Notes on my first try....
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I recently stumbled on HISE, and it looks like it might be an ideal way to build some projects I have. So I decided to jump into the tutorials and see what happened. I’m definitely a dilettante with this stuff, with most of my programming experience coming from C74 Max, JavaScript/NodeJS, and a bit of Python and Lua and other tinkering.
Here’s my notes.
After one try at the tutorial, I found that I should start with the latest release from GitHub, not from the downloads page on the HISE site:
https://github.com/christophhart/HISE/releases
The Mac package currently claims that it is version 2.0, but the About window in HISE Standalone shows “version 1.6.0 (19 Nov 2018).”If you go through the tutorial, the Interface section is a bit wonky. This is addressed in the forum
https://forum.hise.audio/topic/985/tutorial-iv-adding-interface-elements-does-not-generate-code
https://forum.hise.audio/topic/389/keyboard-missing-in-the-designer/6
Though, in the end, I was unable to make sense of the “FloatingTile” interface elements so I could add presets and keyboard. I will have to dig in more to understand those.I was able to latch the Reverb Amount to the ReverbSendGain and the Room Size to the Reverb, which was all pretty neat. I didn’t bother fleshing everything else out - I just wanted a couple parameters to work.
Exporting to a VST was trickier!
In my settings, I always got an error that my BundleIdentifier of com.sensel.HISEtest was an incorrect format. I eventually just ignored it, and did not set it to default. I ended up setting it in Projucer anyway (see below).
I am on macOS Sierra, so I couldn’t use IPP. Disabling this was pretty confusing. I followed the instructions at https://github.com/christophhart/HISE, but every time I tried to export from HISE Standalone, it failed. I directly edited the Projucer file, but export always rebuilt it with the IPP paths enabled. I ended up compiling from Projucer, pressing the “Save and Open in IDE” icon and then building from Xcode. This created the Debug version of the plugin, but did not rebuild the regular version. This is unclear to me why it only created that one. I didn’t see any relevant errors.
I finally got to try out the plugin in Bitwig Studio 2.4. It gave the warning to find the samples, which was all very confusing - Part 5 of the tutorial seems to miss some steps about this.
I somehow eventually stumbled on the need to generate an hr1 file using “Export Samples from Installer” in HISE Standalone. Once I did that and was able to point my plugin to that file, the plugin worked. However, only the generators made sound. It wasn’t until I deleted the plugin and reloaded it in Bitwig 2.4 that I was able to hear the samples playback.All that said, it’s pretty exciting to see how I can build a sample-based plugin pretty quickly with this. It a bit more work than Kontakt, but it’s definitely more powerful and will likely provide a better experience for end-users. The tutorials could use a bit of cleanup and extra links, but it's impressive that I got this far.
Looking forward to trying more!
Peter
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Also unclear to me is how to save a project. I just quit HISE Standalone, and it gave me an error that it unintentionally crashed. When I reopened, and tried to open the project I created from following the tutorial, all the interface design was gone! Probably an RTFM situation!
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Your not alone...although the forum search is handy. +1 on the bundle identifier issue.
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@pnyboer said in Notes on my first try....:
The Mac package currently claims that it is version 2.0, but the About window in HISE Standalone shows “version 1.6.0 (19 Nov 2018).”
That's the link of the last source that you should compile to get the standalone version https://github.com/christophhart/HISE
And here the David's tutorial about compiling HISE Standalone binary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TtezP8lp24&t=5s
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@pnyboer yes saving stuff in HISE isnt so intuitive, but there's all sorts of nice things happening to compensate.
First HISE projects are located in their own directory structure - when you create a new project HISE creates this directory structure - dave healey has a nice little youTube video about project management in HISE.
Whilst you are working HISE will auto-save your project state in a .hip file, these are located in
<your project folder>/Presets <- yes the name of this folder really should be something different, dont confuse it with the folder called User PresetsYou can also save .hip files yourself a using File>Save Archive
- whilst we are here in .hip land you will see here in the forum people posting snippets all the time (very very useful)
to save your project as a snippet Export>Export As HISE Snippet
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you can then paste it into a forum post between the <code></code> tags (5th item in the forum editor top row looks like this "</>")
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you can copy a forum posted snippet by simply highlighting and copying the contents of the snippet and
import (this overwrites everything in your current HISE instance):
File>Import HISE Snippet
On top of these HISE readable data structures you can also save your project state as human readable in XML (which is nice because you can go look at/edit/copy bits of it outside of HISE)
Again all found here:
File>Open XML
File>Save As XMLHave fun.
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@ossian1961 - I expected the "HISE.2.0.0.pkg" to install the 2.0 standalone - is that incorrect? I realize that best practice is to compile the standalone from source, but I'm just getting my feet wet!
@Lindon - thanks for the tips. The Archive format is what I was hoping for. When you save as XML, that doesn't seem to be the whole project - samplers, modulators, interface. It only seems to be the Master Chain. Is that correct?
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@pnyboer nope it should load the whole config - I think you might need to have some sort of UI to make it do all that tho - Dave?
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XML saves the UI data in a separate folder inside the XMLPresetBackups folder. Everything else is saved inside the XML itself.
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@pnyboer said in Notes on my first try....:
I expected the "HISE.2.0.0.pkg" to install the 2.0 standalone - is that incorrect? I realize that best practice is to compile the standalone from source, but I'm just getting my feet wet!
You right, but it was an oversight when Christoph put the file, then we all keep on to download the source and compile it, also because Christoph is usually updating the source after bug fixes. Don't worry, mine was just an advice, not a criticism ;)
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got it. Thanks for the help and suggestions.
