Ah, Made in Abyss, one of the saddest yet most wonderful things I ever watched.

As to your question, perhaps this thread is relevant:

https://www.vsl.co.at/community/posts/t52591-Synchron-in-vep-and-mir#post285278

To summarise, although Synchron products give you a choice of mic placement, the instrument placement and hence the reverb is fixed. If you want to recreate a particular setup (and Penkin's Made in Abyss setup is very particular), it would seem that you may be better off with the old-style VI instruments and then using MIR to place them wherever you want in the Synchron soundstage.

That's something I've suggested too, but I don't know if it's on the "todo list".

As an alternative, you might try a MIDI filter such as MIDI Polysher:

https://eareckon.com/en/products/freebies.html

I've not used it myself, but it seems that it will allow you to filter notes based on velocity. So if you had 2 instances of GRO in your DAW, you could let only higher velocity notes through to the one that was handling the Pedalwerk and then thump out the bass line!

I'm mainly a VIP user, but I'll have a go...

Isn't this where the various "dimension controllers" come in? If you assign one of the "Dim.Ctrl" as the slot controller of your stack of layers, then you can in turn assign velocity to it.

1) Yes, that mostly fixed it. The button is still dark red when the stop is selected, but it does sound now. Thank you!
     [EDIT], sorry, I have to go back on that as I was just holding down a chord and then enabling/disabling various stops. So if I hold a note and enable the Septime then it sounds, but if I release the note then it keeps sounding. If I enable the Septime with no keys down then I don't hear it at all when I play. Let me try deleting the presets completely and re-installing.
     [EDIT 2], no, that didn't seem to make any difference.
     [EDIT 3] If I make a completely new project in Cakewalk and add the GRO, the Septime is no longer a strange colour or with sticking notes, and mostly it works but sometimes it doesn't sound at all! So I need to do some more experiments.

FINALLY - I worked out what is wrong - the Septime is sounding on the Solowerk MIDI channel, not the Schwellwerk! [EDIT] looks like this will be fixed in the next release.

2) But I do. I have the Hauptwerk on channel 1, Positiv on channel 2 and so on. Yet if I allocate a stop on the Hauptwerk, say, to CC 80 and then a stop on the Positiv also to CC 80, if I send CC80 to channel 1 to enable the Hauptwerk stop then the corresponding stop on the Positiv is also enabled.

3) After saving and loading the preset the stepper now works too!

4) Thank you.

And how could I not like the GRO? Now I can play it much more like a real organ than ever I could with the VI version, it brings tears to my eyes quite regularly.

1) The Septime 1 1/7 is not really there for me. I say "not really" because there is a blank space in the GUI where it should be, but all that happens when I select it is that is goes red (see attached pic). Is there also a library update for this? I couldn't see one in my download area.

2) It would be great to have a means of selecting stops individually apart from NRPNs, BUT controllers are not much use because they are not channel-specific and, as I've said before, there aren't enough controllers to allocate one to each individual stop. In a multi-timbral source, you really ought to have most things channel-specific - if the stop selection were channel specific then there would be more than enough controllers to go round.

3) I can't seem get the stepper working. Not really important for me as I spent my entire organ-playing career on organs without steppers so I don't miss it, but several other people rate this feature as important.

4) The octave/sub-octave/unison off mechanism is still not manual-specific. Well, maybe you are still working on that :)

All of that said, combinations are looking good, and I really like the Clear button (it should be called "General Cancel", but "Clear" is shorter and simpler). And if I had to rate the Great Rieger Organ, I'd still give it at least 6 stars out out 5!

[EDIT] Forgot to mention the high-contrast option - much better for me with that enabled!

Originally Posted by: Andreas8420

Microsoft dropped all Windows 7 support 1 1/2 years ago, we can not develop or test software for Windows 7 at this point anymore - leave alone optimize it.

I understand, I was a Windows software developer myself for 25 years, though that's partly why I am now a Windows 10 refusenik!

Anyway, I guess I can uninstall and reinstall the player and see what happens.

[EDIT] Well, that was pretty painless, and as you said, the pan settings for the VST2 player are correctly restored now. The NRPN offset for stop selection has changed, it was 911 for the VST3 plugin and now it's 928, but as that's an undocumented feature I guess I can't complain! How about moving it up to a nice, round 1,000 though? That way you can change mixer and various other parameters as you please without affecting stop selection.

Thanks, Andreas. I only installed the VST3 version, and when I run the installer again it says, "Click Install to begin with installation, or click Back if you want to review or change any settings", but there is no Back button.

This is the bit where I'm almost too embarrassed to say...

Cakewalk on Windows 7

If it hadn't been saving correctly I would have expected the panner appearance not to be saved either, so given that it was saved but the actual sound location was at default made me suspect GRO - but with enough doubt to put a question mark in the thread title! I guess I can just record a little automation to set the panning where I want it, I'll give that a try later.

