randy's Recent Posts
Yes of course, I'll see what I can do about it.
OK, thanks for this feedback on Reaper. Another DAW that probably did not get a lot of beta testing. I'll have to check it out and see if I can find a solution.
Meanwhile, glad you have Bitwig to use.
I just tried to look everywhere why things didn't work for me, what version the dll's are, etc.
Yeah, of course! It was worrisome and will get fixed.
Glad it's working now. Keep me posted...
A little more info about this "Aalto / 1.7" thing: because of a leftover Visual Studio setting, Kaivo has also had the same issue for two years, and nobody noticed. So I feel confident it will not affect operation. I'll fix it in the next release.
Are you on Mac, or Windows?
If windows, maybe check your Anti virus settings?
I just updated again to fix the "demo mode" problem, so please give it a try again.
I see this "Virta / 1.7" thing in the DLL properties for the working version! some other Windows setting did not get update, apparently. This should not affect operation.
Sorry this rollout was not super smooth!
Hi, from what I'm hearing I'm pretty sure there is a problem with the input filter initializing properly on Windows. I'll get a fix out ASAP.
Any coupon codes for owners of your other software available?
Nope.
At a loss as to why I'm getting no output from any Audio outlet other than 'pre' (even 'comp' doesn't work!). FWIW the lights on the 'pitch' and 'peak' outlets are stuck on while the others are stuck dimmed.
This sounds like the input filter having blown up. I made a somewhat last-minute change there so I'm pretty sure that's it. it matches the symptoms. I'll have to take a look at this when my head is clearer tomorrow.
You can expect an update for this and any other release glitches later this week.
Yes, it has been tested on those DAWs and should work. But setup is not straightforward. One of my beta testers kindly made a tutorial for Bitwig. As soon as I can find that I'll post it.
Here are some notes I took over the last year as I worked out different aspects of Virta, my new voice-controlled synthesizer. Virta was a set of ideas floating around since four years ago and a conversation I had with a producer friend of mine. He had been talking to another friend who we’ll call DJ X, a person whose records I liked, with a room full of classic synths and a head full of musical ideas, but who nevertheless said what he was wanting most was to just sing and vocalize, play around with mouth sounds, and have that turned into music. This got me thinking about pitch detection and vocoders, and spectral analysis, and modulars...
So the project was in the back of my mind for a while, and there were lots of precedents. I have had lots of fun over the years putting voice and instruments and drum loops into synthesis boxes with pitch trackers. The Korg X-911 comes to mind as the most fun toy specifically designed for this. Its big brother the MS-20 is surely capable of a wider range, however. There's also the Roland SYB-3, a little "bass synthesizer" that was always flat and "bad digital" sounding but fun anyway. And, again from Boss / Roland, the RSD-10, a primitive digital delay/sampler with a pitch tracking control input, designed to let any keyboard control its (two second!) sample using sound as the interface. With a modern pitch detector and other analysis tools, and the patchable interface of Aalto to use, I knew I could make something fun in this department, capable of unlocking some new sounds.
After releasing Kaivo I decided that whatever this was, would be the next Madrona Labs product, and I started learning a lot about pitch detection, spectral analysis, and about the voice in general. Things I remembered from my linguistics classes in my first year of college were actually useful, which is always nice. I built software components like a compressor, pitch shifter, diffuser, vocoder, and periodicity and pitch detectors.
The name was hard. I went through ideas like voco (pretty much taken), kantos (taken), kantu (Esperanto for sing, sounds kind of wrong) and similar things and you know what? Voice and singing is a popular subject and anything good and short to do with it is probably snapped up already. So I started thinking laterally a bit, about the signal flow and patching, and virta came up almost immediately, and I knew it was right. It wraps up a trilogy with aalto and kaivo so nicely—in Finnish, aalto, kaivo and virta mean wave, well, and stream respectively. Virta also means stream in the sense of electrical current.
I've been having so much fun making patches for this friendly new monster. Though it's capable of wild new sounds, it also has a range of bread+butter, simple effects, and I hope that the patchable interface will make it a great tool to reach for in these less fabulous applications too. I'm excited to hear what you do with it.
