aum.haa

Life has been messing with me a bit lately….sorry for my silence.  Without going into the gory details too much, I’ll just say that some physical and personal issues have been keeping me away from the computer for about two months.  Anyway, I’m mostly back in action, and now that Live 9 has been released, you’ll see some updates to Monomodular in pretty short order.  I’ll probably release a quick compatibility update first (as I’ve had a chance to uncover most of the problems between 8/9 _Frameworks), and then add some stuff for Base and Push once I’ve gotten them in my hands.

For those of you out there that have tried to contact me lately and have not gotten a reply, you have my apologies…I’m very swamped with different projects, and just recently lost about a week to a pretty debilitating virus of some sort.  I’ll be trying to catch up on the backlog over the next week as well as sort out my neglected communications, but please don’t hesitate to send me another email if I’ve left you out.

As always, thanks for the support!

a

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So, apparently Apple has removed svn command line tools from the standard OSX install starting with 10.8.  News to me…..

Anyway, if you want to install Monomodular from Subversion and you’re not able to do so on 10.8+, that would be the reason why.  You can install the “command line tools” by themselves or do a full install of  XCode4.5 and everything will work as it should; however, you will apparently need an Apple ID in order to even download them.

So here’s a shout-out to Apple for continuing to dumb down my operating system and make things far more complicated than they need to be.  Cheers, Apple!

a

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Hey all,

I’ve added some files to the repository; it’s not everything that’s done at this point, but I’ll add more as I come across things.  My work is spanned over a couple of machines at the moment so it may be a few days before I get everything in the same place.

You can use the installer patch to download from SVN, it will put the files where they go and tag everything with the correct date so it’s a little less confusing.  The new Python scripts are tagged b995, and there is a folder in the m4l patches sub that is labeled “b995 Stuff”…this has the new Hex and Encoders in it, along with some other stuff I’ve ported over to b995 for my own sets. Let me know what you find in the way of creepy crawlies please.

Before you ask, none of this stuff is Live9 compatible, sorry 🙁

a

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I’ve finally gotten around to actively working on the Live9 integration.  It was my intention to release b995 before I made the transition, and although it may still happen, I just have too much to do before I can make the release.  So it’s likely that my plans at having a separate release for b995 incorporating the new stuff (mostly MonoDevice support for existing mods and scripts) will have to wait until I’ve finished everything, even thought there may be two separate releases, one for Live8 and one for Live9.

I still intend on adding the current working versions to the repo at some point so that testing can commence from any parties willing to embark upon such a  journey 😉  Hex is largely finished at this point, and I’ve been using it successfully for some time now, but there are a lot of small changes I want to make before a public release is ready.  I hope to implement all the features I want before release even if they don’t work exactly as desired, so that going forward any presets made on older versions will be compatible with the newer versions.  That’s mostly the delay at this point.

Live9 compatibility for Monomodular probably won’t be released until Live9 is released, it’s that plain and simple.  Ableton’s codebase keeps changing enough between each revision of the beta that it makes little sense for me to do more than a preliminary rewrite of my own material at this point, as it will just be extra work for me when everything is finally committed in the final release.  Sorry for this, you’ll just have to get by on Live8 for now.

I’ve found some ways to further rewrite the scripts that will make it a lot easier for end-user editing and customization (at least in Live8 – Live9 may be another story altogether).  You can look forward to that in the next version, so even if you’re not using m4l there will be some benefits.

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Just a quick note to let everyone know that b995 is on its way!  I’ve finished most of the hard stuff, and now I’m sifting through all the bugs I’ve introduced by all the new changes.  All I can say is that I’m really happy with the prospects, and I’m looking forward to writing some really cool patches with the new methods I’m using.  I got to perform with the new version of Hex and EndCoders last night, it was a lot of fun!

b995 is quite a mess, really, but I knew it would be.  There are a lot of internal changes and I had to write everything while keeping in mind that I’ll soon have to radically change the structure in b996 to accomodate Live9 integration.  BUT:  it’s almost done.  b996 will be pretty boring for you guys, but it will get us into Live9.  That’s something a lot of you (and myself, as well) are looking forward to.

I’ll be in San Francisco running sound for Sea of Dreams to bring in the new year, if you’re looking for something to do I’m sure it will be a blast.  Hold tight, you’ll be seeing some activity in short order 🙂

a

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So, I’d previously promised a Live-native solution for multichannel MIDI.  I’d been testing things in Python in this regard, and had some really good results.  Well, after putting everything together and testing it, I found that a real-world prototype didn’t match the performance of my initial testing (but did match the performance of my testing results a year ago….sigh….I should’ve known).  So scratch that.

Otherwise, things are going well.  I’ve managed to shoehorn Boiingg, PressCafe, Polygome, and TR256 into hex without having to make many compromises.  Initial testing is encouraging….this is going to be FUN!  I have a block of time to finish things this weekend, so hopefully there will be at least an SVN commit coming in the next week with bug fixes from the b994 release and some new pre-release b995 stuff.  Stay tuned!

