BoSchafers wrote:A sensationalist overstated forum topic IMHO
Lacks grace and respect.
The new transform function is really slick. Yes, it does not preserve automation yet, a relatively minor detail for most musicians. Perhaps not so minor for the electro crowd, but we're a diverse bunch here.
Please, let's get away form the me me me me me me and have more of: *us* going forward with this ever-evolving DAW
Yes, the topic title formulation seems a bit emotional. Don't know if the topic starter (original poster, OP) really is lacking respect, it seems that he explained himself on that issue later in this thread.
However, I don't think YOU are showing much respect either by walking into this thread and start acting as if you were some kind of authority on who's qualifying as musician or not, what's to be regarded as "minor" or "major" detail, etc. "Electro crowd"...? Come on!
wkundrus wrote:We are aware that this feature is incomplete. It is very high on the list to get that right. We are collecting feedback right now, to understand how go get it right.
Great news! Thanks for commenting here in the forums. I personally think that you guys have designed this feature very well, it would work perfectly fine if we could just trust it in regard to the proper preserving of all the automations, fader states, etc. It already does what's most important for a freeze: rendering the audio with all the heavy VST effects, so that we can bypass the VST effects on a single channel. But if it could also bring back the pre-freeze VST effect automations (and VST instrument automations) upon un-freezing, then it would work as probably most of us would expect it to work.
I certainly agree with nk_e when he writes:
nk_e wrote:
I use lots of plugins, and I use a "freeze function" during the compositional process to capture/freeze an idea that may be CPU intensive so I can work on other aspects of the piece. Later as I tweak, add, or change other things, I might want to come back and revisit some decisions. At that point, I'd really like to be able to unfreeze a track and have all of the tweakable automation parameters still available to me (including controller envelopes, midi data, etc.).
A typical scenario for me is to automate the Orb modulator on an Omnisphere track, and then process it further with lots of CPU demanding VST effects (such as the Vengeance Mastering Suite plugs and reverberation on maximum quality settings). Then a single track might make the CPU meter go up to 40% of the load and introduce additional performance latency with some 15-20 ms. When such a heavy track is frozen, it won't introduce any latency or affect the CPU much at all.
OK, now what happens when I save the song and load it back into S1 some days later? Then I want to change some automation parameters of the Omnisphere track, so I'll unfreeze it and expect to be able to make these changes to the VST effect automations or Omnisphere automations, and then re-freeze the track back to audio again.
A suggestion... How about an "easy" solution to the automation issues that works like this:
You place all automations in separate automation tracks within a folder track. Then you can drag and drop that folder track out to the browser. When it's time to unfreeze (transform back to instrument), the automations are disconnected/broken like today, BUT -- you simply drag the folder track export file back from the browser and drop it on the old folder track and/or console mixer channel and/or instrument track. That way we could store many separate complex automation profiles, easily replacing them for A/B comparisions etc. And it would also blend nicely into the S1 drag-and-drop workflow.
Renoise wrote:I often want everything to sound "un-natural" so I'm not too excited about convo reverbs and such either.
you should then. ever loaded a muted funk guitar riff as an IR? and that is only the start. compose some weird audio in the arrangement and drag it in..
Fair enough, I'll check out the Open AIR convo reverb in more detail. I'm sure you've done a great job with it.
The new freeze feature of V2 seems pretty half-baked and you're not the only one being confused about it. Hopefully the developers are aware of all the issues that have been reported by users on this forum...
auricle wrote:I didn't send an anonymous ticket, I sent it from my account at Presonus .
Okay, I'll go through your steps either tonight (I'm at work at the mo') or over the weekend. However, I do seriously suggest you also send the results of your findings to them through the official channels.
Sure, I'll login and send them a report on this issue. This is the only feature I cared about in V2 besides the folder tracks, this is the one "core" feature that motivated me to upgrade. So naturally I'm going to follow the news on these issues with special attention.
auricle wrote:Well, I have confirmed the same general behaviour as you although I haven't yet done as much in-depth testing. I have sent a support ticket to Presonus yesterday and I haven't yet received a response. I'll reply here when/if I do.
I agree that this is a very important feature and is currently only half useful. On the Mac, Studio One is quite CPU hungry compared to Logic or Reaper so to use all the new tasty features and great workflow, a fully working freeze/unfreeze is absolutely essential IMHO.
