Demo version??? The full version of the beta is available on the page where you go to update your full version.

As for when it's done, these days I'm both working on a video tutorial on envelope operations and on coding. I've started the transition of internal commands from direct function calls to queued text messages, it's working very well (also does a good job at reducing the amount of code to maintain) but it's gonna take some time to finish it all for all commands and everything. Then I'll still have a few minor things to do. I'd say it's not coming out before at least a couple of weeks.

Unrelatedly, can anyone try Photosounder on Mac OS X Lion? Someone on 10.7.0 told me that 1.8.4 crashes when loading a sound (the analysis function is threaded in 1.8.4 and the standard thread-joining function somehow crashes), I'm thinking it might crash in other cases when waiting for a thread as well. I haven't had the chance to test myself yet.

No, I have only the standard version, not the commercial one. My download link shows only 1.8.3.
As you say in the first post, I have only the right to test the demo version, thus my impatience !

Ah, right, well upgrade then! Don't worry it'll be released soon enough anyway. Well, soonish... But yeah there's always going to be cool features in the latest beta.

Tested in Lion in VMWare : Photosounder quit at the end of the sound loading process.

Just as it was reported to me. Thanks! Does it crash too when you turn on live synthesis after creating a new image? It uses the same core thread waiting code that causes the crash so that should crash too I guess.

Awesome program. I just finished my first piece of music (first one in a long time ). Here's a link to the thread here at KvR where you'll find the link to the music.

Cheers,

Mark

Nice, glad to see what you did. You forgot the link btw .

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=324705

I loaded it into Photosounder to hear how it sounds like speeded up 20 times hehe.

I can create a new image or open a picture, turn on live synthesis and play without crash.
It happends only when I load a sound, but I have not tested more.

Alright, thanks. That's pretty weird. I mean, it only does it in Lion of all systems, and with only one instance of the code. And it doesn't look like there's anything wrong with the code... If I can't figure out what's wrong I'll just make sure it loads sounds the old way, at least in Lion. There's no difference in result, it just uses only one CPU core instead of all of them.

Just double checking that the latest (full-commercial) beta build on OSX is from May 12th... correct ?

I accidentally lost the very latest Mac beta when rebuilding the fixed 1.8.3 recently (my building script overwrote it and I don't usually backup betas), but soon enough I'll release a new beta anyway. There wasn't much changed in the lost one anyway.

Doh!



Oh dear! My secret of successfully being able to polish a turd is out

ok kool

Presets AKA scripts. I'm not big on synth presets, but photosounder is another story.

I combined your Duration Doubling & Copy Layer Half scripts and it's a cool way to turn strange sound into complex sequences quickly. I used ideas from your synthesis video on youtube as the basis for a script as well.

Scripts that apply rhythmic and/or harmonic rules to the image? Part of the hard thing to understand is what the functions mean in musical terms. I mean until you told me that v prop effects pitch I didn't really understand.

One rather crazy trick I thought of a short while ago was taking a screen shot of MIDI sequences and opening them in photosounder. Maybe rudimentary MIDI import?

Optional constraints (to scale and per beat?) that prevent the user from making traditionally "unmusical" sounds would probably help too.....I've experimented with scripts that duplicate and move a layer repeatedly and it's a novel way to get melodies that are the same but in a different time domain. By using the percentage features you can have the same "notes" play over 10, 100 or 1000 seconds quickly.

It's such a powerful program it's easy to get off track. The drawing aspect of the program is somewhat of a red herring because I've found if you go all Pollock or Van Gogh you'll get pretty bad results. You have to be more like Dürer or Da Vinci.

Photosounder also has somewhat conflicting dual personalities as an audio editor and as a synth. With an editor you want precision and exactitude, while with a synth I think you want a physicality and playfulness.
That I could have photosounder running on OS X and a windows machine could do the heavy lifting if need be. Some programs do not communicate between OSes.

Desktop isn't always on. And I'm also thinking of when I travel away from my home network.

I was thinking of the audio output or "renders". Sorry for not being clear. Send a tiny PHA from one machine to another then have the other machine generate the audio (possibly now working in lossless) that I then move back over. Yeah, I have a hard time remembering all photosounder needs is a tiny file.

It's not a feature I'm burning to have, but Melodyne style might work? It somehow sends the audio from the plugin to the actual program and back again.


Implementing the parts of OSC that interest you is good enough, even if that means none of it. Maybe "What do you want OSC to do in Photosounder?" would be a good general forum topic?

Control is out for android now I think. Is http://code.google.com/p/dsmi/ and PD what people on windows use for OSC?

I was thinking that if I was somewhere without my computer (but it was turned on) it might be cool to show off photosounder w/o putting my personal file on someone else's machine. But it'd be a rare situation and there are better solutions, regardless! So...

About the crash logs I have a fair amount, but I don't really remember what I was doing. One part that is hard is that I usually want to keep working when I have a crash, but I'll try to take down some notes in the future. As far as RAM I have 4gb in my laptop, but I usually have a few programs open.

Looking forward to what comes next, whatever it may be. The updates so far have been great, so I'm not too worried.

Just being curious, in what way does doubling the image help you create complex sequences?


Well, for rhythm you've got the 4/4 rhythm overlay, I know it doesn't change the image but it can help you transform it accordingly. As for harmonic rules you have the operation to group everything to the nearest semitone, which is pretty useful when used on a layer that only represent a base frequency.

Right now I'm working on videos to go through the basics. The first one will be a description of the editing tools, the second will be more relevant to your interests as it will be dedicated to explaining the convolution/propagation layer modes, since they're complicated to explain but yet can do a lot of things. And what's the use of new powerful features if no one even understands them? Well anyway, right now right now I'm fixing my computer and transitioning from Windows XP to Windows 7, that might take me a few days.



Yeah, I wouldn't implement that, that falls under the category 'someone else can make a third party program for that' category. But yeah, that kinda could be done. Actually I seem to recall that the very earliest versions of Photosounder were capable of opening MIDI files, but I never tried it. I think it synthesised the MIDI file and treated it as a sound. If you were to do something to open MIDI files you'd probably want something that gives you like draw lines that represent the notes, something like that.


No need for a script to do that, you can use a convolution layer with a bunch of tiny dots on it. Not sure what what you're mentioning does, feel free to mail me examples.


True, it sounds like a gimmick if you say you can draw sounds with it, the truth is it's a very technical exercise.


More lik triple personalities, it's also an image editor! lol. And yeah, maybe you can tell that the main focus shifted over time(I can definitely tell since I work with the code). At first (before the release) the focus was a program to synthesise JPGs into sounds, then something that would let you edit spectrograms in Photoshop, then something that could do sound isolation, now the focus is pretty mixed although I'm trying to emphasise its use as a synthesiser and a mastering/effects thing.


Yeah that shouldn't be a problem given it's a text protocol. I still need to fix the program so that it can open PHA files made on any platform.


Sure I guess that could be done. But would it really be convenient?


I don't know what Melodyne does, I don't use any audio programs.


Yeah well, what parts of OSC are YOU interested in? I mean, sure we could have it control knobs, but are knobs that useful? We could also have like a XY surface to draw stuff or control playback, but would that really be useful?


Well you can have it on a USB key and run it from there. It won't even leave any tracks on the host machine.


Thanks. It's funny that I don't really have any crashes myself. Except a few days ago when I loaded a 10 min sound and then turned on live synthesis, but it displayed a clear error message saying it couldn't allocate the ~200 MB buffer it had to. Since I'm on a 64-bit system now I should try to make a 64-bit build, at least for Windows.