Stomp Slots to be VST compatible

    If the Kemper uses DSP chips, which I believe it does, it won't be a question of just running a wrapper around VST code written for a general purpose CPU. Software written for a DSP (or a graphics processor, dedicated FPGA etc) is designed to use the capabilities of those chips, you can't naively translate from code written to run on a general purpose CPU core. Getting the best out of a DSP architecture isn't trivial.


    A closer example to what you're asking for is the UAD hardware, which runs as an external co-processor with dedicated DSP and can host plugins, but those plugins have to be designed for the hardware, you can't just run a regular VST on them. Same would apply for the Kemper, it could be designed to host plugins of some kind (internally that's probably exactly what's happening) but they would have to be Kemper-specific plugins. It'd be cool if that was possible, but it would be such a support nightmare for Kemper I really don't imagine it'll ever happen.


    I have to disagree with both of these points.


    - TSE 808, just a "simple" tube screamer emulation, uses roughly 0.5% of my CPU - an Intel quad-core running at 3.2GHz. I know it's not completely, but we generally talk about processors as if speed and capacity were interchangeable. 0.5% of 3.2GHz is 16.4MHz, which is a huge chunk of the Kemper's (apparently) 120MHz processor. As another poster mentioned, VSTs wouldn't be able to use the DSP chips unless they were written that way, so there's no help there. The Kemper's effects are as efficient as they were BECAUSE of the DSP chips doing the heavy lifting.


    - I think you're correct that the Kemper OS is based on Linux. How many VSTs are there for Linux, though? Google is finding me a really small number, which will grow as Linux's audio capabilities improve, but it's still pretty miniscule. None of them are written to use the Kemper's DSP chips, the Kemper may be so stripped down compared to a Linux desktop that there are system functions and .dlls (or whatever Linux has instead of .dlls) that aren't there, in which case some VSTs wouldn't even work, and there may be hardware differences like my 32/64-bit example above that need to be dealt with. ALL of that has to be handled by the Wrapper. The .dll issue alone might require emulating a bunch of Linux functions, which takes up space in memory and on the processor.


    IMO the processing/memory costs of adding VST support on a machine that was never meant to have it are prohibitive. A better idea, as mentioned by the previous posters, would be some sort of SDK for developing Kemper effects natively.

    Quote from Lokasenna

    IMO the processing/memory costs of adding VST support on a machine that was never meant to have it are prohibitive. A better idea, as mentioned by the previous posters, would be some sort of SDK for developing Kemper effects natively.

    After all: yes! :thumbup:

    Ne travaillez jamais.

    ... and there's that silly monkey's suggestion that we simply request the FX we want, as we've always done.


    Anything truly-potentially-useful-for-many, you'd think, would be accommodated by the coders.


    Quote from SpinnerDeluxe

    I kindly apologize for this unrealistic feature request and promise to never do something like this again.

    Don't kid yourself brother. Everybody knows you're "punk". It's bound to happen again. LOL

    Quote from Monkey_Man

    It goes without saying that enough folks would have to be prepared to pay for them in order for the model to be attractive enough for 3rd party devs...

    In this case I would even port my most important VST to the Kemper: The JHM - Jimi Hendrix Mapper. It will change each and every not you play in pitch and timing, so that you always sound like Jimi. No parameters to tweak. :D

    Ne travaillez jamais.