LayR-Multi Timbral Synthesizer by Living Memory Software will be reduced to half price for one week

god

@Bon_Tempi said:

@god said:

@Bon_Tempi said:
How cpu demanding is LAYR?

similar to Model D and Model 15 or a bit less hungry?

IPad Pro 12,9 2017 here - and still I notice I often avoid the Moog Synths easily a add „too much“ cpu-needs into complex AUM set ups with several other AUV3s running simultaneously -

Will LAYR be the same way?

It is very hungry and seems it can get nastily hungry depending on how many layers, instruments you employ .

If you use it on an older device, or if you use alongside other AUv3 plugins, I’d recommend setting it to run with “legacy engine” option, and to allow the maximum buffer size, and to lower the maximum number of voices to the minimum possible (I think it’s 64). Otherwise your device might choke. Like mine did.

Thanks for your feedback - and from how many layers/instruments are we talking - in the meaning of - it can get „nastily hungry“ from there on ?

are most of the presets on the nastily hungry or less nastily side?

When I had it set up to use maximum of 256 voices it chewed up my iPhone 8+ CPU but since taking it down to 64 things seem to work pretty well. I run it NS2 with an instance of Zeeon, an instance of Lagrange, an instance of Magellan2, an instance of Laplace, a dubstation2, a shimmerFX , an Eos2, a Rozetta2, a perforator, all playing at the same time with instance of LayR playing 10 instruments and it’s maximum of 50%. Leaning toward 40 even. Maximum sized buffers. I don’t know how the low maximum voice value affects how LayR Sounds with 10 instruments, though.

LivingMemorySoftware

@royor said:

@god said:

@royor said:

The dev says 256 voices use the same amount of CPU as 1 voice, but from my experience when I have LayR set to use the maximum number of voices (256) it chokes my CPU to bits, yet and when I take it down to the lowest value of 64, CPU is happy. Anyone having a similar experience?

That wasn’t a quote from me by the way..
EDIT: Nevermind.. haven’t had enough coffee yet this morning.. 🤪

So it wasn't, no worries either way

The point is LayR's voicing engine is parallel, all voices are calculated in one pass whether or not they're actually being heard.
The programming technique to achieve this is quite different from all other synths currently on iOS.
You will see peaks and dips in CPU usage, becuase music apps pretty much run on one core in the CPU and the speed is greatly affected by other apps running and processing that iOS is running. the figures I quote are averaged on a clean slate.

There is one caveat to this though. LayR has a Mod Matrix that was introduced later, after the inital coding for the engine. Some configurations of mod routing via the matrix can lead to significant CPU cache degradation and introduce peaks of around +15% higher. This only applies to those presets that use non-default mod routing though.

royor

@LivingMemorySoftware All good.. That’s some great info for anyone wondering about the CPU usage for LayR.. I was actually trying to find that info within the manual because I had read that somewhere before.. so.. thanks for refreshing all our memories.. 👍

JohnnyGoodyear

@xraydash said:

@SpookyZoo said:

@JohnnyGoodyear said:
It's Division One.

That's the 3rd league these days.

Championship quality?

Premier?

Age showing much over here?

I suppose if we're using current football measurements/rankings it would be knock-out stages of the Champions League.

rototom

@LivingMemorySoftware
does LayR have a patch randomizer?

SpookyZoo

@JohnnyGoodyear said:

@xraydash said:

@SpookyZoo said:

@JohnnyGoodyear said:
It's Division One.

That's the 3rd league these days.

Championship quality?

Premier?

Age showing much over here?

I suppose if we're using current football measurements/rankings it would be knock-out stages of the Champions League.

Ha! That's good enough for me. I'll take a punt.

JohnnyGoodyear

@SpookyZoo said:

@JohnnyGoodyear said:

@xraydash said:

@SpookyZoo said:

@JohnnyGoodyear said:
It's Division One.

That's the 3rd league these days.

Championship quality?

Premier?

Age showing much over here?

I suppose if we're using current football measurements/rankings it would be knock-out stages of the Champions League.

Ha! That's good enough for me. I'll take a punt.

I think, knowing a little of your capabilities, you will find it a very creative object (to create stuff for and with).

god

I experience a small bug in NS2.. Whenever I launch NS2, if LayR is used in the project, then the "Latch" button would load up as activated, even though it wasn't when the project was saved. It's not consistent but it happens real often. Don't know what the deal is.. Also, don't know if this happens inside other DAWs, stuck MIDI notes seem to happen quite often (even for short sounds). Has anyone else experienced this (inside NS2 or other DAWs)?

craftycurate

@god said:
When I had it set up to use maximum of 256 voices it chewed up my iPhone 8+ CPU but since taking it down to 64 things seem to work pretty well.

Same here ... with 64 it’s in the same CPU bracket as something like SB Factory or Aparillo for me, which I suspect also, like LayR, begin processing the max polyphony number of voice objects as soon as the app loads, whether they are called on to play a note or not. This would explain why the initial CPU hit seems high, but doesn’t change much when you start playing notes, and it also means there isn’t a huge CPU hit when you start hitting notes. In the other camp is Lagrange, which generates a big CPU hit when you first play notes.

I don’t know how the low maximum voice value affects how LayR Sounds with 10 instruments, though.

