Plogue Chipsounds Problems (Slow Keyboard Response)

Hi,

There’s a bit of an issue with this plugin – when the Chipsounds interface is open there are delays every few notes when playing with the QWERTY keyboard. If you close the UI everything is fine – it’s as responsive as it should be.

Playback of programmed notes is fine with the UI open or closed.

I tested it in a new Renoise file with nothing but Chipsounds in both Renoise 2.1 and the 2.5 Beta on two computers: a MacBook and an iMac – both are under 2 years old and both are running OSX 10.5.8. The result was exactly the same with both and activating static processing buffers in doesn’t help.

I tried it in Ableton Live and it was fine.

Also, I should note that while I was testing Renoise 2.5 crashed.

I’ve posted the same info in the Plogue Chipsounds Bugs and Problems forum at plogue.com as well.

Thanks!

Edit: Performance is improved greatly by using the AU version over the VST, but there are still occasional delays.

Other than being a bit of a CPU hog, Chipsounds seems to be working fine here when I have its GUI open.

Windows XP Pro SP3
Renoise 2.1 and 2.5b5

Don’t have a Mac I can test it on unfortunately.

It is definitely a CPU hog! Looks like I’ll be putting the new plugin grabber in 2.5 to good use.

Thanks for the info, dblue.

Renoise uses a specific keyboard handler to pass key-presses to the plugin window (if the checkbox is enabled). Just to allow you to send keys for text-events as such. It was not really meant to also trigger notes but perhaps that plugin responds to this as well.

Does it also sounds problematic if you uncheck the “Enable Keyboard” checkbox?

Hi vV,

The Enable Keyboard box has been unchecked the whole time (I was wondering what that was for!). If I check it the plugin doesn’t produce any sound.

Ah, okay, i guess it must be CPU quirks then…

I just tried my old Midiman keyboard running though an M-Audio MIDI interface and everything worked fine using both the VST and AU versions – there were no delays or stuck notes with the Chipsounds GUI open.

Could the keyboard handler be somehow incompatible with Chipsounds?

If the plugin uses lots of resources to draw its GUI (it obviously does), then the whole GUI lags. And the computer keyboard input is part of the GUI.

This must be fixed in the plugin itself. Please let me know if you got a response form the Plogue devs. If not, I’ll nag them as well and ask them for help…

The only response of gotten so far is this: “i guess that would be a question for the renoise UI programmers as we are not responsible for the code that reads the keyboard input, and this report is a bit strange to me.”

Thanks a lot, taktik!

Lets play bug ping pong.

I’ll contact them…