[Edit] And it just seems to be the panning affected, everything else seems to save/restore OK.

There seems to be an issue with the pannning of the GRO's internal mixer. I noticed this when I was trying to replicate an organ with remote divisions in different parts of a church.

So, use the GRO's Mix page pan control for the Hauptwerk, say, to move the sound to the left. Now save the project and re-open it. On checking the pan control, it will be exactly as it was before the save, panned to the left. However, the mixer internally has not applied this panning and the sound is at the normal location for that manual. Now touch one of the handles of the pan control and move it very slightly. The pan is now applied again and the sound will jump to the left.

There is an on/off button for the tremulant for each manual on the MIX page. Or were you hoping for one on the COMBINE page? I use a hardware control on my master keyboard for the tremulant so it's a moot point for me.

It's certainly something that's bothered me too, but I believe there may be a high-contrast option in the next release.

Glad to hear it helped.

Despite Cakewalk's "documentation", I've now got stop selection via MIDI working. It's going to be a bit laborious to set up for each stop individually, though, which is why I still think the player should have the ability to map each stop to something like an NRPN according to its displayed stop number by just checking a single box in the options.

[EDIT]To quote someone on the Cakewalk forums, "A lot of VST's use NRPN's for their automation parameters"

You're welcome. Just check out my edit above first.

Here you go, it turned out to be fairly logical in the end. I had to change the file extension to .txt, so rename it to .csv and then you can open it in a spreadsheet and sort the columns how you want.

[EDIT] Just for clarification, the numbers in the left column are the ones in the VST parameter name, which is "Enable Stop n". To get the actual raw VST parameter number, add 911.

Originally Posted by: wwzeitler

So how does one figure out this mapping?

The long way! I was planning on writing it out anyway so if you like I'll post it here in text/csv format so you can do what you want with it.

Originally Posted by: wwzeitler

It looks like you need to set up automation for each stop individually. Ugh! Hopefully I'm wrong about that!

Recording all automation including individual stop enable/disable is working for me in Cakewalk by just clicking on one button, I suppose every host has a way of doing it with VST3 plugins somehow. But how do I do individual stop selection via MIDI? My PC monitor doesn't have a touch screen and I can't really use a mouse whilst I'm playing. Well, I think Cakewalk has some limited facility for this, and probably other hosts have ways too, but probably not enough for all the stops. I could also do it by making some modifications to my control surface plugin (isn't open source great!), but that option isn't open to everyone. The player should allow the use of RPN/NRPN for stop selection. Or the computer keyboard (the typing one, that is) itself. Just look at how Hauptwerk does it for some ideas.

BTW, you can easily find the stop number by double-clicking on the manual name (underneath the Play/Combine/Mix section) - the stop selection panel for that manual will then expand and you can see the numbers. However, the stop numbers as presented by the player to the host are sequential from 1 to 120, and they don't map one-to-one onto the stop numbers shown in the player. For example, say I enable "stop 80" from my DAW - that actually maps onto stop 116, Soloflute 4' in the player. So, I could write down the mapping, and even implement it in my control surface plugin so it shows the correct names if I really wanted to

Originally Posted by: wwzeitler

So, if we're dealing with samples, there's no reason why you couldn't have a velocity sensitive organ sample.  (Load one up in Kontakt!) It would feel as weird to me personally as a non-velocity sensitive piano. But you'd venturing more into the realm of synthesizers than trying to reproduce real instruments. Which is fine, if that's what you want to do!

Well, you can route key velocity to the swell function to make the organ player velocity sensitive after a fashion! But if it had been physical possible on real organs, they might have needed far fewer stops. Anyway, I'm perfectly happy with organs not being velocity sensitive, though as I've said, I sometimes do use velocity for combination switching.

Originally Posted by: Pyre

I'm all for historical realism, but I am sure many organists and composers would have loved organs to be velocity-sensitive, so the ability to now add that with a computer interface is wonderful.

I like sounds and techniques to be authentic too but there comes a point where it would just be silly to ignore the capabilities we have now. I only have the one keyboard and so, for example, I use velocity-switching to effectively layer different manuals.

Originally Posted by: Konrad

About the no-sound Positiv:

This is actually down to my inexperience with multi-timbral plugins. My DAW (Cakewalk) by default routes all MIDI input, no matter what channel it is from, to a plugin's channel 1. And by default, the button on the track that sets up or overrides this routing is hidden so I didn't even realise it was there!

[EDIT]

Originally Posted by: Konrad

Please watch the attached video for more info

Ahh - so VO can effectively have up to 12 velocity zones!

