pouët.net

INSIDIOUS 6581 for Reaktor is the best and most accurate emulation of the SID with by far the easiest to use interface. This might well be the very last release as, quite honestly, I can't think of anything else to add to it. I created it to replace my Hardsid Quattro, which didn't have any driver updates after Windows XP, and now very feature I wanted when I started its development 3 years ago has now been completed.

You'll need the full version of Reaktor to use it, but if you have it, INSIDIOUS 6581 is free to download from the Reaktor User Library.

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/reaktor-community/reaktor-user-library/entry/show/8572/

some bold claims there :) what exactly makes it better than reSID (except of course that its a totally different thing in the first place)?

I know that they are bold claims. :)

I have previously spent a lot of time waveform matching between 4 SID chips and INSIDIOUS with an oscilloscope. Before this update I went and did some more comparisons with the real hardware, reSID and INSIDIOUS. I was shocked to discover that reSID has got aliasing on all of its waveforms and doesn't emulate the waveform saturation. I think that's because it has been created from a "replicate the hardware transistors in software" point of view, rather than a "this sounds correct" point of view; it emulates the internals very clinically and "correctly", but doesn't appear to take into account the analogue nature of the D/A on the real SID, nor have a good quality sample rate conversion on the output.

Yeah, reSID, while cycle accurate, still doesn't render at original clock rate and then downsample by default, and it's missing the D/A nonlinearities.

I can imagine tho that in turn, INSIDIOUS doesn't emulate those pesky EG bugs. But as it's not really supposed to be a perfect emulation (nobody's going to play .sid files on it) but rather a faithful soundalike for new music, I think that's pretty ok :)

I was very close to putting in the EG bugs, or at least having them as an option, but there was little point. All that would happen is that anybody using it to make music (i.e. me) would have to add some manual volume hacks to get around them, so it seemed a bit silly to have them in there.

Are there any libs/emulators that do that?

Sounds like something which would fit my current Maschine Mk3 based workflow just fine, gotta give it a try.

Fun thing! :)

Sorry for not reading the manual, but how do I assign bank/patch numbers to sounds? I tried sending patch changes, but it's just selecting stuff from the Delta sound set/bank. I was trying to fake a bass/snare thing.
http://www.kameli.net/~yzi/maailman_siddein_taivas.mp3

I'd like to have a switch between sounds. Key switch? Velocity switch?

It supports standard bank change (CC#0 and CC#32) and program change commands.
The best way to do it is to keep your sounds in one specific bank, switch to that bank at the start of your track, then just use Program Changes. That's what the Delta MIDI file does.

To create your own banks and patches is a standard Reaktor thing. You'll have to go to edit mode and then go to the Snapshot tab where you can create new banks and store new sounds. It's Chapter 5 of the "Diving Deeper" document in Reaktor 6. You can access it from the Help menu.

ehrm ehrm. what else do you think it does? (how else could it be cycle accurate really)

I haven't checked the code, but it could run itself with cycle accuracy internally but only output a sample on a sample boundary of the output sample rate. This would produce aliasing.

sure it *can* do this (an obvious speed optimization). however, in VICE it is by default clocked at system clock (like on a real C64) and produces one sample per clock. (i have no idea, nor do i care, what it does standalone)

also the DAC non linearities are emulated accurately, see here

(meh no edit button)

btw, did you also check against beros micro64? pretty sure he at least has some high quality downsampling (admittedly much better than what VICE does) :) he is missing some of the most recent envelope fixes though :) (are you emulating the envelope generator correctly, including bugs?)

I think I got what the problem was. If I send a bank change (with a clip's "Sub" bank selector in Ableton Live), then the MIDI channel setting for that SID channel is changed to 1, which is stored in the patch, meaning that only channel 1 is usable. But if I send a program change alone, then the MIDI channel setting is preserved.



Is it possible to stop the MIDI channel settings from changing? So I could use all SID channels of one Insidious instance, not just channel 1. Without creating an entire set of patches with identical settings except for the MIDI channel. Or using a separate Reaktor instance for each fake SID channel.

Groepaz: EG bugs were discussed already.

So, here's how you select a patch in Ableton Live

And here's how I separated patch changes and actual notes to separate tracks, so it's easy to copy/paste the patch-changes, independently of the notes.

Thanks for pointing that out. The MIDI channels are not supposed to be saved with the patches, but I've just looked and they are currently being so. I'll fix that.

Looks really nice and easy to use, will defo be giving this a run.