Matt Mower's dashboard

INSPECTOR:
Could you make these dialogs adjustable? When we work on the very large screen, i can use a very long windows... if not, we can reduce them...

The inspector has been completely redesigned for the forthcoming release. Once you've tried that I'll await more feedback :)

BRAKE A NOTE.
When the impuls arrive to an event (to play a note, redirect or divide the signal) could be possible to introduce a break to send the impuls later.

I'm not entirely clear what you mean here. There is already the gate feature that allows you to delay notes and the ghost that allows you to play more beats.

I'm also considering more radical things like:

• #8 Built in arpeggiator.


• #9 Split notes.

Feel free to expand further on what you're trying to do.

REBOUNDS:
it could be super to manage more of menus by keyboard (of the computer). Then the movements of the Rebound could be managed by the shortcuts in the numerical part of the keyboard... from 5 we could go to the "12 o'clock" by the 8, to the right by the 6 key and so one....

Using the numeric keypad to set directions is an interesting idea. I've filed that as a new ticket:

• #52 Use numeric keypad to control direction.

Something I immediately started to wonder about was how to handle the situation where you have multiple directional tokens on the same cell. You need to be able to switch from controlling the direction of say a generator to a rebound on the same cell.

A possible approach is modifier keys (e.g. you learn that unmodified the keypad switches direction on a generator while with the option key down it controls a rebound). I'm not sure whether I like that but it's feasible.

JUMP:
now, the signal goes lineary to the 6 directions. But for exemple, like in chess, we can jump with the horse not lineary. It could be interessting to can go to the more other directions.
For exemple: from the C4 to C#4 - D4 - D#4... or: C4 - A3 - B2 - F#1... this is only for other linear directions (like in aviators, we could go to all 12 direction). And why not take another paths (like the horse: C4 - F4 - A#5.... or jump directly to F2, then E5? It will be nearest to the keyboard's arpeggios, no?

Again ticket #17 Playheads should support velocity and spin goes someway towards thinking about nonlinear movement.

SPEED VARIATION:
Now, the music made by Elusium is a little bit mecanical. Each step are the same. It could be very useful, if we could change the speed of the impulse, between different MIDI events. For exemple, the signal goes from the starting event (Generator) to the second at 120 bpm, but from the 2nd to the third, he goes at 300 bpm... and so one.

Each layer has a fixed tempo at any specific time. You can get variations by running different layers at different tempos and by manually or, via LFO, altering the tempo of one or all layers.

One ticket on file considers the ideas of playheads having "velocity" that could be changed:

• #17 Playheads should support velocity and spin.

The next release of Elysium will also have a new "skip" token that will let you jump playheads over intervening cells which will give you more variability (for example by attaching an LFO to the cell skip parameter).

MAKE AND ORGANISE SHOTS
when we program the layer, it could be nice to save it like a "shot" and make another organisation of the layer. I noticed, that in some tutorial, you changed some parameters in the real time. The problem is that you can change a limited number of parameters. With the organisation of SHOTS, you can create several layouts with subtles (or huges) changes, and later, in the real time, or with some sequence of these shots), you can make evolve all these modifications...
Then, during the playing, we can select these shots and modify in one instant the evolution of programmed arpeggios... (this was made at M - a famous software for generative music on OS7 - OS9). This authorize a cool evolutions of patterns in real time.

Yep it's definitely an aim to allow you to create snapshots of individual controls (e.g. how an LFO is setup) as well as panels like layers & the player. Some tickets filed on this are:

• #2 Control presets.


• #3 Configuration snapshots.


• #4 Cues.


• #43 Group sends.

The idea being that you can create presets at different levels, group them, and uses cues to trigger preset changes.

COPY LAYOUTS or GROUPS OF EVENTS
It could be cool, if we can copy/past the complet layer. For exemple, we create a layer, copy them, and make some changes and adjustements in the second layer. In the same logic, it could be well to select several events and copy them to another layer...

There's several features in here, some tickets already filed are:

• #1 Independent load & save of layers.


• #11 Cell group selection & operations.


• #50 Layer grouping.

Essentially the idea being to open collections of cells (and collections of layers) to independent manipulation.

Hi Miroslav.

You've got a lot of good stuff here, let's break it up.

Graphics is definitely a problem for me and on two levels. I use NSBezierCurves to draw the UI, cells, and tokens and I need graphic images for toolbar/inspector buttons and so on. Sadly I am graphically inept on all fronts.

