After approximately 12 hours of trying to compile the thing after tweaking the source very slightly in order to fix a minor inconvenience:
teemu@opensolaris:~$ uname -a
SunOS opensolaris 5.11 on111b-teemu i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris
And now I just hope it actually fixes the original problem and that I won't run into any driver problems...
Ok, nothing much yet, but at least I've got something, and now I've got a place to host my stuff that doesn't fit that well into a blog.
You can find it here: www.signaldust.com
What if there was no lambda in Lisp, but if defun returned the function defined? Wouldn't it be possible to define a macro such as:
(defmacro lambda (args . body)
`(defun ,(gensym) ,args . ,body))
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.
Everything seems to work perfectly again.. had to replace the cable though..
Drums are from FPC, rest is from 4 instances of the previously mentioned new project, effects are external, and mixing sucks. Turn volume up, it's not mastered.
I had to throw away my old synth, for various reasons. Well, I didn't really throw it away, but it will take ages to make anything sort of a product, 'cos certain things weren't really done the way you would want to do them in a reliable software synthesizer.
The good news though is that for past half a year or so, I've been working on a new codebase, and somewhat different concept. The new synth thingie I call 'Valo' and while it's nowhere near finished, it's got to the point where most things work (well, there's no PWM yet and modwheel/aftertouch/velocity support is missing, and MIDI side lacks quite a few things and...) and it makes sound.
At present it has a completely redesigned oscillators, new filter design (well, if you can call a ladder low-pass new anymore these days) and it does all kinds of fancy stuff like mm.. sawtooth and square waves (well actually triangle as well) and it can do stuff like oscillator sync (properly) and the signal path is so non-linear it's a pain to tune everything 'cos when the signal levels change in one place, everything behind it has to be retuned with proper levels again.. which fortunately is not that many things.
I can't say it sounds clean. With all the non-linearities causing intermodulation distortions and noise here and there making everything slightly unstable, it most certainly does not sound very clean. On the bright side, it can sound approximately as clean as your average analog synth.
Yup, there's sample. Thought you'd like one. Some external effects (Kjaerhus Classic-series Chorus/Delay/Reverb) with pretty simple settings to make it sound less dry as the synth itself doesn't have any add-on effects (I'm not a huge fan of those) and currently only ever outputs mono-signal (that might change I think).
The patch itself is a "little of everything" thing with almost everything in the synth in use, including oscillators in synced mode, pitch envelope driving the slave, some (per-voice) distortion to trash it after filter, and finally both LFOs messing with the signal. No manual knob tweaking done. I'm sure you can tell I'm a very good sound designer.
