I’m back into Camp Interested again on this one.
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Three or four long-ass stereo samples is all I need to write an EP. Some panning, resampling and I’m good.
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With this uodate I think ZOIA becomes the perfect companion for a Digitakt… Do you miss stereo samples? Just place a sampler module and control its playback and parameters with a midi channel in the DT. Put an adsr, a filter and some lfos and you have almost a new DT track with up to 8 parameters to lock through the sequencer.
Ps. It also counts for Syntakt users who needs some 909 hats or stereo samples too.
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I also planned to use it with DT or ST, but it doesn’t seem ready yet. I had maybe 10 freezes yesterday (standalone).
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What were you doing? Is it replicable?
Different things, something basic like loading a patch from sd. Using sampler with high pitch (5 octaves) increase CPU usage and can cause freezes.
Did a gig last night (a techno Ceilidh, heheee) with zoia as a 909 drum machine
Tap tempo was triggered by my stomp box using the onset detector and a classic 4/4 techno beat with off beat hi hat could be played on demand with a snare roll being triggered by a momentary footswitch. Great success!
I’m wondering about using sample chains to lower CPU cus 4 samplers definitely was verging on too much especially with the onset detector.
2 questions-
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is there a cheaper onset detection method?
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for 16 step sequences I had to use 32 steps with every other step selected if I wanted 16 triggers to play (eg closed hats 16ths) because otherwise it wouldn’t retrigger. Is this a quirk of the sequencer or the sampler? I’m not that experienced with the sequencer, maybe I was using it wrong.
Cheers!
- An envelope follower/comparator (envelope follower --> positive input of comparator, negative input sets threshold) combination can work for onset detection, provided that there is silence/sound falling below the threshold between onsets. Depending on the source, the envelope follower can be susceptible to noise/oscillation, which causes it to fall and rise above the threshold. One way of addressing that is to create a sort of Schmitt trigger/hysteresis control, which I’ve sketched out in the envelope follower section of Tips and Tricks:
- Were you using a gate sequencer track? If it was a CV track, then a value of 1 at each step wouldn’t have any breaks between the steps (any sort of triggerable module in ZOIA does so by detecting a rising edge; if the output is constant, there’s no rising edge). You can select the track type by selecting the output of a given track and pressing the encoder.
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I knew I’d missed something! Thanks 
Nice I’ll have a look at the Schmitt trigger/envelope follower, thanks again!
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Answer from Empress after a bug report.
“Thanks for both of the bug reports that you submitted! We’ve seen a few reports of crashes & other issues that seem to be related to high pitch, so we’re looking into that.”
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Believe it or not, not being a modular guy I hadn’t even thought of that!
That looks really nice and I love the way you tied the cables like spark leads on an engine 
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@chm_jacques I’m quite interested in ZOIA, especially for playing around with physical modeling and psychoacoustic effects. I’ve watched a few of your videos now, inparticular the three videos above and was wondering if you would answer the following for me:
- The smallest value the ZOIA can work with, is it a single sample or smaller?
- Is the sampling frequency of the device adjustable to get more complex patches?
I think I know the answer to the second question already and I suspect that it is no, but nevertheless I’m intrigued to know, especially the first question. Also, if you have any videos featuring ZOIA’s use for psychoacoustic effects, please point me to them.
Incidentally, the sound you created in the ‘Piano-esque Sounds’ video, and what you said about ‘getting away with it’ immediately made me think of a track called ‘Mercury’ by Kirsty Hawkshaw.
Not exactly the same but as soon as you switched-on that reverb, this is the track that came to mind. With just a bit more overtone and brightness added to your make-do piano patch and a longer reverb tail dialed in, it probably wouldn’t have sounded too far off.
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I’m not really sure how to answer this, because I think the smallest value anything can work with is a sample (a sample in the DSP world is generally derived from the speed of the processor itself, so it reflects a physical, or at least discretely quantized, limit – you seem to recognize this, but I figure there might be people who don’t know what we’re going on about). So, I think you’re maybe asking something else, possibly? But I’m not sure what it is.
And yes, the answer is unfortunately, no. The processor speed is fixed. That said, I think you can do quite a lot with it, and also, that limitation has also produced quite a lot of creativity on my part, as I have to think of better (more efficient) ways to do the same thing. There are times where I wish I had 10% more CPU, certainly; but there are very, very rarely times where I wish I had 100% more CPU and probably there are many more occasions where I think my work was improved for not having it. Just my perspective on the matter.
And I can hear the similarities, thank you You could do a better piano in ZOIA, by adding more overtones/EQing, if you really wanted to, although now, with the sampler module added, I think you’d find yourself in a situation where it might be more cost-efficient to simply sample a piano itself. Which isn’t to deny the joy of synthesizing on its own.
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Thanks for replying., and absolutely, the smallest quantized unit would be a single sample, but I’m not 100% sure whether that would effect the precision of the math. It’s hard to explain but for example if you had a synthsesizer that is outputting audio at 96 through an analogue speaker, and you were capturing it at 48 on the ZOIA, you’re still going to capture the sound of that 96 in your 48 if you see what I mean.
So if you take that same principle and apply it to what’s happening directly inside the ZOIA, it might not necessarily mean that a higher precision is not being used despite its sampling frequency. The reason I specifically asked about psychoacoustics is because the higher the precision, the finer you can make a delay, and at it’s most basic, I’ve always felt that delays are one of the single most important tools.
For example, we know that when you delay one channel against anohter, you get a ping-pong delay. Shorten the delay further and you get slap-back. Shorten it further still and you get stereo-widening. Further still and you get reverb. Go to extremes however and you get psychoacoustic or binaural effects. So that’s what I’m getting at regards how small the smallest unit is, because in order to do all that binaural and psychoacoustic stuff, you really need to be able to get those delays down to crazy small amounts.
Thanks for your thoughts on the processing load, it was nice to hear that coming from you because I did wonder what you thought about it. I’m buying an Anyma Phi soon and was thinking of buying a ZOIA to pair up with it as well.
I think they’re both very interesting products, the sort of stuff I could never get bored off.
The resolution of the delay lines is .02 milliseconds (I believe; it could be .2 milliseconds – I don’t have a ZOIA handy). But there is a processing lag of 1.33 milliseconds per module in a chain, so the functional limit is 1.35 milliseconds, I suppose.
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If it’s .02 that should work really well. I wouldn’t worry about the lag though cause the same lag would probably apply to all of it.
It’s really only the precision that matters for the stuff I was referring to.
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Just want to clarify what I meant by the same lag applying to all of it.
I don’t know if there are modules you could stick in there to act passively to balance-up any discrepancies in lag, but if not you could of course just use a single delay on the line that’s ahead, but again the result is going to depend on how small a unit is settable for the delay.
Anyway, about to grab a coffee now and watch some of your ZOIA sequencing videos 
What do we have here … wha-wha-wha-d-d-d-ha-ha-ha-e-e-e-e-e-e … 
Fun stuff, and that was before the sampler module. Seems it was pretty capable of handling samples even before the update then!
BTW, the other ZOIA tutorial dude on YouTube, Hakon Soreide, curious, who’s that on here?
Great tutorials from both of you, love this stuff!
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Came here to post this!
Sounds great to my ears.