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.

Today's daily insight

I think I just cracked a really hard problem: Why does one sometimes get lots of stuff done, while some days it's totally impossible to do anything?

This blogger thingie

Ok, I can't resist temptation for another meta-post.

I've wasted the last five or so hours with playing around with this blog thingie, trying to get it to look more like mine, and I have to say that while there's still stuff I want to do later, this thingie is actually quite easy to customize.

Need to fix some thing a bit later, and I have to say I miss some of the typographic macros I had. I guess I'll either have to find a replacement, write a Javascript kludge, or learn to live without em.

Still searching for some nice solution to drop audioclips into my blog posts. I'm gonna need that kind of thing in the near future.

New waves, new blog.

So anybody reading this is welcome to my new blog. The subject of this blog will be synthesized and processed sound. The name is partly a joke, but highlights the fact that I don't like overly clean sounds, even if I'm definitely not a noise lover either.

As for the blog I'll be at least exploring some of the sounds and processing tricks I encounter when I play with things. Some of the content will probably be in form of tutorials. Some will be naive exploration of stuff everybody else already knew. Hopefully some ideas will also be novel. At times I'm sure to comment on things having to nothing to do with music. And some posts will almost surely involve some code, for I am a programmer after all. Finally, I'll probably link to some of my music from time to time.

There's some other stuff too, but it's really a bit too early to go into details. Time will show what will come out of this.

As some people reading this might know, this ain't my first blog. The previous blog was called "Beyond the Parenthesis." The last post dates back around a year now. The reasons for it's decay are many, but probably the biggest issue was that the time taken to maintain a custom built publishing kludge was simply too much. My hobbies where also starting to drift away from it's focus a bit too much.

As for comments, feel free to give lots of them, but please keep discussions civil and at least somewhat in topic. :)