I look forward to hear from your support ticket reply.
Would you (or anybody else) care to reproduce this behavior:
1. Create an instrument track with a VST synth.
2. Create a sequence of midi notes for the VST synth track.
3. Create a separate automation track and automate several parameters of the synth.
4. Insert some VST effects on the synth track's mixer channel.
5. Create another separate automation track and automate the Inserted VST effects on the console mixer.
6. Transform the instrument track to audio with Render Inserts = checked, Preserve Instrument Track State = checked, Remove Instrument = unchecked.
7. Transform the frozen audio track back to instrument.
What happens for me is that some of the automation is lost when I unfreeze. It all seems a bit random right now what goes and what stays. But often it's the VST effects' automations that is greyed out and disabled. It's not possible to enable them again, and set them to "Read" mode.
Renoise wrote:If all the original modulations are lost when I transform the audio back (unfreeze the track), then what's the point really? I often modulate hundreds of parameters in a single synths on a single track, seems very stupid to transform that track to audio as I'd have to work from scratch again if I decided to change anything later. The extreme modulations are often what causes the CPU spikes in the first place, they are the very reasons why the VST synth is so CPU hungry.
S1 devs: Please tell me this is not done on purpose: why on earth would you want to trash the automations? Tell me I haven't yet discovered how to preserve the automations and modulations.
OK, here is my current workaround for this, something that requires me to change my regular workflow but will achieve the results I'm after:
If I create a special folder for Automation Tracks, and then create an Automation Track that control the consol mixer faders, the synth parameters, etc -- then that automation track is still there when I freeze/transform the synth's audio to an Audio Track (which will of course include all the automations in the "what you hear" audio file result) on the condition that I make sure to uncheck the "Remove Instrument" checkbox in the Transform to Audio Track option pop-up window before hitting OK. I can then place that CPU hungry synth in a Folder to hide it away from my sight (call it "The Fridge" or something).
At a later stage when/if I decide to change some automation parameter of that now frozen track, I will need to unfreeze the audio track back to an Instrument Track. So I click on the frozen audio track and then choose Transform to Instrument Track. Now everything will go back to the original situation again. The separate Automation Tracks will still be connected to the synth, because I never deleted that synth in the first place, just placing it somewhere out of sight in a special folder.
After some more testing, I have found that there is no really stable workaround on this issue. I hope that you guys in Hamburg will be able to fix this soon. This is the most important feature in V2 for me.
After a Transform to Instrument, automation is lost on Inserts (VST effects) on an Instrument Track's console mixer channel. For example, if I automate Valhalla Room's mix parameter, then Transform to Audio and then Transform back to Instrument, that automation will still be there as an automation track, but it's grayed out and disabled. There is no way for me to enable it again.
I also experience inconsistent behaviour for the VST instrument automations themselves. Sometimes they're still there, sometimes they're trashed.
nk_e wrote:@Renoise
Some really interesting possibilities there. The video makes me want to fire it up again a have a looksee in the near future. (Great product video too, btw.)
If you fire up Renoise again, let me know if you need any assistance in regard to the integration of S1 and Renoise. Observe for instance that you can drag and drop the audio files from S1's browser directly into the sample slots of Renoise.
I'm also using Reaktor a lot in S1, while at the same time rewiring Reason6 to S1. In fact, it's even more complex. I control Reason via LoopBE1 from Renoise, while Renoise is also rewired to S1... killer setup, I'm very happy with it.
Too much GUI elements for me, my brain won't handle it
and very well said. I really don't think it's an either or situation as the two are very good at different things and in my view lend themselves to different uses/genres. Reason 6 is really awesome in its own ways and with Rewrire the two together can be quite powerful.
Reason was a production and a modular synth enviroment for me. Studio One with Reaktor plugin replace that with a much better GUI and workflow solution than Reason 6 gives me, and so my choice has been rather easy.
I'm also using Reaktor a lot in S1, while at the same time rewiring Reason6 to S1. In fact, it's even more complex. I control Reason via LoopBE1 from Renoise, while Renoise is also rewired to S1... killer setup, I'm very happy with it.
nk_e wrote:God yes. Renoise is pretty intense. I've bought it and dabbled with it and am really intrigued....but time is limited and the paradigm is really foreign to me. I'm following it's development though as it seems to me the developers are trying to make it more accessible to folks like myself WITHOUT short changing its tracker heritage and the advantages of that method. Really fascinating piece of kit.
Yeah, Renoise is a really fascinating piece of kit, but I can certainly understand why it appears so alien to most people. When I'm working in S1 and have Renoise open in it, most DAW people get curious and wonder what it is. They're always impressed by the speed at which I can produce e.g. complex drum parts (which would take much, much longer time in a regular DAW). But at the same time it's obvious that the tracker paradigm is too difficult for many people to adopt, I'd even compare tracking with score notation (they are very similar in many aspects).
Renoise is far away from the linear DAW heritage and it's far away from the piano-roll way of sequencing. The real strength of Renoise is actually as a sampler/sample-sequencer. You can do so much more with a .wav file in Renoise that you simply can't do with any other product out there. It's also a top step-sequencer in a sense, once you get how to sequence vertically and alpha-numerically (working in Renoise is more like programming music than playing it).
nk_e wrote:EDIT: BTW I think your nightmare scenario is here. DAWs are increasingly playing me too/look at me/me too these days. How long before ARA is in Sonar do you think?
Hard to say. Maybe the major competitors of PreSonus are going to wait to see how well ARA works in S1 before they decide to go with Celemony's technology in their products. But certainly the game board is now changed and this is probably the beginning of new trends in the DAW market to implement 3rd party solutions (and 3rd parties to offer their API's to DAW developers) rather than create their own inhouse solutions for everything.
Maybe 10+ years in the future, we'll have a completely modular DAW situation, where customers can choose to buy or subscribe to the features they need from a DAW. This would certainly be a direction I'd applaud. Rather than having 20+ DAWs competing with each other with similar sets of features, we could have a situation where there only were a few modular DAWs but with lots of custom possibilities.
For instance, I'm mainly composing instrumental electronic music and work almost exclusively with VST instruments. Given my workflow and needs, I tend to place little personal value on features that address external audio recording issues (e.g. hardware gear templates, guitar amps, better ways to record your local church choir, etc). I don't deal with mics, line-ins, and such. I often want everything to sound "un-natural" so I'm not too excited about convo reverbs and such either. However... I do place MUCH value on the new freeze feature in V2 (Transform to Audio). That's the main feature I was upgrading to V2 for (the second was Folder tracks). In a future modular DAW scenario, I could maybe tailor a product such as S1 to my needs, disabling modules of features that I had no real usage for in my work.
Renoise wrote:I have to confess that I liked the old "glossy" transport bar better than this new one. It's too flat for me, and especially the play/stop/forward/etc buttons now look and feel a bit cheap (like a pre-alpha version with temporary graphics). Other than that, I can't complain about anything.
I posted a mockup of a slightly different, modified, slightly glassed version of the transport a few posts back if you care to comment.
Cheers.
Checked it out, like the glassed stuff but don't like the "button boxes". I'd prefer to get rid of them and just keep the icons without any grey background boxes.
Renoise wrote:No, I didn't automate a transformed track. I automated a regular Instrument Track and then transformed it to audio (freeze). When I then choose Undo or to transform it back to an Instrument Track (unfreeze), all previous automation for that track is lost. Of course I'm aware of the "Remove Instrument" checkbox, and that works as expected with automation that is "part of the recording/playing" so to speak. For example, if I play a synth lead and move the mod-wheel, those movements will be recorded. When I freeze to audio and later unfreeze back to instrument again, the original mod-wheel movements will be there again. It's just the additional and manually written/programmed automation directly on an Instrument Track that is lost in the unfreeze producedure.
However, I have now discovered a way around this problem that only requires a change in my workflow, so I'll investigate that way in more detail and report back on this issue later. Maybe I've missed something here...
That is a biggie. Have you written to Presonus about it?
No, I haven't because I expect that somebody from PreSonus monitors these forums and pays attention to "biggie stuff" if identified as such. Also I'm not so sure if this is a behavior that was actually intended for S1 on purpose, as part of the DAW's freeze feature design.
As I mentioned, I've found a workaround for what I'm trying to achieve, and maybe that's the way to go that S1 developers intended. For more information on this, see my post in this thread: http://forums.presonus.com/posts/list/15009.page
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and very well said. I really don't think it's an either or situation as the two are very good at different things and in my view lend themselves to different uses/genres. Reason 6 is really awesome in its own ways and with Rewrire the two together can be quite powerful.
