Mela Synth (All Numbers) Mega Thread

Nikolozi

@audiblevideo said:
@Nikolozi honestly Mela should have been 2 apps. Midi module and a synth.

Don't forget that it's also a modular audio-FX plug-in

I’m not saying this as a critique but as an acknowledgement of how much you’ve put into it and how stupidly powerful it is.

Thank you, I appreciate you saying that 🙏

TL;DR with Mela you get TWO modular apps in one

But I'm curious what makes you say that it should have been 2 apps? Like from a purely business perspective or useability or something else? Can you elaborate on that?

audiblevideo

@Nikolozi

I’m not saying this as a critique but as an acknowledgement of how much you’ve put into it and how stupidly powerful it is.

I use Mela as a iOS version of a NDLR (hardware) and a MidiHub (hardware). I say two apps because Mela emulates some of the function of two pieces of hardware (along with some Mozaic scripts) AND a complete synth engine.

What you charge and how you parcel functionality it up to you. I was just trying to emphasize that Mela isn’t “just a synth”

Luxthor

I would like to see Mela3 become ‘Mela Classic’ and continue to be a simple synth while Mela4 continues with 5, 6, … to be a super synth or whatever @Nikolozi already has in mind.

BTW, great update, so many things to test out. Thank you. 🤩

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HotStrange

@Nikolozi any ETA on the polyphonic and NFM modes?

Thanks for all the work you put in. Mela is still an all time favorite for me.

Nikolozi

@tja said:

@Nikolozi said:

@audiblevideo said:
TL;DR with Mela you get TWO modular apps in one

But I'm curious what makes you say that it should have been 2 apps? Like from a purely business perspective or useability or something else? Can you elaborate on that?

I think you misunderstood.
He was saying that Mela 4 gives the value and usability of two Apps, even as it is only one App and only costs one time. So that getting Mela 4 is double fun.

oh yep, got it.

Nikolozi

@Luxthor said:
I would like to see Mela3 become ‘Mela Classic’ and continue to be a simple synth while Mela4 continues with 5, 6, … to be a super synth or whatever @Nikolozi already has in mind.

It's an interesting idea. Mela 4 look and feel is quite different from Mela 3, and I guess Mela 3 synth's static wiring/UI has its charm. Sometimes, I feel nostalgia when I look at the Mela v1.9 UI.

BTW, great update, so many things to test out. Thank you. 🤩

Thank you, more to come 😊

Nikolozi

@HotStrange said:
@Nikolozi any ETA on the polyphonic and NFM modes?

When I was finishing v4.0, in my head I was estimating that I would have completed implementing polyphony by v4.2. But I think it's a much bigger piece of work, mainly because there are a few significant design decisions that I need to make. Like how it will work with MPE, if there will be other new signal types besides Pitch signal, e.g. trigger (or on/off signal), or will all these different signal types can be unified into a single type that will have all the MPE type information (Pitch, Velocity, Note-on/off etc). Let's call it the "voice" signal type. These are new concepts that other synths don't have (or maybe some do have similar things), so I want to ensure that they are simple and can be understood easily by Mela users. This is also the reason I haven't made a sequencer module yet, because I think it will depend on how the "voice" signal will work. So, I decided to take a little longer and experiment with a few ideas. And in parallel keep adding features/modules that users are requesting that don't conflict with polyphony. So, don't have an ETA for it yet, but you can be certain it's one of the main things I'm focusing on.

Regarding an NFM-style module, that's a slightly lower priority for now. But I think it will happen after I introduce modules that can contain other modules.

Thanks for all the work you put in. Mela is still an all time favorite for me.

🙏🧡

HotStrange

@Nikolozi said:

@HotStrange said:
@Nikolozi any ETA on the polyphonic and NFM modes?

When I was finishing v4.0, in my head I was estimating that I would have completed implementing polyphony by v4.2. But I think it's a much bigger piece of work, mainly because there are a few significant design decisions that I need to make. Like how it will work with MPE, if there will be other new signal types besides Pitch signal, e.g. trigger (or on/off signal), or will all these different signal types can be unified into a single type that will have all the MPE type information (Pitch, Velocity, Note-on/off etc). Let's call it the "voice" signal type. These are new concepts that other synths don't have (or maybe some do have similar things), so I want to ensure that they are simple and can be understood easily by Mela users. This is also the reason I haven't made a sequencer module yet, because I think it will depend on how the "voice" signal will work. So, I decided to take a little longer and experiment with a few ideas. And in parallel keep adding features/modules that users are requesting that don't conflict with polyphony. So, don't have an ETA for it yet, but you can be certain it's one of the main things I'm focusing on.

Regarding an NFM-style module, that's a slightly lower priority for now. But I think it will happen after I introduce modules that can contain other modules.

Thanks for all the work you put in. Mela is still an all time favorite for me.

