Black Magic Drum Machine Beta testing finished

[alexfalcao]

Andy, elxicano,

I have no problems with beta 15 in Live, It's very stable for me . I will download and test beta 16 now.

Alex.

[elxsound]

Andy, elxicano,

I have no problems with beta 15 in Live, It's very stable for me . I will download and test beta 16 now.

Alex.

Yeah, I'm scratching my head on this one... I can't even get 12 to work correctly. All my other plugins work fine... just not this one, for some reason. Oh well... tomorrow is another day.

[alexfalcao]

Hi elxicano.

Did you try to run BM on another Host? Also try to do a Disk Maintenance, Chkdsk, Defrag, Etc.. Believe me a Fragmented Hard drive will cause errors on applications.


Alex.

[Chester Desmond]

Had a good run with beta 16 tonight. Only Lovecraft narrated by Samuel L Jackson could be more epic. It ran nearly without a hitch for me and the new "pattern toggling" is really great and easy to use; it worked exactly how I hoped it would. Thanks for doing that.
Recording by holding down a key is brilliant. I even think you could make us "synch to host" people happy by having a midi note to engage the play function too. Put that note at the very beginning of your track, hit play in the DAW and BM will start immediately, then just put another note in when you want it to stop (or one long note if play worked as record does via keyboard).
Whether it's patterns or play or record, I can think of scenarios where the old behaviour (ie Off when key is released) would be desirable....an example being in loop mode in your DAW and you wanted a pattern (or the playing loop in BM)to keep playing steadily when it looped to the start; you would use one loop-length note which would sustain then re-trigger instead of it playing the note again and toggling it off when it looped.
Sort of a "keys act like buttons" mode which is available for any function which is accessible by MIDI.
I also had fun by having Tracktion loop 8 bars and adding (in the piano roll) an F every 3rd bar. Each time Tracktion looped it was turning all patterns on and off but each time would be different since the first note in the loop was sometimes turning all patterns on and sometimes off. Over top of another loop it was a really organic and evolving sound. Having this same control over the Play function in BM could add even more craziness.
I LOVE the way you can drag the loop right out of the "open" dialog window and straight into the DAW..I was even able to drag a freshly made BM loop straight into RMV's loop\slicer window. A purely cosmetic nitpick would be to have that open window be BM graphics as opposed to system.
In a matter of 3 minutes I had a sliced up BM loop going in RMV, a BM loop in the DAW and one was playing back in BM and I had a huge wall of groove.

I'm a little excited I guess

Also a volume on the play would be handy, especially if you can playback a loop while manipulating a new one..I am positive I was doing that yesterday but I can't seem to now. Play mutes the "live" section.

The only issues I had were the odd stuttering audio glitch but I haven't nailed that one down and I have heard it with other plugs. I'll keep an eye on it.

The Open button is toggling\needs to be pressed twice (beta 16).

You had mentioned re-coding the knobs so I'll also mention that the knobs are still as sluggish as they've been all along in Tracktion 3.

I am really loving this whole deal....

[Musical Gym]

I have BM running inside FL playing fine until I press Play or Record in the host transport. Then it all hangs up, produces a hum/noise and then maybe gets back to normal. Is there a way to control BM stop/start with host play/stop/pause controls? It somehow seems that they are working against each other.

Edit: Went back to FL after posting this and I've got the meters peaked out again similar to my post(s) on previous page.
Not very encouraging.

[Astralp]

I have BM running inside FL playing fine until I press Play or Record in the host transport. Then it all hangs up, produces a hum/noise and then maybe gets back to normal. Is there a way to control BM stop/start with host play/stop/pause controls? It somehow seems that they are working against each other.

Please read the post about uses on an earlier page. If you want to use the sequencer in sync with a host you do the sequence triggering via midi. The BM buttons are for independent loop creation and not designed to be used that way.

Sounds like you haven't disabled 'Reset on Play' as I suggested at the beginning is necessary with FL.

Edit: Went back to FL after posting this and I've got the meters peaked out again similar to my post(s) on previous page.
Not very encouraging.

Again possibly reset on play option.

[Astralp]

Had a good run with beta 16 tonight. Only Lovecraft narrated by Samuel L Jackson could be more epic. It ran nearly without a hitch for me and the new "pattern toggling" is really great and easy to use; it worked exactly how I hoped it would. Thanks for doing that.
Recording by holding down a key is brilliant. I even think you could make us "synch to host" people happy by having a midi note to engage the play function too. Put that note at the very beginning of your track, hit play in the DAW and BM will start immediately, then just put another note in when you want it to stop (or one long note if play worked as record does via keyboard).

Glad you like it, the trouble with Play is that it only plays back the recorded loop, if none was recorded in the current session, there is nothing to play. I think what you describe here is what the B2 Key does in standard mode, is that what you mean?

Whether it's patterns or play or record, I can think of scenarios where the old behaviour (ie Off when key is released) would be desirable....an example being in loop mode in your DAW and you wanted a pattern (or the playing loop in BM)to keep playing steadily when it looped to the start; you would use one loop-length note which would sustain then re-trigger instead of it playing the note again and toggling it off when it looped.

