randy's Recent Posts
Hi, and welcome aboard!
The Soundplane should work well with Aalto without any need for OSCulator. You could use that program if you need a more complex OSC setup.
Aalto talks directly to the Soundplane application, and this connection should work in any DAW that can run Aalto, including Live. Pro Tools runs a different plugin format and so Aalto cannot run in Pro Tools.
steps to playing Soundplane + Aalto (or Kaivo):
- install the latest version of Aalto (login, click "My Downloads" for link)
- install the latest version of Soundplane app from here
- create an instance of Aalto in your DAW of choice
- connect your Soundplane and start the Soundplane app
- activate OSC in the Soundplane app
You should see a red "OSC Connected" banner in the KEY section of Aalto.
Here are some Soundplane-specific Aalto patches to get started with: Aalto Soundplane patches
I apologize for the current state of the documentation, which is trying to reflect a moving target. As the Soundplane app settles down I really look forward to putting more documentation out there and generally making things more straightforward. Meanwhile, please feel free to ask as many questions as you like.
A reasonable idea. I think there was some efficiency reason there is no signal input though. I'll revisit it and see if I can add control without taking more CPU.
re: the forums, there are a lot of things I want to do, maybe I can add a tag for feature requests, or put a spreadsheet up in Google docs or something. The dedicated threads get kind of annoying to navigate when they get long with the current design.
This is fixed for 1.6. I had to spend a long time working on Kaivo 1.1 so I realize it has been a while. Aalto 1.6 is my next order of business and won't take nearly as long.
Hi there! For the past three months, I've been working on an update to Kaivo, and it's finally time to roll it out. I've tuned up the audio engine, improved the graphics and spent many hours finding and fixing a whole host of minor UI issues that made people including me go "grrrr" sometimes.
Thanks as always for your support, and all the feedback you have sent my way about the 1.0 version. This 1.1 release is feeling buttery smooth here, and I hope it gives you many happy hours diving into sound.
Changes:
- over 50 new factory patches
- optimized DSP code (10-20% improvement)
- made demo reminder noise much quieter
- added a new audio import dialog
- trimmed and optimized source samples
- fixed a compatibility problem with Soundplane
- improved model sonics in high frequencies
- improved resonator tuning
- increased range of resonator damping parameter
- improved legibility of scope dials
- fixed a problem saving the window location
- fixed glitches in xy scope display
- improved typography
- improved granulator view speed
- fixed incredibly annoying disappearing menu issue
- fixed keyboard stealing issue in 64-bit VST
- added case-insensitive sort for patch menu
- fixed audio issues with body nonlinearity
- and many more minor fixes.
Special thanks for making this release happen go to Don Solaris, who generously contributed some great factory patches. (If you happen to have a Waldorf Blofeld, check out his excellent "Analog Voltage" patches at the Waldorf website.)
The new Import dialog is not reflected in the manual yet. But it should be pretty straightforward. In the future, I want to add some file combining magic here, but for now, it simply lets you pull up a file, listen to it, and it the file is longer than 8 seconds, pick the 8 second clip you want to import into Kaivo. If you have any questions, please stop into the forums and ask.
I love the new version -- I think it sounds better! (how is that possible?)
Thanks! Yeah, I think it's pretty objectively better, partly because I fixed some math that was causing a non-physical oscillation in the resonators which was kind of harsh sometimes. I did other things to sweeten and tune it a bit as well. I want a really solid foundation going forward and I was in a hurry to get there.
It would be helpful in the future if the samples/patches download were included in "My Downloads" page or even in the zip download for the Kaivo instrument. Not a big deal, I'm sure you have more important things to do.
These "user experience" things are very important to me. It's not in with the watermarked zip downloads because watermarking a 100Mb download would be very hard on my (and everyone's) bandwidth. But I should make it easier to find. Thanks for the feedback.
After thinking about it, I have no ideas about this. It would really depend on the host you are running in and how it reports CPU. Let me know and if I have that one on WIndows I will give it a try.
That's an error Logic sends out when it runs out of CPU time. If you are getting it a lot, you can reduce the number of voices in Kaivo, or check out the news post "Getting the most out of Kaivo" for some other ideas.
Please try downloading and running the Aalto presets installer again. The default location for presets changed from 1.4 to 1.5.
OK, now I see enko was talking about the same problem. It's easy to fix-- just an oversight / lacking feature because I never have any external volumes connected here.
Ah, OK, I'll address this in the next update.
I tried to find sounds that weren't too resonant in themselves, mostly. The idea being granulator as "exciter" and the resonators doing their job. Of course, nearly every sound have some kind of resonance, so, this rule always gets broken to some extent. And granulating lots of things just sounds cool.
The samples have to be short because they are all loaded into RAM when the plugin is created.
