“It’s the graphics, stupid”

(this post is actually a sequel to some other ones related to the same topic, namely the Windows 7 and 10 graphics issues in different music software)

Ok, here’s my guess about what actually happened.

1. When HD became the buzzword of computer graphics and Apple released its Metal 3D graphic shader back in 2014, Windows were in a hurry to come up with something similar.

2. However, Windows 8 – having been released two years before Metal –  had not been a success. In fact, it was a mess and an expensive disaster. Therefore there was even bigger a hurry for new operating system shiny enough to encounter Apple products. The result was Windows 10, released more or less prematurely as an unfinished product in 2015.

3. Here’s where different music software vendors come in. They all faced the same question: how do we make our products look better?

4. If you check out my previous posts on Native Instruments plugins and soft synths such as Massive X, they were the first major company to step on this HD landmine. Since most people were still using Windows 7, their new releases didn’t work well on any Windows version. It was all because of the combination of HD graphics, different generations of hardware and lack of proper testing that made so many people to abandon several generations of NI software products. The  whole thing was a painfully revealing proof of the fact that audio software vendors did not have enough people with technical GUI expertise working for them.

5. The next hopeful vendor to face the same problem was Steinberg, which traditionally has had a reputation of putting out sturdy yet groundbreaking products. Well that didn’t work out with Windows 10, as one can see below:

The screenshot in question was taken from Steinberg forums, and it features Cubase 10 running on Windows 10. However I can confirm that the same issue still persists in Cubase 12.

All dropdown menus are completely blank.

6. The reason for this is neither Windows 10 nor Cubase, or any hardware by itself but, rather, the combination of all three. Cubase 12 runs perfectly on Windows 10, but some of its graphics (with transparent effects) will not render correctly depending on for example the OpenGL version running on a particular computer. This is of course dependent on hardware, mainly the graphics processor. On their website, Steinberg lists the actual graphics processors compatible with latest Cubase, but usually they settle for mentioning that “Windows 10 native supported graphics units” can handle Cubase versions 10-12.

7. As one can see browsing through Steinberg forums, some users have had luck with paradoxically lowering the graphics settings of Cubase to make the dropdown menus visible again. However, there’s a downside to this, which is crystallized in the error message below:

8. This very error was what I personally encountered when trying to install Waves Complete 14 plugins to an older computer running on Windows 10. The cause of this error has nothing to do with computer audio but – you guessed it – graphics. On Waves 14, the GUI of some plugins has been updated to be both HD and freely rescalable, and this sort of solution requires graphics processing power.

9. I was however able to make the installation work by basically turning on maximum graphics performance in my old laptop, and all Waves plugins including the new GUI ones now show up fine. There is however a downside to this, as described in the Steinberg forum post below:

10. The issue masmith516 was dealing with back in 2019 concerned disappearing i.e. blank dropdown menus in Cubase 10. As one can see, he or she lowered the graphics properties of Cubase only to find out that this move actually makes the latest Waves HD plugins to malfunction. Thus some people can run both Cubase and Waves, but not at the same time. Again, none of this has anything to do with audio: it’s all about graphics.

11. As Ableton Live 11 as well as Bitwig Studio 4 both work fine graphics-wise in my older laptop and have no issues with Waves plugins, my final solution was to ditch using Cubase 12 altogether. I don’t want to buy a new computer just to be able to see the dropdown menus of an audio editing program.

12. All in all, just like Steinberg these days, many audio software vendors are in my opinion more about making visually impressive and thus GUI-heavy “entertainment software” instead of practical tools. There are vendors able to combine these two into working products (in my opinion for example Izotope and also Arturia have been successful in this), but all too often the end users have to deal with a plethora of issues related to visual outlook of their audio software. 

Is my operation system supported? Is it the right version of that operation system? Is the graphics processor of a workstation originally aimed at audio recording and editing powerful enough? And why the hell Cubase stops working the very moment Waves plugins start to work, and both things happen for the same exact reason?

It’s the graphics, stupid.

No Mas(sive X)

As I wrote before, the new Massive X synth by Native Instruments has major issues in its GUI department. First massively delayed and then hastily released, Massive X now has the first larger update to version 1.1.

I think that the best thing to describe graphics issues is to show them. This first image is what Massive X should apparently look like on my DAW:

When I first installed the demo version of Massive X (with same functionality as the full version), it crashed every second time and looked like this:

It’s easy to see that something’s missing. In fact the majority of controls are not there. So how about the 1.1 update? Well, let’s see:

Definitely better, one would say – if it was a demo. But we are talking about a major flagship software release a full year after the original launch. Seriously, what the hell is this? Switching between different skin options render completely different GUI results. With this pace the full GUI will be available in 2024, when the 1.8 version comes out.

