | Motorola 56303 | x4 | |
| Clavia Nord Lead 3 | Motorola 56362 | x6 | research / dev |
| Novation SuperNova | Motorola 56303 | x8 | |
| Novation Nova | 5x Motorola 56362 (Synth) | ||
| 1x Motorola 56303 (FX) | x6 | ||
| Korg MS2000 | Motorola 56362 | x1 | |
| Korg Microkorg | Motorola 56362 | x1 | |
| Access Virus A | Motorola 56303 | x1 | |
| Access Virus B | 1st rev āSā = Motorola 56303 | ||
| 2nd rev āTā = Motorola 56311 | x1 | released (plugin) | |
| Access Virus C | Motorola 56362 | x1 | released (plugin) |
| Access Virus TI Snow | Freescale 56367 | x1 | dev (plugin) |
| Access Virus TI & TI2 | Freescale 56367 | x2 | dev (plugin) |
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Wow. 8 chips! I never imagined it had that much more juice compared to the TI. I never owned any older Novations apart from the X-station (which I still use), Iāve nearly bought a Nova a few times & the 4 part multi-timbal synth they had back then.
Iād actually like the MS2000 most on that list, itās a really nice sounding synth Iāve had a couple of times. It has a unique soft resonance to the filter.
Thanks for the list!
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I donāt think Access/Kemper will adopt the project as well, since theyād need to maintain it, which is a task that obviously isnāt part of their business model. Rather I hope for an integration as part of the emulator, which would dump the ROM from a Virus TI, connected to the computer via USB to keep it in-memory. This way I would expect that Kemper could support a legal agreement for TI users to use the ROM loaded by the emulator legally (unless dumping and using the ROM differently already isā¦ maybe someone knows?)
Another point is, that the advantage of a hardware unit compared to the emulator is to off-load CPU-usage from the computer to the TI. This will remain one of the most relevant selling points, once the emulator is stable and efficiently running the TI. So that part would need to be integrated as well.
Which Supernova is that though? There were versions with different numbers of voices. I have a 20 voice SN2 in my rack.
Just tried the emulator as Virus C for the first time in a year or two, to see how far itās come. Well, thatās just stunning work! Hats off! Still not 100% stable yet, but still a great achievement.
Virus TI is what Iām really interested in though, since I have a desktop TI. Being able to maintain my time investment in patches is very attractive. I can understand why they might not want to release that yet though.
What would be interesting to me, is being able to use a variant of their Virus TI front-end GUI to edit the real TI hardware on Mac. Never really been impressed with the MI/Aura plug-in. Wonder if theyād consider letting someone do that work?
I sent a support request when I bought my Virus in October, and this morning I got a āthank you for your requestā email. If itās 3 months to acknowledge an email I think expecting them to do anything at all with the Virus is a bit optimistic
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Unfortunately yes. The curious part is, that itās such a strong brand in the synthesizer industry and even an important part of the history. I understand that the whole firmware would have been required to get rewritten, and still I think with the right people and team on board, it would habe been a great opportunity to make a new Virus.
Unfortunately, no clue. The table I posted is from their website. I would guess itās the original 16 voice Supernova, but I have no specific insight. They might have said more on their Discord, but I havenāt visited that.
TI is there now in case you missed it.
Just got it working today and, well. I guess my Snow is just for live now.
Are you experiencing any cpu spikes, esp playing chords? The Osirus releases were unusable for me because I would get tons of cpu spikes in both Ableton and Logic, esp but not exclusively playing polyphonically. (M1 MBP here)
I am pasting some of what I said from another forumā¦
I know everyoneās situation is different, but with the OsTirus, as a quick test, I loaded up 8 instances of it (so 16 DSPs total), each running the same random patch using 8 voices. Iām on a Ryzen 9 5900x and saw about 50% usage across all 12 physical cores. Yes, not scientific at all and does nothing really but prove that it works in my use case, but I found it encouraging overall.
I played long, sustained chords during that test without any dropouts or glitches. To be fair, I donāt run low-latency buffers; Iām generally running 256 at 48K / 24bit. So far, for me, itās been surprisingly stable.
Itās only an observation, but it seems like Mac users report more stability and CPU issues. I donāt know if thatās down to CPU architecture or optimization, or simply that there are more Mac users than PC users, and thatās skewing results.
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Seems pretty reliable here - if youāre having issues, it might be worth either trying the Snow firmware option (same sound, but fewer parts and lower clock speed which means its less CPU intensive to emulate) or checking the clock speed options. For what itās worth, I managed to get to 14-or-so instances of the plugin running the Snow firmware on my 5 year old PC before it started to struggle.
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Iām on a 2019 Intel i7 mbp and cpu spikes from osiris and ostirus for me were from heat throttling. If I can keep my cpu cool Ostirus only uses about 3-11% cpu even when playing chords.
Heat is an issue for mbps, it gets better for the later ones but is still a large factor. Itās something to investigate at least.
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