Microfreak : lots of presets don't load

[fredditch]

Hello,
I'm on Ubuntu Studio, and when I want to load some presets, I'm having a lot of errors (with the message : 'terminé avec des erreurs' meaning 'finished with some errors' in french). For example, when I try to load the content of the free presets sound bank 'back to the 80's' available on the Arturia website, only the same 14 of 32 .mbp preset files will be loaded. I would have thought that there were some errors in these remaining 18 files that don't load, but when I try on a Windows computer with the Arturia Midi Control Center, there is no issue.
I'm I the only one to experience this ?

[dagargo]

Perhaps Elektroid is pushing too many operations too fast.

Do the uploads work when you do it one by one instead of sending a batch?

[fredditch]

Nope, when I upload presets one by one, I have the same error with the ones that didn't work in the batch...
And no problem with the ones that worked.
And after each operation, error or not, the microfreak side of the windows stay disabled and grayed during 15 sec approx.

[dagargo]

I can confirm your issue.

I'm working on it right now but I have no idea of what's going on with these presets yet.

[dagargo]

I think I've found the issue.

As most of the code is reverse engineered, some assumptions might be wrong as in this case.

When loading any type of serialized data, a check was performed over a part of the data believed to be all zeros but it is not the case for the failing presets. More precisely, I'm talking about the last part of these lines. Any value seems to be right.

$ cat 001-Solidtrax\ Back\ To\ The\ 80s\ V2_2-A1.mbp | head
22 serialization::archive 10 0 4 4 1844 9 Paid Them 5 0 0 18 110000100000000000 [...]

$ cat 003-Solidtrax\ Back\ To\ The\ 80s\ V2_2-A3.mbp 
22 serialization::archive 10 0 4 4 1844 9 Low Rider 0 0 0 18 000000000000000000 [...]

A fix for this has been pushed to branch fix-microfreak-preset-upload. (I've also run all the integration tests and seem to be right.)

Could you, please, test it and report back?

[fredditch]

Tested and approved ! No more errors, thanks for your wonderful work !
Do you think there is something to do to reduce the latence between each operation ?
The device window is disabled during approx. 15 sec after switching on the Microfreak, and again after each upload...

[dagargo]

Great is working better now!

Thanks for reporting and for your words. I really appreciate when Elektroid is useful for someone.

Branch merged in #215.

---

The 15 s wait is the time it takes to read the whole 512 presets. The only thing I can try to do is decreasing the waiting time between messages. The reason for the waiting times is just not putting devices under too much stress because sometimes crash, reply with unexpected responses or just do nothing. All this pauses are device and operation independent.

I'll try to reduce this during the weekend but I already tried to be as fast as possible while being reliable.

[dagargo]

Actually, the rest time between each preset item list was 30 ms, which is way higher than needed.

It seems that at some point I used the wrong constant for this. I've just fixed this directly into master in 9455c70.

Examples of typical execution times before and after the change.

$ time elektroid-cli microfreak:preset:ls 1:/ 2>&1 > /dev/null 
real	0m17,192s
user	0m0,046s
sys 	0m0,020s

$ time elektroid-cli microfreak:preset:ls 1:/ 2>&1 > /dev/null 
real	0m4,320s
user	0m0,000s
sys 	0m0,053s

The GUI will be even faster as the backend check is performed only when selecting the device. Listing all presets is about 5x faster than before.

@fredditch, try it out and let me know if this improves your experience so I can close this issue.

[fredditch]

Hey, sorry for the reaction time, I was a little busy these last days.
So I checked the last fixed version, tested and approved !
The execution time is really lowered, and it's a pleasure to use the app now.
Thanks again for your great work ! I'm very, very happy to have a linux management solution for my synth :-)
I have an Elektron Model:Cycle too, can't wait to test it with Elektroid !

[dagargo]

Don't worry! Reaction time was right. 🙂

Really happy to help other people manage their devices under Linux. 🙂