Audiobro LASS 3

[Guy Rowland]

Thanks you two - yes, much better now on the faster and rebow sections - so auto-divisi doesn't play well with some of the new scripting?

[Lawrence]

Good catch Duncan.

Thanks for re-rendering, Luke. That faster passage sounds much better.

I've always found that LASS 2.5 was my most agile string set. I don't think 3 sounds any better in that way, but it was pretty much fine in 2.5.

[Duncan Krummel]

The auto-divisi has a short, but settable, window to determine if the notes are meant to be legato, disconnected, or chords. My guess is overlap caused the auto-divisi to kick in. If using this, I usually opt to hold the sustain pedal down and play as staccato as possible. The sustain pedal automatically enables legato transitions for disconnected notes. It takes a few minutes to work it out in the hands, but it's actually pretty nicely useable for just mucking around.

[Guy Rowland]

This was an interesting email Audiobro sent to customers:

Hello,

You may have noticed our servers are down.

We are overwhelmed and grateful for the high demand for our LASS 3, MSS, and Genesis products. To meet demand, we tried to upgrade our servers to better manage the load, but it’s taking longer than expected. For this reason, we will be emailing you all when the server is back online. Also, because of this interruption, we will be extending the Black Friday/Cyber Monday Sale through December 6th, 2021. Of course, anyone who needs to complete their downloads will get a new download.

So, to summarize:

We're overwhelmed and grateful for the demand
Tried to upgrade servers to accommodate but it's taking longer than anticipated
We will email you when the servers are back up
We'll extend sales and pricing until next Monday (Dec. 6th)
Anyone whose download got interrupted will get a new one

Thank you for your patience and support.

Best regards,
­
Your Audiobro Team

I found myself delighted to read this. I think Audiobro are a terrific company, and I want them to succeed. With MSB and MSS, I've felt they haven't gone down as well as perhaps they'd have liked, and it bothered me that financially things might be tough. I take this as a sign that their pricing has aligned with demand, and hopefully they'll be on a strong footing going forward.

I still don't think LASS 3 is for me, but I always want to know whatever they're up to.

[Jaap]

This was an interesting email Audiobro sent to customers:

Hello,

You may have noticed our servers are down.

We are overwhelmed and grateful for the high demand for our LASS 3, MSS, and Genesis products. To meet demand, we tried to upgrade our servers to better manage the load, but it’s taking longer than expected. For this reason, we will be emailing you all when the server is back online. Also, because of this interruption, we will be extending the Black Friday/Cyber Monday Sale through December 6th, 2021. Of course, anyone who needs to complete their downloads will get a new download.

So, to summarize:

We're overwhelmed and grateful for the demand
Tried to upgrade servers to accommodate but it's taking longer than anticipated
We will email you when the servers are back up
We'll extend sales and pricing until next Monday (Dec. 6th)
Anyone whose download got interrupted will get a new one

Thank you for your patience and support.

Best regards,
­
Your Audiobro Team

I found myself delighted to read this. I think Audiobro are a terrific company, and I want them to succeed. With MSB and MSS, I've felt they haven't gone down as well as perhaps they'd have liked, and it bothered me that financially things might be tough. I take this as a sign that their pricing has aligned with demand, and hopefully they'll be on a strong footing going forward.

I still don't think LASS 3 is for me, but I always want to know whatever they're up to.

Exactly my thoughts Guy when I read this email. Likewise I have decided for now that I stick to LASS 2.5 as I am just happy with it and for less intimate string sounds I actually dig up these days MSS. Took a while to let it grow on me, but starting to really like it and more often then not I reach for MSS instead of CSS. But at the moment I don't see any added value of having LASS in the new engine (though that engine is stunning!) as I only use LASS for very occasional projects these days. But I am very fond of Audiobro as company and I hope this is actually a sort of good news for them.

[kpc]

I agree with you both. Happy to see AudioBro (hopefully) doing well with this release. I love LASS and use it all the time. I opted not to get MSS at the release, for various reasons. But I have friends who have it and really like it. I might pick it up someday if I really get back to writing for strings.

I just ordered V3, waiting to see if it will download. I will kind of miss the ARC a bit - clever bit of programming I always thought.