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That’s how it is here, anyway:  “Wet”.  It’s been raining for days.

I’ve made steady progress in getting things ready for b995.  CNTRL:R is already ported over to Monomodular, and I have a working version of “hex” for the other grid controllers.  It’s getting exciting!  I plan on fleshing out Polygome, PressCafe, and Boiingg style sequencing with it in the coming days, as well as some other goodies.  In addition, I still have to improve the timing mechanism and squash some bugs.

Steve Noreyko has been working on the Wiki, adding in bits and fixing my mistakes, which is extremely welcome help for me.  Please, let me know if you’re interested in participating in that sort of thing, I’m happy to set you up an account on the wiki.  Outside contributions make things much more readable for the masses, as I know I tend to gloss over a lot of things that I just assume users are already familiar with.

I’ve also been checking some of the new Codec stuff:  there are definitely some errors, and hopefully I can get the fixes incorporated into the next pre-b995  incremental update.

I’ve had some inquiries about Live9 compatibility for both my own scripts as well as the stock Livid stuff.  It’s coming, but don’t expect it until b996.  Even though I’ve confirmed that our methods will work in Live9, I know it’s much less trouble in the long run to wait until closer to final release of Live9.  In addition, there is a great deal of work I’ll have to do, and I’d rather wrap it all up into the b996 release, just for the sake of my own sanity. In any case, if you’re interested in testing send me some mail and I’ll get you out test versions as soon as I get them ready.  I’m anxious to start testing in Live9 myself, but simply haven’t had the time to comit to it with everything else that’s going on for me.

Monomodular b996 is probably not going to see a whole lot of visible changes, but I’ll be recoding the entire back-end to get rid of redundancies, smooth transitions, and make things faster overall.  I’m hoping to incorporate a few coding conventions I’ve learned recently.  The more projects I get involved in, the more important it is to make my code-base self-sutaining.  Otherwise, I end up spending all my time rewriting things and making small changes to a huge number of scripts.  It’s something I’m learning to avoid.

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I’ve added a few vids to the YouTube page describing Hex and Endcoders.  Enjoy 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSRQNTSYm24

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkyNa4tz1y4

a

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I just dropped some more ambient misdirected weirdness into the pot, there’s enough there to keep you busy and confused for hours and hours. I know I am. Confused.

As always, your comments are welcome, but, well….what is there to say, really?

This ones pretty dark….

Ambient Soup

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I hate Windows.  With every inch of my, uhm….hatred.  That said, I love everybody that supports this project, and I know at least half of you are Windows users;  I don’t slight you.  I just can’t get anything done on that platform.  Simple ergonomics are usually my biggest gripe, but at least I can run most things in a virtual machine and benefit from at least some of my usual OSX comforts.

Yesterday, I got some reports that Windows permission issues are fubarring the b994 installation process on Win7.  I thought about it for a bit (and have been thinking about it even longer, believe me), and decided that I’d embark on creating a better solution for Windows users….the Mac installer works pretty darned well, after all, why can’t the Windows installer match its convenience?

Well, as it turns out, it just can’t.  I got sucked into the “Black Hole of Almost There….” yesterday, and only managed to discover that Windows is just plain “STOOPID” where permissions are concerned.  Maybe if I was a “real” programmer, who wrote in low-level languages everyday, this would be trivial for me, but add onto that the fact that writing a Max-external (the solution to the problem, unfortunately) isn’t really even trivial if you write low-level everyday of your life.

I’ve made improvements, it looks prettier, and it doesn’t flash ugly command-prompt boxes at you, but it still doesn’t work as expected half the time.  SOOOOO, if you’re installing things on Windows, follow a few guidelines:

a)  If you’re using Win7 or above, run Live as Administrator.

b)  Place the installation package folder in Live’s Library before starting it.

c)  Don’t blame me, I really DO try.

I’m sure someday it will work right, but honestly I’d rather spend time improving the content than building an installer and writing boring operational level code, so I’m going to leave you with what I’ve got for the moment and come back to it when I’m not quite so angry at the Windows platform.

Oh, yeah:  I’ve updated the installer with a new version, and retagged the version, so if you were having problems installing things yesterday you can try again:  this won’t overwrite anything, it will just install a newly tagged version.

I’ve re-enabled SVN support in the installer for both platforms.  If you want to stay abreast current changes, or open the individual patch content in the m4l editor, I recommend using the SVN button to download from the repository.  This will give you the most current versions of the patches I’m working on in the “Unfrozen Patches” subfolder, which are more easily editable in m4l.  This should solve problems for those of you that were unable to open the frozen patches on Windows.

I’ve also added support for the “Dev” button, which will add a folder to your “clippings” menu in Max for some easy pasting of useful abstractions.

Let me know if the new installer catches anything on fire….

a

P.S.  …so, that’s what I did instead of shooting videos for you this weekend.  Hmmph.

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