Sudden Sound and Interface Change

All of a sudden over the past two weeks instruments I have been using for over a year have changed in sounds quality to be almost unusable. This happened withoutme doing anything, but then I went in to instrument settings and I find a whole new interface for changing sound. This interface is hard to use.

Anyways, has anyone had the same problem? I use an external midi keyboard and the Steinway piano instrument pack.

What operating system are you using n-Track on (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)?
The latest Android update has an issue with a wrong (short) decay/release timing for some sounds including the Steinway Grands. A new update that fixes the issue will be released within this week.
If this is not the issue please send an audio sample or a short video of how the instrument is sounding incorrectly to support@ntrack.com and weā€™ll investigate the issue.

Thanks.

Flavio.

Thanks for the info. I am on Android so I will eagerly await the release.

Ron,

the update is now live on Google Play. Please let me know if you still have problems.

Flavio.

Flavio I have a similar problem for the great n-track pro on iOS. I recently switched interfaces to a Motu M2. n-Track sees it as an input for audio, but it only sees one input (input one on the the left side of the Motu). Iā€™m going to buy a Hyperdrive 6 input usb-c and Iā€™ll see if that makes a difference. Otherwise itā€™s the best DAW on iOS.

This update definitely fixed the problem and got the Steinway pianos back to sounding like pianos. Thanks.

While Iā€™m here, I just wanted to add a bit more about my interface puzzles. I may make this some kind of enhancement request in the future, but for now I was wondering (I only use N-Track on Android):

  1. Why did the interface change? Is this planned? It seems like the sound change interface was added to the same button where previously you would click to change the instrument selection. So now you click that button and you are presented with a big screen to change sound quality with instrument change requiring another click from that same screen. Not looking for complex justification, but because of difficulties in understanding the sound change interface and capabilities it was a bit confusing seeing this. Iā€™m hoping that sound change capabilities will be stabilized and documented better (see below).

  2. So in terms of sound change interfaces, I believe with what I perceive to be this new one there have been three other main interfaces for changing sound quality and from those total of four main interfaces there were two additional optional ways to change the interface. So I believe I have worked with six different interfaces for this capability at some point up until now.

  3. So it has been a bit confusing for me to where to go to change the sound quality and what I will get. The help pages have not been very good in this regard (unless help has been updated recently). One of the confusions has been how to get there. For a week or two at least, I occaasionally would get to a screen that had very detailed table based parameters for changing a lot of sound features. At some point, I could no longer get to these parameters through the ways I was getting to them before. I have been trying to rediscover these parameters on and off for a few months now. It was an entry based interface where you could enter a number directly rather than having to fiddle with on screen graphics. I preferred that, but I donā€™t know if itā€™s somewhere still hidden in the interface.

  4. So besides access (how to get to it), completeness (it seems like multiple methods are simultaneously available and documentation has not helped me in determining how to get to it efficiently) and method (graphical based changing the shape of an object versus entering numbers, for example), my other issue is understanding the high level architecture of the changes I make locally in relation to the sounds I download from your repository. I think this should be documented. For example, if I change the sound quality, is that only relevent for the song in which I change it or does it get added to the sound? In other word, can I make a persistent copy of the sound which I can then apply to new work? This would be a great feature, but there would also need to be some mechanism to identify and label altered versions locally and then to selet them (or not) on new recordings. Also, a good way to revert to default out-of-box sound quickly when you want.

Sorry this is so long. I can go into more detail or put them in a change request forum if you want. It was a bit mixed up with the other problem because when I started getting funny sounds I clicked to change instrument and then see all those sound change buttons tried to fiddle to see if I could correct sound myself. Iā€™m pretty sure the interface changed. I did not see the sound change and access to the instrument change feature combined on a page before.

Thanks.

Iā€™m not sure if Iā€™m following you relative to the 6 interfaces for the instrument sound settings. The user interface (UI) to change between sounds is called the ā€˜Instrument browserā€™ and has not changed recently.

I think youā€™re referring to the n-Track Sampler settings view. That view has been redesigned in the latest Android update (and will be included in the next Windows, Mac & iOS updates), and is now shown on top of the on-screen keyboard, so that you can easily adjust the Sampler settings while simultaneously hearing the results of the changes youā€™re doing (previously it was a separate screen so you needed an external hardware keyboard to play while adjusting the settings).
The Sampler settings now by default shows two XY controllers that allow you to set vibrato and tremolo, plus an ADSR graphycal controller:

You can still go back to the parameter based view (which was previously horizontal sliders, now itā€™s made of knobs subdivided in tabs), by tapping on the 2nd button on the top left of the screen:

The previous version had the settings for the Sampler and the Synth mixed together. The Onda Synth also has now a separate page with different settings:

It is true that some settings that were present in the previous version have been hidden in the latest update. They are mostly settings that were there either for development/testing or were very difficult to understand/adjust. In general the old sampler/synth settings were a bit chaotic. We plan to re-introduce some of these settings (such as for the arpeggiator) with a better UI in one of the next updates.

When you make a change to a setting in the the Synth or Sampler UI, that change is applied only to the track where the Synth/Sampler has been opened from (i.e. that is currently selected).
If you say add an instrument track, select Violin from the Instrument browser, edit the Sampler settings, then create a new track and select the violin again from the Instrument browser, you will again get the default settings for the Violin preset. We may later add the ability to save your custom sound presets.

We plan to post a tutorial video on how to use the new Sampler and Synth UI soon.

Please let me know if you have comments or suggestions for these views.

Flavio.

Hello Helmie,
I wrote you in pvt. :wink:

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Thanks alot for the detailed and helpful response. This clears up a lot.

The six views I was referring to really isnā€™t that important and was approximate anyways. I guess I was just getting at the chaos you refer to as I have gotten to various screens and subscreens (off tabs) in the past that allowed me to change the sound using various types of input paradigms. Now that I know these you show me are what is intended going forward I am fine trying to learn these. I never learned the prior ones anyways, so Iā€™m not requesting any of them to come back.

But now that I have the instrument browser terminology straight, just to clear up one thing, now the instrument browser is accessible if you click where it says ā€œSteinway Grand Liteā€ on the n-Track Sampler page you show, correct? And you get to the N-track Sampler page by clicking the on-screen keyboard icon at the bottom of the main window. So is there a button to get directly to the instrument browser from the main window.? I believe I was able to do that before from the main window, but after the update I got to this n-Track Sampler when I was trying to get to the instrument browser for some reason.

Besides that I need to understand Sampler and Synth capabilities better and when I might use one or the other. So Iā€™ll need to play around before I could provide any feedback. So donā€™t take anything Iā€™ve said necessarily as any kind of enhancement request or bug report. Hopefully, Iā€™ll be able to provide some feedback soon if Ihave any.

Thanks.

Ron,

you can also access the instrument browser tapping on the track instrument button on the left side of the track (you may have to zoom vertically to make the instrument button appear). The ā€˜Steinway Grandā€™ button in the screenshot below.

Flavio.

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