Is Xite right for me?

[Roland Kuit]

Hi Stardust,
I'm a composer/teacher/author and researcher in modular synthesis.
I'm happy there is the XITE-1.
Period.

[fra77x]

"You work harder with a sound-quality lack "

That says it all...

[dawman]

btw, thanks for the new module w/ SDRAM and MVerb.

GaryB...
The Wild Bill Goldstein....????..

Wow I didn't know that. Have you met him?
Bloody Lucky You..

I remember years ago he did NBC's Theme for the NHL, and when I read about him
the list of accolaides was shocking.
Twilight Zone was always one of my favorites.
Rod Sterlings Voice then his Orchestral Horn Swells..

How did he do this w/ half full jars......?
How could a man ever get around these career ending hurdles and create such great music.

GaryB, please have him guide us to our destiny as we mortal humans cannot function w/ half full jars, and the thought of a sequencer not working when I already purchased Cubase for a sequencer is making me so mad I lost my groove.

This means I have been doing 4 1/2 years of gigs on gear that doesn't work, I knew I was drinking too much, I must have blacked out as I use full jars, but they're full of Jager, hence the memory loss.

Ankyu......

[garyb]

who said "bedroomers" were ignored or not important?

who is it that is on a personal tanget?

real trolls are trolling!

sad panda.

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[garyb]

there really isn't a more useful audio tool than an XITE, even with any limitations or bugs that it may have. there is NOTHING that is a better long term investment right now. this is my personal opinion. there is nothing that offers more quality and uses for the money. this is fact.

[hubird]

the last addition ('this is a fact') is a pity, as you were doing so fine...

a 'personal opinion' isn't a fact, even if the opinion may be plausible

[garyb]

[hubird]

I appreciate the easy way you take my words Garyb, but I'm afraid the 'fact stating' thing is something that triggers Stardust's nerves the most.

I saw it happening during my absent period of about three years.
Stardust trying to fight against a dominant, truth claiming minority.
Sorry to say this, and not trying to stir things up, just analysing as how I see it, or at least how Stardust sees it.

Truth claiming concerned not only speaking about Scope, it's shortcomings and it's preferred use, as well as the rather dominant expression of one political view on Planetz, usually called conspiricy thinking (which indeed triggered me the most).
At least that's my analysis.

During the 3 years I didn't post on Planetz I never saw one single person protesting against the way Stardust was spit out from Planetz by a few.
Now it's easy to nail him for his -indeed- inflammatory comments (although the content is pretty nice, as some have confirmed also).
But there's a history feeding the beast.

However Stardust, things on Planetz have changed a bit I think, even while it's partly enforced by the interference of moderator John himself.
I would like to see you posting like in the old days again, open for discussion and speaking from the heart.
I'd say, give them a bite when needed, fight truth claiming when necessory, I'll support you , but avoid making it a Mission...we are just freed from one

[Eanna]

What must the OP, or anyone who may be thinking of purchasing an Xite and stumbles upon this thread, think of this forum?

The tone that is generally attributable to this forum is an upbeat one. It has suffered here due to personal crusades on all sides.

Stardust, I've checked your recent posts to planetz.
14,796 posts here at this time of writing - so it seems you have invested a significant part of your life to this forum. When someone spends alot of time on something, it's usually because it is a labour of love. But your raison d'etre here seems to be to continue a labour of incidious loathing. Its very bizarre behaviour.

I also notice that you have been quite inactive on this site for two years, occasionally dropping by in order to stir things up. It appears to me that you have rarely missed an opportunity to "have a pop".
You appear hell-bent on damaging the reputation of a company for which new sales are vital. I don't know what you hope to achieve by this, and I don't understand why you would wish ill on S|C by following a crusade to highlight only their failings, in an attempt to obfuscate what is good about the platform, and to belittle those who believe in the platform and what it brings to their music-making lives. This too is bizarre behaviour.

If you do own Scope hardware and the Scope software to run it, then surely it's important to have a healthy S|C in situ than an unhealthy S|C?

To the others who rise to him, leave this man hang himself. A whinging duplicitous man who is ignored is a weakling.
And leave politics / conspiracy theories / personal opinions as stated facts, at the door, please. Its a drain on everyone's energies.

To the OP, sorry you had to witness this pointless bickering.
For what its worth, I agree with Dawman - let your experience with Solaris convince you of the sonic qualities of this platform.

All the best, Eanna

[hubird]

if I only knew what's an OP...

[Eanna]

I believe its an Original Post, the starter of a thread..

[dante]

the last addition ('this is a fact') is a pity, as you were doing so fine...

a 'personal opinion' isn't a fact, even if the opinion may be plausible

It's a fact that its his personal opinion, and it's his opinion that its a fact !

