(of REAPER)... is up.

The biggest single thing in it is that I made a nice system that buffers all source material in another thread, so the audio thread doesnt have to wait around for a slow network device or disk, etc (well, it still might have to, but it's a lot less likely). All of the effects and mixing of tracks still run in the audio thread, though that may change eventually, but for now it makes sense (since you may be monitoring an input on those channels, and would want to have the effects applied on there with as little latency as possible). At any rate, playback is now a LOT more reliable, with less little dropouts. It took me a few days of thinking to come up with this compromise, and a few hours to code it, but I'm pretty happy about it, thus far.

The other thing of interest is I made a separate position and playback cursor, so you can see where actions such as splitting will take place (or where you will start playback if you hit play and you were stopped). Makes a lot more sense now.

And there's a bunch of other small things (MIDI peaks now show the approximate notes/durations/etc), VST latency compensation, bla bla bla.

I picked up a $200 Behringer midi/usb control surface, going to add support for it tonight I think. Initially the faders will just map to volume sliders (and be controlled by them), but eventually there will be automation modes, I'm planning (automation will be supported with or without a real surface, that is, mmmm).

So much to do + no deadline = happy justin.

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freeform jam with bidercoleianmore

Got a bit frustrated this evening with the amount of data that I've made myself deal with. There's just so much of it. The mp3 collection and photos are so small and manageable, and the full recordings of all of our jams and rehearsals are somewhat tolerable, but in keeping all of the NINJAM recordings that we host, too much data gets created. And for some extremely stupid reason, I insist on trying to keep it all. And what's the point of keeping it unless you do it redundantly. and I don't just mean on RAID. I mean on RAID, and on another drive, preferably one that doesnt spend all of its time over 100F, etc. So much data, bleh. Nevermind the data that is less big, but scattered around (backing up web servers like this one, cvs databases, etc). There's a lot of irreplaceable bits out there.

Oh yeah my other complaint was that in processing the NINJAM autosongs it ends up using alittle of CPU on my main workstation (which has plenty of CPU to spare), but uses way too much disk bandwidth. So I'm setting up a box just for that processing.

Back to my first paragraph, perhaps it just makes sense to say fuck it. You can't keep information forever. Or if you can, it's not worth bothering. If only we had our 100gb blu-ray recordable discs. if only I can hang on til then, I'll be able to put everything I will have by then on 20 of them or so. times two. plus the online (RAID) version. sigh.

I guess it's not really that much data.. I mean, everything fits within my 1.2tb array. so maybe I should just get another, and keep them synchronized. and set up rsyncs to backup other stuff to them. or just keep getting more firewire drives for the seocnd copies. rOn got one of those usb->IDE cables, that might be a good way to go, and just buy a few 400gb IDE drives..

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...posted it late last night, let me know if you have any problems.

Recordings:

freeform jam with kevinnewtonfritz

2 Comments

I have the nastiest cough I've had in a long time, bleh.

So I've added basic VST support to REAPER, and in doing that I also added VSTi support, which then required me to add MIDI input support, which is pretty much done (there are some sync issues). So now I'm going to add MIDI file reading/writing, and I suppose MIDI output as well, and that will be hot. I can't wait to merge a lot of this into NINJAM, too, so we can use softsynths (as well as DX plugins and VSTs) directly. I'll do that someday soon.

Other stuff that will be in the next version of REAPER (in the next week or so):

+ moved config files to application data instead of the program directory

+ effect bypass support

+ directx plug-ins use the current samplerate instead of 44khz

+ made it so you can arm/disarm tracks while recording

+ option to create new files when recording every X megabytes

+ a bunch of preferences updates

+ tons more

Yay.

Now I'm going to go cut an EP from a relatively productive new years eve...

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freeform jam with brenwienerkevin

OK so I spent a couple nights doing some big changes for REAPER, and now, we have 0.42, which has some pretty neat new features (dockable mixer window being the most obvious, and master playspeed envelopes being the coolest). Word.

