Audiosuite menu and new Plug-ins

[Driven1]

Hi folks,

Recently I said I'd download and try installing the new free "Soundtank" plug-in. Why, I don't know really 'cause I'm already using soundfonts, but I digress...

The problem I've encountered is that when the plug-in was installed, it gave every indication that it did install. PTFree also has every indication that the plug-in installed but one...

The Audiosuite menu has not changed to include the new plug-in. I read a suggestion in the Answer base to change the menu font size in my windows display prefs but they are already as small as they can be set at 8 pt.

I even thought of trying to remove a lesser used plug-in from the plug-ins folder and then removed the dae prefs folder so that PTFree would reset it's installed plug-ins file. No change.

Any ideas on how to get new plug-ins to show up in the menu?

The Driven [img]images/icons/rolleyes.gif[/img]

[smmdrum]

Sampletank is an RTAS plug-in only.Click on one of your channels inserts and look at that plug-in list.

[Bastiaan]

It can only be used on stereo-tracks. In protools Free that means an aux-track, because ptfree doesnt have stereo-tracks.

[Driven1]

Thanks guys!

As it turns out, the Soundtank plug-in does show up in the inserts menu but will only be seen when working with a track that is stereo enabled like an aux as mentioned. It appears that it will also show up on tracks that have been "Stereoized" by another plugin.

Thanks again,
The Driven [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[Bastiaan]

I suggest you only use stereo aux-tracks. There is no use in inserting the plugin on a track, since you loose the track to record to, or play back from. It is not possible to just record enable a track, and record the synth on that track. If you want something like that, you could do a bounce to disk, or send the audio from sampletank to a stereo-buss, and set the input of a track to that buss.

Hope that helps a bit.... [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[Driven1]

Thanks Bastiaan,

Actually, I figured that out after a bit once I read (Oh m' god. I've broken a sacred software tradition, I read the documentation!) the accompanying docs that came with SampleTank. I have the hang of it now and am quite impressed with it. It solves a lot of problems and limitations encountered using soundfonts and also solves the problem of needing things like Hubi's loopback to get some things to work from midi.

I created a new session with an Aux and then loaded SampleTank with their free small room pop drums (not too impressed with the snare but the rest of the kit is ok, whadaya want for free), then imported a stock midi drum track and assigned each piece of the kit to a separate input on midi channel 1. Ran it and it sounded pretty good. The ability to tweak EQ and effects makes it even cooler (this is one of the areas that's really difficult when using sound fonts).

So for anyone interested, yes, SampleTank does work with PTFree and is actually pretty cool and a great addition to the PTFree arsenal.

[Bastiaan]

Just curious......

If you play a keyboard...is the latency with ptfree and sampletank ok? I use a digi001, and there i have less then 3ms latency, so thats definatly ok, but since a lot of ptfree users suffer from large delays....

well...only wondering...

[Bastiaan]

how to measure latency:

pencil in one note on a midi-track.

create a send on the aux-channel you have sampletank running from.

Open the send-box, and slide the fader up to 0dB (unity)

create one audiotrack, and set the input to the bus you send the sampletank to.

hit record, so the note gets played, and recorded as audio.

Zoom in on the midi-not, and select the space between the beginning of the midi-note and the beginning of the audio-waveform. Then look at the counter that shows the length of your selection.

That's your latency (atleast that's how i found my 3ms....) If i am making a mistake here....please let me know

[Driven1]

Bastiaan,

I haven't tried the keyboard yet, but what I have done is tried to replace the midi drums and violins that I was using soundfonts for originally in a tune with SampleTank just to see what happened.

The tune I'm using to test with has 8 full audio tracks, most using at least one audiosuite plugin or more (up to 3 in some cases) and 2 Midi Tracks.

I set up SampleTank on a new Aux Track and then loaded violins to Channel and Drums to Channel 2 of SampleTank. I then assigned the Violin and Drum Tracks to SampleTank accordingly.

What I ended up with was horrible latency between the audio tracks and the midi tracks. I didn't measure it, but from experience I'd day it's somewhere around 100ms. Pretty bad.

After that I thought well maybe I'll try KX drivers (which I had tried before but couldn't get them to work well on my machine.) Got them to load and actually work this time! I then went and made whatever changes I needed to do to get everything to work properly.

Tried the tune again using the KX drivers and ended up with the same thing. Latency around 100 ms.

Then I started running into problems with the KX drivers so I loaded the APS drivers back up and got everything running.

Ran the tune again and got the same latency. I then tried turning off all effects in SampleTank and noticed a slight improvement but still not usable by any means. I then loaded my slavo drum font back up and reassigned the drum tracks back to the APS midi out and left the Violins set to SampleTank and unloaded the drums from SampleTank.

Ran the Tune and it was acceptable with only a very slight latency in the Violins.

So it appears that the amount of load on SampleTank has a huge effect on it's performance.

Just to let you know, under my normal setup, audio recording latency is around 10ms and midi is less than 5. I use an Athlon 850, 386 megs ram, Win 98 SE, SBLive MP3 running APSLive Drivers. I've also used midi from PTFree to run some Buzz Machines with no latency problems.

If anyone figures out some tricks to get around SampleTanks load/latency problem that would be great. For now I'll treat it as another sound font. I'll continue to play around with it and I'll see what the keyboard latency looks like.

The Driven [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]

[Gingley]

Does anyone have a site for downloading the free SampleTank plug-in?

Thanks, G.