[Liquid EDGE]

Stardust.
Just reading your first post. If you removed your personal attacks from an otherwise mostly correct explanation of things (though overly negative and slightly misleading) the vibe of this thread would be a lot nicer.

You seem quite angry.

Chill out.

Sonic core have done the best thing by everyone, they keep support with the original pci cards while introducing New hardware that's the most powerful "studio in a box" on the planet

Porting the scope software to work on New hardware has understandably introduced a few quirks (which all have workarounds) so don't make mountains out of almost insignificant blips. (yes there is the step sequencer issue on scope xite but that's 1 issue out of 100's of things that scope xite offers, and hey there's a work around now)

At the moment they are working on a complete re build of scope plus other New stuff such as parseq. So be patient, use what you have and just deal with the fact that sc are a small yet passionate bunch doing the right thing by all.

As I keep trying to say. Scope is like an f1 car, amazing yet needs to be treated with care.

I don't even want to imagine what it's like to engineer and program such software that has such a huge variety and scope for all things audio production related.

Scope is truly wonderful.

And when it comes to support and communication with them I find them a very nice bunch of people that are obviously very busy.

[hubird]

a 'personal opinion' isn't a fact, even if the opinion may be plausible

It's a fact that its his personal opinion, and it's his opinion that its a fact !

[Bud Weiser]

I am a composer (orchestral/film style) and producer.

Good info.
So you have deadlines always and work under pressure ?

I have a Solaris hardware synth on order, and am quite impressed with the sound samples from Solaris/Xite synths. Reading the forum, it seems there are many limitations/caveats, and I'm not sure how easily this will integrate.

Just to be precise,- John Bowen´s hardware Solaris synth and XITE-1 are different animals even they are based around the same technology.
Anyway,- congrats to your J.B. Solaris,- but don´t expect it´s 100% issue free.

Some remarks on gear manufactured by very small and/or boutique companies,-

when working under time pressure frequently and dealing w/ deadlines always,- boutique gear is a bit risky in general because everything in regards of service and availablility of parts is significantly different compared to the business structure of well and worldwide established companies.
Think about that in hardware as also in software because there are also the factors manpower and service network.

It might rule for Sonic Core as well as it does for the italian organ company KeyB for example who tried to establish in the US market shortly.

When expecting the gear running 24/7 356 days per year,- have double gear or gear which is exchangable where you´re located the same day or can be serviced the same day.
Same rules for international concert touring.

So,- you´re here @PlanetZ and you know what old Creamware cards and SCOPE are as well as what XITE-1 is,- right ?

Before I buyed XITE-1 in 2012,- I already knew what I´ll buy because I investigated and it was also pretty clear the combination of the S|C hardware & software, 3rd party software and the host computer and it´s OS might cause some problems here and there,- as always when dealing w/ computer gear and software.

As an example,- I never had a crash of SCOPE or the XITE-1 malfunctioning w/ the S|C stock devices and the optional devices like Prodyssey and ProTone.
Actually, I´m not trained w/ Modular (IV) because lack of time,- so no comment on this device.

But yesterday, I had my 1st BSoD w/ XITE-1/SCOPE 5.1 and ZARG Ambient while loading a patch,- AND after I had updated my WinXP SP3 ...

Well, who to blame ?
S|C, ZARG, my computer hardware or Microsoft ?

To be true,- when I only worked w/ native software like Cubase SX3, Wavelab 4.01b, RME card (I still have it), NI Komplete and an assortment of softsynths and soft sample players etc,- it wasn´t free from problems too and when I worked w/ hardware only in the past it was also not hassle free.
I´d say,- there are issues always, but different ones at different times and being caused by different reasons.
A lot is software incompatibility s##t and software bugs today,- even in hardware instruments,- mainly keyboards and MIDI modules because all is software driven today except you go out and buy a tonewheel-organ or vintage but refurbished analog synths which lack a memory system.
As soon as these come w/ a preset memory system,- there will be some kind of OS in an eprom and the nitemare starts sooner or later.

Now to your questions:

1. Ability to use as a VST inside Vienna Ensemble Pro. I was going to put this as a "box of synths" inside a Vienna Ensemble Pro instance.

I don´t have Vienna Ensmble Pro,- so no idea.
If it would ask for XTC or VSTIM MOde,- I´d say,- forget it (for the time being).

I was hoping that this would let me use a bunch of great, DSP synths that I could load up without concern for CPU cycles.

Wrong, there´s always concern for CPU cycles,- on XITE-1 as well as on hardware Solaris or in any DSP driven synth out there.
It all depends on the design of the/that synth and HOW the DSP are used.

On XITE-1,- you cannot max out polyphony endless or until ALL DSPs are in use for only just THAT synth.
It´s by reason the DSPs are organized in slots,- 4 in one slot and AFAIK and IIRC,- the main problem is commiunication between DSPs housed in different slots, so you run out of communication lines much earlier than out of DSP power.

