folderol wrote: ↑Sat Jan 07, 2023 6:11 pm
I wasn't keen on the first part, but liked the more laid-back remainder.
Thank you for being such a good sport, and giving a chance to the rest of the song although the first part wasn't to your liking. A lot of people would have just gone "neeeext!..."
I'm sorry if my reports have caused such surprise and disappointment. I feel really grateful for Yoshimi, thank you for all your work. For a long time, I used it as my base camp for everything synth; as I mentioned, the sounds you find ootb are unbeatable, which is great for someone like me who doesn't want to tinker with sounds, just have a good selection I can pick from and start to play or compose, which is where the fun is for me.
But I haven't been able to create a workflow that makes sense in Reaper. Whenever you open a plugin instance, it spawns several windows at the same time (often, among them, an incongruous greeting screen "It seems you're using Yoshimi for the first time"...), so it's more screen real estate of what you had in the works covered, plus double or triple work to move those windows around and close them when you're finished. With one instrument, this is is highly inconvenient, but the moment you want to have two or more open at the same time, it becomes a cluttered mess quickly.
Add to that the fact that it is so mouse-centric; you can trick it into opening a list of instruments with key bindings, and even navigate around the instrument names with arrow keys, but, ah the frustration, you cannot choose one with enter or space; you have to CLICK on it. I see this as a big usability annoyance; the way I understand usability, the mouse should be a last resort kind of thing; when the piece of information to acquire is selecting a text (like an instrument name), the keyboard is always better, quicker and more transparent.
Zynnfusion is also too mouse-centric for my taste, but at least everything is under one single roof, that stays contained within Reaper's plugin window, and also, it has text search and tags that make easy to find an instrument that makes sense; I hope this mention to Zynn isn't fostering some kind of "turf wars" between forks I'm not aware of, nor I want to be. I offer with all candour my comments about my user experience.
Maybe what happens is that Yoshimi is more thought out as a "set and forget" kind of thing, instead of opening and closing it every time, which takes a lot of setup time. if I recall correctly that's how i used it in the past, as one single instance with Ardour and Carla. I guess that's what you refer to when you speak of "working as a multi"; sometimes, as I used it with Reaper, I thought to myself "wouldn't it be great if I could have open only one plugin, and it "morphed" to the correct synth parameters depending on which track I click on?".
It might very well be that all these problems have to do with Reaper (Linux native); its capability of using LV2 is relatively new and there are some plugins that act funny...
My Yoshimi version is 2.1.2.2. I'm willing to update it to the latest one "for the cause" if that would be helpful for development, although I think the results won't vary greatly, given that these problems I mention are mostly structural, of philosophy of working. I hope my comments are informative and helpful...