The other day I wanted a compact polyphonic graphical CV meter, and I wasn’t having much luck finding one. If I don’t care about size, then the Nysthi GraphicMeter is excellent. But it is much bigger and more obtrusive than what I was hoping to find.
Then I suddenly remembered, the VCV VCA-1 has a built in graphic voltmeter, and it is polyphonic - perfect! The only downside is it is unipoler 0-10V only. So bipolar CV would have to be offset +5V, and excessively small or large voltage ranges might have to be scaled to get a decent representation.
When I first patched in the poly cable to the CV input, I was puzzled - it only showed one channel. Then I remembered that the IN input controls the polyphony. So I just have to patch the poly cable to both CV and IN. EDIT-Starting with Rack V2, only CV input is required.
Here is a trivial demo patch using Bogaudio 8FO with output offset +5V to get 8 unipolar signals. I skip every other channel in the VCV Merge module so that I get some separation between the channels in the display.
Starting with Rack 2, the VCA multi-channel display no longer requires input to the IN port. It works fine simply patching a polyphonic cable to the unlabeled CV input port.
oh, that’s pretty cool. Not a criticism, but my taste would be for something bigger that VCA, but smaller (and less ugly) than polyvu. although I guess with the VCA one even though you can’t really tell who is on which channel you can see if anyone is super loud or super quiet…
I’m mostly interested in the VCA as a meter when the patch has plugin constraints. For example, it served me well in my 2021 Day of the Dead entry. I had 6 independent voices that would randomly fade in and out at different times - and it was a convenient display tool to let me know what the state was at any given time. I found it easier to read than the VIZ module.
Yes - I think I noticed that when you released it (recently I think). I like that module.