🙏🧡

Thanks for the reply! No rush at all for me, I was just curious. Keep up the good work 🙏

Samu

Don't forget to check @Nikolozi 's nice videos He drops from time to time

This one uses an envelope follower to independently process transient and sustain portions of a sound.
Cheers!

scrape

@Samu said:
Don't forget to check @Nikolozi 's nice videos He drops from time to time

This one uses an envelope follower to independently process transient and sustain portions of a sound.
Cheers!

Nicely explained. You can never have too much of this sort of thing

HotStrange

@Samu said:
Don't forget to check @Nikolozi 's nice videos He drops from time to time

This one uses an envelope follower to independently process transient and sustain portions of a sound.
Cheers!

Yep! Great videos and top dev. Probably my favorite synth on iOS.

Nikolozi

Cheers everyone and thanks @Samu for linking the video.

Feel free to let me know what modules or features you want me to make future videos about.

HotStrange

@Nikolozi said:
Cheers everyone and thanks @Samu for linking the video.

Feel free to let me know what modules or features you want me to make future videos about.

I’m just patiently waiting for NFM and Poly 😉 no rush though seriously. I’m still loving it just as much without it.

Nikolozi

@HotStrange said:

@Nikolozi said:
Cheers everyone and thanks @Samu for linking the video.

Feel free to let me know what modules or features you want me to make future videos about.

I’m just patiently waiting for NFM and Poly 😉 no rush though seriously. I’m still loving it just as much without it.

Was hoping to do polyphony in the 4.6 update, but migrating all modules is taking a lot of time. Plus I'm improving them as I go through each. So, the 4.6 update might have a few cool new modules. And hopefully, polyphony will be ready for the 4.7 update.

HotStrange

@Nikolozi said:

@HotStrange said:

@Nikolozi said:
Cheers everyone and thanks @Samu for linking the video.

Feel free to let me know what modules or features you want me to make future videos about.

I’m just patiently waiting for NFM and Poly 😉 no rush though seriously. I’m still loving it just as much without it.

Was hoping to do polyphony in the 4.6 update, but migrating all modules is taking a lot of time. Plus I'm improving them as I go through each. So, the 4.6 update might have a few cool new modules. And hopefully, polyphony will be ready for the 4.7 update.

Oh sweet! I didn’t realize it was coming that soon, thanks for the update! Can’t imagine the amount of work put into this already. 🫡

HotStrange

Cool new update for my all distortion and noise heads. 3 new modes of tearing a sound up 😂

Luxthor

The hype is high! I can’t wait… 😅

Samu

Mela 4 has my 'blessing' and the upcoming poly-update will solidify its presence on my iPad!

auxmux

Nice, been waiting for this.

Fear2Stop

I’ve noticed a pretty bad bug….when used in GarageBand iOS, it works fine, but once GB is closed , every time I try to reopen the project with mela , it crashes and won’t reopen anymore, meaning the song is ruined

HotStrange

Mela 4 is seriously a treasure. I feel like I praise this app more than any other one besides maybe Koala because it’s just fantastic. Even without polyphony.

Once it gets that NFM FM module it will be unstoppable. This, Tera Pro, and Buttersynth alone could have you covered synth wise for years to come.

Nikolozi

@Fear2Stop said:
I’ve noticed a pretty bad bug….when used in GarageBand iOS, it works fine, but once GB is closed , every time I try to reopen the project with mela , it crashes and won’t reopen anymore, meaning the song is ruined

That's the worst kind of a bug when a crash corrupts your project. If the host crashes it's usually a fault of the host as each AUv3 runs in a separate process, and if an AUv3 crashes it shouldn't be able to take down the host. Having said that I would like to investigate to see if I can do something about it from my end. Would you be able to send me a sample project that does it and also a crash report (I can help you locate the crash report). Feel free to email me the details directly. My email can be found in Mela under Settings > Connect > Email Nikolozi. I'll also do some testing to see if I can reproduce it on my system.

Nikolozi

@Nikolozi said:

@Fear2Stop said:
I’ve noticed a pretty bad bug….when used in GarageBand iOS, it works fine, but once GB is closed , every time I try to reopen the project with mela , it crashes and won’t reopen anymore, meaning the song is ruined

That's the worst kind of a bug when a crash corrupts your project. If the host crashes it's usually a fault of the host as each AUv3 runs in a separate process, and if an AUv3 crashes it shouldn't be able to take down the host. Having said that I would like to investigate to see if I can do something about it from my end. Would you be able to send me a sample project that does it and also a crash report (I can help you locate the crash report). Feel free to email me the details directly. My email can be found in Mela under Settings > Connect > Email Nikolozi. I'll also do some testing to see if I can reproduce it on my system.