Now I must try to fight off a cold or something.

Recordings:

newpoo-without-direction

2 Comments

OK so if you go to The REAPER website you can get REAPER v0.40, which is now public.

Every time I release something I'm always trying to get shit perfect, but I always fail and end up releasing more updates, so I'm just going to be OK with that, and though this release should be pretty good overall, you might want to check back for updates (I may do them a couple times a day, even).

Now I just get to sit back and let people tell me what is (or isn't) broken.

Also, I propose that people send me small REAPER projects for possible inclusion as examples, or REAPER color themes (for inclusion). I'm going to update the web site to reflect this and encourage people to submit.

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El nuevo screenshotto (I know, I know, bad):

Won't be long now. The general todo list is still quite large, but the number of items that need to be done before releasing is quite small (really just a few).

It's so satisfying working in an environment where doing new things is easier than I expect; it makes me happy to get things done quickly, and happier that I created the workable environment to begin with.

I'm hoping I can keep REAPER feeling as sparse as I feel it is now. I might be biased, but it feels less cluttered than a lot of other audio software, and I think that's a really good thing.

Steve kept comparing shit to garageband and telling me how I could probably take ideas from it. I'd used it some before, but today I fired it up (well, spun it up is more like it, since I have an ancient 667mhz mac), and was thoroughly disgusted. I honestly don't know where to begin. Basically, everything UI about it sucks. The audio end of it seems decent, though it's painfully slow on my G4. Anyway. Back to bitching about the UI-- It has a ton of buttons that have tiny little icons that it isn't really obvious what they do, and there are no tooltips or anything to help you learn, you really have to click, figure out what happens, etc. So lame. And when I drag a nice loop into the project, I can't just resize it larger and have it loop, it makes me go drag a second copy of it. lame x10. anyway.

Recordings:

satanslovesong

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freeform jam with kevcraig

freeform jam with brenchr

We migrated this server to a new box running a newer-than-4-year-old version of FreeBSD, so if shit's broken let me know. I might have missed some email as a result, too.

Did 80% of envelopes for REAPER last night. Just gotta finish off some UI elements for it, and add non-linear curve support (though most of the legwork is done). I think I know how busses will be done, too.

Finally, here's a pretty interesting mp3 someone made, apparently using samples from NINJAM sessions.

Recordings:

noisynastyreaperfunthatfallsapart-vocals
noisynastyreaperfunthatfallsapart

5 Comments

Here's a new screenshot:

Here is an mp3 I made today while testing it (the project in the picture is the project).

The v0.5 preview release should be ready within 2 weeks. The main big features that are not done yet are envelopes and busses, and there a lot of small features planned that are not in yet, but having said that, it's coming along very nicely and there's already a lot of great features and customizability.

Some features added since the first update on this that are especially nice:

+ DirectX plug-in support

+ peak building on the fly when recording (no more waiting after long recordings to build peaks)

+ media item segment looping (so you don't have to actually create a new file to make a loop of a part of another file)

+ you can arm/dearm recording for channels during playback (soon you will be able to while recording)

+ you can change channel recording sources while recording

+ plug-in architecture

+ dynamic audio generation capabilities, i.e. "click track" item.

+ you can use mp3 (VBR even) and OGG (multi-stream even) files directly in your projects

+ I updated NINJAM's cliplogcvt so that it can output to the REAPER project file format directly, making it very easy to use REAPER to edit/remix NINJAM sessions.

And of course, the most of the more standard features one would expect are done, such as:

+ High quality 64bps processing (though higher quality resampling modes still need to be finished)

+ Unlimited undo/redo support

+ Item fades

+ Snapping

+ Automatic crossfades

+ Selection loop support

Stay tuned. If you do some creative URL modifying, you can get a tasty treat.

