Friday 14 December 2007

9 Days of Effort




Almost there! it needs to be properly usable by next friday, or I'll be flying out to Switzerland with Traktor and my tail between my legs. I did a few mixes and it worked pretty well, except... the stop button doesn't have any effect. Ah, going to have to fix that.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think its nice that you share your software creations with us in the form of many different still images, but do you ever plan on releasing it?

Anonymous said...

Now that would be sweet.

Anonymous said...

Fair play to you Chris.. your putting the work in.
I hope its all sorted in time for your gig. Let us know how you get on.

Respect _Chris_

cylob said...

Hi, thanks for the responses. I don't know if I'll ever release the program, but for this application in particular it's a nice idea, as all the DJ programs around at the moment don't really hit the spot, not as far as I'm concerned anyway. Due to the license under which SuperCollider is made available, programs can't be sold, which is fair enough since all of the functions are the result of volunteer coders. So it would have to be open source freeware - something to bear in mind (I'm not sure how willing I would be to provide "customer support" if it would take a lot of time for no fiscal reward, for instance. Not because I'm stingy but because I'm poor.) In the meantime, I like to blog about the creation of my tools, say something about the train of thought that goes into these things, and at least show that there's a bit more to what I'm doing than fiddling around in fruity loops, whether you like the end result or not!

Anonymous said...

hi there,

you mentioned a few days earlier,..

"I think it's possible to make something which automatically keeps 2 or 4 tracks in time, without having to constantly adjust them. All it takes is a little preparation beforehand - such as inserting a few simple tags into the soundfile."

..how did you solve this problem, especially the "meta-tag-approach"?

cheers,
coi

cylob said...

Hi Coi,
well, tagging is where Native Instruments really did well, as Traktor makes a pretty good guess most of the time of the tempo, and works out where all the transients are. There are code libraries for SuperCollider which do a similar job, but it would take a bit of time and effort to implement them. In the meantime, the markers are simply to let the program know when the start beat is, where another definite bar is (from which the tempo can be discerned) and then the downbeat of an unknown bar can be specified and the program can work out the intervening tempo information - the more of these tags there are, the more accurate the tracking. So, that is a little time consuming to do, for the moment, but it's no more hassle than tagging audio files in Ableton Live for instance. The information is then saved to disk in a special file and can be referred to by the browser.

Anonymous said...

Very clever stuff. Cheers for sharing this with us all Chris.

Anonymous said...

you don't have to be poor if you can code this well. Seriously, I couldn't make a button in Suepercollider. You are a genius in my book when it comes to this stuff.

Anonymous said...

hello again..

so you actually tagging by hand/editor..?

last year or so i stumbled over an application called jacksondj, which uses a quite clever way of analysing rhythmical structures. actually is just a different approach of displaying rhythmical informations, tagging is still done by hand..has a rather spectrogramic(with ah few ffts thrown in;]) feel to it..but very impressive..though windows-only.

i#m referring to the beatmapper,
the application itself lacks a few bits&bobs like vst, asio, userinterface...but overall good potential, ridiculous low usage of resources, stable..though the development seems to be abandoned..

i#m with you on the "don't really hit the spot"-point. no really satisfying metaphors/uis for handling audiostreams in a realtime-environment..so hurry up ;]

best wishes,
coi

Anonymous said...

hello cylob,
being a non*musician (never use any musical software) all i can say is that you're custom-made sofware looks great & mysterious!
cheers
M.

Anonymous said...

Hi Cylob
i was wondering about the technicalities: did you use the Mp3 extension for SC? I never checked it out properly, never thought it could do rate change on it!

nice 1 tho

Anonymous said...

and, how did you get waveform scrolling with it!?!?!