FLAG (free) Thorns (Multiband Saturation)

Hi Again,

Jonas here, I just released my third module for VCV Rack. It’s a Multi-Band Saturation Effect with simple controls.

The audio is split up in 8 bands, individually saturated, and then summed together.

The “tone” control changes where the split points are, making the high or lower bands “larger” thus more saturated.

The HQ control changes the internal oversampling settings. (higher oversampling, fancier filters)

Because of the oversampling (and to maintain decent performance) the module introduces a small delay, about 1ms.

Here are some examples of how it can sound on different material:

303:

Bassline-Riff:

Kick:

Drumloop (w. bass-line):

Hope you like it!

Jonas

27 Likes

thank you, great addition :+1:

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Oh, nice! Thanks so much for this!

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Thanks Jonas, this sounds great!

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Excellent! :grinning:

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what a cool idea. That’s super clever with the tone control - I much prefer that to 8 separate finicky controls. btw - you’ve got plenty of room - why not attenuverters on all the CV inputs?

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Thanks for the kind words! Re attenuverters: Good idea… I was thinking what to do with all that space :slight_smile: I was considering adding a pre and post saturation… basically do as many non-linear things as possible when I have the audio up-sampled… but yeah attenuverters might be nice too…

Dude, this sounds awesome! Thanks for the module! :clap: :+1:

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Hi Squinky, in the latest version (1.2.1) I added attenuverters. Also made the tone-knob more detailed ( subtle change, you would only notice when you modulated tone very slowly )

6 Likes

I noticed the most recent version of Thorns, Stems and the free Oppressor have no GUI on Linux? They show as blank space in the module browser, and also when loaded in the rack. The modules themselves do load, they are just 100% invisible (you can right click the blank spot in the rack and get the context menu, for example).

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Fine here on Ubuntu Studio.

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Thanks. To be sure, I deleted FLAG Free and reinstalled from the VCV library, the GUIs still don’t show up. Using a Debian 12 based Linux system here. FLAG Free are the only modules that show this behavior here (I have most of the library installed, both free and premium.)

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I’m seeing this in the log:

[14.452 warn src/widget/FramebufferWidget.cpp:219 render] Framebuffer of size (inf, 190.000000) could not be created for FramebufferWidget 0x10ebf8b0.
[14.452 info src/app/Browser.cpp:201 createPreview] Creating module widget FLAG Oppressor
[14.452 warn src/window/Svg.cpp:112 load] Failed to load SVG /home/guenon/.Rack2/plugins-lin-x64/FLAG-Free/res/oppressor.svg
[14.452 warn src/widget/FramebufferWidget.cpp:219 render] Framebuffer of size (inf, 190.000000) could not be created for FramebufferWidget 0xca096b0.
[14.452 info src/app/Browser.cpp:201 createPreview] Creating module widget FLAG Stems
[14.452 warn src/window/Svg.cpp:112 load] Failed to load SVG /home/guenon/.Rack2/plugins-lin-x64/FLAG-Free/res/stems.svg
[14.452 info src/window/Svg.cpp:28 loadFile] Loaded SVG /home/guenon/.Rack2/plugins-lin-x64/FLAG-Free/res/components/flag_button_7_0.svg
[14.452 info src/window/Svg.cpp:28 loadFile] Loaded SVG /home/guenon/.Rack2/plugins-lin-x64/FLAG-Free/res/components/flag_button_7_1.svg
[14.452 warn src/widget/FramebufferWidget.cpp:219 render] Framebuffer of size (inf, 190.000000) could not be created for FramebufferWidget 0xca0bcc0.

Edit: argh, sorry about the jumbled line breaks. And thanks to pachde below for the code fences remark :slight_smile:

1 Like

The forum is markdown, so edit your post to wrap your log in code fences: three back ticks on a separate line before and after your log snippet, like this:

```
your log
```

From the symptoms, I was expecting to see SVG load failures, and that’s what you have. Do these files exist on your machine?

It looks like the distribution package may not have unzipped correctly. Assuming that it’s not a matter of a lack of disk space, you can unsubscribe, then make sure that the folder for Flag-free is gone, re-subscribe, then update. Take note of what’s in the log for when Rack restarts the first time after the update, as this will have messages about the installation of the plugin.

3 Likes

Thanks, yeah, found the issue:

I made sure another time, and did it the way you suggested, i.e. also unsubscribing instead of just deleting the FLAG-Free directory and redownloading. The package extracts fine, but I’m still seeing the same errors.

Extracting the package:

[0.230 info src/plugin.cpp:262 extractPackages] Extracting package /home/guenon/.Rack2/plugins-lin-x64/FLAG-Free-2.2.4-lin-x64.vcvplugin
[0.262 info src/plugin.cpp:164 loadPlugin] Loading plugin from /home/guenon/.Rack2/plugins-lin-x64/FLAG-Free
[0.263 info src/plugin.cpp:235 loadPlugin] Loaded FLAG-Free 2.2.4

---

Still seeing these errors:

[88.457 info src/app/Browser.cpp:201 createPreview] Creating module widget FLAG Oppressor
[88.457 warn src/window/Svg.cpp:112 load] Failed to load SVG /home/guenon/.Rack2/plugins-lin-x64/FLAG-Free/res/oppressor.svg
[88.457 warn src/widget/FramebufferWidget.cpp:219 render] Framebuffer of size (inf, 190.000000) could not be created for FramebufferWidget 0x9e93d20.

However, checking the filesystem, the svg files for these modules have their names capitalized. They are Oppressor.svg instead of oppressor.svg, and so on. I manually renamed them to lowercase, and now the GUIs show like before.

I pulled the plugin archive and peeked in, and yep, the files show capitalized names there.

3 Likes

Interesting. Seems FLAG dev needs to make some fixes.

@jnorberg

image

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Indeed, it seems they work on your system because you still had the correctly named files in that directory, too :), yeah. When installing fresh, the GUIs don’t show, as it only has the capitalized svg files.

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Oh, thanks for pointing that out… I have indeed been renaming things… (always a bad idea) and did not test on Linux… I could probably try and blame “git and windows” here, but that wouldn’t help anyone…

Locally fixing the names should fix it. should be:

thorns.svg
oppressor.svg
stems.svg

It will be fixed in the next update.

3 Likes