Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Still alive...

Some time has passed without any updates again. That's been because there has been enough other stuff happening I guess. Haven't had much to talk about too, because what I've been doing has either been not of general interest, or has been in a phase where it's not ready to be announced, or too damn technical to explain without some effort.

Anyway, situation is that Valo was kinda announced on KVR forums and got some feedback. Then I basically rewrote it's modulation stuff and some minor additions and whatever. Still haven't been making much noise about it though, because I still haven't got a website up for it. The other thing is that I'm currently reconsidering what I'm going to do with it, because I'm not sure if I have time right now to add those features that I would like to see done before I start messing with licenses to people. I'm trying to fix the most critical stuff as soon as possible, but whether I'm going to do a commercial release is open. I'd like to see it used though, so I'm keeping the possibility open that I just release the current version as freeware instead and then do some new stuff in a successor as some stuff wouldn't easily fit in Valo anyway.

In any case I managed to come up with some sort of a tune using (mostly) Valo, which gave me a better perspective of where it is currently. There's definitely a lot of things it could be doing, but at least I'm starting to believe that it actually already fills the initial design goals quite nicely. It can provide me some of the edge, but also warmth, that my previous attempt was incapable of. On the other hand adding the old filter from the previous project as an alternative might be a good idea, because the transistor-ladder-wannabe in Valo cannot quite do some of the sounds that I so liked about the previous project.

I'm going to allocate some more time for DSP development again though. I've got a lot of ideas, but Valo is still my priority, and after that I'm considering a small personal platform of some sort, so I can go faster from quick&dirty prototypes to quality product. This will take some thinking and trying and testing, but I might talk about those things in the future here, since as far as I know, there's not that much audience on this blog that I would alienate.

I'm also thinking of setting up a more generic website to collect and write about some stuff that is really hard to find on the web. Topics would probably fall between music theory, sound design theory and audio signal processing theory. I could write some of the stuff here, but I don't think a blog is necessarily the right format for that, and mixing my personal rants and proper content probably isn't such a great idea. I'm not going to build yet another open community forum though, because we've got enough venues for freeform discussion I think. Rather I'm thinking of focusing on editorial content.

No comments: