!Epoch, for the next 4 years

[woggle]

Again, thanks guys for the continued feedback. My developer-centric world often overlooks the wider picture, and so opinion from a (potential) user base is deeply appreciated.

My opinion is that the 'middle ground' is actually more active than people give it credit for; as well as the full-on developers, and the folk who only use the factory and third-party stuff, there are those who chop and change larger 'blocks' in these environments, but dont necessarily share as much. But they're not averse to doing some level of customisation and construction. Hence the proliferation of DAWs supporting 'composites' of some sort, as Racks and Combinators and Preset Chains.
This is also where Reaktor 6 very successfully pitched itself with Blocks, but even prior to that the Reaktor UL is full of 'remixes' and 'rebuilds' of other people's creations.

Agree. I seem to remember (so long, long ago ) Colin saying he had various levels of encapsulation happening so that complexity/detail could be concealed as, when and if one needed to. Which is fine by me and I think will be fine for many others.

[ThomasHelzle]

My opinion is that the 'middle ground' is actually more active than people give it credit for; as well as the full-on developers, and the folk who only use the factory and third-party stuff, there are those who chop and change larger 'blocks' in these environments, but dont necessarily share as much. But they're not averse to doing some level of customisation and construction. Hence the proliferation of DAWs supporting 'composites' of some sort, as Racks and Combinators and Preset Chains.
This is also where Reaktor 6 very successfully pitched itself with Blocks, but even prior to that the Reaktor UL is full of 'remixes' and 'rebuilds' of other people's creations.

I fully agree.
And I think !Epoch caters well to all the layers from what I have seen so far.
Some may only use it for it's sequencers and presets as some do with Reaktor.
Some may customise things a bit or use some nodes here and there, but won't dive into full on building (similar to wiring up Reaktor Blocks).
And then some will do exactly that, throw in some Lua, do complex structures and surprise all of us with what's possible.
My comment above was mostly about not dumbing down everything because many people may never use or understand it. If you can attract some good people who actually do enjoy the complexities, that does a lot of good for the whole community, since it also encourages others to look deeper into a tool.
Colin himself is such a person in the end - every plugin developer is.

I always was half artist and half technical and I'm used to switching between the states and love it.
I am very used to artist-only people who get the creeps or shut down if "math" is even mentioned (says a lot about bad schools probably). I had the luck to learn the beauty of math and algorithms early on and can see nature both as very beautiful and very algorithmic (in a way, our genes are a very clever kind of extreme compression ).

I liked how the guy presents the two sides in his ill.methodology - you need both, so make sure they don't fight:


And from there, everybody will tend more to one side or the other of course. Some may be perfectly happy with tinkering and listening themself to their creations while others become big in the music industry and cater to large audiences. Both are just as valid - music isn't just what everybody likes and whistles in the street, that often IS actually the dumbed down "interface" I was talking about.

Cheers,

Tom

[woggle]

I liked how the guy presents the two sides in his ill.methodology - you need both, so make sure they don't fight:


And from there, everybody will tend more to one side or the other of course. Some may be perfectly happy with tinkering and listening themself to their creations while others become big in the music industry and cater to large audiences. Both are just as valid - music isn't just what everybody likes and whistles in the street, that often IS actually the dumbed down "interface" I was talking about.

Cheers,

Tom

I agree with your general points but ill Gates (?) should give up the neuro stuff as he does not understand it at all

[ThomasHelzle]

I agree with your general points but ill Gates (?) should give up the neuro stuff as he does not understand it at all

I actually have no idea what kind of music he makes - I'm not into EDM at all - but his points are valid no matter what you do - at least I found his lecture very refreshing and to the point.

Cheers,

Tom

[woggle]

I agree with your general points but ill Gates (?) should give up the neuro stuff as he does not understand it at all

I actually have no idea what kind of music he makes - I'm not into EDM at all - but his points are valid no matter what you do - at least I found his lecture very refreshing and to the point.

Cheers,

Tom

I think it is a shame he includes some garbled pretend neuroscience - it really put me off enough not to be able to finish.

[ThomasHelzle]

LOL - and I thought you talk about "Neuro" as a style of EDM...

Cheers,

Tom

[bungle]

Oh another interesting point, those heros of add on creation, rarely do they have a huge catalogue of music they have created, most (not all) tweakers and builders enjoy that more than actually making music haha

Why are you bringing up Reaper in the !Epoch thread

?????

[bungle]

If you even want to push the boat out further, you have to add in locking, so that somebody can design something and lock it up so that others can't copy, believe it or not, there are actually people that will not share until they have some kind of locking, i personally believe these to be the most horrid people that have ever walked the planet, but that is just the way i am, if i know something or how to do something, i will tell/show/help anybody to the same.

[woggle]

Oh another interesting point, those heros of add on creation, rarely do they have a huge catalogue of music they have created, most (not all) tweakers and builders enjoy that more than actually making music haha

Why are you bringing up Reaper in the !Epoch thread

?????

it's a joke on the joke about Reaper always being brought up no matter what the thread - AND - I'm joking about Reaper actually having a public fanbase that is proud of tweaking and building and massaging Reaper into a working state - sometimes appearing to have Reaper purely for the goal of trying to make Reaper usable.

[bungle]

Oh another interesting point, those heros of add on creation, rarely do they have a huge catalogue of music they have created, most (not all) tweakers and builders enjoy that more than actually making music haha

Why are you bringing up Reaper in the !Epoch thread

?????

it's a joke on the joke about Reaper always being brought up no matter what the thread - AND - I'm joking about Reaper actually having a public fanbase that is proud of tweaking and building and massaging Reaper into a working state - sometimes appearing to have Reaper purely for the goal of trying to make Reaper usable.

Oh right, yeah Reaper is stunning, if you are a tweaker you can tweak forever, but if you aren't you can throw a bunch of scripts and add ons from the forum at it, and be done, since i gave up tweaking, I have made probably ten times more music (Probably being conservative here)

[colin@loomer]

Just to keep everyone in the loop as to current development, for the past few weeks I've been concentrating on bug fixes and optimisations. It's neither fun nor glamorous, but it is progress.

I've also added another built-in data type, maps, which stores a map between a unique key and a value. I was loath to add another built-in, but there are many use cases which I realised that 50% or more of the modules were essentially emulating maps, inefficiently, using arrays. Particularly when it comes to custom MIDI note mangling, you often need to keep a cache of the original note so that you can remap a matching note-off MIDI message to the corresponding note-on's pitch and channel.

... on saying that, a lot of the modules do (optionally) handle note rematching automatically. For example, with MIDI switches, which can route MIDI messages to multiple destinations, they can automatically remember to which destination the note-on was routed and will match this for the corresponding note-off regardless of the current switch destination.

Another big change has been in the way that sequencer data is stored. It's too technical and boring to be worth troubling anyone with the details, but the upshot is that the the performance and space limitations of sequence lengths aren't really an issue any more. In fitting with everything else, I've also changed the way that these are persisted in the XML presets. They were the one anomaly in that they were the only internal data stored as binary within the XML, mainly for space reasons. I feel that having them human-readable and editable ultimately trumps the few extra kb savings in preset files that a compressed binary format gave.

[bungle]

Readable makes much more sense, quick hack in Reaper, load Loomer sequences as events hahaha

[tmpacct]

stress test

[colin@loomer]

stress test

I have no idea what that means!

[bungle]

Thought this thread was done !!