Rayzoon Technologies LLC

[rtwfroody_]

I grabbed the Jamstix free version to check it out. I hope to use it as a metronome that's actually fun to play along with.

So I set up the most basic example: Basic Rock, James Stix (I tried a few others), Rock - Default kit, and hit play on my VST host. Jamstix starts playing, but like half the time the "drummer" skips the kick or snare. Sometimes it does play them, although a bar where I actually get kick-snare-kick-snare is really rare. It sounds great in the preview when I selected it, but when playing for real it just sounds really sparse.

I'm sure I'm making some basic mistake. What should I be checking? (I already confirmed that I've got all the sounds in the kit by hovering over the entries in the groove section.)

[Azimuth]

1) Build your song in the Build window using the Jamstix Classic style and the Machine player model. Add a single Verse by typing "V" in the Your Song Structure pane. Click the "Create Song" button.

2) In the Groove Tab window, in the Song Sheet pane, Left click the "Reps" number next to the Verse song part and in the window that opens change the number of repetitions to a suitable choice.

3) If you don't want any Fills to be played, uncheck the "RF" and "TF" checkboxes in the Song Sheet.

[rtwfroody_]

Thanks, but it's not helping. I think I may not have explained the problem correctly. The groove display shows all the drum elements correctly, but there is often no audio for those elements.

Here's a video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/seLX9jMiX3nEupg29

At 14s I hit start and everything sounds fine. At 45s there's a little hiccup. Then around the 1 minute mark so few of the hits are being played that it's hard to tell there's a drummer at all, and shortly thereafter there's complete silence.

This is all with the machine drummer, who I would assume does not vary from bar to bar.

[Azimuth]

I'm not sure exactly what is going on there but why do you have midi feeding Jamstix in your DAW wiring diagram? Try eliminating that and see if the problem is resolved.

[rtwfroody_]

Disconnecting the midi input from jamstix doesn't change the behavior at all.

[Azimuth]

What DAW is that you're using?

[rtwfroody_]

I'm using Gig Performer 4. I just tried it on BitWig (3.3.7) and there it does play all the sounds as you'd expect (and sounds good!). They're both using the same VST file as far as I can tell.

This seems really weird to me that there could be this kind of difference between VST hosts. It looks like there's a Debug Log Mode I can configure. I assume that goes into a file somewhere? I'll see if I can collect that.

[Azimuth]

I'd say that if Jamstix is working fine on your computer hosted by BitWig, I'd say Gig Performer is probably the problem since you've eliminated your computer hardware as a possible source.

[rtwfroody_]

Here are logs I collected. I just opened Gig Performer, then in Jamstix it looked like it was set up to play something. I hit play and right away I got some bars with very few instruments actually being played. So I stopped it fairly quickly and exited out of Gig Performer.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jy86PcLeNFcMyLMCHIzGms0b-TSbKOnU/view?usp=sharing

Reading through the log nothing really pops out at me, but I also don't know what I'm looking for.

[rtwfroody_]

I found the problem. I had Gig Performer set up to use a 3ms audio buffer, to minimize latency. BitWig was using a 10ms audio buffer. Playing around with this setting a bit, I see the problem unless the audio buffer is set to at least 10ms.

I don't know if this is something in the design of Jamstix, or if my computer is just too slow, or if there's some Windows OS option I need to set. But now it works.

Thank you for your help.

[Azimuth]

No problem, I'm glad it was something easily solved and you're up and running.