randy's Recent Posts
Hi, I'm working to finish the next plugin very soon, hopefully in the next few weeks. After that I will look at this issue.
Meanwhile, does Bitwig have some kind of "fixed buffer size" setting? That has been known to fix similar issues.
Hi there. The only way to sync the oscillator is through a trigger sent to the "reset" input. You could send that trigger from the sequencer, or from one of the envelopes.
Or if those are in use you could send it from a controller using the KEY module. By drawing a CC curve in your DAW you can do the resync wherever you like. The resync will happen when the CC changes from 0 to 1 or greater.
There is an orange RSS link to the right of "News" on the front page. This feed is for the main News section, where I will certainly post when Soundplanes become available, and when it is anything like close. Also, in your account settings you can decide whether you are subscribed to the newsletter or not.
How would I set up the Soundplane to achieve this?
I set up the Soundplane's defaults with this kind of playing in mind. Just turn a "quantization" toggle off, and any scale you pick will be played in a fretless way.
After some urging from people I also recently implements .kbm and .scl files, you the scales can be mapped to the keyboard flexibly. Most of the built in scales use a default keyboard mapping.
A good reason for Aalto to have MIDI out would be to capture the crazy rhythmic things you can do with the clock and PLL sync in the sequencer. These are hard to get with any other tools I'm aware of.
As far as what notes are coming out, just listen I guess. It so depends on how the sequencer is being used that there is nothing "automatic" I can think of that would help.
The Soundplane is a continuous surface at heart. It can give continuous pitch response or discrete steps, depending on how you set up the software. Much more like the Continuum in this cases but with the added benefit of full 2D sensing.
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If you would like to give someone an Aalto or Kaivo license as a gift, it’s easy.
Just buy the software in the usual way, but enter your friend's first and last name instead of yours when you make the Madrona Labs account. Then you can gift your friend the account name and password. Your friend can log in, download the software and change the account email to his or her very own.
With a beta, maybe.
but why is magnitude 1/distance, and not 1/ distance squared?
That is a very hard question to answer. Why do the laws of physics do one thing and not another in this case? It would be a long answer and I would have to look a bunch of stuff up. And then ultimately we would get to some aspect of quantum electrodynamics as we currently understand it and then same question would be there: why is it that way? And ultimately, we don't know.
I guess maybe the question you really want answered is, why do I say it is one over the distance, how do I know that? And the reason is that I looked up the equation for the capacitance between parallel plates. I really don't understand it any more deeply than that.
...so 15 volts p-p?
sure, or whatever your audio interface is capable of putting out. It would depend on the interface. What you don't want is distortion. So use an oscilloscope or similar and make sure you don't have it.
what is the optimal distance between strips to stop cross-talk
I used to use bigger gaps but capacitance between the edges is very small. a few mm should be fine.
Or is the design less for striking and more more for touching
The design is for striking, touching, whatever. So as a basis for all these things you need an accurate position, the rest of the behavior depends on whatever you do with that data. Most of the time I am controlling envelopes directly with pressure. Or in a physical modeling setup I may be adding energy with velocity. I don't think about MIDI ever unless I have to, it is very limiting.
My overall advice as always is just to experiment with one or two junctions before you build a whole array.
I remember the B-spline is only needed for the audio synthesis. If you just want a controller, you are probably fine using the magnitude data directly. There is a paragraph somewhere in my thesis about the filtering being in some sense optimal. It doesn't preserve all the bandwidth but for sending controller data to an audio signal it's probably more important to avoid audible glitches.
how do I extract velocity information from this set?
Phase is just a detail of the FFT, which is being used as a multiplexer for real data. So you put real data in and get real data out. The magnitudes are proportional to 1 / distance. So the range of physical distances you use is very important. Having the magnitudes you take the inverse to get position and to get velocity you take the derivative.
Yes, sounds useful. To varying extents in different DAWs, I guess. Thanks for the tips.
