New Gadget Madly In Hope

On: 06 May 2015

What's doing?

Hi Folks, I haven't checked in for a while!
Here's the story:
I have a pretty good version of Droneo 1.4 in January... but it had a number of bad issues in it:
For years, the control rate calculations like evolution and patters, were done at the beginning of the buffer computation cycle. But changing the engine to AudioBus meant that the size of the buffer - and the speed at which it updates, was not under Droneo's control. So that meant that evolution would proceed at an undetermined pace.
Also, the conversion to AB also made my good old iPhone 4 hiccup with more than about 4 reeds, since it wasn't efficient enough and also maybe because the audio IO is now floating point based, which doesn't seem to bother the newer devices but might be slower on the old ones. Why do I care? because the iPhone 4 is my home entertainment system device.
Droneo 1.4 had a number of innovations that you will never see. But that won't matter becasue I'm working on
Droneo 2.0 (and abandoning Dronica, which was to be basically what Droneo 2.0 will be).
I've been going back and forth about whether to make a new app or just replace the old one since about 2011!

Anyway Droneo 2.0 is going to be pretty modern. It'll support all the iOS device sizes in portrait and landscape.
It will deliver the promise of Dronica, that is, it simplifies and empowers the features of Droneo: no limits on number of reeds, Churning, Consorts, and Mirrors are replaced with evolution between states (scaled beats), and the pace of that evolution is governed by a heartbeat. Voice banks are being replaced with a tag-based system, and old banks and patches will be legible. There'll be a tighter connection to the Droneo Voices web service, so you can post and retrieve Droneo voices to the public. I'm not sure, but I think you'll be able to stuff them in iCloud too, and pick up your own Drones on different devices.

The Tone Spiral is gaining power as it includes thousands of Scala scales as Guides. It may also be able to import and export scales from Gestrument.

The interval Spec is also expanding, adding ideas that are also in PolyHarp: for example, I have a notation that expresses a number as its prime factors, so you won't have to figure out what 3^24th is, etc. (in that case, it'll be "24;" more on that later). This makes a lot of sense if you want to quickly suss out the consonance between various intervals - you can just subtract the powers of the primes. Of course, negatives and other real numbers are allowed, ;.5 is the square root of two, for example. Polyharps' parade of roman numeral intervals (I,IV,VI#...) are also supported.

It'll be localizable, (I pity the translators...)

The wavetables (timbres) that are the heart of the synthesis are getting updated: they'll have better resolution, may contain several cycles of waves, and may also allow generating them and importing them from audio copy.

I mentioned the beats in passing, basically, a beat is a bundle of volume, pan, timbre and a passel of evolution parameters.

It'll save voices to Audiobus and also act as an IAA generator.

The instructions won't be one huge page anymore.. I'll see if I can make it so that it exists both as a web page and PDF doc. I may need to write some scripts to help me with that.

So, a lot of work! I'm about 1/4 done with it. So that'd Droneo 2.0


PolyHarp is the other main thing obsessing me. There are some corners of it that need some work still. PolyHarp builds scales out of chords, can act as a guitar, piano, multi chord strummed device with intervals plucked from hell, in 200 voice polyphony, or act as a MIDI controller.AB, IIA, etc. It is about the most powerful autoharp fantasy ever.
I want to see if I can make the internal synthesizer more efficient and powerful and sound better. It's OK so far, but I think it could be better.

Then there are fixes to AUMI, which I want to experiment with some more in terms of a motion flow tracker. fast movement is hard to track right now, I want to make the frame rate something fierce!

So that's what's going on!
-- Hery


posted at 00:17:51 on 05/06/15 2015 by jhhlnet - Category: General

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