Rank Routing without Groups in HW 8

I tried to route all ranks directly to a bus (without using groups at all), but it didn't work. No signal arrives at the bus.
I investigated a lot and found the following strange behaviour (default installation without any changes so far):
1) Load any organ, open "Rank Routing dialog", select all ranks for preset 1 and assign perspective 1 to "Bus 0001" (default is "Group 0005"). --> It works.
2) Now assign the same to "Bus 0009" (or any other bus with higher number) --> It does not work, although both busses are configured in the mixer in exactly the same way.
3) If I now add bus 0009 to group 0009 (or any other group) it works (although the ranks still directly route to bus 0009).
4) If I again remove bus 0009 from group 0009, it still works ... but after unloading and loading the organ it does not work anymore.

I think there is some strange error. Workaround so far is to always add the bus to a group even if you directly route to the bus (but I think this is not intended).
Could you please check?

Best Regards,
Lars

[mdyde]

Thanks, Lars.

I can confirm that I can reproduce that problem using your steps, and it does indeed appear to be a bug. Buffers for audio mixer buses are intentionally not allocated unless something is routed to them, so as to save memory, and it appears that the buffers for a bus may not be being identified as needed in your test case, which would result in no sound being heard from that bus. However, as long as the bus is a member of any group at all, even if nothing is routed to that group, then its buffers are guaranteed to be allocated, so it will work properly.

Hence as a work-around for now, if you want to route ranks directly to any mixer buses (instead of going via groups), please ensure that those buses are also members of some dummy group (e.g. group 1, or even group 1024).

My apologies for the bug.

@Martin:
It would be very helpful if there is a way to set a mixer preset completely to zero, i.e. without presets. I'm always unsure if unwanted routing is taking place, putting a load on the CPU. The many designations make reading the settings unnecessarily difficult.

I have named the Primary Bus 1024 to "None" and removed all routing connections. I put all unused perspectives on this bus, so I can be sure that nothing is done. But if you can do it in Hauptwerk, then this is certainly the better alternative.

[mdyde]

Thanks, vpo-organist.

We do have an enhancement request logged for adding the ability to default all of a a mixer preset's settings for a selection of common use-cases, such as 'all-blank'.

Note also:

- If the green virtual LED isn't lit for a bus then no non-silent audio is currently going into it, so it won't be using any CPU time.

- No audio will be routed to rank output perspectives 2, 3 or 4 by default. Audio will only be routed to those if you have specifically turned up the "Perspective mix: source persp to output persp 2/3/4" voicing parameters for any ranks (they all default to zero). Hence those output perspectives won't use any CPU time by default.

- Even if you do route non-silent audio routed to any given mixer bus, the bus's CPU load will be tiny (it will use much less CPU time than a single voice of polyphony would use) unless you have an impulse response reverb selected for that bus. Hence the CPU load for buses is effectively negligible anyway (unless you specifically apply reverbs to them).

Thanks, Martin

Hashtag MeToo!

I have just spent a happy few days trying to get to grips with the routing system in HW8. I have had seven screens open on three monitors and have been squinting to try and read all the text and spot whether a "LED" is glowing or not. Eventually, I realised that not all buses are created equal and that mattered.

Like the OP, I realised that by using just one Primary Bus you could get from the snappily entitled the "Rank Routing to Audio Mixer (Primary) Buses/Groups (for multi-channel output)" screen to your loudspeakers. While that worked for "Primary 0001" and "Primary 0002" it does not seem to work for higher numbers.

If only I had seen this post first!

I received HW 8 last week and I am impressed by the new mixer layout!

Finally it has the same functuonality as real mixer. As I am coming from traditional music production I can say that it is very easy now to adjust everything I want. For example, I have the Caen IRs from Jiri and it is great to allign the several parts as Récit and Positif to their own IRs and speaker groups.

I got the impression, that the bug which is discussed here only exists on the windows platform. I cannot reproduce it, as all the Primary busses work fine, directly alligned from the ranks themselves. But this seems to be the old story, I have been using HW from V4 on my Macs and I had never any problems, really.

Could be interesting for people who read here, to hear that the bug does not seem to exist on the Mac. Btw I am using a Mac M1 Studio Ultra with 128 gb ram.

[mdyde]

Thanks, Chris. Glad you like v8.

That bug does actually apply equally on macOS and Windows, but depending on the sequence of events when assigning ranks to buses, it might not always be apparent immediately. Either way, the work-around (make sure that the bus is a member of any group at all, even if you don't route anything to the group) always avoids it.