[Jaap]

I am not always a man of my word hehe. I purchased MSB today and while at it I added also LASS 3 as it could be useful for something I have to work on (my inner demon told me this...)
That said, it's really a fantastic update to be honest! Load up and play and it sounds so lovely. I know a lot dislike the sound of LASS, but I always loved it. I love that roughness and harshness and those shorts, they are so nice and powerfull and the new engine works like a charm for them.
The First chairs seems to sound a little less harsh (in a good way), maybe it are my ears today, dunno, but I like it

[nahnou]

Hi,
Very nice update. Anyone using Lass with Cubase? Cubase doesn't close when i try to quit a project containing Lass 3, each time i have to quit using the Task Manager.. Anyone one experimenting the same issue?

[Muziksculp]

Not a single in-depth review, or walkthrough of LASS 3 has been posted on YouTube yet, I wonder why ?

[scherzo]

Hi,
Very nice update. Anyone using Lass with Cubase? Cubase doesn't close when i try to quit a project containing Lass 3, each time i have to quit using the Task Manager.. Anyone one experimenting the same issue?

Hi nahnou,

Since no one else responded.... I don't have LASS3, but I do have Modern Scoring Brass which I believe uses the same engine, and it does indeed give me the same problem here. Unfortunately this is a long-standing known bug in Cubase, at least on Windows - some plugins/libraries will prevent it from shutting down normally.

As far as I am aware, there is no real solution at this time except hosting the problematic stuff in Vienna Ensemble Pro instead. I've just gotten used to the fact that I have to force-quit Cubase more often than not - it's stupid and annoying, but it's never really broken anything for me so I just deal with it.

One thing to be mindful of though is that when you force-quit Cubase, changes made to preferences/key commands/etc will not be saved. So whenever I do non-trivial changes to my configuration, I try to do it in a blank project (or with no project open) and then restart Cubase to make sure the changes persist before I get back to work.

[Lawrence]

FWIW, I usually have to force quit VEP 6 after it has been connected to Cubase 10.5 for a while. This is on Mac.

[nahnou]

scherzo, Lawrence, THANK you very much!!
It seems to be a ram issue, for some reasons Cubase cannot clear RAM before quiting..

[Guy Rowland]

Thread revival - I’m thinking of making the jump, even though I have everything just as I like it in the template. 3 reasons for a change of heart:

1. Since this is a separate install, I can put it even on a different drive and then I can be 100% sure it won’t disturb anything. This means that:

2. If I want to load LASS into a project ad-hoc that doesn’t use my template, LASS 3 will be infinitely preferable.

3. This will be a great laptop library. 23gb - fabulous! I DEFINITELY can’t face LASS 2.5 on the MBP.

Incidentally, while many don’t care for the port and the glisses, I find the latter in particular a huge strength. I have one piece that 100% relies on them. In the past decade, there’s been a lot of high profile scores that make uses of glisses, and if a library doesn’t have them, it can’t do it (obviously).

How happy are LASS 3 owners after all this time?

[Guy Rowland]

After finding some issues with the Sordinos in my template, a hour fighting with the old ARC made me go "oh to hell with it", and I am now the proud owner of LASS 3.

It is, of course, massively easier to use, though still with some Audiobro idiosyncrasies. I've decided that, aside from changing the keyswitches, I'm just going with the defaults on everything this time and see how I go (for MSB I ended up editing the script itself with direction from Audiobro so I could make long and short nkis that didn't take double the memory). My old stuff is still there if I need it after all. Love that you can set your keyswitches, save as a default and then they load into every other instance. Sanity-saving.

[Lawrence]

I bought the upgrade but found the interface almost as arcane as the LASS 2.5 and haven’t dug into it very far. I haven’t replaced the old LASS in my template.

I opened 3 today and found one thing strange-it seems everything is set to poly legato? Is there an easy way to switch it to mono legato?

[Guy Rowland]

I opened 3 today and found one thing strange-it seems everything is set to poly legato? Is there an easy way to switch it to mono legato?

It's dependent on 2 controls - Legato has to be on an Auto Divisi has to be off.

[Lawrence]

Thanks Guy. I finally found the switch to turn auto-divisi off under “Ensemble.” This wasn’t obvious to me.

[Guy Rowland]

Thanks Guy. I finally found the switch to turn auto-divisi off under “Ensemble.” This wasn’t obvious to me.

I hear you, I too think all the most important controls would have been better on the single page. Still, having re-wrestled with the original ARC recently (which surely stood for ARCANE) it’s massively, massively better. It took days to set it up originally, this time everything was in place in an hour or so - so great that I can copy all the settings from one instrument to another. I also like that I can now just load it ad-hoc.

That said, one other thing I’d like is a simple front page control that had the A/B/C/FC sections on buttons you could just highlight what gets used, with everything else done under the hood. There is a similar thing in the ensemble tab, but it doesn’t work quite that way or that simply.

