2CAudio Kaleidoscope | It's A Trip | Latest Update 1.1

[Andrew Souter]

What computer specs (cpu cores & speed, gpu, L3) do you recommend to run Kaleidoscope to its full potential?

As fast and as many cores as you can afford. I have a 12-core Mac Pro cylinder. This is the best possible at the moment on the Mac side of things.

On the win side you could do even better with a dual socket xeon system. You could currently build a 36-core dual socket Xeon beast for example. KS can use as many cores as you throw at it.

Some time in the next couple months there will be 22-core Xeons. KS will love them.

On the non-xeon side of things, Ivy-Bridge-E, Haswell-E, Broadwell-E (when available) are nice choices.

I would say 4-cores is about the minimum you should consider for a workable experience, and the best possible experience is limited only by your hardware and wallet.

However it really depends on your workflow also. If you have lesser hardware you can still use KS; you just need to do more bouncing/freezing/exporting.

If you want to do full many-track KS ambient pieces plus some B2, Aether, and 3rd party FX, and keep everything live, as I did for pieces like this:

https://soundcloud.com/andrew_souter/wa ... ian-fields

...you want lots of cores.

This is something like 15 KS's + 4 B2s + 1 Aether + general mix/mastering comp/eq/limiting etc. all "live". I exported only the stereo master track. That was approaching the edge of what the current 12-core Mac Pro could handle. There was no audio data in the track. Same as the "Cocoon" example I posted a screen shot of earlier in the thread.

If you have less, just bounce more though. No problem. It's always a good idea to bounce project stems anyway for achieve purposes.

And if you simply want to process some existing audio content, for some special FX, there is no reason to keep it live. Just render it as soon as you find something you like. This will be perfectly fine on standard laptops for example.

[Andrew Souter]

...all that said, we did basically spend almost all of 2015 working on improving KS performance. We have a (free) update coming soon-ish (hopefully) and then we can evaluate again what the current state is in terms of performance... Some aspects should be significantly better/faster/more-effecient.

[Michael L]

Thank you very much for such a detailed response, Andrew. It is quite helpful!

[Sampleconstruct]

Tree instances of KS using similar presets, processing vocal whispering, vocal gibberish, some bamboo chimes and a rumbling noise drone:

https://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/ ... -patchpool

and a live-on-video-jam, also using 3 instances of KS with tempo-synced, pattern-orientated presets to process a Zebra sequence:

[jackmazzotti]

considering the nature of the users of Kaleidoscope I feel it is my duty to inform you of the this unbelievably awesome spectral sound design tool plus it's FREE!!!
work on individual sine waves of any sample
kinda like Melodyne but even better in some ways
http://www.klingbeil.com/spear/

[Beatworld]

considering the nature of the users of Kaleidoscope I feel it is my duty to inform you of the this unbelievably awesome spectral sound design tool plus it's FREE!!!
work on individual sine waves of any sample
kinda like Melodyne but even better in some ways
http://www.klingbeil.com/spear/

Interesting but ANCIENT system requirements and last "news" is from 2009.
Seems to be frozen in time

[jackmazzotti]

considering the nature of the users of Kaleidoscope I feel it is my duty to inform you of the this unbelievably awesome spectral sound design tool plus it's FREE!!!
work on individual sine waves of any sample
kinda like Melodyne but even better in some ways
http://www.klingbeil.com/spear/

Interesting but ANCIENT system requirements and last "news" is from 2009.
Seems to be frozen in time

Works perfectly on Yosemite
Very fast too

[Sampleconstruct]

KS goes 7-8, three similar presets using the piano-roll-concept processing a frame drum and a Tremor groove:

[Sampleconstruct]

Some galaxy hopping:

[TwoToneshuzz]

Spending some time with the Kaleidoscope and Simons Subscription presets today. Really an incredible wealth of material generated here. I have a track or two on the way. I'll listen some more to the many Demos Simon has made to get a overview of some of the capabilities of the Kaleidoscope.. It's a whole new way of working. Though even with my limited usage I've got a pretty good feel of the main parameters and their controls..I think it's the visuals and the intuitive GUI that helps me there..

Oh yeah getting used to bouncing to disk, and it's fine workable with my 3.1ghz quad core i5 2011 iMac just max out the buffer and go exploring!

[Sampleconstruct]

Something quite dark, made this early morning after creating some new images/tuning files/waveforms and presets, two instances of KS processing various organic noise sources, then bringing them together in MMorph so that one KS gets morphed with the other KS.

https://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/ ... -patchpool

[TwoToneshuzz]

Something quite dark, made this early morning after creating some new images/tuning files/waveforms and presets, two instances of KS processing various organic noise sources, then bringing them together in MMorph so that one KS gets morphed with the other KS.

https://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/ ... -patchpool

Extremely satisfying souncscape, it just has so much depth, power, and internal momentum.. It's a complete statment in it's self, like a moving sound sculpture. If it was set up to play in a space somewhere to run ad infinitum it might create a new cult..

[Sampleconstruct]

... If it was set up to play in a space somewhere to run ad infinitum it might create a new cult..

Thank's Wade - I might setup some speakers here in the woods and see the cult growing

[Andrew Souter]

so after many, many, many months of effort we are on build 420 and we finally see a performance improvement!! Coincidence? You decide. It's a trip indeed!

(for the record, I'm actually not really an enjoyer of such things... but it's an ironic coincidence isn't it?)

also I've made a pretty kick ass limiter to put into KS in the past couple months! Many of you suggested such things earlier in the thread, and what can I say: you were right! It is very useful! esp when you are doing off-line sound-design where you might like to pass a signal through KS multiple times using the same tuning. This would typically result in very unpredictable dynamics do the the nature of applying highly resonant filters that are tuned to the same frequencies as found in the source. Well, now we have an extremely transparent limiter that can avoid this and keep everything perfectly tame even in such circumstances... pretty cool!

as far as I can tell so far in fact, it's one of the cleanest single-band limiters I have tested comparing to all my favorites...


and while being semi-off topic, let's be completely off topic. Read this, Dune is just awesome:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/j ... are_btn_fb

[dayjob]

so after many, many, many months of effort we are on build 420 and we finally see a performance improvement!!

that's good news! i hope it's released soon. looking forward to checking out the limiter as well... but CPU improvement is most important thing for me.