I'm also not very happy with the conceptual state of the graphics I have. The sigils representing the different kinds of token are not very good.

It's one of the problems of working on your own. Nobody to compensate for your weaknesses. And one of the reasons I made Elysium open source, the hope that other people might.

m/

p.s. Yes several people have suggested an iPhone version to me and I will probably look into it. But I'd like to do a credible 1.0 release of the desktop app before getting distracted into such a time sink ;-)

Hi.

Yes the Parameter Parser still needs some TLC. Please send your log file to matt@lucidmac.com and I will take a look.

Thanks for letting me know.

m/

I noodled around with this tonight and can tell you the next release will likely feature a new "skip" token. When applied to a cell it will add a certain amount of "skip" to any playhead passing over it. A skip of 1 means skip 1 cell, 2 means 2 cells and so on.

The skip value will be a dial and, hence, can be dynamic using an LFO and the token will have the same gate & probability dials that other tokens have. Should be pretty crazy.

m/

Hmm... i love that "stone skipping a pond" imagery.

I'd thought of a "trap" token that would hold-up a playhead. Rather than messing around with velocity, a skip token might be a good way of doing this.

So we'd have a token that would act on any playhead leaving a cell and cause it to jump over a certain number of neighbour cells. I haven't looked at that code (busy working on updating the LFO's at the moment) but I think that's doable.

I'm planning to work on Elysium this week, if I can I will have a play with this and see if I can make it work.

m/

I have thought about this although I have no immediate plans to implement it since it complicates loading and means looking into the Leopard file system monitoring code.

Maybe in the future.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

m/

Good idea, thanks.

ANSI escape sequence stripping is checked into GitHub and will be included in the next release.

m/

Let me make sure I understand your problem. You want to play two notes in succession but the path between them means that the length of time between the notes is wrong?

If so it's an interesting problem that I've not really considered before although I have toyed (on paper) with the idea of velocity and acceleration as concepts in the sequencer so that you could, for example, have a playhead travel more or less than one hex per beat.

Off-hand I am not sure how you'd script this in the current version. While you could add a did-run callback to the 2nd note token and you could directly manipulate the playheads array there would, likely, be problems because the layer runloop has some housekeeping related to playheads that this would interfere with.

Have you explored whether you could get the right effect using a second generator and tinkering with its offset?

Matt

This is implemented in the current github build, I'll probably release it tomorrow (since I already released a version today).

Hi LP.

Sorry, your last message slipped under the radar. I do have MIDIMonitor, use it all the time for fact checking, but my issue with Logic wasn't interpreting the MIDI messages it was sending but, conceptually, that what I was doing seemed to make Logic want to be a slave to an external clock.

I am sure this is just my unfamiliarity with Logic but I don't know any truly experienced Logic pros to ask for help. My experience asking Q's on Logic-related forums is variable.

Right now I am in the middle of a big control-scheme refactoring but, once that's done, I will try and rally the troops to make some headway on the timing and MIDI issues.

Thanks again for the info & feedback.

m/

Demetrius.

How are you getting on? It's kind of tough to do ongoing diagnostics this way... if you're still having difficulties it would, perhaps, be easier to use iChat or (preferably for me) IRC.

Let me know.

My need for graphical support is, if anything, greater now since I've reworked the inspector and need button icons for that too now.

m/

demetrius.

I'm not sure why you'd have any MIDI issues. Elysium uses straight CoreMIDI and, in my experience, has not required any configuration change on any Mac. I know some other people have run Elysium into Live so it's definitely possible.

By default it outputs note on/off messages to MIDI channel #1 and if Live can see incoming MIDI it should just work provided you have something setup on that channel.

Maybe you could try MIDImonitor:

http://www.snoize.com/MIDIMonitor/

and see what's going on.

m/ – Matt Mower, on January 26, 2009 09:34

The 29 warnings you can ignore. I know what they are related to, they're not a problem.

To solve the other problem you will need to install an interface builder plugin. That's not hard:

Download this:

http://brandonwalkin.com/blog/bwtfile...

inside you will find:

BWToolkit.ibplugin

copy that into

/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/Library/Interface Builder/Plug-ins

restart interface builder and you should be good to go.

Sorry it's been a bit of an up-hill struggle. Hopefully you're there now.

m/