Also, when looking at hardware Solaris,- it doesn´t deal w/ "slots" and there are no older 60MHz SHARCs inside because of backwards compatibility,- but nonetheless and even there are running 6 of the 333MHz SHARCs,- the polyphony is limited to 10 voices.

So, there are limited ressources always.

This would be with Cubase 7 64 bit, ...

I avoid talking about 64Bit systems because I´m w/ 32Bits upm to now.

2. Can I load this thing up with lots of synths?

Yes,- but depends on which synths and complexity of patches.

... definitely several Solaris instances, ...

No,- not yet and not in stock configuration.

There are workarounds available and/or in the pipeline, but that´s not the subject here.
Also SCOPE 6, which I believe will come up w/ many improvements, isn´t the subject here because of it´s unavailability up to now.

3. I see a lot of posts about limited polyphony of 4,5, or 7 notes. Is that really true?

Yes.

Shouldn't be a big issue, but just curious as to why?

It´s the same as w/ any other DSP based synth,- depending on what you program, polyphony decreases.
I can program patches on my 128 voice Kurzweil which end up w/ 3 voices polyphony and the same will happen to your Yamaha Motif as well as Virus TI2 or such.
Use the emulated MOOG filters in the Virus TI2 and it´s polyphony is limited to 8 voices max. p.ex.

Shouldn't the DSPs yield lots of polyphony?

Do simple tests,- assign different synths from SCOPE to a single DSP and watch DSP/SAT meter in %,- then look when ONE DSP will be saturated,- it´s about the 5000-6000 mark when DSP and SAT connection errors appear.

I get out between 4 and 8 voices of polyphony w/ every S|C SCOPE stock synth,- small and big ones as well as the optional devices mentioned above,- several synths (up to 9) loaded simultaneously,- a STM2448X mixer loaded, stereo channels active, 4 aux FX, all hardware I/Os in use, 6 busses (ASIO) to record in Studio One Pro, 4 busses (ASIO) back to SCOPE, WAVE driver active, main out and control room out active and some more MIDI stuff loaded.
STS 3000/4000 Sampler in addition w/ 32 voices.
The DSP load of the XITE-1 is about 55% that way,- but you might run out of SAT connections loading the next device.

I´m pretty sure,- there are other combinations possible, maxing out more DSPs because of needing less SAT connections.

Needless to say I try using synth emulations as they were in the past,- so I use Minimax monophonic because it´s a Minimoog D which IS monophonic and I also use the Prodyssey mono- or duophonic even I tested it´s usage w/ 6 voices successfully.
Same rules for Profit which for me was and is a 5-voice synth,- period.

When it comes to the Roland stuff like Uknow7,- I want six (or eight) voices and w/ the Vectron and Lightwave, I want eight for sure.
I just only make it work like the original hardware worked and deal with it like that.

That said,- I´m happy w/ XITE-1 because it also gave me back all the old hardware synths I sold before and in a more or less maintenance free state,- and they sound fat and there´s no latency when using SCOPE standalone,- so what ?

SCOPE standalone is nearly perfect and stable ´til the cows come home until you load some crappy programmed device where "crappy programmed" also means "not optimized yet" because programmed w/ a outdated SDK p.ex..

Well, I see VST/AU hosts crashing all the time when loading a crappy 3rd party plugin,- isn´t it ?

Is this related to the posts I see about things "optimized for Scope 5" vs not optimized? How do I know which synths will be "optimized"?

That´s very hard to recognize if at all.
It also needs a definition what "optimized" means.
There´s a difference in bug fixing or optimization.

Some devices have GUI bugs which drive me nuts,- p.ex. the behaviour of the octave switch of OSC #1 in Minimax.
You get the right result soundwise,- but you see no significant change in the GUI when choosing 16' or 8' (or is it 8' and 4',- I forgot ...).
In fact, that needs optimization.
Other than that,- it might be possible optimizing DSP autoload and off-load routines for all the S|C devices and I think many of these are already optimized but not all.
In fact, it´s speculation because I have no clue about development and coding of SCOPE devices for XITE-1.
What happens to the 3rd party stuff is more or less unknown,- as always.
Do 3rd party developers all own and use SDK 5 and will they use SDK6 later ? Who knows ?

4. Should I be thinking of this as external hardware? Send it 16 ch. of MIDI on a physical MIDI port, then pipe the audio back into tracks via ASIO or even ADAT? Is that more stable?

Yes.
XITE-1 is a piece of real quality hardware and build like a tank,- it is a hardware sound module, FX device, routing machine incl. mixers and a soundcard, dual mic-pre, DI, AD/DA (and format) converter as well as a MIDI interface.

