Some thoughts on voice allocation, portamento, envelopes and some more stuff

[Thomasch]

Hi folks.
At first i want to say, that i really love the CZ V and its extended modulation capabilities.

There are some drawbacks, that might be really worth to fix.
The most important problem is see, is about the voice allocation / voice stealing:
It seems to work completly wrong on the CZ V when i compare it to my old CASIO CZ-5000.
On the original CZ-5000 you can play the same note multiple times after each other and it will not kill the old note. (as long as you not reach the max voice count)
On the CZ V the old note will be killed when a new note with the same notevalue arrives. If you use a different note as a follow up that was not played before this will not happen.

This behaviour might be not so important for short attack/release sounds but it's very  important for pads and similar sounds with long attack and release times.

It also seems, that this has an influence how portamento is triggered and it seems that it only bends for the first time a note is played.
If you repeat the same note sequence (like an arpeggio) there will be no bending.

And btw - the UI implementation of the portamento is somehow "wrong".
I really miss the dedicated Portamento On/Off Switch from the original Hardware, which also switches the legato mode for the envelope retrigger in mono mode on and off.

The real portamento times and their corresponding values in the UI are also completely different from the original, but is less of a problem for me than the fact, that voice allocation/voice stealing and potamento triggering is completely broken.

Please check that back on a original CASIO CZ and you will get what i mean.
If you don't have access to the original hardware, send me a message if you need help, i own a CZ-5000.
Made my own virtual CZ years ago with Synthedit and some of the problems i had, seems to be equal to what i see in the CZ V.

There are also some problems with the response of the envelopes, it seems that the slope - the logarithmic shape - of the original envelopes are more aggressive, than the ones on the CZ V.

The next thing is the anti aliasing, that seems to cut a little too much from the high frequencies,
User scalable intensity of the anti aliasing might be of help. I remember i've done something like this on my own plugin back in the days, and it helped to improve the dull high frequencies at the cost of more aliasing. But sometimes a little bit of aliasing can bring also more life to a sound.

best regards
Thomasch

[Thomasch]

Just found another bug.
SysEx import of CASIO CZ Patches are interpreting the DCA1 and DCA2 Key Follow parameters in a wrong way.
I made a short test and created 10 *.syx patches with DCA Key Follow values ranging from 0 to 9.
Then i imported the patches to CZ V
original CZ-5000 value: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
imported CZ V value  : 0, 1, 2, 3, 0, 1, 2, 3, 0, 1
conclusion: it seems that you miss some bits from the original data.

This bug applies only to the DCA Key Follow Data. The DCW Key Follow Data is imported correctly.
A fix might be just a little bit of copy and paste from the code for DCW Key Follow.


I will add more bug reports, as i find them.

[marie_arturia]

Hi Thomasch!

Thank you for your feedback, it's really valuable to us
I logged the problems you found on our side so we may resolve these in a future update, I could reproduce the voice allocation and portamento stuff.
We have a CZ101 here and we will try to check with the hardware too.

I really miss the dedicated Portamento On/Off Switch from the original Hardware, which also switches the legato mode for the envelope retrigger in mono mode on and off.

We chose not to make it appear on screen but it is still possible to have the mono and legato modes (even if it's less visible).
For the original legato mode, just deactivate the POLY switch.
For the original mono mode, you need to set the Polyphony value to one (in the bottom toolbar)

Best,
Marie