[PD] oscillators (osc~ / cycle~) not working well in FM?

[Matt Barber]

​Right, there are good reasons to want that behavior, but should it be the
default in a program that aspires to be "deterministic"? ​It's not that
hard to add microscopic DC if that's what you want, or add a tiny, tiny bit
of low-pass-filtered noise to you oscillator to make it act more like
acoustic gear.

The other thing is, Pd isn't only an audio application. The quality of an
oscillator is context dependent, and "how does it sound" isn't always the
most important consideration. "Can I predict how this will behave?" is the
more important question much of the time.

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 11:31 PM, Robert Esler <robert at urbanstew.org> wrote:

> I think you just found one of the nuances I’m referencing.  Think of
> analog gear, none of the sinusoids are anywhere near perfect, yet we still
> like how they sound.
> We’ve known about these issues of microscopic DC, phasing, etc of unit
> generators for a long time.   I recall an old pd thread explaining how
> [osc~] is working:
> http://music.columbia.edu/pipermail/music-dsp/2004-november/061991.html
> Moreover, we’ve all lived with [osc~] for what, about 15-20 years?  It’s
> legacy code.
>      I’m probably being so adamant because I’ve been reading the "Ugly
> Duckling" to my daughter, but aren’t children’s stories also lessons in
> computer synthesis too?
>
>
> On Nov 23, 2015, at 9:05 PM, Alexandre Torres Porres <porres at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> moreover, I really doubt there's any particular nuance that comes out of
> this... or that a fix would break it. All I know is that it's preventing FM
> patches from achieving stable waveforms as they should.
>
> 2015-11-24 0:31 GMT-02:00 Matt Barber <brbrofsvl at gmail.com>:
>
>> I usually agree in cases like these, but a sinusoid oscillator with
>> built-in DC is not the expected behavior in most any synthesis environment.
>> Notice how everyone in this thread was genuinely surprised by this behavior.
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 9:20 PM, Robert Esler <robert at urbanstew.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I would call this more of a feature than a bug that needs fixing.  I
>>> would hope that [osc~] and [cos~] don't change, simply because many of us
>>> like these little nuances.
>>>   If it is really bothersome then perhaps create a new version, but
>>> let’s not change a legacy object.  A simple “fix” might break someone
>>> else’s patch.
>>>
>>> Just my opinion,
>>> -Rob
>>>
>>> Did you make it work in a patch? if so, can you share it? :)
>>>
>>> Maybe someone could work on a "fix" on the source and send it to miller,
>>> perhaps this could be updated for the next version release (0.47).
>>>
>>> cheers
>>>
>>> 2015-11-22 19:32 GMT-02:00 Matt Barber <brbrofsvl at gmail.com>:
>>>
>>> Yeah, so all that really needs to be done is to force symmetry by copying
>>> the 0-pi phase inverted to the pi-2pi phase + guard points for
>>> [tabosc4~].
>>> I did that and it's been stable for 3.5 hours. It wouldn't be too hard to
>>> fix this in the Pd source; it would be a marked improvement to [osc~]
>>> even
>>> with the 512-pt table and linear interpolation.
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>
>
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