planet Z

Sent: Friday, May 19, 2000 2:22 PM
To: pulsar-scope@egroups.com; pulsar-mac@egroups.com
Subject: One week of Pulsar v2.0

Hi Lists !

Here are some statements on the recent discussion which tends to calm down fortunately:

CW Support:

First of all, when you ask for answers on questions which arise out of problems that you have with some (Pulsar/SCOPE/PowerSampler) software version, here in this forum, you can be 100% sure that you won't get a response from CreamWare itself. The fact that we have a look in this mailing list from time to time is because it is very interesting to see what you users discuss and think about the various aspects of our products. This already helped us a lot regarding the development of our products because most of you guys have a very good knowledge and very good ideas and we are really thankful for that (!) but we will not offer any tech support here. For direct CW tech support you'll have to use the various ways that are listed in the manuals or under 'Contact' on our web page. Yes, i hear some of you saying: What use is a tech support when i don't get any answer? In contrast to other companies we don't delete any e-mails but, as happened lately, we can't answer all e-mails/support requests when collegues are ill (yes, we're only human here and can get sick from time to time) or when they spend holidays which they deserve, when software releases, Messe preparations and other things take a lot of resources and prevent from answering e-mails and especially when all this comes together etc etc... We apologize for this and assure that we do our best to support every single customer! On the other hand e-mails with a content like: ''my computer crashes, fix this CreamWare'' will simply be ignored (i hope you know why, if not: RTFM). And yes, the support database and much more will come up again soon!

Status of Pulsar v2.0 after one week:
MAC - G4 installation problems:

- Installation on a G4 or Generic can freeze at the end
- ASIO2 modules saved in projects lead to a failure when trying to reload the project
- AKAI CDs not recognized

We tried to fix these errors and the preliminary result (beta) can be downloaded from ftp://creamware.de/software/Pulsar/Mac/

It is important that the Pulsar v2.0 installation is done on a harddisk which doesn't contain blanks (eg 'software' or 'audio'. 'Macintosh HD' eg is not valid!). After a reboot please install the update and Pulsar should run now (you will need to enter the key 42).

- Sound Manager can be problematic but almost any application on a MAC has problems with this and therefore almost any audio application offers ASIO support which works fine with Pulsar. Still, we try to optimize not only this.

PC (and partly MAC as well):

- crashes in BASE.DLL at startup (when a mixer is in the default project). We tried to fix this and the preliminary result can be downloaded from: ftp://creamware.de/software/Pulsar/20to20a/

Simply run SETUP and reboot. A custom made default project which is loaded in 'Desktop mode: OS' can produce strange effects after this little update so we recommend to use 'Desktop mode: Pulsar' for special default projects until a final update for Pulsar is made (so you can regard this little patch as (the often misused expression) 'beta').

- driver version confusion: This doesn't effect the proper function of Pulsar but indeed could have been better. Corrected with upcoming update.

- BigMixer presets: a bug which is still present. Is it really so much important? Why not saving projects including the BigMixer with its special settings and use these projects as the basis? Usually a BigMixer preset is directly related to a very special routing which is present in a project and can't be used for other projects by simply changing the preset, but anyway, we'll fix this some day.

- stuck midi notes: apart from the workarounds (changing midi channel, no of voices etc) other hardware devices have the same problem. We have a look at that.

- audio quality: so far there are only rumors, no concrete hints, descriptions of how to reproduce something like this etc. Fact is we didn't come into your house with soldering iron and change the hardware components and the converters you use while you were out for a beer. We are and always have been very very critical with ourselves when it comes to audio quality and we haven't been able to measure any change from v1.3x to v2.0. So if there is anything, let us know exactly how to reproduce this please and we do anything to fix it immediately. Sound examples welcome too! If you have crackles, clicks etc check the ULLI and driver settings, samplerate settings and the speed of your computer/processor. Don't forget, there are still certain limits, a processor with 500MHz written on it is not a 5GHz processor and applications like sequencers still are dependent on host processors which in the end can be responsible for clicks/crackles.

- PCI Master Overflow: A version-independent phenomenon directly related to the power of a computer. Apart from the hints in the manual all we can say is that a machine with good components (eg what we use mainly: ASUS P3B-F (our favorite right now - G4, 450MHz, 256MB RAM or more for MAC -), Matrox G400/32MB with disabled busmastering, 256MB RAM or more, some fast IBM harddisk (by now it doesn't really matter any more if it's a SCSI or IDE in contrast to times when we only recommeded SCSI harddisks for HDR ('tripleDAT-times', when SCSI was much faster and more reliable than IDE))) :-) (oh, sorry, some ())-)) confusion) does not produce this message frequently. Reverbs, Sample Players, Samplers, some effects use RAM via the PCI bus. Audio tracks played from a sequencer do so too and there's a limit then somewhere which everybody can experience by pushing the computer hard enough. This message reminds me of the message: ''Your computer was not fast enough'' which appears in tripleDAT when you simply try to run more audio tracks than your machine allows. Some audio sequencers are written in a code which doesn't 'care' regarding this issue but with Pulsar it unfortunately turns out which these are....

- after assigning controllers to the BigMixer, saving and reloading the project you can only hear sound coming back again when you move a fader by mouse or controller. Will be fixed.

- some other bugs of course which we know about and which have been, and are, mentioned here.

You have to know that during the development of Pulsar v2.0, besides the new GUI a major issue was the proper function of a multiboard system. We put much efforts in this and are very happy to have almost 100% of these multiboard problems solved. Those of you who know the first versions should see the huge steps we made from v1.0 to 2.0 and as usual we keep on fixing, improving and offering free updates. We can't do everything at once and we can't make a 100% bug free software but we do our best also by listening to you! So please, Pulsar is made for creating new sounds, new music in a user friendly and creative way and everybody who seriously is interested in this without spending tons of money is able to find ways for himself how to handle minor bugs, there are always workarounds ...

In our opinion v2.0 is one of the best versions we ever made and improvements are to come, we're more or less still at the beginning. We apologize for anything that causes inconvenience when it comes to installation problems and real malfunction of the software (which we sure do not intend) and you know that we try to fix these things asap but when you are an owner of Pulsar for let's say more than half a year now and when it still doesn't do what you expected it to do in all aspects then you seriously should think about spending your money and time somewhere else than expressing your disappointment all the time in public forums like this.

Best Regards and Thank you guys who find the right words, we're always open for any kind of constructive criticism!

Rembert Gantke
CreamWare Support
e-mail: rg@creamware.de web: http://www.creamware.de