I've been testing out the latest beta and all seems fine except for this startup time issue. I know I've reported it before but it really is such a big deal for me that I thought I'd put in one last plea before the beta round is finalised, as I'd hate to see this ship and the opportunity be lost until any possible v3 release.
Before I purchased Analog Factory I read all of the comments on the forums (yours, KvR, etc.) and this was an issue that came up time and again - people were even warning people off because of it, so I'm not the only one that thinks this is an issue.
When you're composing you really want your workflow to be fast, and if you need to call up a synth and you've got a choice between one that starts instantly, and another that takes ages to load (no matter how good the sounds) you end up reaching for the more immediate one. I was really hoping that Analog Factory would end up being my go-to synth, but to be honest I've not used it in a single project yet because this issue bugs me so much. And if you use multiple instances the load times for projects become crazy. In fact, it takes longer to load an instance of Analog Factory than it does for the entire host application to load.
Is there nothing at all that can be done to reduce the startup time? I realise there are thousands of presets now, but modern computers can manipulate thousands of strings in milliseconds. I obviously don't know the details of the processing that's being done, but would it help to put the names into a preformatted file and simply read it in? Or is it the time taken to fill the list box perhaps (in standard Windows listviews there are ways to handle bulk uploads to avoid such problems, is this a similar case?). Do the dongle checks take a long time - in which case is that something Syncrosoft should be looking into, because copy protection should not impose such an overhead for legitimate purchasers.
Or maybe there needs to be a way to avoid loading all of the presets at all unless you need them. Maybe only load them a page at a time as you scroll through the list? Maybe add a switch that, once you've found the preset you want in a song, you can say "remove the rest of the patches from the list" and it would remember this so that when you next load the project only the patch you used will be loaded. I don't know, I'm clutching at straws because I obviously don't know how this has been coded, but maybe there's an approach in here that might give you some ideas for optimisation.
Again, I know I'm going over old ground, but I think this is a fantastic synth, but the load time just makes me reach for other synths every time which is such a shame.
Many thanks again for a great product.
