I have planned on some day making the Classic mode playback more flexible, so that it could play the texture forwards and backwards, at any speed (including "freezed"), as well as be envelope controllable, but haven't yet done anything to enable that.

There's basically 2 ways this could be done.

1) Like you perhaps imply, have an envelope that maps the texture playback position (like the Source position maps the playback position of the source sound files) but keeps the user set real time texture length the same. Or

2) Have a global tempo/playback speed type of parameter/envelope that would change the texture duration like the Play Forward mode already does.

Programming-wise I think option 1 would be easier to implement, but I am not sure if that is what you meant you would like to have?

Thanks for the sound snippet!

Hey Xenakios, just amazing work! The program works flawlessly and I can never hear it creating ugly digital artifacts.


I have a suggestion for the random panning. I think it would sound better in most cases if the panning could be strictly either Left or Right, no in between. It could be added as an option.

I now changed the panning spread so that there are now 3 modes available instead of the previous 2 : Full random, left/right random (the new mode) and alternating left/right. (And I could add more modes too, if there is anything interesting left to try for that, though the scripting system really would handle such more exotic needs better than having a ton of different options in the menu...)

I hope to be posting a new build in the coming days...

Bump for 1.2.5 :

http://xenakios.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/hourglass-1-2-5-rel eased/

And the goodness keeps coming! This is the possibly the most flexible and powerful offline granulator in existence at this point. Infinite kudos.

Infinite kudos is appropriate given the nature of HourGlass and granular manipulation.

∞Kudos

Thanks a lot, Xenakios !

Some people have a great product and give it away for free (thanks, Xenakios!). Some other people haven't a product (anymore) and want to get money for the idea (Ernesto)...

It's a mad world...

Bump for 1.2.6 :

http://xenakios.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/hourglass-1-2-6-rel eased/

Thank you.

Newcomers to this thread - You NEED to check this application out if you've even a passing interest in granular synthesis.

Suggestion re usability (also bump). When you choke the processor and no grains are left, the message telling you that you've starved too many voices and should stop playback obscures the transport bar. When you click to close it, it'll usually come straight back unless your modulation affects the number of grains playing over time. As such you can't stop playback unless you've got ninja mouse skills or you know that spacebar is the relevant keyboard shortcut. Is it perhaps worth adding that spacebar stops playback to this message? I'm guessing that changing the location of such notifications would be far more work.

Yeah I hadn't considered this as I never use the transport buttons for starting and stopping the playback myself...I'll change it in some way.

I was just coming back to say I've only just noticed that every element of the display is repositionable! So much for me saying it'd be more work to change locations of things! This software drops my jaw in a new way every time I launch it. Indeed, the warning message does obscure the transport bar in its default position, but I guess just addding (spacebar) after the word stop in the message would be sufficient.

Going further, I've just noticed that fragment length can be toggled to function as a percentage of the grain generation rate. Incredible. PSOLA-like speech processing here I come!

Yeah that's a useful option, unfortunately currently buried in the parameter's button menu...The main parameters GUI might go through a yet new redesign at some point, but I don't yet exactly know what kind of a redesign I should attempt...