Loupe 1.5.4 fix for Reaktor 5.6

From now on, buying Loupe on this page also gets you a copy of Loupe 2!

It came to my attention – frustratingly, as I was attempting to write some music – that the Reaktor 5.6 update had done something that messed up the slice points in Loupe. After changing a snap, slices would play on too long, drop out or play the wrong part of the wave when they were first triggered. Subsequent key presses on the same note worked fine.

I spent hours trying to fix it the proper way, by looking for initialization problems. Finally I decided to brute force the issue with an iteration macro:

All this does is silently bang out 128 notes in a split second when the instrument loads or changes snaps. As you see in the instrument properties manager, MIDI output is directed back at itself, making Loupe properly initialize every slice. This is perhaps inelegant, the equivalent of kicking 128 televisions, but it works well, doesn’t cause other problems, and I’ll take a working kludge over broken ideological purity any day.

If you have an instance of Loupe already loaded with your snapshots and samples, and you don’t want to bother with the update, you can simply install this macro in the main instrument structure, and make sure to go to the connect tab in the instrument properties and redicrect its MIDI output to itself. Incidentally, tracing the events in this macro makes for a pretty good exploration of intermediate to advanced Reaktor event wrangling and I welcome any questions – post ’em below.

Download the update here. Don’t have a Loupe license? Learn more and purchase here.

Shout out to Felix Petrescu (Makunouchi Bento) and Phil Durrant (Trio Sowari) for beta testing!