[Guy Rowland]

A little heads up to LASS 3 owners - I've been getting some serious problems with LASS corrupting Cubase projects which crash on attempted launch. I wrote to Audiobro, who confirmed this is an issue, and they're going to send me a link to a new beta that fixes the problem - unfortunately the link they sent doesn't work, so they need to resend.

Even with the new beta however, this won't work by just installing it. Old instances need to be replaced to be safe. So there's an obvious problem there - if it crashes on attempted load, then you are still stuck.

The only way I've been able to part-recover a lost project is to load Cubase without any third party plugins (hold down Ctrl/Cmd-Alt-Shift when you launch the DAW). The project then loads with all plugins missing. I then delete the offending instance from the VST rack, save as a new project and restart Cubase normally. I then add Kontakt back at the rack and relink the old instance's midi channels (keep your eyes and ears open - like almost everything with Cubase this can be slightly flaky, one time it auto-reassigned stuff to the other instance of Kontakt I had in the project).

You'll have spotted the problem there - you lose any other instruments that were in that instance of Kontakt, so have to remember what you used and manually set them up. What I had taken to doing latterly was having LASS in its own instance of Kontakt with the five main instruments in, so I at least wouldn't lose other stuff.

A bit of a major howler from Audiobro this, but they're good people and at least have a sort-of fix to hand (apparently it has something to do with too many Kontakt parameters being saved with the project). If you think you could use this version ahead of an official release, I'd write to Audiobro support requesting it.

I'll report back here once I've installed and replaced everything in my recent projects. I usually use LASS in my VE Pro template, it's only recently I've been using instances ad hoc in Cubase or I'd have stumbled into it earlier I expect. Also most projects DO open, I have no idea what specific thing causes some to corrupt.

[Lawrence]

Sort of glad I’ve been too lazy to load into my template/use, but are you saying that it works ok in VEP?

[Guy Rowland]

Sort of glad I’ve been too lazy to load into my template/use, but are you saying that it works ok in VEP?

It has been fine in VEP, but that's likely because I work uncoupled. It seems the issue is to do with saving and loading.

[Muziksculp]

Hi,

In this video, showing LASS 3 in action, you can see he setup an instance of Kontakt, with the multiple instruments from LASS 3, I guess he has the Auto Divisi ON, for each String Section part. Then he has plays them in real time, all set to receive on the same midi channel, or to omni.

Does anyone know what the Divisi-Settingst for this type of Divisi real time performance to work properly in realtime ?
in LASS 3 ?

I love the sound he gets playing it in real time.



Any videos or help in working with the LASS 3 Divisi System would be appreciated.

Divisi is supposed to be much easier to work with , and setup compared to the more complicated setup process for Divisi in LASS 2.5, But, I could not find a videos explaining how to use Divisi in LASS 3.

Any feedback/help about this detail would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Muziksculp

[Guy Rowland]

I think what he's doing in that video (he doesn't say or I missed it) is loading up every main instrument and assigning to the same midi channel (except for basses which he forgot). He'd also have to have unified the keyswitches, which is pretty simple using the switcher's save / load, and I think switched legato off and sordino on, with his own reverb / spatialisation.

If that's the case, it's still a bodge. This will use auto-divisi of each instrument to play up to 3 notes, but this will be limited by the instrument's playable range. If you play 3 notes in both hands across the keyboard, the right hand three will sound on violins I and II, violas probably and maybe the cello. For the left hand it's likely no violins, some viola maybe and so on. So it's not a very good system, but it still sounds nice in the video don't it?

It's actually a bit of a failing of LASS 3 is that there is no multi script, which is what the ARC used to do. That was horrifically complex, but it's shame they didn't do some multis with a simple multiscript in that could handling splitting the divisis on a logical per-instrument basis, also adding first chairs. You'd need to use Divisimate otherwise.

Whilst mucking around, I realised I've been making life unnecessarily taxing on my machine sometimes. If I want to use LASS in the good old fashioned way of 5 monophonic instruments, I'm better off using patches in the Full Sections (Divisi Mixdowns) folder - just streaming one set of samples not 3. It's a bit silly that these patches default to polyphonic imo, but I guess it's easy enough to disable them then save the patches as a default state (also with my keyswitch map too). Once I'm sent the fixed patches I'll get on with this I think.

[Guy Rowland]

PS - whoops, missed an email from Sebastian at Audiobro who has sent the beta patches. On it!

[Guy Rowland]

Oh that's a shame - I'm getting crashes on these beta patches when trying to reload. So not fixed yet - back to Sebastian.