randy's Recent Posts
Well that’s interesting news. I will have to reconsider my policy, at least when doing business in the EU. I don’t have time to absorb everything now but will take a look in the future.
I wonder though, how this affects, say, iPad apps. You can’t transfer them, right? So, are they all illegal in the EU?
I imagine nobody would bother to resell a $4.99 app, but then, I did not imagine anyone would want to resell an Aalto license.
I sent the news out to the mailing list the same morning, sorry you missed it! Once I collect a dozen or so of people who missed out and want one I can probably do another small run.
Aalto 2 will be a paid upgrade.
I don’t think I’ll be adding any new modules, but the LFO will almost certainly get some attention.
Sorry, I didn't see this post before now, please feel to email me if you don't hear back!
The quantized key is generated from the current position always and immediately if quantizing is on. Unless "note lock" is on, then the first key is held for the duration of the touch. After that the quantized values are sent through the portamento filter, if the change is plus or minus one key (horizontal). If the change is > 1 key, portamento is not applied. After that a vibrato value is created from the speed of motion of the touch within the key. Vibrato is added to the current fractional key value from the portamento filter. The result is sent out OSC and via MIDI pitch bend when possible.
Hi Brian,
I imagine this problem will be dependent on how your DAW is loading stuff. Please let me know your experience with Ableton-- thanks.
cleaned things up a bit...
Well, OSC doesn't send signals, just a series of messages, so any reconstruction of a signal, as would be needed to avoid zippering, is going to be up to the receiver.In other words, Expert Sleepers needs some kind of filtering there, and I would be surprised if it didn't have it already. I would ask Andrew about how to filter the data.
I would shoot for data rates of maybe 50 Hz with this kind of setup. The initial "note-on" (or in the case of OSC, first message for a touch) is always sent ASAP, so you are not adding latency. It’s just the frequency of control messages after that that is affected, and you can't really generate more than 50 Hz of bandwidth by moving your fingers around anyway. The higher rates are just in case they are needed for some application I wasn't considering...
Thanks for understanding-- it is not simple. In the end I think a lot of devs/business owners, me included, go with their gut on a lot of decisions like this. Personally, I have never considered returning a software product I bought or transferring it to someone else, so setting up the infrastructure to transfer licenses was not a priority for me. Having more data might influence my decision.
I think that in reality (forget the legalese) one buys software and owns it, and it just isn't right to forbid transfer of its ownership.
In my version of reality, owning anything only comes about as a result of agreements between people, which is fundamentally the same thing as “legalese.” But this gets pretty deep pretty fast. :-)
I don't know what that question means!
Yes, more details will be announced when I figure them out.
I'm going to add to the sequencer a little bit for Aalto 2. I'll check the intellijel info, thanks.
Hey XXL / 3XL guys: I will special order a few extra shirts for you. If you want one, order an XL using the PayPal menu, and type in the special instructions to me that you really want 2XL or 3XL instead.
I am doing the shirt order tomorrow morning so I can fulfill all my Large orders ASAP, so I need you to get yours in today!
OK, I'll check tomorrow and see what it would cost to get a few extra made in big sizes.
I have no problem having this discussion.
My main reason is, I have no way, no technological means by which to take Aalto away from anybody! This is the flip side of my lack of copy protection, which I think is a huge benefit to my customers.
So... let’s say Joe customer enjoys his personalized copy of Aalto for a year, then decides he’s not using it much. So he sells it to fund some other plugin purchase. Joe tells me about the sale and so I assign a license to Bob who he sold it to. But Joe still has his own, watermarked copy. I have no way to mess with or inspect Joe’s hard drive or take his software away from him, because I want to spend my time writing DSP algorithms, not bullshit to get in Joe’s way. So now I am trusting Joe to never, ever use his software again.
So I think the analogy with a car is not good. If I could buy a car, copy it and sell that copy to whoever I wanted, retaining a perfectly functioning copy, very soon cars would not be worth much.
And then there’s support. Say Joe is a power user of Aalto while he has it, and asks a lot of questions. (Answering questions is how I spend an hour or two every morning.) Now after a year Joe sells Aalto to Bob, and Bob, whom I now have the responsibility to support, now asks a whole bunch of questions as he learns his way around. But this time I'm not getting anything in return for helping him. And the more this happens, the more people I have to support who aren’t supporting me.
Besides, when doing support I don't want to have to keep track of who is a licensed user and who is not. I just kind of want to answer everyone’s questions if I can. I answer questions if you haven't bought the software yet, and it seems dumb that after buying and selling it again, you would get worse support than if you never had bought it at all.
Support is a major deal to me, and in a sense I think it’s the main thing you are buying when you get a license: the relationship where you can ask me things. So I think it’s not fair for Joe to sell my services to Bob, without giving me anything in return!