Originally Posted by: Angelus

So anyway, I finally have things exactly as I want them

Well, no, not really because I realised I can't use the couplers in this setup without enabling stops in manuals other than the one that the player instance is dedicated to, and that then runs into the whole "combinations only set or clear stops" thing all over again. I was going to write a custom control surface for a Windows tablet that I have to handle the combinations for all the instances, so maybe I can put that between my keyboard and PC to handle the couplers as well. [EDIT] I now have limited coupler capability (so far: Hauptwerk to Pedal, Positiv to Pedal, Positiv to Hauptwerk, Schwellwerk to Hauptwerk and Schwellwerk to Positiv) via a small MIDI utility I wrote

I found another very small issue, though, which is that there's some ugly "zipper noise" each time I stop the playback of a recording whilst a note is sounding. I don't get this on any of the other 50 or so VSTs that I have, including VI Pro. It happens even if all channel FX and IR reverb are disabled.

MPE is a valid subject, but perhaps that discussion would be better in a separate thread rather than discussing it here. I would rather concentrate on usability hits (and of course out-and-out bugs here).

And talking of which, given that I can't just use the player how I want to, I'm having to host several copies of it in my DAW (Cakewalk)...

So anyway, I finally have things exactly as I want them - I can have combinations that only affect the manuals I want (because each track is dedicated to one manual) and the sustain pedal only works on the Pedalwerk.

Originally Posted by: Paul

..so keep it coming!

As you wish

The next thing I found was related to the sustain controller. OK, it's fair to ask why anyone should need sustain on an organ anyway. The reason is that I don't (yet!) have a pedalboard so I split my master keyboard 3 ways. The bottom octave and a bit is assigned to the Pedalwerk, which I have on MIDI channel 5. I also enabled the sustain pedal on that channel only so that I could at least play pedal points (Orgelpunkt). The problem I have is that all the manuals respond to the channel 5 sustain controller even though they are on different channels.

Originally Posted by: badibeat

Vienna Instruments Pro allows to activate key velocity

That was a real help because I could set up what were effectively different combinations for different velocity zones. Maybe with the new combination facility it won't be needed, though.

I finally managed to get it downloaded. At last, this how an organ should be played!

The only real negative comment I have is about the GUI. I really appreciate that it's scalable, but even at larger sizes I'm still having problems with it. Grey-on-grey is a good choice when working in low-light conditions, but for the sake of others like me with eyesight that's not as good as it once was, PLEASE can we have a higher-contrast option? All it would take to significantly improve the usability for me would be for the stop names on the COMBINE page to be in white (or at least, a much brighter shade of grey) if not selected.

A few more small points:

• The octave and suboctave "couplers" aren't working as I would understand them. They seem to affect all manuals, but they should be per manual and the "unison off" feature should not need both the super- and sub-octave to be set. For example, if I play C4 on the Hauptwerk and have it coupled to the Positiv, I should be able to have suboctave, superoctave and/or unison off for the Positiv only so that I can get all possible combinations of C3, C4 and C5 sounding on the Positiv (C3, C4, C5, C3+C4, C4+C5, C3+C5 and C3+C4+C5), while still only having C4 sounding on the Hauptwerk.
• The tremulant has a good sound but perhaps it's a little fast for my liking, so would it be possible to add a speed option as well as depth? I just noticed that all tremulant parameters are available as CCs.
• I seem to be having problems understanding how the swell should work (or not work) across different manuals. OK, the answer to this one is on the MIX page rather than the PLAY page, where I can enable/disable the swell per manual and even assign two expression pedals to different manuals.
• This one is maybe not so small, unless (as is always possible) I'm failing to understand something. So, the combinations all seem to affect all manuals, which would be fine if the combinations weren't just turning each stop on or off. On pre-digital electrified actions, there would typically be banks of three-position switches to set up the combinations with each switch corresponding to a particular stop within a particular combination - up for on, down for off and centre to ignore, but there seems to be no equivalent to this. The way it seems to be now is fine for performance (and in a DAW where I can use multiple instances of the player), but not much good for live improvisation. For improvisation, by definition you don't set everything up in advance, rather you would have combinations that set various sound textures for each manual individually. I can't just open the combinations window and select combinations for each manual/pedals separately because, for example, setting a pedal combination clears all the manual stops.
• A late addition (or rather, a subtraction): Where did the Schwellwerk Septime 1 1/7 go??? I hope it wasn't dropped just because it wouldn't quite fit nicely in the GUI! (BTW, Paul Kopf states in the opening post that there are 116 stops, which is not correct as there were some stops apparently not in good enough condition when the original VI samples were recorded.)

All of that said, I'm immensely pleased that the Positiv Unda Maris D6 sample seems to be fixed now!

Originally Posted by: fratveno

With Stepper I meant two buttons (>> and <<) to advance forward or backward sequentially through the registration slots with single commands (from the sequencer).

Ahh, I have keyboards and synths with that functionality (and indeed would never attempt any sort of live performance without it), but I've never had the evident pleasure of playing a pipe organ that had it.