Cycles is so good I’ve actually started to feel bad about how easy it is to make incredible music. It literally feels like cheating. It’s incredible. It pairs incredibly well with some of my monome sequencing scripts.
I made a sketch the other day just testing some gear with cycles, combining my grid and arc for sequencing along with my Polyend Tracker for rhythm. A friend of mine told me the recording sounded like a cross between Animal Collective and Squarepusher. That still feels good.
One thing I noticed regarding the cpu is that if I run it in kontakt standalone (I have the full kontakt 6), that it will run at about 20-25% but if I load it up in logic, it’s less than half of that. This is based on the cpu meter in kontakt. Just thought that was interesting.
And yeah, it’s close to cheating! But hey, it’s 2020 and we all deserve a break haha.
The way that I see it is that I’ve been through a time consuming and expensive journey to find a way to express myself musically where I’ve been chasing tools and methods while at the same time trying to figure out what I want the end product to sound like. I’m not saying Cycles is that but it’s definitely giving me a lot of enjoyment while getting me closer to a musical end goal.
I wonder if Kontakt isn’t running on a “per core” basis, so you’d be at 25% of a single core whereas your DAW is evaluating on the entire CPU. I know Reaktor is single core, can’t remember for sure if Kontakt is as well but knowing NI I wouldn’t be surprised.
That’s a good point! I’m just basing it off of what kontakt tells me running in logic vs standalone. Still it’s prob good workflow practice to commit and at least freeze when I have something I like.
I kind of have a feeling that kontakt in logic isn’t showing me the true cpu use. I’ve been jumping around demoing DAWs with MPE and so I’m not too familiar with Logic. When I open up the cpu meter in logic, it is a lot higher than what kontakt shows me. Who knows, maybe it’s doing something under the hood to make it more efficient? Or maybe it’s just hiding the true cpu usage? When I try it in bitwig, kontakt shows about a 5-10% higher cpu hit than standalone kontakt so that’s prob a truer indication. I can get up to 40%+ with some granular patches. I haven’t really used multiple instances of cycles so I haven’t hit any limits but my hunch is that I’m probably seeing the same types of hits that everyone is seeing, as my laptop is just a quad core i7.
That being said, no one cares about my cpu haha. I’m just trying to decide on a DAW to settle on with MPE support and I thought that it was a no brainer if Logic was twice as efficient.
Bottom line is that Cycles is amazing!!!
One question I have, if I’m using kontakt on its own with Cycles, is there a way to adjust the length of incoming midi notes? A sequencer I’ve been using doesn’t have an easily adjustable note length parameter.
Nice little write up just landed in my inbox. Congrats @veil_s
Edit: some Lyra/Cycles doodles from today.
Be sure to check out Bitwig if you’re looking for a MPE friendly DAW. I can’t imagine a better environment for that work.
Anybody suffering from issues of user samples being loaded aren’t actually loading in to the program? I can seem to only get a sample to work on C3.
Are you 100% sure you are up to date? This sounds like how Cycles behaved before the latest version. When you’re about to drop the sample over the interface, it should look like the attached photo(which is upside down for some reason?!?). If it doesn’t, you’re probably running an older copy (I was too until a couple weeks ago). At any rate, after you load the sample, try clicking “poly” which should map the sample across the keyboard. 
It only works like the sometimes. And then after the first time it doesnt. It shows there are samples on other keys, but if I press something, I cna’t use it. I just chacked Native Access and I’m on v1.2.
How would I even erase samples on that too? The user preset also says that it can’t find certain files when I first load it and I need to go through a whole file finding thing.
I honestly might just delete it, reinstall and try again…
Hmm, gotcha. 1.2 is what I’m on as well. And thus we have reached the end of my troubleshooting abilities 
I do remember that I had to re-download from pulse when updating…
Usually a full delete and install is a good call with Kontakt stuff. BOO
Yeah man, sorry, nothing kills a session like stopping to update stuff (trying to sort out some crow clock stuff at the moment myself and am about to just go for a walk!)
Yeah, the sad thing about hardware is truly that there are just moments of constant futzing around! Good luck with yours!
How are people integrating Cycles into a Eurorack setup? I think it sounds pretty damn amazing, but I can’t figure out the best way to fit it into my process.
Using Deluge and a rack (https://www.modulargrid.net/e/racks/view/1295781). Feel free to take a look at my modular grid and make suggestions
What I will often do- in fact, I did this about an hour ago- is take a structured piece of sound (say, a piano melody) in the DAW, route that out to Morphagene or Arbhar and mangle it into a big ole beautiful mess, then capture about 4 bars of that performance. Then I’ll drop the mangled audio into Cycles and impose some kind of rhythmic structure upon it with either the loop or grains engine. And what I end up with is a really interesting interpretation of the original sound that also plays well with the rest of the arrangement.
In the attached example (which is the first, very basic draft of a theme for a friend’s podcast about an attic door that leads into a parallel dimension) Cycles is responsible for the kinda “trilly” piano thingy on the right channel that fades in and out once the orchestral section begins. It’s a patch that maps the mod wheel to grain size, and I’m essentially performing a human sine wave. Hope that helps!
wow this is really beautiful!
might be hoping for too much/searching the tutorials now, but is it possible to use Cycles for multichannel output as well? can just imagine how wonderful it would be to map some of that internal modulation to slinging grains and samples around a quad/8ch set up or similar!
I’ve never been able to get my own samples working with cycles. Can you offer any advice?
wait… i think i got it.
I did thanks, I think it must have been me not understanding the interface. Been exploring for the last 30 min and I get it now.