#1

I’m really getting into the mark eats sequencer. It’s a wonderful tool, so much fun and really invites you to make patterns and play them in the most musical way. But I’m finding a problem: when I change page, the music hangs briefly before continuing. Everything else seems to work fine without interrupting the flow, but this is annoying. I’m using the sequencer to send midi to Reaper, with an original series 256, on a late 2013 mbp 13" retina.

Any help would be very much appreciated! I scanned this forum and the old one and couldn’t find any mention of this issue.

#2

Hi, this sounds like a performance issue but i’m surprised you’re seeing it on a macbook pro. Do you have a lot of other stuff running; is the Reaper project pretty heavy? Perhaps you could test with a minimal amount of apps open just to see if that solves it.

#3

oh and what OSX version are you running?

#4

Hi Mark, thanks for getting back to me. I’m running Yosemite 10.10.1. The reaper project was quite simple, just three instances of aalto, and the cpu meter was never above 50% (reaper taking up 22%), with no other apps running… so it’s puzzling.

#5

Hmm weird. I’m going to be putting out a new version of Sequencer in the coming weeks that does optimize some things so I’m inclined to say “noted” and see if that new build changes anything for you before getting too deep into this.

Couple of quick questions though: :slight_smile:
Does it also stutter when you move the mouse over the grid on screen and the little button panel appears?
Does the CPU actually spike when you change pages (might be hard to tell if it’s brief)?

#6

I just discovered that if I keep the number of voices per instance of aalto to 3… the stutter goes away. I should run some tests tonight to see how far this is true, but it looks promising so far. But at this point it seems to be a matter of aalto hogging resources, even though the CPU meter doesn’t report it as excessive.

I have to admit that I’m relatively new to mac and things that would be obvious to me in windows are often confusing and obscure in osx.

#7

Cool glad you worked it out! I guess aalto is heavier than expected. The next version of Sequencer should be lighter on resources so may help you push it further. You could also try minimizing Sequencer so it doesn’t need to draw stuff on screen when animating between pages and see if that helps.

#8

A little tribute to the wonderful mark eats sequencer, using aalto. Sorta like drums, sorta:

http://soundcloud.com/strettara/drumsorta

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#9

Awesome, thanks for sharing! :smiley:

#10

BTW Mark - I have no idea what your plans are for the sequencer update, but it would be very cool if there was an option to choose whether to set channels to note or cc messages (assignable: like assign sequencer channel 5 to channel 1 cc 7 with settable range, perhaps). That would make it much easier to use as a modulation sequencer. You could then use midi learn in the vst to assign that channel to control a given parameter. It would vastly expand the power of the system. Just a thought, anyway.

1 Like
#11

+1 for cc sequencing!

#12

https://www.instagram.com/p/BA8RFKrNj7V/

:slight_smile:

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#13

Very cool! I’ve been looking at midiPipe for this kind of thing but it’s a lot of work. Really looking forward to the next version.

Also - love the varibrite 256, I’m jealous! That’s the top of the grid tree imo.

#14

Haha - upgrade lust here - but it would be very cool if you could set a delay for all messages from a given pattern. That would effectively allow you to turn the 256 into a sort of 512 with some very nice syncopation. Like, delay by a 32th. That alone would be awesome. But… I’m happy with whatever you do :slightly_smiling:

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