JACK Midi Control from your Android Phone over WiFi

Since my fundraising for my plugin GUIs is more or less bust, I've been thinking more about making music. I can't really stop developing, cause I'm fairly addicted, but I'm trying to ween myself back to just making whatever I want, rather than trying to develop stuff that will change the world. The world doesn't care that much. Anyhow, this blog is no place for bitterness.

But I have been playing with synths a bit more lately and still am really missing my expression controls. Now I could try to use the old touchmidi app I developed, but it only works with my laptop, and I now have a dedicated desktop in the studio to host my synths so I don't have a touchpad to use. I do have several android devices though. They should be great input interfaces. They can display whatever they like on the screen and have a touch interface so you can have arbitrary configurations of buttons, sliders, knobs, whatever. So I decided to figure out how.

Easy(ish) Triple Boot on 2014 Macbook Pro

UPDATE* Feel free to read, but I've since renounced this process and made a new one here.
Nothing is easy. Or perhaps everything is. Regardless, here is how I did it, but first a little backstory:

I got a macbook pro 11,3 from work. I wanted a lenovo, but the boss wants me to do some iOS stuff eventually. Thats fine, cause I can install linux just as easily on whatever. Oh wait.. There are some caveats. Boot Camp seems to be a little picky. Just as well. MIS clowns set up boot camp so I had windows 7 and Yosemite working, but they told me I'm on my own for linux. It seems from the posts I've read about triple booting is that you have to plan it out from the get-go of partitioning, not just add it in as an afterthought. But I also found suggestions about wubi.

Common Synthesizer Envelope Types

The term "infographic" seems like such a marketing buzzword it makes me want to ignore whomever says it. But I'm all for the presentation of information in a logical and clear manner. As I was pondering on how to increase interest in my audio plugins I thought about my ADBSSR envelopes that I love in the cellular automaton synth. I wanted some way to present quickly both how to use them and why they offer advantage over traditional ADSR envelope generators.They do add complexity but there's really no way to add a swell as we horn players do all the time to a patch without it. It even can look exactly like an ADHR when the Breakpoint is set to 1. Anyway I thought a diagram with explanatory text would do the trick. So I made one:

Figure 1: Not an infographic

This isn't an infographic though. I don't really know why I think that word is so stupid. Probably just because I tend to hate on anything trendy and hyped. Anyhow. Now you know how I feel. This image is in the public domain though I would appreciate citation.

FIX IS VERY SWEET!

One of my mission companions would say that a lot. He threatened (jokingly) to fix people. He was Tongan and barely spoke English or Filipino but we had fun and got some good work done.

Regardless of that, my Presonus Firebox had been making a strange whining sound for a while. I started a session a few weeks ago to finally begin a new song but (as usual) didn't get very far before fatherly duty called and the session sat for at least 2 weeks or so. This happens as regularly as I record which is roughly every few weeks. I eventually passed through the studio to grab something out of our food storage in the next room and realized that the firebox was completely dark. "Strange," I thought so I went and tried to restart JACK. The firebox wheezed and whined and eventually the blue LED slowly lit up. "Not good," I thought (I usually think very tersely), but I had to get that food upstairs and get dinner on for the kids.

My First Linux Audio Tutorial Video

I like that title. It makes me think of chunky toys and blocky characters with big eyes. But this is much less cute than my kids playthings: I made a video to introduce my infamous plugins. Here is the video. How I did it is below.

(if you can't see the embeded player here's the link: http://youtu.be/oHCPgh9HRAQ )
EDIT: The second one is done now too. See  http://youtu.be/izyf27eLPPA

Adding Blur in Cairo

I've made several widgets now that light up. I've worked around it mostly through gradients. Radial gradients are perfect for a circular LED. A linear gradient filling a carefully shaped path got me by for a square LED. But now I'm making an analog oscilloscope type widget, and a 7 segment LED and gradients aren't cutting it. If only you could do blur in Cairo.

Oh, but you can...

Making an LV2 plugin GUI (yes, in Inkscape)

Told you I'd be back.

So I made this pretty UI last post but I never really told you how to actually use it (I'm assuming you've read the previous 2 posts, this is the 3rd in the series). Since I'm "only a plugin developer," that's what I'm going to apply it to. Now I've been making audio plugins for longer than I can hold my breath, but I've never bothered to make one with a GUI. GUI coding seems so boring compared to DSP and it's so subjective (user: "that GUI is so unintuitive/natural/cluttered/inefficient/pretty/ugly/slow etc. etc....") and I actually like the idea of using your ears rather than a silly visual curve, but I can't deny, a pretty GUI does increase usership. Look at the Calf plugins...

Anyhow, regardless of whether its right or wrong I'm going to make GUIs (that are completely optional, you can always use the host generated UI). I think with the infamous cellular automaton synth I will actually be able to make it easier to use, so the GUI is justifiable, but other than that they're all eye candy, so why not make 'em sweet? So I'll draw them first, then worry about making them an actual UI. I've been trying to do this drawing-first strategy for years but once I started toying with svg2cairo I thought I might actually be able to do it this time. Actually as I'm writing this paragraph the ball is still up in the air, so it might not pan out, but I'm pretty confident by the time you read the last paragraph in this almost-tutorial I'll have a plugin with a GUI.

(*EDIT 14 Sept 2015 - a big mistake was pointed out to me in my LV2_UI instantiation, updated below).

So lets rip into it:

Drawing a GUI in Inkscape

So I got all excited and posted that last article about a lot of the technical stuff to make a GUI in Inkscape, but after posting it I realized it makes quite a few assumptions, so I'm going to add a few follow on posts, some of which (mostly this one) should have been written first. So its a prequel. Or a Part 0. Something like that.

Anyway the biggest assumption I made is that you are proficient in inkscape. Perhaps you are, but I wasn't until I started trying to draw GUIs in it. So basically all my skills are honed to this purpose. I'm not qualified to give a real inkscape tutorial so you should probably stop reading right now, but just in case I can help someone out there make a cool GUI I'll press onward.

Creating A GUI in Inkscape

Long time no post eh? Busy busy times. The roof of my house is naked and I'm trying to get it covered up, so not much free time. But I was trying this while waiting for a build at work. I still owe you dedicated reader(s) a discussion on some of the production techniques on my new song, but it will be a while.

Anyhow, I fiddled for a year or more with creating QT widgets that display svg drawings of primitives I draw in inkscape. I was trying to do this for rakarrack and at the time it was the best way I could reconcile my infantile GUI knowledge with my infantile art skills (inkscape is manageable for me. You just draw shapes. Its geometry!). I had moderate success, the widgets are functional, (and can be found in my infamous repository) but lacking some significant features, namely, due to QT, no floating point representation in dials. Also I have to manually create a file to dictate what primitive files are used and where they are placed in the window. The svg files are loaded at run time after this descriptor file is parsed allowing for anyone to customize the look, which is kinda cool, but not really necessary. In the end, it was over complicated, and I didn't really like working on it (why I haven't released a single program with a fancy stylized gui yet).

Enter AVTK.

How to Export a Github Wiki to PDFs and/or a Website

I recently needed to forward some documentation for work. This documentation had been done wisely in a wiki in Github. Unfortunately it was an enterprise account and we couldn't just give them a link. I just needed to put the important sections into a pdf or website and send it along.

Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to do it.

After some pain and suffering I got it the way I wanted, and I'm sharing it here so I don't forget.

LV2 forge and Tempo syncronization, or: More LV2 Learnings (still not quite a tutorial)

Ah so the urid map must be persistent...