New Gadget Madly In Hope

21 March 2010

Droneo 1.2.1

Well, I thought I"d be working more to get Loopi ready, but instead, I've fixed up Droneo 1.2 to get a few issues resolved.
Foremost, I didn't like by hastily put together export/import format, so I redid it a little to make it more friendly to external processes like wrapping.
The parser is more tolerant, it tells you what's wrong if it thinks something is wrong, makes sure some values aren't out of line, and allows yo not to specify some settings or mix up the order. All commands end with ';', so they can be wrapped. # at the beginning of a line to the end of a line is a comment.
By the way, ";","<" and ">" are converted by the exporter into ":","[" and "]", in case these control characters are in descriptions , names or reed interval specifications.
That's so the parser won't get confused.

Look at how beat up a handmade voice can be!

Droneo FV1.1 droneoahet; version: 1103 ;
name: FV1.1d ;
#here is a line that will be ignored
desc: Droneo: Harmonic scale with Evolving Mirror 3, churning with Sine 11 ;
#created: 2010-02-23 03:20:55 PM ;
baseFreq: D1 ;
#volume: 0.0 ;
volume: 00.00 ;
reed5: <6/1>,0.3243507,0;
reed6: <7/1>,0.6357273,0;
#timbre1: Evolving Mirror 3 ;
#timbre2: Sine11 ;
chorusFreq: 32.10078 ;
churnFreq: 34.84496 ;
isRandom: NO ;
#nameStyle: 0 ;
#modulationState: 0 ;
reed3: <4/1 nice> , 0.5838312 , 0.7914156 ;
reed4: <5/1>,0.2335325,0;

reed7: <8/1>,0.4995,0.8822337;
reed0: <1/1>,0.06487013,0.999 ;reed1: <2/1>,0.7005974,0.999;reed2: <3/1>,0.2465065,0.999 ;
reed3: <4/1 nice> , 0.5838312 , 0.7914156 ;
reed4: <5/1>,0.2335325,0;
reed5: <6/1>,0.3243507,0;
reed6: <7/1>,0.6357273,0;
reed7: <8/1>,0.4995,0.8822337;



Droneo will still read the old format, but only gen the new.

It will also load that export into a blank patch if you launch Droneo via the droneo:// URI scheme.

For users of the new Kept Base Frequency feature, Droneo will now remember the last Base Frequency setting that it was using and reuse it on restarting Droneo.



00:16:02 - jhhlnet - No comments yet, click here to add one

10 March 2010

Droneo 1.2 is in the store!

Droneo 1.2 is in the App Store now... update yourself and tell your friends!

Well, that was a fast approval: Droneo 1.2 is on the store now! Tell your friends and update yourself!

I just updated the web site at http://www.jhhl.net/iPhone/Droneo, so you can get details in there, but here's a precis of the new features:

- More insect timbres, triangle and square timbres, and Evolving Mirror timbres, and new Evolving Chant.
Evolving Chant randomly changes vocal timbres while its evolving.

- The Timbre Picker has been reorganized into groups!. This ought to make it faster to pick through the 40 timbres Droneo has now, and more later!

- Import / Export with clipboard. If you have a nice Droneo Voice you'd like to share, you can copy it, zip over to your blog, and paste it in. Someone else can copy it and go over to Droneo and import it into a voice slot. You can also mail it, put it in Notepads and the Address book, or, you clever people, you can write a python (or whatever) script to generate one. I might actually do something like this in Javascript on the website.

Also, the droneo:// URI scheme will launch Droneo and try to load the droneo voice that the rest of the URI points to. I have a page of these (a small one) at http://www.jhhl.net/iPhone/Droneo/Voices/.

- New spash page!. More honeycombs, drool, drool. The icon is still the same though. Sorry for those who hate bugs on their iPhones.

- Longer wave form : more accurate sounding timbres, especially at low frequencies. The insect patches are especially goos at low speeds.

- Fine tuning for the Base Frequency . If you are trying to tune Droneo to real-world instruments, you can now fine tune the base frequency with a slider when you set it.

- Inherited base frequencies. You can set the base frequency to "K" and it will use the last manually set base frequency as its own base frequency.
so you can set up a bunch of Voices that can be fine tuned simultaneously to the first Voice. You can also transpose that frequency by octaves up or down (with K+1, K-1, etc. ), so there are some patches that will be in tune, but use high (or low) intervals.

- Standard note names for reed intervals now sport octaves! Not much of a feature, but it looks nice!

Well, that's a little chewy, but nevertheless, I think this new Droneo is worth a look!
20:56:17 - jhhlnet - No comments yet, click here to add one

06 March 2010

Droneo 1.2 last minute features

The features keep creeping in, these one suggested by Droneo user J. Lawrence. He had a particular problem that Droneo was not really set up to handle, which is to match Droneo's base frequency to real-world instruments that themselves cannot be fine tuned. This is a different problem form getting the intervals fine tuned (which the tine spiral does pretty well).
So, I've added a fine tuner slider that pops up when you set the base frequency. It has a range of +/- 50 cents, with a dead zone in the middle so you can get back to the center tuning more easily.
There's a second feature related to this one, designed to deal with the problem of reusing that carefully matched tuning in other Droneo voices.
It's a little tricky, but makes sense once you get the basic concept.

- Every time you set the base frequency explicitly, or use the fine tuner, it remembers that setting as the "Kept" frequency, K.
- This includes loading a new Droneo voice. Whatever explicitly specified base frequency you set gets saved as K.
- Setting the frequency to "K," though, will use that frequency instead of setting it freshly. This will display as "K [frequency in Hz]".
- Sometimes, K is not in the right octave for your needs. You can specify K+octave or K-octave to transpose it up or down the specified number of octaves. So if your intervals are high, you might want to say "K-3" . This in no way affects the actual K frequency, only the effective frequency you are using. It will show
as "K-2 [effective frequency]" e.g. "K-2 27.5"
- If you wiggle the fine tuner, it will stop being relative and become explicitly set again. Doing so also resets K! Yo can use this to transpose
your explicitly set base frequency by octaves, just type "k+n" or "k-n" for octave "n", and tap the slider in the middle.
- To help with this trick, and fine tuning in general, I've put a dead zone in the middle of the slider so you can zero in on the pre-fine-tuned frequency.

One way to use this would be:
You set up the first voice to be a tuning voice (it can be something simple like a very quiet sine, for tuning purposes).
Then you switch to a relatively tuned bunch of more interesting drones, which will be able to be in tune with your tricky to tune analogue musical instruments.
In fact, these can be in completely different voice banks, or imported .

Thanks!
01:16:25 - jhhlnet - No comments yet, click here to add one

01 March 2010

Droneo 1.2 preview



Not shown in this video: the excellent Evolving Chant timbres,
23:11:26 - jhhlnet - 1 comment