Just select Normal for the Midi Mode on the Sequencer Page, I kept the old behaviour which is much better for sequencing Does that cover your needs?

I also had fun by having Tracktion loop 8 bars and adding (in the piano roll) an F every 3rd bar. Each time Tracktion looped it was turning all patterns on and off but each time would be different since the first note in the loop was sometimes turning all patterns on and sometimes off. Over top of another loop it was a really organic and evolving sound. Having this same control over the Play function in BM could add even more craziness.
I LOVE the way you can drag the loop right out of the "open" dialog window and straight into the DAW..I was even able to drag a freshly made BM loop straight into RMV's loop\slicer window. A purely cosmetic nitpick would be to have that open window be BM graphics as opposed to system.
In a matter of 3 minutes I had a sliced up BM loop going in RMV, a BM loop in the DAW and one was playing back in BM and I had a huge wall of groove.

I'm a little excited I guess

Wow, that's interesting, I hadn't thought of dragging loops directly in! I'll see if I can add custom graphics, but I'm not sure if that will be possible via SE SDK, I might be stuck with Windows stuff at least for now. If it sells, I'll be developing it with the VST SDK which will open up many new graphical possibilities.

Also a volume on the play would be handy, especially if you can playback a loop while manipulating a new one..I am positive I was doing that yesterday but I can't seem to now. Play mutes the "live" section.

Well the Play was only designed for auditioning the loop you just recorded, not for this purpose but it is certainly an interesting idea I guess if I added a midi trigger to play then that could mix instead of muting, so the GUI behaves the same, perhaps velocity could control the volume?[/quote]

The only issues I had were the odd stuttering audio glitch but I haven't nailed that one down and I have heard it with other plugs. I'll keep an eye on it.
The Open button is toggling\needs to be pressed twice (beta 16).

Yes if you can find any more clues about any glitches that would be handy, it may possibly be the compressor or Limiter.

I've fixed the Open button in the next version.

You had mentioned re-coding the knobs so I'll also mention that the knobs are still as sluggish as they've been all along in Tracktion 3.

I'm not sure what else I can do about that, Tracktion must limit the GUI clock I guess. I could possibly add a direct control mode of the knob so it respond like the sliders, but it won't be very nice/accurate to use.

Thanks for your ideas, all very interesting stuff! I'll have a go at implementing some of it later on

Andy

[Astralp]

Andy, elxicano,

I have no problems with beta 15 in Live, It's very stable for me . I will download and test beta 16 now.

Alex.

Yeah, I'm scratching my head on this one... I can't even get 12 to work correctly. All my other plugins work fine... just not this one, for some reason. Oh well... tomorrow is another day.

I've mailed you a test version with a new VST ID which will eliminate whether it is some sort of cache problem

[SampleScience]

About the GUI: how about different skins? Since you have someone for that a couple of skins in different styles would be very cool (like a minimal "Live" style of skin). Just a suggestion. The original look good (even if I don't like those multiple shadows on kobs! )

[Az're-ul]

One power cut and 1 beta later

2 small feature requests

1) Can you put a list of changes as a text file within the zip? All of a sudden my previous files suddenly would only play once then stop - actually down to EXT2's saving the project's state rather than BM, as reloading the fxb and reading this thread sorting it.

2) Don't know how anyone else feels about this one but sometimes a X2 clock tempo setting could be useful so you could program/play 32 steps in a bar.

Off to play...

Edit:

.. or not

Something has got corrupted in my Windows installation during the power cut so I'm going to have to do a re-install. Just backing up everything I can now.

Back in a couple of days hopefully, unless my C: drive is borked.

[Musical Gym]

Thanks for info on problems in FL.
Will go back through thread to learn what to do and not to do.
Looking forward to a manual when it's done.

[elxsound]

Andy, elxicano,

I have no problems with beta 15 in Live, It's very stable for me . I will download and test beta 16 now.

Alex.

Yeah, I'm scratching my head on this one... I can't even get 12 to work correctly. All my other plugins work fine... just not this one, for some reason. Oh well... tomorrow is another day.

I've mailed you a test version with a new VST ID which will eliminate whether it is some sort of cache problem

Thanks... I'll give it try shortly (just woke up... its been a very long week).

[jdt]

Hey all, I didn't see this recently in the thread, so here goes.

Installed BM 16 beta few minutes ago. Extracted as usual, tried to load BM into FL 8 and got an address violation... wouldn't load. Tried again , same thing. Tried to open it in Sonar, no go. Another dialog reporting serious vst error. I noticed there is a difference in file sizes...BM #12 is 3.17mb, #14 is 3.18mb, #15 is 3.19mb and then #16 is 3.18 mb. Did something get left out of the BM 16 .rar?

Probably not needed but I'll send the screenshots in. Luckily 15 works like a charm.

[elxsound]

Hi Andy,

I'm still getting the crashes in Live, even with the version you sent me via email.

I did try this in Cantabile Lite, and it ran without any problems, so I guess that narrows my problem to Live on my system (since alexfalcao is able to run it fine in Live).

Please let me know what you'd like me to try next, since this seems to be a very strange problem.

[alexfalcao]

Hi elxicano,

Try to reinstall Live. That's what I do when something weird happens in Live, and sometimes works..


Alex.