MIDI signals are quantized to note values in the KEY module. If you put in an LFO or whatever as pitch to the granulator it is not quantized.
Thanks for the patches! I would either post the granulator sound somewhere like Soundcloud, or avoid using custom sounds in patches you want to share.
Someday I would like to write a kind of packager that makes it easier for people to save and load patch+sounds. But this is a ways off. And in any case, they won't fit in a forum post!
@adamj, I am guessing you haven't installed the new samples and patches yet. They can be found on the Kaivo product page. This should fix the problem you are seeing.
the window retains it's size and location only if presets are not changed
Fixed for the next update.
I just checked that the Kaivo Samples and Patches installer is installing scales into the right place on Windows. It seems to be OK here. The installer puts them into ...Administrator/appdata/roaming/Madrona Labs. There should be a "Scales" directory in the "Madrona Labs" directory alongside Aalto, Kaivo.
They would need to be installed in the folder of whatever user you are running your DAW as. If I understand you right, you say there are empty folders with the scale names? I'm not sure what you mean by maps. If there are empty folders it could be that the installer failed somehow. I would run the installer again and look for errors.
@enko... I think I see what you mean. I could make some different starting points in the "from" menu that would be saved.
@jbe, thanks for the feedback --- can you send me an email to support at madronalabs.com with some more specifics? (OS, DAW version, kind of file you were importing, the very last thing you did before the freeze, etc.)
Yes certainly, you can just go download it right now!
Thanks for reminding me!
In general, the idea of a license transfer does not make a lot of sense to me. But I came to realize a lot of my customers felt differently. So I have been doing transfers here for anyone who asks nicely.
The $10 fee is what I ask to do the transfer. Either the buyer or seller could pay it.
I realize clarity is lacking here. But I'm still figuring this out, and basically experimenting right now. If it keeps working out OK I'll write up a more concrete policy.
@jcancelo No problem, I brought your license up to date so you should be good to download 1.5 now. If you have any more questions, please send me an email at support @ madronalabs.com.
Hi there and welcome.
There are so many microcontrollers out there. I don't really have a suggestion. For the Soundplane we designed our own board around a TI DSP. But I did look at the Beaglebone Black the other day for a while. It looks like it has a bunch of power. If I were starting a DIY project I might try using that.
Lots of the other details you mention are addressed in the paper. But that's only one implementation and there are many other ways to do it. typical capacitances are in the 10s of pF. The cutoff frequency is not an issue anywhere, the cap. changes the gain of the circuit equally from 0--DC more or less.
I would definitely start with one squishy capacitor first, and see what you can do.
I don't understand what happens when you guys are saying you can't log in. What happens instead? And then, I guess it is intermittent, or you couldn't be here? Did you do anything different to get logged in?
re: Logic and graphics I have fixed a possible issue for the next update. I'll get Aalto 1.6 out ASAP so please stay tuned and let me know how it goes.
This update fixes a weird font display problem that happened on some Macs.
Also, the fix to the note-off problem in 1.1 was not working in all situations. This fix should be better.
Also the "note lock" feature is restored for those who want it. When "note lock" is selected, the note is only sent when a touch is first detected and does not change during the duration of the touch. This is good for, say, triggering a different sample or a different note on each key, but still having the x and y and z parameters of the touch to affect the sound.
Depending on your host you may have to hold shift before turning the dial to get the fine tuning.
Do all dials move too fast or only maybe only those with detents on them? What OS are you on? Can you tell me another plugin I can demo where the knobs work well for you?
It seems whenever I change the mouse ballistics, I make someone happy and someone else sad. Still I'll do what I can.
update coming very soon, but no new models in it. more focus on usability.
Hi Roland,
Always a pleasure! Thanks for the report. I can't hear anything wrong in this patch you posted. But maybe that's because the sample is a shifting cloud of different pitches.
I've gotten another report about something similar going on with the granulator. I'll make some of my own longer sounds to test with and see what I can figure out.
Cycling 74's Gen might be a good tool for this kind of thing. I haven't found time to try it.
hi randy, what i meant was that the inlet amount dial for Host Ratio should ideally snap to the timing divisions.
I'll give this some love with the upcoming sequencer overhaul.
the sequencer rate is PLL-driven, so even though the dial may not seem to go to the right place, there should be a little range around the simple ratios where the tempo locks into the right ratio exactly.
OSC: 1st ADSR, Filter 2nd ADRS, LFO to main volume/reverb/whatever, Sequencer to play ARP/sequence.
A very common situation i think.
Yes, I understand. I'm just trying to explain the thinking behind the design. Aalto's design is a tradeoff between lots of attributes. Having a simple UI, so that you can learn Aalto as a performance instrument , was probably my #1 goal behind great sound.