Hi Shawn:

This may be a possible way to explore a solution.
Explore whether the attack portion of the amplitude envelope is not too fast or almost instantaneous.
Sometimes it happens that with some types of sound an excessively fast attack produces a very audible click that does not however belong to the digitized sound sample.
Try to slow down the attack ratio by a small fraction and see if you still hear clicks.
The high pitched sounds of Rhodes pianos are especially good at testing this problem.
If this is solved, the problem is undoubtedly related with the calibration of the amplitude envelope.

Thank you for the suggestion but changing the envelope has no impact on the click being inserted roughly 60% through the specific sound above (and from 30-80% in various other sounds) unless of course the envelope is set to go to silence before the pop occurs, which isn’t a valid solution. No other combination envelope settings, filter settings, etc., has any impact on the popping.

Anne

Some thoughts:

1. Has anybody else reported this type of corruption when importing non-WXC x3a files?

2. Is this bug reproducible with the Motif?

To be specific, do you have a Motif with which you could try loading these files to see if they exhibit the same behaviour? On that note, what about loading one of your x3a into a motif, saving the file again, then trying that?

3. What about loading the x3a file into John Melas' Motif Waveform Editor? http://www.jmelas.gr/motif/wave.php

Does it create clicks inside the program when you play the keys? (I suspect not). I wonder what would happen if you saved the file then tried to import that into the Montage.

If you're loathe to spend 60e to buy this program just to troubleshoot this issue, at the very least you could email the file to John Melas and see if he can confirm this bug?

https://yamahasynth.com/ask-a-question/synthesis-bug-in-yamaha-montage#reply-83983

Before any of that you should really consider updating your firmware to 3.00 — as I recall the original poster is at least two firmware updates behind the current firmware version.
Reach out to your regional Yamaha distributor (address, phone, email are typically listed in the back of the Owner’s Manual).

https://yamahasynth.com/ask-a-question/synthesis-bug-in-yamaha-montage#reply-83983

Before any of that you should really consider updating your firmware to 3.00 — as I recall the original poster is at least two firmware updates behind the current firmware version.
Reach out to your regional Yamaha distributor (address, phone, email are typically listed in the back of the Owner’s Manual).

I am on firmware 3.0. It did not fix the USB driver crash. Since I bought it in the UK, I will not be able to make use of any regional-exclusive features or support; luckily I don’t think I have a need for any at the moment.

Some thoughts:
2. Is this bug reproducible with the Motif?

To be specific, do you have a Motif with which you could try loading these files to see if they exhibit the same behaviour? On that note, what about loading one of your x3a into a motif, saving the file again, then trying that?

3. What about loading the x3a file into John Melas' Motif Waveform Editor? http://www.jmelas.gr/motif/wave.php

Does it create clicks inside the program when you play the keys? (I suspect not). I wonder what would happen if you saved the file then tried to import that into the Montage.

If you're loathe to spend 60e to buy this program just to troubleshoot this issue, at the very least you could email the file to John Melas and see if he can confirm this bug?

#2: I sold my Yamaha MOTIF XF 8 and do not have a spare.
I use X3A files because they are easy to generate, especially with John Melas’ tool to help in creating bare-bones files for study.

#3: The John Melas tool has never supported playback of audio for me. There are no conditions under which I have been able to make it produce sound, after having tried it on 3 Windows OS’s (Windows 10 ×2 + Windows 7 ×1) and 3 different physical machines.

When Yamaha is ready I can upload the files.

Melas can play raw Waveforms. I don't have registered versions - the free demo is severely limited. However, it does play back Waveforms when I can find one with a raw encoding. Not saying this is your problem - but Melas doesn't have decoders for the WXC and other formats so those won't play back.

In the other thread, I was leaning towards thinking that the converter may have the bug. If this is so, then the waveform as stored inside Montage will have the data as incorrect and exporting this to a X7U file will show a difference between the X3A that was fed to it. If this is the case, then the waveform will be "bad" inside Montage and the Melas tools will playback the same problem.

If you demonstrate that the data is bad (and not the playback) - then it would tend to point to an issue with the conversion routine vs. a problem with AWM2.

As mentioned, the John Melas tool produces no sound under any circumstances on any machines I have (this statement was meant to encapsulate raw playback as well, which is the only thing I have ever tried to play back with it).

If I load the WAV manually I do not get playback with pops.
Unless they are using a different sampler for each, the error must be inserted during loading of the X3A, which makes sense. During load you are going to analyze the WAV data possibly embedding into a companion file some metadata to optimize supersampling or loop points (or WAV mipmaps; the same WAV resampled for optimized playback within certain frequency ranges).
I know that it adjusts the loop point as well.

Take a looping sound, load it once as part of an X3A file, load the raw WAV into another element, and when you hit the key they both play at the same time, but phase off one-sample-per-loop. So modify your raw WAV loop end point back one (towards the beginning) sample and try again. Phase is maintained through loops now, unless you have some fine tuning involved.
Apply +24 microtuning to the WAV inside the W3A file, and in the next element over load the raw WAV with the loop point moved back, and then microtune it to +24.

Once again you start to hear subtle phase-shifting after each loop. It’s resampling or doing other ”fix-up”s during the loading of the X3A (loop-point re-smoothing after “baking in” the fine-tune adjustment—waveforms from external files cannot be modified specifically because they use the whole set of bank data to bake in certain attributes).

In other words, it is very well established that during the loading of X3A files, the Yamaha MONTAGE performs extra steps to both analyze and modify the WAV data.

There is only 1 sampler, and envelope bugs that cause premature cut-off of the sound are generalized bugs that don’t care what the source of the incoming WAV data is; they just look for silences to save on polyphony, which is a separate issue from this one.

How related to AWM2 that is is up to Yamaha to decide; in any case it happens during the loading of the X3A file, and I am only waiting for the files to be requested.
A single 16-bit mono WAV and an X3A file with the same. Then you can see see it for yourselves. But I have to tear down my current setup to generate the new X3A file (and then rebuild my setup to continue with what I am doing right now) so I will not do it without a request.

Anne