randy's Recent Posts

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.

I am always happy to offer 50% off on software for any person currently teaching or enrolled in school or university. Please send me some kind of documentation of your academic status, such as a picture of your current university ID. Then I’ll send you a coupon code for the discount.

Nice!

Thanks for the feedback. I made a ticket and I'll take a look at this soon.

Beta testing is closed now, release is coming very soon.

If anyone has a 1.1 installer to share with Nihad, please feel free. Meanwhile I'll look for an older backup when I can.

I have seen this occasionally also. I think it only happens when the CPU is under heavy load. I'm back to Soundplane software soon and I'll see what I can do about it.

The most recent app info is kept at
http://madronalabs.com/topics/1691-sticky-soundplane-client-for-mac
which is the topmost "hardware" forum topic. I should put it on the product page too.

Here's the actual link:
http://madronalabs.com/media/soundplane/Soundplane1.4.0.zip

I hope that we will be able to stream the event live.

Well, Logic's meter will do its best to measure just audio processing. Activity monitor is, in my experience, more useful in general, but will always include the UI drawing, which in the case of Aalto can be expensive.

I would try just turning animations off and see if that helps.

Good morning again! With version 1.7 of Aalto, our favorite West Coast softsynth now adds MPE support, and other improvements.

MPE stands for Multidimensional Polyphonic Expression. It's a way of using MIDI to transmit the rich, per-note expressive performances that instruments like the Haken Continuum, Seaboard, Linnstrument and of course our own Soundplane are capable of. Geert Bevin, longtime Eigenharp player and currently a software developer at Moog Music, lead the charge on this effort, and I thank him for moving things forward. You can find Geert's post with the MPE specifications here: [expressiveness.org]

Many smart and experienced people, including all us makers of new and ambitious controllers, looked over a draft of this spec and contributed changes. MPE makes sense, is easy to implement, and should be very useful. With its addition Aalto becomes one of a just a few great sound makers out there for per-note expression. I am hotly anticipating more Linnstrument+Aalto, Seaboard+Aalto sounds.

Soundplane owners have always had a great connection to Aalto over OSC. But the big deal for the Soundplane is that now, while we are still waiting for the OSC-based composition environment of our dreams, we can use ordinary DAWs to record and edit an entire Soundplane performance.

Aalto version 1.7 also brings improved Soundplane compatibility with MIDI patches, optimized animation drawing, and bug fixes. MPE support in Kaivo synthesizer will follow next month with other changes.

1.7 is of course a free update again. The demo is at the usual place, and license holders as usual can click "My downloads" up on the right there to get your update.

Macintosh users, please note:

Aalto 1.7 requires Mac OS X 10.7 or higher.

@rsdio has done quite a bit of work on it. We've been stalled waiting for me to finish up Virta, so we can finish the project together. Virta is getting released very soon and then I can return to Soundplane-related work. I'm excited about it too.

Hmm, that's odd. You have been using Aalto for a while, do I remember right? So did this just start happening and did anything change beforehand, like the version of Logic?

What if you shut the graphic window?

Also, CPU measured how? In Logic? Do you get audible glitches?

Hi and thanks for the feedback. I have a bunch of parameter-related things to do, including OSC automation of all the parameters, that I'm saving up to do at once as a redesign. So I haven't worked much on parameters etc. lately. I have make a note about this button trigger thing and will be sure to do it when I work on parameters sometime soon.

Hi, I'm interested but I didn't get the email.