I use the SAVE button to store favourites so that i can use them cross daw. I you onluy use one DAW you could simply save them with it as well.

indeed I love it, the analog boost , distortion filters and even eth verb is awesome dense

 

thing uses only 3 to 4% resources! Some people here seem to be using hardware from before 2010 or so, I don't understand why people are asking for better performance, I was waiting to use this from the first time it was posted here, but was put off by people reporting high CPU usage, which absolutely doesn't seem to be the case, not with pads not with polyphony not with effects, as far as I'm concerned this is a ready to use product for your productions. The only thing I will criticize is the sound, it doesn't sound like it isn't a VSTi, most VSTi's nowadays have a similar sound quality, I understand the hype as far as first real virtual analog EMU ou there but absolutely not for the soundquality.

As far as the discussion that VSTi's can't sound like real hardware the discussion can be buried, because this clearly proves otherwise.

Well done to the dev's thank you for making it publicly available! looking forward to other Emulations that may come!

 

Nope, not my work. It is from the user galaxpel / gui-design channel on Discord.

 

Any chance for a Microwave XT emulator? Been wanting to get my hands on that synth for years. Almost pulled the trigger this past year but decided against it.

 

they will finish other emulators the week after you buy the synth. it's just how that always works out.

 

Fuck me in the ass!
Nice Optimalization!
1.2.4 version - 102%-113% CPU
1.2.5 version - 26% - 47% CPU

Questa ena qiero dupo analo der supero!
Mucios Gracias Bombanieros!

 

This project is so amazing... I'm not even into synths but I'll try this just because is that cool

... Murphy's law...

 

Ill sell you mine for $2K, so I can turn around and buy a Waldorf M to replace it.

 

oh sweet jesus, finally a chance to get my XT back again, hope they get that one working fast
anybody know how to make a rom from the firmware files?

 

Manjaro user, extracted the .so from the .deb, dropped in ~/.vst3 with the BIN, will not load in Reaper.
The times I did get the dll to load, I get the "no BIN" error message.

EDIT: instead of the BIN i used the small case bin files and those worked. sorry and thanks.

there's an issue with the timing of the arpeggiator when looping a midi clip. laggy.

some of the dropdown menu items are super super tiny. like less than 8 pt font size.

idea: generate graphical thumbnails for the waveforms and filter type responses instead of text labels.

stellar work, thanks!

 

Last edited: Feb 3, 2022

MicroQ or Q. I'd rather they make Q or Supernova, but there is too much talk about MicroQ on Discord, and I don't mind that much since I love MicroQ, too! I'm going to get a better, far more faithful version of Komplexer back! Gosh I miss it - such great synth for weird pads! :drool:

@livemouse Regarding the Arp sync, that is the original hardware limitation, too. You have to play 4 bars in your DAW before Virus will get the into sync with the song. Novation never managed to resolve the issue, even with the beta v6.6 firmware, which was made to resolve the issue. Anyway, it's better to use firmware v6.5, which is the last stable release [uses less CPU, too], and live with the issue. So never start any arp presets before you run the emu for 4 bars first.

 

Last edited: Feb 10, 2022

It doesn't work like that. You have to load the firmware into the thing and then copy the whole EPROM into the computer, that is physically pull it out and put it into an EPROM programmer then send it into the computer using EPROM software.

@ArticStorm Regarding Motorola 563xx DSP chips, this is what @Ayahuasca posted in the other thread about DSP56300. It's great for reference so we finally have it in this thread, too. I wanted to post this here for ages, because this thread is still alive.

The synths below all share the same Motorola 563xx DSPs:

• TC Electronics PowerCore - 4x Freescale DSP 56367
• Waldorf MW2/XT — Motorola 56303
• Waldorf Q — Motorola 56303
• Clavia Micro Modular — Motorola 56303
• Clavia Nord Modular — Motorola 56303
• Nord Lead 3 — 6 Motorola 56362
• Nord Modular — 4 Motorola 56303
• Novation SuperNova — Motorola 56303
• Novation Nova — 5 Motorola 56362 (synth engine), and 1 Motorola 56303 (fx unit)
• Korg MS2000 — Motorola 56362
• Korg Microkorg — Motorola 56362
• Access Virus A — Motorola 56303
• Access Virus B — Motorola 56311
• Access Virus C - Motorola 56362
• Access Virus TI - 2x Freescale DSP 56367
• Access Virus TI2 - 2x Freescale DSP 56367. Later models used DSP56321

