Pro A5 is out!

Cambler

@AnalogMatthew this is easily my favourite synth of recent years. Everything that comes out of it sounds beautiful. Love the new tunings/microtonal feature as well. Amazing work!

One request/wish - would you ever consider flicking the switch to allow this to be used on silicon desktops? I, and I assume many others, sketch on iPad and finish on Mac. Using Logic and cross compatible auv3's means projects move directly across - it's a total dream. I can see this synth being used a lot in my work so would love to not have to render out stems and be able to continue to tweak on the Mac.

Pxlhg

In the somewhat heavy company it has, this result is pretty surprising, no?.
Preset is called //Keys | To The Point// but I've twisted a few knobs and don't recall which. Buffer: 1024 Sample Rate: 48Khz

Just wondering, nothing more.

edit: Everything is driven by PolyPipe and I also have 2 instances of PhaseRings.

dendy

@Pxlhg said:
In the somewhat heavy company it has, this result is pretty surprising, no?.
Preset is called //Keys | To The Point// but I've twisted a few knobs and don't recall which. Buffer: 1024 Sample Rate: 48Khz

Just wondering, nothing more.

edit: Everything is driven by PolyPipe and I also have 2 instances of PhaseRings.

these measurements are always tricky.. like yeah, A5 is a bit heavier on CPU - it’s approximately in ballpark of ButterSynth .. Maybe area where some optimalisation would be nice is when it is iddle - it’s relatively heavy on CPU in that case, so here is definitely area for improvement…

But it’s not that dramatic .. to get real numbers ideally try leťs say 8 instances with both oscillators enabled, 5 unison voices and “modern” filter, every instance playing 8 voices (8 long notes) .. this gives steady load to your CPU and reduces CPU throttling - with CPU throttling the CPU peaks (and AUM measures CPU peaks to my knowledge) often distort measured numbers.

Just recently did some tests of CPU load with various polyphonic synths (in setup i described above - just to known if i did all possible to optimalize my own synth on which I am working) .. Butter was probably heaviest of all i tested and A5 took second place - but the differences were not that big.

Usually biggest part of CPU load in poly synths is nonlinear filter (cause you need to calculate it for every played voice) - so synths with are using standard linear SVF filters are cheapier, filters with analog emulations are more heavy ..

This is ButterSynth LDR 24dB filter

This A5 with with “modern” filter

(it’s from iPhone 16 max, host supports multicore)

Btw Butter in this test had turned off oversampling on OSCs, and it doesn’t have oversampling on filters - I have no idea if A5 is doing some oscillstors or filters oversampling - in case it does 2x on oscs/filters then turning that off would reduce the load a bit.

Optahealth

Microtonal is the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life! Thank you!

Is there a way to set the root note?

@AnalogMatthew said:
Re: Tuning.

A big new tuning feature has been in the works, and part of it accidentally made its way into the latest build.
Sorry about that.

More info: If you don't load preset "SRW - Tintabulation Too" in a session, everything will remain in tune.
Otherwise, you'll be in "Grady: Poole 17" microtonal scale until you load Preset 2 "Fragile Syn Piano", which will reset it to a 12-tone scale

The good news is, the fix is already done. And instead of waiting, I’m just going to unlock the whole feature early. Submitting to the app store now.

SURPRISE: Everyone is getting a Microtonal P5 🎉

mervenca

@AnalogMatthew said:

@DePingus said:
Might have found another bug. Is the noise supposed to disappear when I enable filter key tracking? If I use the Kybd button in the filter section, the noise cuts off. If I use the Keytrack knob in the More filter sub-section, the noise goes down as you turn the Keytrack knob up.

Good ear. That's always been the behavior of the noise with keytracking on. It's a little more pronounced now that much of the new noise oscillator's freq response is concentrated in a higher freq. It's pretty close to how it was before the 1.1 update. But, I'll do some more A/B-ing and will try to match it closer if there's still a delta

Didn't get the comment on how the noise has always been this way?
But regarding standard synth functionality, right now the noise osc filter is just not opening up when keyboard mode is on..

dendy

@mervenca said:

Didn't get the comment on how the noise has always been this way?
But regarding standard synth functionality, right now the noise osc filter is just not opening up when keyboard mode is on..

yeah current state is bug, looks like noise oscillator is not mixed together with other oscillators into same filter but goes through it’s own independent filter which just closes on key tracking enable and doesn’t actually track (and also doesn’t react on cutoff tweaking)

At least it sounds lile that - try enable noise + osc 1, enable key track and rhen play tone and rweak cutoff - filtering of normal oscillator is changed, but noise is filtered still same way, ignoring cutoff position

MadGav

@dendy said:

@mervenca said:

Didn't get the comment on how the noise has always been this way?
But regarding standard synth functionality, right now the noise osc filter is just not opening up when keyboard mode is on..

yeah current state is bug, looks like noise oscillator is not mixed together with other oscillators into same filter but goes through it’s own independent filter which just closes on key tracking enable and doesn’t actually track (and also doesn’t react on cutoff tweaking)

At least it sounds lile that - try enable noise + osc 1, enable key track and rhen play tone and rweak cutoff - filtering of normal oscillator is changed, but noise is filtered still same way, ignoring cutoff position

Which would be a strange choice as (a) it requires an additional filter, meaning more CPU cycles and (b) messes with filter saturation behaviour which in the hardware is working on the mixed signals.

dendy

@MadGav said:

@dendy said:

@mervenca said:

Didn't get the comment on how the noise has always been this way?
But regarding standard synth functionality, right now the noise osc filter is just not opening up when keyboard mode is on..

yeah current state is bug, looks like noise oscillator is not mixed together with other oscillators into same filter but goes through it’s own independent filter which just closes on key tracking enable and doesn’t actually track (and also doesn’t react on cutoff tweaking)

At least it sounds lile that - try enable noise + osc 1, enable key track and rhen play tone and rweak cutoff - filtering of normal oscillator is changed, but noise is filtered still same way, ignoring cutoff position

Which would be a strange choice as (a) it requires an additional filter, meaning more CPU cycles and (b) messes with filter saturation behaviour which in the hardware is working on the mixed signals.

Yeah.. i don’t see in A5 DSP code so I can just guess based on what i hear…

Funny side info, I am just working on complex noise oscillator in my own synth lol, so I am literally dreaminh about noise all the nightc then i open forum a boom - people discussion noise oscillstor lol.. I feel totally noisy..