I wonder what the fuss is with that.
Since decades we route MIDI to racks full of hardware gear and record audio from their audio-outputs.
You will do that w/ yopur hardware Solaris too or will play it w/ your hands an record directly.
If you´re able to play keys,- that´s cool !!!
If you aren´t and need that sequencer crap always for any note and sound event to create,- well, it isn´t.

Who says we need sequencers for composing/ arranging ?
I myself can do that on a piece of paper using a pen.

I understand you need the sequencer because you do big orchestral scores and want to listen to that stuff immediatedly,- so you have to use it, maybe also because you do the layout of the orchestration w/ it.
But that´s possible w/ the SCOPE synths running in SCOPE standalone.

What´s NOT possible is,- total VST integration and total recall,- all-in-one project.
But that´s also the case w/ rewire,- isn´t it ?
You store your independent VST host- as well as Reason-projects for the same song when using rewire and that´s the same w/ SCOPE.

5. Can I have some configuration auto-load, including all instruments, effects, program settings within plugins, etc?

Yes, but it depends how much the load is as well what´s loaded automatic and in which sequential order w/ Windows when booting the machine.

... or would I have to open up control panels and reload everything including patches to get going every time? Ideally, I would want my "box of synths" to be able to auto-load a standard template and then use program change messages to change patches, etc.

That works w/ the PCI cards and XITE.

There are issues w/ the auto-recall of MIDI presets.
It can be that was intentional and is not a bug because SCOPE wasn´t developed for live performance in 1st order, I think.
So, MIDI presets for the controller assignments have to be created manually, separately saved for each device and to be recalled manually again after a project is up and running.
For me, that´s the most cumbersome issue of SCOPE up to now.

I didn´t try w/ the mixers for now,- so when there were comments here about bugs w/ MIDI presets and mixers,- it seems to be correct.

(But I really HOPE,- it will be history w/ SCOPE 6 !)

Thanks in advance for any assistance! This is clearly a very powerful and great sounding device, but it is not clear how well it integrates and how easy it is to use when it is part of a setup rather than the "whole setup".

Xite-1 sounds really good,- but it´s not super easy and idiot proof.
It needs some experience to deal w/ it in our world of lightnig fast growing technology.

For me, as a keyboard player and home studio owner, it was a cool deal.
There´s the (1HU only) unit giving me lots of synths and FX as well as the mixer I need,- routes audio to and from ASIO, I have my ADAT AD/DA connected as well as a, also via ADAT and MIDI connected,- 2nd SCOPE machine w/ 15DSP PCI card.
It integrates well in my studio and I have it all set upm the way I can work with or without XITE-1 or any computer or w/ everything in a combo,- hardware and software,- old and modern gear.
I still have an ATARI Mega STe available for MIDI or a old Mac running Logic 6,- modern DAW machine w/ Studio One and Reason 6.5 too, NI Komplete 7 and so on ...

I think, the physical layout of the studio is much more important than the machines.
Machines all have limitations,- so I combine ´em to get out of the gear what I want.

In regards of XITE-1,- you yourself have to know if you need it and if you want to make that investment.

For me,- it made more sense to buy the XITE-1 than buying a hardware Solaris b.t.w..
I´d like to have both too, but I couldn´t afford.
I still have enough keyboard instruments anyway and when John would decide for building a Solaris rack unit, it would be mine soon I think.

Bud

[katano]

Hi,

I'm not a pro, I'm running a little project studio as a hobby. I've not been that active the last few years because I became a father three years ago

So what I'm using Xite-1 for is mainly:
- Recording rehearsals and ideas for my own band (multitracking about 16 channels, what a luxury )
- Recording demo 'tapes' for other bands (up to 32 channels)

How do I work:
- Setting up an all-in-one project in Scope (recording, mixing, mastering in a single project)
- Using Cubase as a recorder only (via ASIO), doing all the 'important' stuff on Xite-1
- Adding some Scope synths to enhance the composition (again, in the same project)
- Adding some Scope guitar amps to model the clean guitar sounds (you guess, in the same project)
- Of course using all kind of Scope effects for mixing and mastering (yes, in the...)

So what is Xite-1 for me:
- A complete highend studio in a box, I don't need anything else for a complete production (apart from cubase and a few microphones and a nice preamp and... you get the point )

What gear do I use together with Xite-1:
- a quite old Dell PC with three LCDs
- Windows 7/64bit
- Cubase and Wavelab
- TFPRO 16x preamp
- S|C A16 Ultra for A/D-D/A
- some other preamps and lots of microphones
- Mackie Universal Control
- Event Monitors

Problems:
There are a few limitations regarding DSP distribution and compatibility issues with some devices, but there's always been a work around. And at last, we're here to make music, right? In that aspect, Xite-1 and the Scope platform offers everything I need, that's a fact

Good vibes
Roman