Recordings:

somenewtest-reaper

10 Comments

freeform jam with brenchr

The new project (REAPER) is coming along nicely, getting very useful. Hopefully something fairly complete will be ready before Christmas, that's my goal at least. Christmas presents for all. It seems the fall is a productive time for me, often. Though I think I need to take a few days off of it, having spent about 2 weeks of solid work, well, has taken its toll.

Flew a new collective pitch R/C heli for the first time today, woot. It's really amazing how the technology has come along since I was a teenager. Also, Brennan got me RealFlight G3 for an early christmas present, and it's pretty awesome (aside from the complaints I do have, it's a tremendous amount of fun).

Brennan and Biderman and I had a nice jam today. It's so much fun, especially when we are able to pay attention to what everybody else is doing and adapt and coordinate stuff. Coffee seems to help a ton, too. In general, finding myself more able to play lots of different things is very satisfying and fun..

Recordings:

freeform jam with brenbiderman

9 Comments

freeform jam with brennan
proj5-reaper

anp-reaper

OK so I've been spending the last 9 days or so writing a new program, called REAPER (which stands for something along the lines of Rapid Environment for Audio Prototyping -- but I just like to think "don't fear it" or "reap your harvests" or whatnot).

Now I know, there are many products that fall into this category, ranging from crappy open source to not so crappy open source (requiring linux) to crappy closed source to super insanely expensive hardware-dongled closed source. So why am I writing yet another editor? Because I'm making something that fits the category of being exactly what I want to use. It's mostly like Vegas (without the video capability), but with features that I always wish Vegas had.

I will be posting some alpha builds soon, but in general I haven't decided on how to release it. I'm really tempted to do some nag-free shareware again. At the very least it will have very sensible public plug-in APIs that make it easy to extend, and maybe it'll go open source too, I don't know. We'll see. For now, here's an image:

There's a lot to do, which I'm excited about, but it's already quite usable, and already does things well that other software I've used does poorly. But now, I need to go do everything else. Fun fun fun. Stay tuned, I'll be posting the alphas in here, and hopefully a v0.9 beta type release by Christmas. The biggest obstacle I face is DirectX and VST plug-in support, since the APIs for hosting them seem to be a pain (well, DirectX, anyway, I haven't looked at the VST hosting API yet) . At the moment I just have Jesusonic integrated, which is super easy (since it has a reasonable API that doesn't require the disgusting monster that is DirectShow). Keep an eye on the comments of this article if you are interested, I'll likely just post links in there...

Finally, NINJAM users, expect a new release of the Windows client in the not too distant future, with some of the improvements to the audio system I've been making for this. Specifically, increasing the accuracy of the timing of the recorded loops (currently it's not too far off but it could be a lot better).

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freeform jam with brenchr

Here it is. We had a fun afternoon making it, too. It's very weird, be warned.

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freeform jam with brenbidernewtoncoleausrob

I spent some time improving and cleaning up the script that powers this portion of my site, which was originally Brennan's hlscript, and am now releasing it as "hl--". I'm intending to backport much of the new functionality to hlscript, since hl-- lacks many of the features that hlscript has.

Also, I updated PathSync a few days ago, with an option to help deal with daylight savings time anomalies.

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freeform jam with brenchr

...but had some fun when I got a small cheapo R/C helicopter, and made this little video. Now if I can just learn to try not to impress the camera...

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Had some weird terrible nastiness that I don't what it was. Some sort of flu or food poisoning or some shit, bleh. There went the weekend. At least I had a wonderful wife(!!) to take care of me.

The video from the show is up, currently in three formats (CAUTION: if you lack a sense of humor your probably don't want to watch these): high quality xvid/mp3 AVI, low quality xvid/mp3 AVI, and as a flash video on youtube. Thanks to Newton and Penny for videotaping it. Overall it went pretty decently, we all fucked up a fair amount, but nothing too catastrophic. Forgot to play a Led Zeppelin cover, though.

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