One thing you can try is to make a copy of your project, delete Mela 4 from your device temporarily and try opening the copy. This way you should be able to recover the rest of the project. If you are able to open the project after deleting Mela it probably means GarageBand doesn't like or expect certain behaviour from Mela.
Don't open the original (only open the copy) while Mela 4 is deleted, just in case the issue is resolved in the future, otherwise, you may lose Mela's plug-in state.

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HotStrange

@tja said:

@HotStrange said:
Mela 4 is seriously a treasure. I feel like I praise this app more than any other one besides maybe Koala because it’s just fantastic. Even without polyphony.

Once it gets that NFM FM module it will be unstoppable. This, Tera Pro, and Buttersynth alone could have you covered synth wise for years to come.

Yes, I moved my go-to Synths out of folders ... but I still cannot get me to delete all the other gems...

Yeah can’t bring myself to delete them either. And of course some go beyond what those “big 3” can do. Like id700, OPL, AddStation, etc. There’s room for them all 😎

I more so meant if you were confined to only those 3, you would probably be fine .

Samu

Mela 4.7 is out now with a crazy list of additions...
https://apps.apple.com/app/mela-4-auv3-synth-fx-midi/id1668299428

This update adds full Polyphony support to Mela 4, allowing you to build custom polyphonic synthesisers easily.

A Quick Guide to Polyphony:

• An Instrument lane takes a MIDI signal as input and converts it to a polyphonic signal which is simply a set of independent voices.
• A voice consists of note-on/off information as well as Pitch and Audio signals.
• At the end of an Instrument lane, the audio signals from the voices are summed and sent to the output.
• Modulators on either Audio or MIDI lanes act like monophonic sources whereas modulators on Instrument lanes generate polyphonic modulation signals.
• Depending on what type of lane the target modules are on we get 3 possible configurations: poly-to-poly (this includes mono-to-mono), mono-to-poly and poly-to-mono.
• With the mono-to-poly configuration, the same modulation signal will be applied to all voices that the target module is processing.
• With the poly-to-poly configuration, there will be 1-to-1 mapping with the modulation source and target voice.
• With the poly-to-mono configuration, the last triggered voice's modulation signal will be used as the source.
• For the full details check out Mela’s Getting Started guide.

Polyphony Settings:

• These settings define voice allocation rules and are stored as part of the preset.
• You can set the maximum number of active voices.
• You can also set whether to reuse a voice if its associated note is the same as the newest note or always follow the Voice Priority setting. The latter makes it possible to have multiple voices playing the same note.
• The Voice Priority setting prioritises voice allocation based on whether the note is newest, oldest, lowest or highest.

Voice Activity Module:

• The new Voice Activity module lets you monitor voice allocation in real-time.
• The module displays MIDI information as well as audio levels of each voice.
• The MIDI information includes note name, velocity and release velocity.

Module & Lane Actions:

• Added the "Duplicate" menu item to the module's actions menu.
• Duplicating modulator modules also duplicates the modulation targets.
• Added the "Duplicate" menu item to the lane's actions menu.
• After duplicating a lane, a duplicate of a modulator module will have the same modulation targets, except for those targets whose modules were on the same lane as the original modulator. Those will be replaced with the corresponding targets from the duplicated lane.
• Added "Convert to > Audio/Instrument/MIDI" menu items to the lane's actions menu.
• This makes it easier to modify presets, especially when trying to make existing presets polyphonic.
• Note this action removes incompatible modules and sets input and/or output fields to off.

Backwards Compatibility:

• The following modules will no longer be supported on Instrument lanes: Chorus, Compressor, Envelope Follower, Flanger, Phaser, Stereo Delay and Oscilloscope.
• These modules will only be insertable on Audio lanes.
• The presets created pre-polyphony will continue to work in a compatibility mode.
• Note that this limitation is introduced as users generally wouldn't want an instance of such audio effects on each voice.

Presets:

• Split "Synth" preset group in "Leads", "Pads", "Bass", "Keys" and "Synth FX".
• Migrated existing factory presets for v4.7. Those that made sense to be polyphonic were converted.
• Added new factory presets.
• Added "Open Recent", "Save Preset" and "Save & Export" items under the File menu for the standalone mode.
• You can use the keyboard shortcuts Command-S to save and Command-E to export the current preset on iPadOS and macOS.
• The Instrument plug-in's Default preset is now polyphonic.

Other Changes:

• Envelope Generator now highlights the active segment.
• Fixed a bug where renaming a module would cause its animation to freeze or refresh at a lower frame rate.
• Made MIDI Source’s Smoothing parameter to default to 0ms. For most cases, Velocity and Key Track ramping doesn't make sense.

Gavinski

https://x.com/gavinski_s/status/1724410870309200121?s=61&t=h9IT_HLFyi9pwn2iXlMGDQ
Win any Nikolozi app here, winner picked in 2 days as usual!

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bluegroove

@Samu thank you for the heads up. Looking forward to playing with this update.