Some issues

Tebbes

Hi all,

I'm a new LXR user and forum member. I bought someone's LXR a few days ago and have spent my free hours getting to know this great machine.

It had firmware 0.23 when I started to play with it a little, but I have updated to the latest 0.27 using the link in the first/top post in the firmware thread.

I have sat down with the manual to learn all of the features, but of course I still had some questions. Some were answered in this forum (thanks!) but some answers I couldn't find (i did a thorough search but I didn't read the entire forum) so I hope some of you can help me out.

The repeat function is acting a bit weird. The manual says (and this was true in 0.23) the lowest repeat value is 1, but I'm seeing 0 as lowest value. When I set a pattern to rpt1 and then go to another pattern and I set the other pattern also to rpt 1 and then go back to the previous pattern, the first pattern only plays one bar while all patterns afterwards play two bars. When I set those same patterns to rpt 2, the first pattern plays two bars, and all patterns afterwards play 3 bars. The first pattern that plays always (!) plays one bar less than the rest. 

I've played around with some filter frequency sweeping on the hihats, and wanted to record it manually in an automation track. I noticed that the values of the sweep is only recorded in the active steps. So instead of a sweep the filter frequency jumps from value to value. Is it possible to implement active automation on inactive steps in a future firmware update? Or is there another way to work around this?

I also noticed that when I have played a pattern that has a voice with the AEG decay set to a higher value the sound of that voice continues when I stop playback (which can be logical) but with some sounds/samples it's like there is a delay effect on it. When I change the waveform or sample of that voice the new setting also becomes audible and sounds like a delay. The sound only dissappears when I turn the decay down even when I mute the voice/track. Is this normal? I never had a synth that does that

The LXR is just friggin' awesome, so I hope these are all firmware related issues......

julian

repeat function:
I will check this out. could be a firmware bug.

Automation:
at the moment there is no way to record seamless sweeps. maybe in a future update I will find a good way to implement some sort of interpolation to make smooth transitions between the recorded values. but for now it will only record one value per active step.

with very high decay amounts the voice will sustain nearly forever. maybe I should lower the maximum value a bit? I don't get what you mean by delay effect, thou.

fcd72

Please stick to the near infinite decay!

Tebbes

With the delay effect I meant that it sounds like the sample gets retriggerd to achieve such a long decay time.

It starts with a decay time of around 50. When you say it sustains nearly forever with high decay times, it explains a lot. But muting the voice should also mute the sounding decay, right?

rudeog

The issue with the repeat function is that when you switch to a pattern, it looks at the number of repeats set for the new pattern, counts how many bars have elapsed since you hit play and divides that number by the number of repeats. It takes the remainder of this, and if this remainder is 0, it will consider the pattern to have repeated the correct number of times. This is problematic because it doesn't behave exactly like it says in the manual. I've puzzled over a better way to implement this, and even have a spreadsheet showing how things would repeat under different scenarios. The closest I've come to doing something about it is to think about adding a global pattern quantization value which forces the pattern change on those boundaries. The problem is that you still don't get the desired behavior (as described in the manual). In my custom firmware, I've added an option to turn off this behavior (ie, it will repeat the pattern exactly the number of times specified and always move to the next pattern after it's done so). So at least it behaves as you specify.
Also bear in mind that a repeat count of 0 means it will play once (ie, not repeat at all) and then move to the next pattern. So if you want something to run for 4 bars, set the repeat count to 3.

Tebbes

@julian, I tried to upload a short video so you can see what I mean with the delay effect, but the file was not supported. I could mail this to you. Strange thing is not every sample behaves this way, but in this example I used the cymbal sample that is in the LXR. The effect is audible from a decay setting of 24+ (not 50 as I posted earlier). It could be used as an effect though  I did notice with the custom firmware the effect is way less.

@rudeog, been playing with the custom firmware and turning off the behavior works like a charm. 

:-bd Maybe this setting could be made permanent and not a choice?

MusicCircus

@fcd72 "Please stick to the near infinite decay"

Yes please do not take that away!