new sequencer (Sequitur)

[TotcProductions]

So why's this planet so damn angry anyway?

[shamann]

So why's this planet so damn angry anyway?

Because it is red?

[exh]

No, all non SE synths i tried worked fine (wusikstation, kjaerhus spectra, oatmeal and others, and that was both inserting them as new tracks and swapping them out with SE ones that i'd already loaded. I'd load an SE, no sound

Well thanks much for the report, I've added your synthedit problem to the wiki. I haven't been able to reproduce it but I'm sure everyone here is even more familiar than we are with how variable VSTs are. As of now I have no guesses why a VST would work on some systems and not others, and it's been my experience that generally I never find the source of these problems. What's happened so far is that I've continued trying to improve VST support by trying to find what's nonstandard about what I'm doing and making it more standard, and eventually more things work. So for now, I'm going to move forward by trying to find cases of broken VSTs I can reproduce and fixing those, and hopefully along the line this will go away. Sorry I can't be more responsive.

thanks,
eric

[exh]

the GUI looks like Muzys and Tracktion had a baby.

Haven't seen muzys for years, don't really remember it. Traktion's an awesome program, I think that guys's doing a great job, but as far as I know all 'chaining' style UIs came from bars & pipes, an Amiga program from the late 80s. For those that haven't seen it this screenshot might not make a lot of sense but it's probably the origin of what a lot of us are building on.

[exh]

hang and eat children etc....

thanks,
eric

it hangs them before it eats them!!!!?????
sweet! I really should invite my little bro and sis over.

no,no "it can CRASH and hang and eat children etc"
not hanging and eating only...crashing too!

hmm, in that case theres also some annoying kids next door. should make a trail of funnel cake and candy.

The only problem with that is you'll probably end up attracting more children than sequitur can eat. And then what are you left with? Just a lot of kids running around with sticky hands.

[exh]

I suggest a slicer tool that lets you draw a curve over the selected note to change the rate of slicing.

Cool idea, I added it to the wiki here.

Is it possible to change what the bloom curve is.

Yes, you can use 'z' and 'x' keys to modify the curve or better yet, go into a song window File->Preferences->MIDI tab and map a knob to macro A. Now you can use the knob to control the curvature.

are there things like reverse and stretch and inverse.

There were in the beos version. They'll come back but a lot has changed under the hood so they need to be rethought. The old model was pretty static, you generally just 'operated a tool' like using a pencil to create a note. The new model is much more dynamic, with parameters mapped to controller knobs that you manipulate as you're using the tool, so operating a tool is now somewhat akin to performing music, rather than just clicking a button. It's taking some time to figure out how everything should fit together.

hpow about a transpose strtch tool? will the line tool do that?

Transpose stretch is a great idea, I added that to the wiki. The line tool will not do that, it's not useful for notes right now. What it'll do is try to order them by pitch according to the line. Well, I've never found it useful.

Realistically a lot of these tools aren't 100% useful unless they are in whatever key you're writing in. We have the On Key node to maintain a key, but key signatures aren't in yet so it's not as useful as it needs to be. So right now you can maintain a key nondestructively but for the tools a lot of times you want that built in, and we haven't done that yet.

[exh]

Yeah, basically they only give out the Rewire license to big registered companies, not to indie developers like yours truly. Apparently Justin can't get a license either (for Reaper). The Props simply ignore most requests.

I can understand if they're using it to maintain quality. If they work closely with any licensees to guarantee all rewire apps work well together, I think there's some justification for it. Don't know if that's the case though.

[exh]

YAY! Sequitur LIVES!

Good to see you again jace!

Eric Hackborn is ... brilliant.

Hey I think you meant "sexified."

Drop me a line if you want to catch up.

later,
eric

[exh]

I'm a bit confused; is this going to be a free sequencer? Or is it going to be released with a pricetag when it comes out of beta?

Yeah we figure the choice at some point is to either charge and at least give people the option of buying, or stop working on it, so when it gets to a minimum required level of stability and completeness we will diverge the product line. There will be a commercial "Sequitur A" and a freeware "Sequitur F." Haven't fully decided what the freeware limitations will be but expect a limited track and VST count, and a sharp reduction in the things that make sequitur unique -- like the tools probably won't be anything more than what's currently there.