Notice that Q uses only one 56303 and Supernova, too. Unless he made a mistake and wrote Q instead of MicroQ? That could be the case. I think MicroQ uses one DSP and Q uses 2, too. And there's no mention of MicroQ. hmmm Anyway, 56303 is about 30% easier on the CPU than Virus C, so that's going to be absolutely massive!

I'm very excited with where this is going, you can tell.

Cheers!

 

Last edited: Feb 10, 2022

“The Future (?) of Access Virus (June 23, 2017)

This is a speculation type of post, using some specifics gathered and trying to deduce a conclusion about the future of the Access Virus. Only time will tell what will be realized, and anyone can think of what can be or can not be expected in view of these facts. So take it as much seriously as you want, call it a gossip, rumour, whatever… so read it like this… or skip!

The origins

First we should talk a bit about the special computing chip, the heart of every Virus synthesizer, a certain version of the Motorola 56k DSP (digital signal processors). The origin of the DSP 56000 series came from Motorola's requests to the U.S. Music Industries as to which DSP architecture features they would need to produce synthesizers and other keyboards.

This happened in the mid 1980s when the Japanese music industry introduced digital keyboards using ASICs (Application Specific Intergrated ICs), and started dominating this field previously exclusive to US manufacturers. Yamaha, Korg, Roland and others started to outdate Moog, ARP, Oberheim and Sequential Circuits.

The result of this request was the birth of the first Motorola 56000 digital signal processor (DSP) generation in 1986. These 56k chips were used widespread also in the audio industry since the mid 90s, not just in hardware synthesizers and effect processors, but appeared as an auxiliary digital signal processor for audio functions in some high-end multimedia computers, like the NeXT, the Atari Falcon or the Silicon Graphics Indigo workstations.

The DSP bloodline is breaking.

Fast forward to 2017, today the main domain of the 56k use has drastically changed: car hi-fi systems are being replaced by multi-media dashboards, the significance of DVD players and Blue-Ray is constantly decreasing in the age of streaming/download and even the MPEG/Dolby audio decoding is handled by more powerful and different processor architectures.

The traditional DSP's are here to stay for some embedded systems, designed for longer life cycles, like telecommunication devices (sonars, radars, transponders, decoders, etc), different devices in avionics, naval, military, medical or automotive industry, where the life cycle of devices is naturally much longer compared to consumer electronic devices.

As you certainly know, Virus is a digital synthesizer, with a 56k DSP running software code to generate and modify all aspects of the sounds, these are the exact models:

1997 Virus A - 1 x Motorola DSP 56303
1999 Virus B - 1 x Motorola DSP 56311
2002 Virus C - 1 x Freescale DSP 56362
2005 Virus TI - 2 x Freescale DSP 56367 - 2x150 MHz
2009 Virus TI2 - 2 x Freescale DSP 56321 - 2x275 MHz

(Motorola first renamed its chip division to Freescale, later Freescale has been acquired by NXP, and NXP recently by Qualcomm, hence only the brands change.) Products of Kemper Music (the other brand of the Virus creator Christoph Kemper), the Kempler Amplifier series also use an NXP chip, the DSP 56720 running at 2x200 MHz. This newest and probably the last 56k DSP is part of the Symphony series DSPs, where the main difference to its predecessors is that they are dual core chips.

However, the days of the 56k platform are numbered: according to the official End of Life (EOL) policy of NXP they provide supplies for 15 years from the original release date, so the chip used in Virus TI2, the DSP 56321 is available until 2020, the one in Kemper Amp DSP 56720 ends in 2023 and there is no new 56k DSP in NXP roadmap anymore.

As mentioned above, companies manufacturing traditional DSP chips target growing industries with the more modern technology, and audio is not in the focus anymore, also the type of processors being used have changed to low consumption ARM, FPGA and MCU chips. So the Motorola / Freescale / NXP / Qualcomm DSP as a computing platform will become much less relevant in some years and eventually will vanish.