I said everything I had to say about Massive X in my earlier post, so I’ll just reiterate this. As long as Native Instruments cannot prove they are able to make a working soft synth GUI without the DAW crashing and completely missing some of the graphs, I will not be buying any of their products, including hardware. If their Kontrol keyboards are designed by the same people as Massive X, the 61-key version only has some 30 actual keys that work.

You don’t have to believe just me. As I write this, it’s Black Friday 2019, and I decided to take a look at what people are talking about at the official NI Massive X discussion forum. Here’s a sneak peek:

 

 

End of Remix?

During the years I have spent time on several online communities offering remix contests. Sites like Peter Gabriel’s Real World Remixed as well as Indaba Music are now history, leaving the field to such actors as Splice.com, Blend.io and lately SKIOMusic.com as well as the Native Instruments spinoff Metapop.com. A more restricted service is available at MixTheMusic.com, a site that requires users to work in Presonus Studio environment as well as pay for the stems without the option for exporting tracks and thus releasing one’s own work anywhere in public.

What I’ve noticed in general as of late is that many of these sites have either none or very limited opportunities available for users. Gone are the days when one could choose between remixing Snoop Dogg and Christina Aquilera: nowadays the original track is more likely made by an aspiring EDM producer and the 1st prize is a Skype call.

So what happened? Music production has all but gone viral in the last decade, enabling people to come up with good-sounding stuff on their phones. By all means it should make sense for record companies to offer some of their b-roll music to get free widespread publicity for their artists.

One possibility – a likely one – is that these remix contest sites really don’t have plausible business plans. In the end they will have to pay compensation to be able to distribute remix stems according to existing copyright laws. To cover the costs these sites should sell something, whether it’s ads or third-party deals of music software and hardware. After all the people remixing music do buy stuff and are often very enthusiastic by nature.

Yet none of these sites seem to last very long when it comes to being a vibrant actor. After the startup phase they all sooner or later transform into static sites with nothing or very little to offer.  My educated guess is that they simply run out of money and eventually become obscure because of lack of user activity.

Then again, the limited MixTheMusic.com approach means that the primary reason for making music is effectively erased. On MixTheMusic there’s no chance of anyone else ever hearing what you just did. Isn’t that why the original artists started making music in the first place?

To put it mildly, there are gazillion obscure artists and albums in the world. Just check out any store selling old vinyl: there’s most likely an album by an artist you’ve never heard of. Very little or no revenue is currently coming in from those releases. So why not bulk buy rights for re-releasing some this music if there are meaningful master stems available? An excellent club remix might give a forgotten artist a totally new life: after all the artist would still get his or her share from public playing of the new mix.

However there is a much simpler solution: get rid of the middle man i.e. the remix site altogether. So please, record company giants as well as smaller labels: open your vaults of auditive obscurity for remixers (instead of letting the old floppy discs/tapes rot or even burn up in some warehouse). That Dutch pop act from 1980s you once signed to one album is most likely making zero money right now, creating only legal and storage costs.

Let the remixers help, won’t you?

 

 

The DAW of coding

Personally all my attempts to learn coding have pretty much failed. I honestly have no interest learning a programming language since the whole concept is an oxymoron. If a computer comprehended language, it would not have to be programmed in the first place.

The syntax of any programming language is based on calculations, and they are based on mathematics. If a computer is any good at anything, it’s calculations. No human can keep up with a computer – we can only make them do something useful.

So why any coding lesson still looks like the ones I took when learning Basic on Commodore 64? I mean I also made music on C-64, and even then there were software to help me.

There are trillions of lines of working open source code in the world. I can never be as good as the people behind it, but I can learn to take advantage of their work.

What I need is the DAW of coding. In music production I have created tracks on different DAWs, and those tracks are by essence unique. The DAW of coding would enable me to come up with a practical application to be rendered in the end, just like I print a track without necessarily knowing everything about music theory or being able to write the whole notation.

I am aware about Github for example, and I know these repositories already have massive collections of code in different programming language, just like there are for example sample libraries, virtual instruments and mixing plugins to be applied in producing music. Also, different web editors can provide me with code based on the graphic layout I design. So why cannot there be a code editor that provides me with the necessary code based on what is written between those ### characters now used in documenting the code?

What I don’t have is the DAW of coding.

Tame Impala Drum Sound

This is only a short post about something I recently tried using the Izotope RX7. The software in question has a feature called Music Rebalance, which enables turning certain aspects of the track (vocals, bass, drums) up or down.

I have always liked the drums on Tame Impala tracks, so here’s what I did:

1. I uploaded a dozen or so Tame Impala tracks into RX7 and applied the Music Rebalance feature on each of them. In RX7 I switched everything else except drums down and then exported the isolated drum stems.

