[PD] sequencer app for osx

[Luke Iannini]

Yo Damien,
I've been working on exactly that for the past few months using Pd's
venerable data structures.  It has quantization, a piano underlay,
draggable notes, draggable lengths, draggable velocity, zooming X & Y,
draggable looping, the whole bit (layers coming soon, but you can of
course run many of them side by side; I'm working on a synchronization
system since running multiple instances makes it more fun to do
polyrhythms).  Thanks to some wonderful shortcuts Miller built in to
DS arrays, you can add and remove notes (and even shift groups of
notes) really easily.

But, there are some bugs in Pd that prevent it from being everyday
usable... the two major ones are that the notes are in a "quantized DS
array" (for performance reasons), which exposes a very painful
interaction bug where dragging is just close enough to working to be
horribly frustrating, and editing the notes (to change lengths or
velocity) only really works for the notes closest to time 0.  And,
finally, Z-ordering is undefined and gets screwed up every time you
open the window (but, I've worked around that one for the most part
with some hacks).

So, I'll wrap it up and post it after I locate all the stuff necessary
to run it.  It should convince you that such a thing is most
definitely attainable in Pd, and perhaps Miller will be so excited
that his language for the future of music is being used to make a
30-year old interface, that he will go fix the bugs immediately : )

(I promise though Miller, my actual goal is to build a happy
environment for both traditional grid-note-editing and graphical type
stuff like in 4.data.structures/07.sequencer)

Back soon,
Luke

On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 12:43 PM, Damian Stewart <damian at frey.co.nz> wrote:
> Martin Peach wrote:
>
>>> (since i haven't yet found a pure Pd sequencer i'm happy with)
>> What makes you sad about Pd sequencers? Maybe it's fixable.
>
> have you ever used Ableton's MIDI sequencer? it's a piano roll, with blocks
> for notes. drag start and end points to control noteon/noteoff points.
> quantize to a grid of any size you want (switchable with a hot-key) or turn
> off quantization completely to finetune timing (for that little 'humanized'
> extra, whatever that might mean). super-intuitive scroll and zoom with a
> single mouse button drag in the top. the main features in this i'm
> interested in is the quantization grid control, and the ability to super
> fine-tune note durations.
>
> lines down the bottom control velocity. if you have two notes on the piano
> roll trigger at the same time, it's super-easy to choose which note's
> velocity you're editing.
>
> i don't believe it's do-able in Pd, not without a ridiculous amount of
> work, and i'm too lazy to do the work myself (and if i wasn't, i'd do it
> from scratch in a different programming language eg Processing or C++,
> rather than fighting Tcl/Tk).
>
>> Why not run three instances of midifile or even textfile with the same
>> data?
>
> yes, this is what i'm already doing. the problem is generating said
> midifile/textfiles in the first place.
>
>>> - easy access to velocity and note duration
>>
>> Do you mean that the thing should output the duration at the same time
>> as the note-on, or the file should be readable in a text editor?
>
> no, i mean that i should be able to easily see and edit the duration and
> the velocity without having to think or do much work. see above..
>
> --
> damian stewart | +31 6 8178 5197 |  damian at frey.co.nz
> frey | live art with machines | http://www.frey.co.nz
>
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