A rhetorical question: however it is possible to transfer the Virus Assembly code from single core to the latest dual core Symphony DSPs, Access would certainly not choose a soon-to-be obsolete and unsafe chip platform for their next iteration of Virus, not even in the case of increased potential performance.

Unfortunately you can not use the concept of future-proof when it comes to technological advancements, but some newer processors used in hardware devices (like Analog Devices SHARC or Texas Instrument C6000 DSPs, or ARM CPUs) has been developed with a decent C++ compiler.

(Compiler is the application that translates the code written by programmer to a hardware specific machine code, whereas a high-level language, like C++ provides a higher level of abstraction when coding, resulting in a simpler development and more understandable and easier to read code, compared to a low-level language like Assembly.

See examples: a flanger written in 56k Assembly and in C++ for ARM). It means that the code describing the algorithms are being created on a universal language, as opposed to the low-level assembly code written for platform and manufacturer dependent DSP platforms. The 56k architecture has not been designed to run a machine code compiled from a high-level source, like C++, this architecture was specifically made for special audio tasks, like oscillators, convolution, filters, FFT etc. programmed in low-level Assembly language - and this is what the Virus is being built upon.

There is a C++ compiler (Tasking) for the 56k DSP, but it has some issues and it certainly would not be efficient enough for real-time audio compared to Assembly... but the main point is that there is likely no existing C++ code describing the Virus algorithms, as it was always developed using 56k specific Assembly.

It means that in order to run the Virus algorithms in a new, long-term and similarly powerful computing platform (like ARM) would require to re-write its code in a high-level programming language (C/C++).

This is one of the reason (but probably not the most important one, see below) that we hardly see anything new from synthesizer companies previously utilizing the 56k DSP platform.

With the exception of DSP 56311 and DSP 56321 the rest of the chips of the old platform are "not recommended for new design" and there is no new 56k chip beyond Symphony DSPs.

Source: www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=500345

 

Very interesting read. @BEAT16 Well, at least for me, techno-maniac [except for smartphones and social media platforms] who'd been living through those times. FPGAs [Fast Programmable Grid Arrays] and ARMs are taking over. No specialised DSP chips any more because it's not worth it. It's far more profitable to use some kind of "can-do-anything" FPGA programmable chip or ARM that you can use for anything from fridges to cars, synths, and computers.

edit: also great point - assembly is dead, unfortunately, so they use a universal, well known and easier to learn, C++ language and compiler that you can program anything you want with. Assembly is hard to program and debug, but maaan assembly code runs faaast, that's why I'm sad to see it going away, like some very valuable lost art...

 

Last edited: Feb 10, 2022

Thanks ! And it's nice that we have great people here.
By the way, I think our forum is very nicely designed, I've seen much worse. I think a lot of software programmers have no graphic sense.I'm not a smartphone and social media platform user either,
I guess that's how it stays normal in my head. Oh yes, here they are called anti-social media.

 

Last edited: Feb 10, 2022

TheVirus TI Snow is not a Ti2 class Virus. Actually, the Snow version is more limited in polyphony and parts than a Ti Keyboard, or Ti desktop.

The Snow is limited to 4 parts, and 50 voices of polyphony, compared to 16 parts, and 80 voices for the Ti keyboard and Ti Desktop. The Ti2 versions offer around 25% more polyphony/processor power compared to the Ti Keyboard and Ti Desktop.

AccessVirus TI is currently only avaialble in these models : Ti2 Keyboard, Ti2 Desktop, Ti2 Polar
Source: https://gearspace.com/board/electro...tion/605988-virus-snow-ti-classed-ti-ti2.html

 

Last edited: Feb 10, 2022

I much prefer this (already) to some of the overhyped, overrated, underwhelming trash that's out there (mostly from uhe) and it's functionally better too. The only thing I'd like is if there was a global fx on/off button (clicking the fx tab?) and if the Juce framework didn't decide to be at 100% when you resize the gui to 200%. As it is, it is still better than the borked Avenger gui, and many more! So good, such an exciting project - thanks everyone involved! Just playing around w/ default presets is joy! Just pwns.