2. I then picked the stems with the best (clearest) individual kick drum and snare sounds. Those stems I opened in Audacity, the free audio editor.

3. In Audacity I sliced four kick and snare hits from each of the stem tracks and normalized the files before exporting them. Why exactly four is explained next.

4. I once bought this Yamaha DTX-12 multi-pad instrument from a sale (image attached). Each pad can have four different layers i.e. samples loaded to it. These samples can be any kind of sounds (the limit is the meager 64mb internal memory capacity of DTX), but in this project I used the Tame Impala kick and snare samples.

5. Yamaha has a great iPad app that connects to DTX, making it fast and easy to construct new drum kits. Using the app, I loaded four layers of kick and snare samples on two of the pads, leaving the rest for hihats etc. I then made the kick and snare pads to play the layered samples in consecutive order (A, B, C, D) instead of playing them stacked (all at the same time with one pad hit).

6. By using four different samples the drums don’t have the ‘machine gun’ effect of repeating the same exact sample even when playing fills etc. You don’t need a drum pad to use layers like this – I believe the same can be done for example in NI Maschine or just on regular MIDI keyboard. Drum pads have the advantage of adjusting the playability though: you can hit the pads either with drumsticks or with hands or even fingers.

7. As a result I can now have the same drum sounds as on Tame Impala albums, and it’s all completely legal. As a bonus I can switch for example the kick sound to one from another track if I like it more. Needless to say, the method described above can be applied to any artist with good-sounding drums (not all tracks render good results in RX7 though, it’s mostly a method of trial and error).

The App Hostage

Recently I’ve noticed that one by one the apps on my old iPad 3 have stopped working. The new versions – obligatory to use – do not support iOS9 anymore, making a perfectly working tablet less useful.

This is why I am seriously considering buying Microsoft Surface for the first time ever. The apps I am referring to are paid subscription services such as ESPN and Eurosport. Their new app policy basically makes me their hostage: I would have to buy new hardware to continue using their services I am already paying for.

My old laptop has no problems with the subscription services mentioned. Therefore a tablet running on Windows would have a longer lifespan than an iPad, because using it is not based on apps.

My iPad 3 has a retina display and enough processing power to run every streaming service available. However those services seem to disagree, and this will eventually result in diminishing number of people wanting an iPad. After all, at some point the current flagship model will also grow old, and the apps one by one suddenly stop working.

Massive X to Second

I have written previous posts concerning some of the new Native Instruments products and the issues I have had with their GUI. Lately I have discovered that I am not alone in this.

Massive X, the intended modern classic of soft synths, was supposed to come out along with Kontakt 6, but then only some spec images were actually available. After six months of further developing, Massive X was finally released only to be revealed that its GUI problems were the most extensive ones in the NI lineup so far.

Just think about this: on the the bottom of the official NI Massive X website there is currently (October 2019) a link saying “we want to hear from you” that reroutes users to NI support forums. Following the link it soon became evident that I was not the only one with this kind of GUI in my DAW:

 

Just for comparison, below is what the Massive X GUI should apparently look like:

 

Following the NI forum threads one can quickly see that a huge number of Massive X users – myself included –  have most of their GUI completely missing. Also, this has nothing to do with Nvidia drivers or the specific OpenGL version users have on their workstation. The issue is a larger and fundamental one by nature, and it goes right down to NI methods of rendering any graphics in their new products.

None of my other plugins or VST instruments currently give me any kind of trouble – it’s strictly Native Instruments only. As mentioned earlier, I piled up 6-7 random plugins with moving graphics by other vendors literally on top of each other as a test and ran them all: no issues. Also, the new Abbey Road Studio 3 plugin by Waves Audio includes rotating animation of the actual studio as well as camera-guided real-time head movements, and my workstation has no trouble dealing with it.

All this should finally ring the alarm at the NI headquarters, where there seems to be people completely unable to lead software development projects. I mean what kind of an audio product company misses several deadlines and eventually puts out releases with completely flawed and unusable GUI?

Magazines like Computer Music are already releasing their Massive X tutorials and such, but Computer Music actually reviewed Massive X only in their fall 2019 issue. As the review had it, the GUI is still half-baked, and I assume they somehow had themselves the latest, more or less fully working version. Even they could not try out the Massive X standalone version, which seems to be completely shelved at the moment (October 2019).

As I write this, on the NI forums there is a plea for more people to join their beta program in order to get the 1.1 update ready as soon as possible. The reality is however that the upcoming 1.1 version of Massive X should have been the very first public release available for customers. Everything before that has actually been like it’s a beta program. A lot of people have been waiting for a whole year wondering what’s the matter with their workstation when the real reason for their problems is in the actual product. And what is perhaps most alarming is that if NI is still at this point of development looking for feedback through testing, they basically have no clue about the core issue.