I think I give good support, and having no copy protection to get in anyone’s way is something I'm also proud of. If I let people resell their licenses, I'm afraid it would hurt my ability to provide value to my good customers in these other areas.
Hi Brendan,
I remember seeing your username but I didn't look you up to see if you were an existing customer or what. So, please don’t take my comments personally at all.
-Randy
Sweet!
Thanks, I think I fixed it.
Yeah, you know, just patches. Could I collect yours and include them with Aalto?
An entirely new Aalto would just be something else. No, this will be much like the existing version, but with lots of the features people have been asking for. I'm not even sure which ones will make the cut yet so no teasers.
wat
Yes, lots of people use Aalto for live performance.
Of course!
I should add that I'm not sure this adjusting is right for your situation. Making the instrument tighter tends to make the return slower, not faster! When you have a chance you could compare with Kurt’s board which IIRC has all 5 shims not sanded down much.
For adjusting I use veneer with an adhesive back, which is 0.01" thick. This is an easy material to find at your local woodworking store. I put the shim on and put the back on again. Then if it's too tight I take the back off and sand the shim down a little.
That’s good you found better settings with the max force. I made the defaults the values that I use day-to-day for best response, but the right settings will depend on you and, to a lesser extent, your instrument.
The release is a mechanical thing that happens when the foam is compressed for around a second or more. As you have noticed, it only happens with a heavy touch, so a lighter playing style is the all-around best answer---and easier on your fingers!
There is probably no point playing with the elastic layer itself. As you guessed I have tried many different materials and thicknesses, so you have the best results out of three years of experiments there.
However, the tension applied by the back of the instrument can be varied pretty easily by messing with some wooden shims. I tune each instrument by applying different shims or sanding them down if necessary. I would recommend that you wait and really get familiar with the software options before trying an intervention like this.
I want to encourage people to hack on their instruments, because I think it’s a great activity. I made the Soundplane to be easy to work on. On the other hand, I have to say technically that doing so voids your warranty. It’s a fine line and a little frustrating but I’m sure you understand. I don’t expect anyone to make a mess of their instrument but if that did happen I would have to charge something for shipping or repair.
Did you see the assembly / disassembly video on the main page? I put it out there to show exactly what’s involved in replacing any part of the Soundplane. If you were not comfortable replacing the surface yourself you could send it back to me.
You could definitely buy a replacement surface if you wanted one. I would have to do some accounting to figure out what the cost should be. There’s quite some labor involved, so it won’t be trivial.
I think this is a really cool patch! Do you by chance have a few more you could contribute to the user patches?
As I wrote above, the "voice" output from the KEY module (now "vox") has no detuning on it. I think that the ENV is to blame, in this case, for things going out of sync.
It looks like the way the ENV code is optimized makes slight errors in timing accumulate over time. I can look to see if there’s a an easy way to make this better, because I can see from your patch that it would be very cool.
It's not really the mission of the ENV modules to provide an accurate timebase though. In general with floating point math, things like free-running oscillators are not exact relative to one another unless you take great pains to make them so. Just like in analog, you have to provide a sync pulse somewhere if you really want things to be in sync. In this case you could just retrigger the note every few bars.
Thanks for the good report with bullet points.
Important: what OS are you using?
Did you happen to try any different DAWs?
On Windows 7 User Presets are in in Windows:(Yourhomedirectory)/UserData and factory ones are in C: / AppData / Roaming.
I think Vista is the same, but I am not totally sure. I would recommend you move to Windows 7 if you get the chance. I don't really support Vista or get much call to these days.
Hey, we fixed it, it should work here again.
Try this patch. I think it pretty much does what you want. I should make the range of the rate input bigger, but you get the idea.
I'm looking at some automated control of patching for the future.
<Aalto pluginVersion="66054" presetName="seq stop" scaleName="12-equal" scaleDir="" key_voices="4" seq_loop="0" seq_trig="1" seq_rate="0.00200000009" seq_rate_p="3.99999976" seq_offset_p="7" seq_value0="0.758928597" seq_value1="0.348214328" seq_value2="1" seq_value3="0.473214328" seq_value4="0.348214328" seq_value5="0.758928597" seq_value6="0.258928597" seq_value7="0.491071463" seq_value8="0.866071463" seq_value9="0.651785731" seq_value10="0.401785731" seq_value11="0.6875" seq_value12="0.526785731" seq_value13="0.544642866" seq_value14="0.419642866" seq_value15="0.669642925" env1_release="3.31999993" env2_repeat="0" env2_sustain="1" osc_timbre="0.0799999982" osc_waveshape="3.7252903e-09" patcher_input_1="000000000000100000000000000" patcher_input_9="000000000000100000000000000" patcher_input_11="000000000000000100000000000" patcher_input_12="100000000000000000000000000"/>