Thanks to all of you who were in the seminar!

Looking forward to some Renoise-powered productions :-D

Your wishes have been fulfilled – Sorollet V2 it’s finally out, for you to enjoy (or suffer, depends on your tastes, but hopefully you’ll like it).

The project comes with the song that I released for the Breakpoint’s 2010 newschool exe music compo, Bizarría sorollosa – which can be listened to here too:

Bizarría sorollosa by supersole

If you’re running Windows, you can also download and listen to the song running real-time in your computer, by downloading the compo entry (the zip is huge because it also includes an .ogg rendering of the song; the .exe is just less than 12kb). If you want to listen to it real-time but are not running Windows please download the source and build it yourself — it should be only a matter of typing scons on a terminal, or pressing the build button if using Netbeans like me.

My entry itself ranked last, which was a bit of a disappointment, although there were fantastic entries on the compo which totally deserved to rank superhigher than me. But more on that on a future post…

So now I can draw curves for any parameter in my synth, in any pattern, with them associated to an instance of Renoise’s Automation Device, and they will be replayed when running the demo. Only points and linear curve modes are implemented –I never use cubic, even in real life renoising, so I won’t miss it–. But it’s enough for making songs way more lively and varied, and I am reaching the point in which I feel like running out of time, so feature-freezing at this point is a very sane idea :)

I have also added another little neat, experimental feature… that I won’t disclose yet in the interests of creating a bit of expectation! I haven’t tested it too much yet, and I’m not sure how well will it work when I submit the synth to serious (stress|test)ing, in order to compose the song, which is what I’m going to do in the following day(s).

In the compiler front, Visual Express and I haven’t come to amicable terms yet, but I’ll leave the complaints for another post. Only two words and a question mark: No refactoring?

In fact, in what regards to volume (the volume column, more specifically) my player is slightly more feature richer than Renoise, since if you send different volume values to a VSTi in Renoise once the note has been sent, it doesn’t do anything, while my player acts accordingly and updates the volume for the corresponding voice. This can be used for the old tracker trick of having a rapid sequence of 64, 00, 64, 00, 32, 00, for example, and since it’s always quite handy for me, I have implemented it even if that’s not exactly what Renoise does. Not sure if I’ll repent later!

I have also begun work with reading and parsing the automation envelopes that I can create with Renoise in order to change synth parameters on the fly, with the Automation Device. I looked into CC changes but they looked just too complicated, while the Envelopes look simpler and more granular/synthetic, so I went for that approach instead. I am almost done with reading the data, I only have to let the patterns know about them and use it when playing :-P

Filter cut off sweeps, there we go!!

All in all, I’m finding Visual 2008 superverbose, superboring and superslow to work with. I don’t know if I had just idolised VC6 but I don’t remember it being so cumbersome. For example, the autocompletion or “intellisense” thing doesn’t show me useful stuff most of the time… it usually shows me a list of low level Windows constants that I obviously don’t care about, instead of showing me classes from my project. Also, the keys for triggering autocompletion are super odd (ALT + right arrow) instead of the usual CTRL+Space. I haven’t found the option for automatically adding matching braces, so I have to do it manually. The options and general semantics are annoyingly microsoftive (e.g. “Solutions” actually means “a generated binary”), editing project properties is annoyingly slow, and etc, etc. Even the XCode configuration panels look nice compared to this!

What is also possible is that I have got accostumed to Makefiles and the whole idea of going through a series of tabs and trees and options and blablah just looks silly at this point. We’ll see if I end up liking it at the end…

End of the mini-rant and back to the demo: I got a new version where a simple representation of the left/right buffers is painted on each frame. That’s the most advanced graphical stuff I’ve done to date in this project, hehe. The sound is quite saturated in comparison with the output I get in Renoise for the same song. It’s probably due to the fact that in my code I’m not doing any clipping in the output of SorolletVoice and am adding all together in the mixer, but Renoise is probably clipping each voice internally when it gets the output of each VSTi instance. So I’ll add that tomorrow… otherwise as soon as more than one instrument is playing at a relatively loud volume, hardly anything can be distinguished!