I suspect that, as with most multitimbral/layered synths that the number of “voices” is not the same as polyphony i.e. if my LayR patch has 16 instruments, then a 64 voice limit will allow 4 note polyphony (any more will exceed the concurrent voice limit and lead to note stealing).

god

I’m getting some erroneous results freezing and mixdowning arpeggiated LayR tracks inside Cubasis3. Either with the real-time mixing option enabled or disabled. Anybody else experiencing bad rendering of LayR tracks ?

EDIT a few minutes after posting this message found out this is a known issue that’s a few years old, is apparently neither C3 or LayR fault but something Apple needs to fix but doesn’t ..

Montreal_Music

Should I buy it? Sounds really good. Any bugs or things that I should know before buying it?

Prog1967

@Montreal_Music said:
Should I buy it? Sounds really good. Any bugs or things that I should know before buying it?

No bugs gere and get it is one of the best synths around for pads

god

@Prog1967 said:

@Montreal_Music said:
Should I buy it? Sounds really good. Any bugs or things that I should know before buying it?

No bugs gere and get it is one of the best synths around for pads

There is a known bug of LayR and Cubasis 3, when rendering/freezing the track , Cubasis 3 renders it wrong. Makes LayR pretty useless in C3.
There is also a problem with the state of Latch that is not saved sometimes.
But otherwise powerful and useful tool just be aware heavy on the CPU (the topic of CPU load was on heavy debate on this forum. It’s due to LayR’ engine - it’s a monster. It’s a whole music making app inside an AUv3 guest. In short, If you just to have simple sounds maybe LayR is an overkill, you better use LayR if you want rich landscape atmospheric multiple vocal sounds). Also the builtin patches, especially the Brice Beasley Cinematics are amongst the best I’ve heard in any iOS music making app.

craftycurate

@god said:
But otherwise powerful and useful tool just be aware heavy on the CPU (the topic of CPU load was on heavy debate on this forum. In short, If you just to have simple sounds maybe LayR is an overkill, use LayR if you want rich landscape atmospheric multiple vocal sounds).

It's quite a while since I used LayR, but from memory, there are ways to reduce CPU hit.

Its default max polyphony is set to 256 as I recall, and system resources are reserved upfront for this, not allocated on demand, so CPU hit is high regardless of actual notes playing. A bit like some more recent Native Instruments synths which are built in Reaktor e.g. Form or Rounds, which are CPU hungry for the same reason. I asked the LayR dev about this and he confirmed it works this way.

I reduced polyphony to 64, and the CPU hit was significantly reduced. This still allows for some complex sounds.

god

@craftycurate said:

@god said:
But otherwise powerful and useful tool just be aware heavy on the CPU (the topic of CPU load was on heavy debate on this forum. In short, If you just to have simple sounds maybe LayR is an overkill, use LayR if you want rich landscape atmospheric multiple vocal sounds).

It's quite a while since I used LayR, but from memory, there are ways to reduce CPU hit.

Its default max polyphony is set to 256 as I recall, and system resources are reserved upfront for this, not allocated on demand, so CPU hit is high regardless of actual notes playing. A bit like some more recent Native Instruments synths which are built in Reaktor e.g. Form or Rounds, which are CPU hungry for the same reason. I asked the LayR dev about this and he confirmed it works this way.

I reduced polyphony to 64, and the CPU hit was significantly reduced. This still allows for some complex sounds.

Yeah, I remember LayR dev explaining this on another thread a while back. This is fine.

my biggest issue with LayR ATM is that I can’t use it with Cubasis3 because of bad track rendering, this is a known bug and neither LayR or Cubasis are at blame but rather Apple but it’s been a while and they haven’t fixed this.

The thread is https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/26890/layr-issues-in-cubasis

In short: can’t use LayR in Cubasis3

Prog1967

@god said:

@craftycurate said:

@god said:
But otherwise powerful and useful tool just be aware heavy on the CPU (the topic of CPU load was on heavy debate on this forum. In short, If you just to have simple sounds maybe LayR is an overkill, use LayR if you want rich landscape atmospheric multiple vocal sounds).

It's quite a while since I used LayR, but from memory, there are ways to reduce CPU hit.

Its default max polyphony is set to 256 as I recall, and system resources are reserved upfront for this, not allocated on demand, so CPU hit is high regardless of actual notes playing. A bit like some more recent Native Instruments synths which are built in Reaktor e.g. Form or Rounds, which are CPU hungry for the same reason. I asked the LayR dev about this and he confirmed it works this way.

I reduced polyphony to 64, and the CPU hit was significantly reduced. This still allows for some complex sounds.

Yeah, I remember LayR dev explaining this on another thread a while back. This is fine.

my biggest issue with LayR ATM is that I can’t use it with Cubasis3 because of bad track rendering, this is a known bug and neither LayR or Cubasis are at blame but rather Apple but it’s been a while and they haven’t fixed this.

The thread is https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/26890/layr-issues-in-cubasis

In short: can’t use LayR in Cubasis3

I don't have Cubasis so I didn't know about this. Sorry. There are some presets in Layr that are amazing. In my book 100% recommended even with the issues mentioned above

el_bo

Have had this synth on my mind for a long time, but never made the leap. The one thing stopping me is the fact that it apparently loads a huge glut of resources in one go, to give itself enough space to play elaborate patches. How does this work in practise?

What if you only need a patch that is relatively simple. Is there a way offload those unused resources back to iOS? What if you're near the end of a project, and have already used a fair chunk of resources...Will it refuse to load? What about having multiple tracks of Layr?

Are people starting the project with Layr, then rendering to audio etc.?

Curious. Thanks

P.S For reference, I have a 'student' iPad (iPad9).