Adjusting LFO's frequency manually while playing notes garbles its output

Bugs
#1

When you play notes to Vital and adjust an LFO’s speed at the same time the LFO’s position gets randomized.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Connect a slow LFO to something clearly audible, say a filter, and make the modulation range quite big. Set it to sync mode.
  2. Connect a macro to that LFO’s frequency if you want to do it with a macro
  3. Play fast notes and adjust the LFO speed slightly directly, or through a macro or any midi binding while doing so. The LFO’s phase position gets randomized. The randomization can be also seen visually on the LFO.

This doesn’t happen when automating the speed. I also haven’t been able to reproduce this by modulating the speed, but I’ve encountered this kind of behavior when modulating the LFOs and playing notes, so I suspect this or something similar affects the LFOs even when modulating them. Manual frequency adjustment however does that for me consistently.

Vital 1.5.5, standalone and VST3, Windows 10

#2

Wondering if it’s a side effect of vital calculating the modulations with the new lfo speed, therefore the spot jumps around at every new calculation, which may be occurring a bunch, hence the garbled? Like the worst gps rerouting the lfo has ever seen Haha
Just a thought

Edit: does adjusting Vitals quality have any effect? Not sure it will but just wondering…

1 Like
#3

Yes, it’s entirely possible. It sucks big time that Vital doesn’t have free running LFOs that would avoid this kind of behavior. Weirdly this doesn’t happen with automation, but maybe it’s just calculated with a higher resolution or so.

I highly doubt that oversampling has anything to do with this but maybe I’ll just see when I’m at Vital again. Doesn’t take much more than couple of minutes.

#4

Agree free running lfos would be awesome, not too hard with ableton (assume bitwig also easy) to get one going but hey every click saved is appreciated Haha

#5

They’re still not Vital’s LFOs and I can’t modulate them inside the patch or assign a patch macro to them or remap them… UNLESS I connect a DAW LFO to Vital’s LFO’s phase slider. Then all that’s out of my reach inside Vital is the speed of the LFO, which is kinda crucial tbh, but at least there is a partially usable and bit hacky workaround.

#6

I think you’re right about Vital calculating new positions for new notes. The effect stops when adjusting tempo synced LFO so little that it doesn’t have a real effect on the speed.

Ofc this could be seen as a design choice instead of a bug, but as Vital doesn’t have free running LFOs we really don’t have an LFO that could change speed and output consistent modulation curve without retriggering. But surely we can kinda expand Vital’s randomization capabilities with this one somewhat as there’s only one note on random and four random LFOs, which isn’t much tbh.