Virta will be on sale here starting Monday, March 28, for $89.
Sorry, that was a bit difficult for unexpected reasons!
I'm wondering if it's an issue with the Roli MPE data triggering something like a parameter change really often. Can you try the same patch with and without MPE?
Hiya, sorry I've been slammed and it's short notice but I'm sticking to first Friday and have booked Ada’s for April 1. Will post to all my normal channels later tomorrow.
I don't know what the presentation is, I was thinking I might do a Max / MSP intro.
I wonder what is going on. Some Kaivo presets do use a lot of CPU, that is for sure. But all of them run without crackles at more reasonable buffer sizes like 256 on my Mac, which is a mid-2012 MBP.
This thread is a perennial favorite:
http://madronalabs.com/topics/3565-getting-the-most-out-of-kaivo
But I don't think it really addresses what you are seeing.
Maybe there is an issue with graphics. Try turning off the animations in the "gear" menu, and try it with the plugin window closed.
The manual is online now at http://madronalabs.com/media/virta/images/VirtaManual.pdf . Short answer: all of the above.
I have no idea about future price changes.
I'm here to help. You have a good weekend too.
I appreciate these comments. I stopped worrying about optimizing the touch code because the best use of my time is in making a completely different algorithm.
You could leave out the convolve3x3r calls above, and probably get something usable.
I've spent the last few weeks here in the labs fine tuning physical models for Kaivo, our new software synthesizer. “Kaivo” is Finnish for “well,” as in, a deep well of sounds, and I've been working on deepening that well over the last month or so. Kaivo's models include metal, nylon and gut strings, different sizes of chimes and springs (yes, springs), wooden instrument bodies, membranes and metal plates.
If you already know about Kaivo, you are probably ready to stop reading and head over to the product page. Feel free, the rest of this note will be here for you when you get back.
Today marks the release of this product I've been working on for two years, but only the start of its development. The current models only scratch the surface of what the underlying engine is capable of. I'll release some more models free of charge as time permits. I'm excited to hear what ideas Kaivo sparks when people really get into it, what new musical terrain it helps you explore.
I couldn't have done this without my peeps, so some shout outs are definitely due. Firstly to Eric Moon, who wrote the granulator and limiter, and put up gracefully with my many tuning requests. To Dan Godlovitch at U. Vic, who helped with the math. To George Cochrane, tech writer par excellence (now with adjustable metaphor dial). To David Chandler, for all the wonderful mutants. And to everyone who sent patches or samples or feature ideas, whether I had time to work them in or not.
Happy patching, and please keep sharing those crazy sounds and compositions via the
Madrona Labs SoundCloud page.
Thanks for the very nice feedback!
Great news! I have a BBB on the shelf, can't wait to try it here.
Very cool! I'll be excited take a look when I'm back to Soundplane work.
When you do pick up the tracking code, I would encourage you to look at the new-tracker branch. It's not fully working, so that's a disadvantage, but it is on the way to a much better solution than the old tracker, and maybe far enough along that it will be useful.
Good thinking, please keep us posted if you do a test.
No, but thanks for the reminder.
It looks like you are doing great, you are over the biggest hurdle!
I know I would end up spending the whole day on it if I switched gears to look at your code, so I'm going to have to wait to join this party until Virta is released.
No date, could be any day though after say tomorrow. I just ran into some final hurdles and you know, it's gotta be right. In certain important ways anyway.
Hiya, I am reading about this exciting work with great interest and would love to be helping out better were it not for crunch time on Virta!
The endpoints above look good, but I am not really fresh on this USB stuff.
Version 2 of the touch tracker will be coming fairly soon after this plugin release. It should be clearer and faster and better suited to porting.
There is some drift added to Aalto's oscillators so they don't lock up in a polyphonic sound. In the future this could possibly be an optional feature.
I was thinking of adding different paths in the future if that seems useful. Ideally the path is a little script or something that you could make yourself.
One further question: do your discounts apply to sale priced items?
No.