As a conclusion, the Massive X botched release is definitely the biggest fuck-up I have ever seen when software synths or virtual instruments are concerned. And as I mentioned, I’ve only seen about one third of it all because of the deeply flawed GUI of Massive X.

The irony of it all? I am yet to read anything negative about the Massive X audio capabilities. It’s just that most of us cannot access them.

Massive X GUI

The latest issue of Computer Music magazine covers extensively the latest Native Instruments synth release Massive X. To get right to the point, the attached image presents the verdict of review the magazine did: 

Earlier I wrote about the problems both NI Native Access and some of the new NI plugins have caused in setups using multiple monitors.

It is probable – as the review implicates – that Massive X, originally meant to launch along with Kontakt 6 but missed the deadline, was eventually rushed. 

However if one takes a look at the new synths in Kontakt 6  – rather unimpressive in visual sense – there’s a bigger pattern here.

First there were GUI issues, after which all following NI products have been releases with heavily limited visual interfaces.

In a sentence, someone responsible for developing NI GUIs has fracked up massively – also with Massive X.

Native Instruments used to put out several high-end software products every year. Nowadays only the sound is still there.

The eMMC Diaries

This case has actually nothing to do with music, but since it includes the most important element of learning – a mistake – I thought writing about it would be useful for someone.

Some two years ago I bought a cheap laptop with no dvd drive and 32GB of flash memory serving as the platform for running Windows 10. As you can see by browsing online, this causes problems when Windows is being updated: there is simply no room on a 32GB drive for those updates.

However, I do have a 500GB hard drive I bought and installed in the empty SATA slot. Up until yesterday however I believed that this made no difference. The eMMC – stands for ’embedded multimedia card’ – is soldered into motherboard, and as the C: drive there’s nothing I can do.

That was the mistake.

I just list the things that solved the issue:

1. I got myself a 32GB USB stick and formatted it in NTFS format.

2. Next I got myself an ISO image of Windows 10. You can use your imagination how.

3. By using Windows disk management, I created to 250GB partitions (D: and E:) in the 500GB hard drive.

4. I then downloaded a free software called Rufus, which is superior to Windows media creation tool.

5. I used Rufus to transform the ISO image to my USB stick, because by this the USB can be used as a boot drive.

6. I restarted the laptop and kept hitting the F2 key (works at least in Acer) until I got in the boot menu.

7. I switched the USB drive above the C: drive in boot order and exited the boot menu by hitting F10 (in Acer).

8. The laptop now asked me if I want to install a new copy of Windows 10. I did and chose D: drive – one of the two 250GB partitions – as the installation destination.

9. After the installation was ready, I again restarted the laptop and entered the boot menu.

10. I unplugged the USB stick and and switched the D: drive as the primary boot source.

11. I now had a fresh Windows 10 on D: drive, which was at the same time renamed C: drive by Windows. The eMMC drive was also renamed F: by Windows.

12. Just to make sure, I then formatted the F: drive. If my laptop would still have been using eMMC as its boot source, this would not have been possible. However the eMMC was formatted, and I no longer agonise over the 32 GB limit.

Native Instruments Crash Course

There are well-documented discussions online about the new Native Access registration tool by Native Instruments. Many of them concern the fact that Native Access without exception crashes on systems with multiple monitors. I have experienced this myself, and so far the only workaround has been to disconnect all external screens when Native Access is in use. This is of course highly impractical and leaves users with problems solely created by Native Instruments.

But this is not all.

Recently Native Instruments has released two new plugin packs: Mod and Crush. The reasonably-priced packs include effects often used in modern EDM productions, when they are going for a more edgy analog feel. This idea is applied also in the plugin GUI as one can see. It is no accident that they have been given a look resembling guitar pedals:

The problem is however that what I see instead of GUI is a blue screen: both plugin packs crash my Win 7 64-bit multiple-monitor systems instantly when launched. 

On one monitor – laptop only – the plugins work as soon as I don’t try to mess with the controls. They are almost unresponsive from the start, but any attempt trying to move the knobs results in BSOD, as it is called.

In comparison I loaded eight random plugins by other vendors with heavy GUI load on top of each other and activated them all: no problemo.

Considering the earlier Native Access example, it looks like Native Instruments design department is in serious crash course with many people’s setup. It doesn’t matter if a registration tool or a plugin looks cool if it is unusable. These are audio tools, not 3D animation demos.

What I look for in audio setup primarily is stability. As long as Native Instruments follows a different path, I will access other alternatives.