Alright, scratch all of the above for the Zero Crossings mode. Here is a new version (updated in the repo) that directly uses an estimate of frequency in order to set the Controller value. Previously I was thinking in terms of a specific distortion effect, so I used the zero crossings directly and made the Controller into a pseudo LFO, but by using frequency instead of raw zero crossing count, it made the Controller much more usable.
Here’s a demo.
Notice that the Controller’s value is being written to the automation lane on the fly. It is a bit noisy as expected from a crude pitch detector using zero crossings, but it seems to be tracking frequency well enough. At the beginning of the ZX Input bus, there is a band-pass filter to help out the zero crossing detector.
Also, unlike the previous video, there is no cheating happening here by swapping the audio. This video shows the actual live recording of the playthrough, crackles and all, that was captured by OBS, even at near 100% DSP usage.
I’ve made again a max-simple experiment for my personal understanding of the default Zero Crossings Controller behavior. I’ve decided to test how the Controller detects processed/rendered signals (Helm synth with sine-wave oscillators) - looks rather similar! As I understood - I can use this mode also with the processed signals from any synth track (no need to render, with the exception of saving some cpu) Here’s a video:
For understanding additional options I need some further experiments.
Thank you, as usual!
Nice vid! You’re seeing the new behavior where the Controller value is proportional to the frequency, and yes, you can use it on any audio source.
The clamping you’re seeing at the top is due to the new parameter “zx max (Hz)” which dictates the maximum frequency that can be calculated and also determines what corresponds to the Controller value = 1.
Here’s a screenshot of your experiment using different settings for the zx max parameter. In this, it’s the same ramp using midi pitch bend over ±48 semitones repeated four times, but the zx max parameter is set to 1000, 2000, 8000, and finally 200 Hz between the four runs. You can see that the ramp smashes into the ceiling at a different time within each ramp.
EDIT – thanks to your video, I noticed a small bug in the clamping behavior. In this screenshot, there are two Morph Controllers. The top one uses the old logic and has all sorts of noise when the signal frequency is higher than zx max, and the lower Controller uses the corrected version that discards higher frequencies.