[spuddle]

Can these line tools be constricted to a particular scale?

[exh]

Who did you gave the source too?

It was a couple people but I honestly don't remember. Someone named frank, maybe? What I have changed and evolved into the current windows version but I have no particular issue with the already-released source being used for anything. I think it would be a real headache for someone trying to dive in, but whatever.

I have used Sequitur sporadically(?) and as eric probably knows (sorry eric) I both hated it and loved it.

The issues were primarily around recording, right? I think dianne mentioned this already but we don't generally record much over here so it's harder for us to get that polished. We've made small improvements in the current version, and you mention something that I'd love to do, an 'always on' MIDI recording service. I think that'd be great. Beyond that feel free to work with us more closely about specific improvements. The easiest thing to do is to start adding to the wiki. This is intended to be a public wiki so anyone is free to modify it, including changing the structure, since it's in a very early form. I think dianne followed up on your quantizing issue, but if not feel free to jot some notes down on it in the wiki.

I want to make more tools and/or adapt them to generate flam-like drum effects and not-so-random patterns for drums.

Flams are something we plan on covering well in an upcoming release. The drum effects will fall out of what's there for echosystem and, if you remember the hot beat injection tool, some of what it could do. In the old vesion specifying the underlying patterns was difficult, but we've got much better and more flexible tools for doing that now.

About the tool seeds specifically, it's a little early to say anything about that since none of it has been released in the windows version yet. I want to do a real overhaul on that but it's not something I've spent much time on yet. If you have specific suggestions please send them over.

[exh]

What are Dan's Audio and the other nice looking audio features?

The Dan Audio node is a mistake, don't use it as it will go away. It was an example audio node I wrote for, well, Dan, and wasn't supposed to be included. All it does is cut the volume down by I think 50%. In the realm of exciting audio nodes it comes in at 97,342 out of 97,343 (the only one more boring was the one that only cut the volume by 10%).

The only audio nodes in sequitur besides the input and output are Audio Mixer and Audio Recorder, everything else is on a supply-yourself basis.

[exh]

So why's this planet so damn angry anyway?

It didn't used to be.

Bad childhood.

[exh]

Here's an example: If you create a new empty MIDI track, on the 'Output fx' mouse over beginning of the pipeline and right click...you should see a list that says "Echo, Eat Duplicates, Quantize, etc.." in addition to the MIDI devices installed on your system.

no way I'm getting this to work. All that pops-up is the vst-menu*

The popup menu will be context sensitive depending upon what you can actually use at any given location. If you're popping up a menu in a location that has MIDI nodes on either side, you'll get a menu of MIDI nodes, like what dan described. If you're getting a list of VSTs, then either you're selecting the menu on a track that already has audio output, which would force the list into being nodes that produce audio, or you're selecting it on something with no output and getting a list that does have the MIDI nodes but maybe they're just buried, since it sounds like you might have a large number of VSTs?

Which is a good point -- thanks for bringing it up. I've never had more than a handful of VSTs installed at a time but I see that some people need better organization of that menu. I'll work on that for a future release, and let me know if you have any specific ideas on how you think it should be structured.

Oh and of course -- there could also just be a flat-out bug, and the correct items are not showing. Haven't seen that but if someone thinks they have I'd like to hear about it.

[exh]

first of all the 'Echo' creates an icon. If I left-click it I get a menu on the far left. But obviously it's a midi-effect - it creates echoes of the note-on messages it receives. This of course has got nothing to do with splitting up/duplicating audio-streams. Now my wild guess is that Sequitur has both midi- and audio-'Echo' and so far I've only been stumbling upon the midi-'Echo' - right?

Hey jens I think you get everything there was just a miscommunication -- there is only one Echo node, it is a MIDI effect, dan was just describing routing the output of the echo MIDI node into the inputs of several VSTi nodes, so you just have a couple VSTis playing in unison.

As I've now posted, there are only 2 audio nodes included, Audio Mixer and Audio Recorder. Everything else is either housekeeping (the audio inputs and outputs) or accidentally included (Dan Audio).