Woah, it's already December. It's been a year now since I started journaling about this rain
piece for resonators and brass. Since then the project has expanded to incorporate more computer-controled
solenoid and motor-driven activation of the resonators, and the focus has...
It's time for me to clean up astrid's usage of LMDB. I never really understood how database
handles and transactions relate in LMDB -- they feel completely reversed in some ways.
The documentation says you only need to open a database connection once and can then reuse it
f...
It's a pedalboard, I think. This might be one of those misguided "if I only had this thing" thoughts, but I think the setup for rain -- and my instrument generally --
would be at home in a pedalboard.
I can build in (multiple!) power supplies, including batteries for every...
A game for this weekend:
This is the game we'll play in three steps:
1) Listen to the sounds around you. Listen to the tones. Listen to the other sounds.
2) When you have the sounds around you in your mind, add a tone to them on your instrument. Don't worry about playing to...
Woah, I missed September! That's what I get for leaving the house, I guess.
I've been giving astrid a tour of the real world, which has been fun and sometimes disheartening when everything breaks down. I was sorta hoping I was through the worst of the showstopper
bugs, but ...
In astrid-land, the news is that MIDI output is in better shape again. I'm using the ALSA seq API directly this time around like I did for
MIDI input. I'm also trying out a different approach with simple wrappers for note & CC messages and new interfaces for raw MIDI me...
It only took like a week to get the new libpippi microsound module fixed up enough to drive pippi's
grain clouds. They're much faster! Shaved about 20% off the runtime for the test suite, too. :)
The new "formation" engine is lacking support for grain masking and burst tabl...
It's July! I'm back from Texas. Somehow the littlefield.c instrument actually worked out. I had some
head-scratcher moments trying to get the butterworth filters hastily ported from Soundpipe to work
with the pulsar osc bank -- oddly the same filters worked fine on mic inp...
I took an extra day off work and I still feel woefully behind. I guess this is the way it goes, I
suppose I'll never really feel ready unless I take the safest possible path?
I really don't want to be programming at all in Littlefield if I can help it. Tonight is a last dit...
Oh boy, more leak fixes this weekend!
Forgetting to sem_close some of the sempahore guards on sampler memory was leaving file
descriptors behind in a weird zombie DEL state (when looking at them in lsof) and eventually
the hard limit of per-process file descriptors wo...
When I was five or six years old I had this Bugs Bunny read-a-long 7" storybook. Something about
Bugs going to space with a rocket fuel made from carrots, of course. I don't remember the story
very well, but I do remember how magical the experience felt.
I remember lots o...
I took astrid out for a test run with the a name for tomorrow fellers this weekend while I was in Milwaukee.
It all actually kinda worked out! I have lots of small (and some large) tweaks I'd like to make.
In the engine, I'd like to expose the shared memory sampler to pyth...
I'm starting to count the days... I was hoping to be done with the plumbing-type instrument building
by this weekend, and spend the next couple weeks before I go to Texas just practicing and developing
the instrument script. I'm not too far off, but there are still some wi...
Almost something!
More of the pitch controls are wired up now, but I'm still finding my way into interfacing with them.
In this recording the parameters of the littlefield instrument are being sequenced by littleseq, and
I'm just toggling littleseq on and off and issuing ...
Oops, it's June already!
A couple days ago I said:
[Sending params as strings] simplifies the daisy firmware concerns a bit, too.
(Even tho it's more annoying to work with strings than just memcpy some bytes into a field, that's OK.)
Which made me feel sheepish today sinc...
Param handling is coming along. I decided not to encode messages at all. Instead I'm keeping everything
in a string format until the instrument gets the update message in the message thread. At that point it
calls a param map callback defined on the instrument with the str...
Got serial control working this weekend! Here's a very exciting video demonstrating a volume control
mapped to an amplitude parameter in the test instrument:
I'm working my way toward sorting through the param handling stuff:
[C] is the instrument command console which p...