I'm working hard to get a beta out this month, at least.
Maybe Dec 15-20? Timing will depend a bit on my Virta work so please stay tuned.
Thanks for getting back with the solution. I'm glad it's sorted.
You mean each voice on its own stereo pair of outputs? That's a lot of outputs (when we get 8 voices for Aalto anyway). Would one per voice be as useful? What software would you use to route them? Curious about your application.
OK, I see, thanks.
Yes, the version is your problem. You are running 1.4.6. You have to find that old plugin and remove it.
I don't know anything about Studio One, but some DAWs can have an optional VST Plugins folder of their own.
Are you sure you are running the Aalto 1.7.0? You can check in the registration area in the plugin. An older version will not load newer patches. A newer version should load older patches just fine.
/AppData/Roaming ... is the right place. It will use the current user's files, so you could have problems if for some reason it was installed as Administrator and now you are running as a different user, or vice versa.
I hear this would be cool, but to be honest it's not high on my list of features to add. The main reason is that these areas where the plugin communicates with the host are the ones that give me the most trouble. Different hosts can behave differently and require a lot of testing to get things right. The clock input is one example. Getting clock sync right across all the different hosts I'm testing on took a long time.
Meanwhile rendering out a click and triggering other sounds with it as you suggest, is a cool idea. I always prefer working in audio over MIDI anyway.
p.s. until we add a search bar you can type "site:madronalabs.com mysearch" into Google.
Weird, I'll check it out.
Very nice sound design and demos!
For patches like "ARP Mad Sciencist" and "PER increasing feedback" it would be helpful if there were some notes, so people know that they need to turn the host clock on or whatever.
I know it would be cool to put notes in the patches themselves. I have this as an Aalto 2.0 feature.
Hi, I'll try to answer your questions about Aalto CM. It should work well but is lagging behind the main Aalto release in several important features. I believe it's at par with version 1.5. For a list of new Aalto features since then you can look at the README for Aalto: http://madronalabs.com/media/aalto/_read_me_first.txt
If you install a newer version of Aalto it will install over the CM component. You can save the CM component by copying it from /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components to a safe place.
CM edition is not Retina ready. The release version is better but you may still see some blurry displays. This is because drawing all the animating dials simply takes too long on a Retina display. In the future, I will use OpenGL to accelerate the drawing.
I am planning to add a search button here. Meanwhile you can use Google to search for things on this site. Type in Google's search bar "site:madronalabs.com Aalto CM" (for example).
There are a bunch of ways you could make Aalto start up when you want. I would automate some parameter that turns the sound off / on. Like the gate level. Or you could modulate something outside of Aalto, like the channel level.
Or, you can change the patch so it only plays when a key is held down to get more control. turning on 'key trig' in the sequencer and using the envelope to get the signal, you can get a key-controlled drone, then just use a long MIDI note to control the sound.
There are sometimes glitches with the sequencer with Live 9.x and Aalto 1.7, after a few minutes of playback like you describe. There will be a fix for this coming soon. To work around this you can add key control as I'm describing above and then restart the sequencer with a new note every few bars or something so it will stay in sync.
Hmm. I have heard good feedback about El Capitan. I'm not sure how to go about reproducing your issue.
Possibly your Audio Units cache has a problem. You can try removing the cache at ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.audiounits.cache, and then removing and reinstalling the AUs.
Yes.
I tried to implement the canDo as per Bitwig's suggestions, a simple thing. Too bad to hear it is not working. I am in touch with Bitwig and will investigate. Though OSC is going to be more important long term, I want to help make MPE support as smooth as possible.
OK, I'll reexamine all this after I get the Virta beta out/ Thanks for the detailed feedback.
Are you moving to Bitwig as your main DAW now? I guess that means you are liking it? I haven't heard from too many Bitwig users yet.
Cool, thanks for the update.
I'll definitely announce any sales via the email list as well as the website.