AQ releases SCAMP 1.2.0, now with MIDI NOTE TRACKING!

[AdmiralQuality]

What's new in SCAMP 1.2...

http://www.admiralquality.com/products/SCAMP/?kvreb

- Added MIDI note control of cutoff freqency! Filter cutoff will track the pitch of the last played MIDI note (and persist after the note-off), centered on middle C, which is the default current note after SCAMP is loaded and/or after bypassing and subsequent reactivation by the host. Notes played below middle C will lower the cutoff and notes played above middle C will raise the cutoff, allowing SCAMP 1.2 to be "played" from a MIDI keyboard or sequence. This tracking of musical pitches creates some very exciting new modulation possibilities for SCAMP!
- Doubled the speed of GUI updates to produce smoother motion when moving controls.
- Fixed a GUI bug that was limiting control resolution. Much finer control is possible now, both in circular and linear modes.
- Changed all presets to bypass channels 3 to 6 by default.
- Shrunk mouseable areas of most GUI controls, controls will no longer move if you click in their shadows.
- Added display of version and serial number to the about box, and a Web hotlink to http://www.AdmiralQuality.com
- Further performance optimizations, measured at approximately 5% less CPU than version 1.1.1.
- Fine tuned the calculation of the displayed Cutoff Frequency in Hz (note that only the value displayed has been changed, not the actual sound). The displayed frequency should roughly match the frequency that the filter will self-oscillate at when resonance is set high. (Note that modulation from the envelope follower, LFO, or MIDI keyboard will render this value inaccurate. It is only useful for displaying the resonant frequency of the filter without modulation.)
- Tweaked resonance gain compensation to respond to modulation (this will introduce a very minor change in SCAMP's sound for this version.)

Enjoy. No evaluation reset this time, but the sound and performance are essentially the same as before (new performances increases are only minor). The big change is the MIDI note tracking, this filter can now be played like an instrument!

Cheers.

[Johnny Cherry]

When's the synth coming????

[AdmiralQuality]

When's the synth coming????

Well, all this new stuff came from the synth development.

"2 weeks!"

Anyway, sorry... if more people would buy SCAMPs then Poly would probably be done by now, but have been a bit distracted trying to stay fed and not kicked out of the building.

But now it turns out EVERYBODY's getting kicked out of our building anyway (ownership changed, they're demolishing it probably to put up condos), that's *really* going to help. Admiral Quality needs live/work studio space in Toronto.

I'd say "2 weeks". But... then it just won't come true.

Hang in there though.

[AdmiralQuality]

Funny, I just stumbled across this article on id-soft's John Carmack (Quake, Doom, etc) that has some quotes on the "two weeks" phenomenon.

http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/723/723648p2.html

On a somewhat lighter note, Carmack addressed the topic of schedule slippages, mentioning "The Mythical Man-Month," a classic mid-1970s book on software engineering that's still fairly relevant to today's software development. Perhaps inevitably, the conversation turned to the problem of programmers constantly underestimating how long something would take, something Carmack had firsthand experience with.

"It used to be a joke at id when someone would say, 'How long would something take?' 'Two weeks.' Because a programmer can get anything done in two weeks," Carmack joked. "Fourteen days, if you stayed up, you could just get anything done in that time. Of course, it doesn't actually work out like that. In any of the projects I've worked on, I've never failed in any of them, but I've never been on time.

"Even with all the experience that I've got, there's just something that's fairly damning about the work that we do, and it's pretty common," said Carmack. "It's really rare to run into a programmer that can actually say 'it's going to take this long' and get something done in that timeframe ... unless it's something they've just done before. In our defense I would say that we are trying to do new and different things, and there's an aspect of research and not just engineering -- we're trying to do something that we haven't done before, and you can't predict the unknown with complete certainty."

So, there you go, at least I'm in good company.

Poly-Ana IS coming along though. Again, all these new SCAMP features are pulled out of Poly's development. (We feel it's important to get updates to our current customers ASAP. Also this lets us test them, without having to prematurely release Poly.)

I do expect to have a demo MP3 in a few more days, just to show some progress and give a few hints as to the sound possibilities. But it's all in such rapid flux lately that it's hard to stop and say, OK, this is good enough for a demo, because tomorrow there's just going to be another feature, or improvement in the sound, and I'll be wishing I hadn't made the previous day's demo.

Thanks again for your interest. I know it's hard to wait. In the mean time, SCAMP's filter resonance can now be played from a keyboard, just like a synth.

[AdmiralQuality]

There's been a suggestion on this board today that SCAMP "phones home" or possibly tracks demo users in some way. I will comment on this only once, here:

SCAMP (or any Admiral Quality product) DOES NOT TRACK ITS USERS, WHETHER THEY ARE IN FREE-EVALUTION, EVALUTION-EXPIRED, OR AUTHORIZED WITH A PURCHASED KEY! Admiral Quality is ABSOLUTELY OPPOSED TO SPYWARE, and would NEVER collect any information from a user's system that is not directly related to our product!

Note however that if you click on our Web link in the About Box, you will clearly and openly see, in the URL's query string, that we do send your SCAMP version and SCAMP serial number. Those are the only pieces of information we attempt to collect from our users, and it only happens if they voluntarily click on our link in the About Box. NO DETAILS OR INFORMATION FROM YOUR SYSTEM CAN BE DERIVED FROM THIS DATA, it's just to help us get a (very rough) sense of statistics regarding how long people have SCAMP before they buy. And just like we can see the referring URL in our Web logs, to see what sites people have linked to us from, we also want to see how many links we get from running copies of SCAMP. (Though with sales as low as they are, it's hard to get meaningful statitics on THAT too! But maybe someday... we collect this stuff "just in case". It might also be of interest to an investor someday, should we ever be forced to pursue that route. Right now, I'm too busy to even look at web logs or think about marketing analysis.)

That's all I can say on the matter at this time. But to prove this, I will happily issue 1 free SCAMP license key to another established and respected developer on KVR so they can then verify that it doesn't happen with a purchased key either. I ask that this test be done by another, independent, established, software development company or organization with a good rep on KVR, as people might think I'm faking it otherwise. So if you're unknown and have no product of your own, don't bother asking. (PM me to ask, don't want to pollute this thread unnecessarily. In fact, let's please just not discuss this further here AT ALL, at least until this test has been done and the report is in.)

Aside from handling that, I won't be commenting further on this, as it only serves to legitimize the false claims. 'Nuff said.

Cheers everyone. Enjoy your free, fully functional, non-spyware, 7 day evalutaion periods. We strive to be as generous as possible, both with the free, fully functioning, evaluation period, as well as our more than competitive pricing.

[funkster1]

There's been a suggestion on this board today that SCAMP "phones home" or possibly tracks demo users in some way. ...

OK. it was me who made that statement. I have since found out that I DO have some
problems due to my firewall and possibly other stuff going on on my Office/Net system.
So I officially beg your pardon, it must clearly be my own fault/pilot error.
I never meant to do any harm to you.

Best regards
Raphael

[AdmiralQuality]

OK. it was me who made that statement. I have since found out that I DO have some
problems due to my firewall and possibly other stuff going on on my Office/Net system.
So I officially beg your pardon, it must clearly be my own fault/pilot error.
I never meant to do any harm to you.

Best regards
Raphael

No worries funkster1, and thanks for saying so.

Offer of an independent check still stands BTW. If any other developer wants to waste a few hours verifying this, please PM me and let me know.