Disqus - Latest Comments for james_britt

Re: KORG volca fm gets its own custom editor, plug-in

James Britt / Neurogami — Thu, 02 May 2019 13:47:13 -0000

Don't care for Dexed because it doesn't map 1-to-1 to the Volca FM, and often what doesn't produced expected results. But, yes, free, and handy.

Also, with a small hardware hack on the Volca, you can grab patches from the Volca and save them using Dexed. That part I find very useful.

Re: KORG volca fm gets its own custom editor, plug-in

James Britt / Neurogami — Thu, 02 May 2019 11:44:58 -0000

Peter Kirn should post an update or add a disclaimer to this article because this not-an-editor in no way allows you to "[m]anage all that FM sound depth of your KORG volca".

Re: KORG volca fm gets its own custom editor, plug-in

James Britt / Neurogami — Thu, 02 May 2019 11:42:58 -0000

Yeah, Sythmata is sweet. I was expecting something like that. But this "editor" is nothing like that. See my second post here. tl;dr: It's a GUI for automating the twiddle knobs. In no way shape or form does it let you "[m]anage all that FM sound depth of your KORG volca" as claimed in the review here.

Re: KORG volca fm gets its own custom editor, plug-in

James Britt / Neurogami — Thu, 02 May 2019 11:38:17 -0000

Update: This is not a Volca FM editor.

I wrote to the developer, who replied, "Unfortunately, Korg has the Possibility to control hidden controllers via sysex commands not integrated, you can use only send whole sound preset as bulk dump, so it is not usable for automation."

Nice, perhaps, for automating the front controls, but that's easily doable via CC commands from any DAW anyways. Calling this tool an *editor* is nonsense.

Also very misleading for Mr. Kirn to write, "Manage all that FM sound depth of your KORG volca". Another lesson learned.

EDIT: I wrote back to the developer and asked for a refund. It was done without hesitation, so super props to him. Perhaps what this tool does is useful to some people, but if so make sure you know what you're getting.

Re: KORG volca fm gets its own custom editor, plug-in

James Britt / Neurogami — Wed, 01 May 2019 20:51:09 -0000

I bought this a short while ago. Been using it, and as far as I can tell all this does is offer a GUI /automation of the knobs you might twiddle while playing.

There is no option to edit the 6 oscillators, or the other (numerous) patch parameters required to create or change a voice. And if this is true, then this is in no way a Volca FM editor, and calling it that is bogus. It's nice, I suppose, that you can save off different knob settings, but that's really not enough to call this a Volca FM *editor*

Perhaps someone can show me I'm wrong. But otherwise, lesson learned: Do more research on what a product actually does,

Re: Class: Rational (Ruby 2.3.3)

James Britt / Neurogami — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 19:45:31 -0000

It's an error in the source code comments (which in turn becomes the documentation) for this class, and that only gets fixed by changing the source code. That's why a bug report is needed.

Re: Class: Rational (Ruby 2.3.3)

James Britt / Neurogami — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 17:38:27 -0000

Did you file a bug report?

https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/

Re: PHX Commons Aims to Create 21st Century Gathering Space

James Britt / Neurogami — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 18:14:57 -0000

Why is none of this information about PHX Commons on the PHX Commons Web site?
"Eat - Gather -Create. Give up your name and email address" is not terribly useful.

Re: Send MIDI messages faster than ever, right from the command line

James Britt / Neurogami — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 11:12:48 -0000

"not sure what this program has over on something like Midiox"

From the midiox site: "MIDI-OX is a Windows 95/NT program (also Win98/Me/2000/XP/Vista)"

So, not cross-platform. Not open source. I also could not find anything on the midiox site about using it from the command line.

Re: Send MIDI messages faster than ever, right from the command line

James Britt / Neurogami — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 20:14:11 -0000

Very interesting. (Side note: that font makes it painful to read so much text. )

I will check this out. Thanks!

Re: Send MIDI messages faster than ever, right from the command line

James Britt / Neurogami — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 20:10:23 -0000

DIsqus needs to fix their URL parsing code when auto-linking text.

But that will take forever, so I edited my comment. :)

Re: Send MIDI messages faster than ever, right from the command line

James Britt / Neurogami — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 11:39:31 -0000

I wrote a program (in Processing) that generated graphics based on MIDI input. The MIDI would be coming from Renoise; I added a special track to my song to send out MIDI notes in sync with the music to drive the visuals.

Different notes/instruments would have different effects in the Processing program. To test things out, and to experiment, I needed to send notes from a fairly wide octave range and different instruments. I could plausibly have used an actual MIDI controller, or done this from Renoise itself, but it was so much easier for me to be able to just type a few characters and hit send to do the same thing. I had complete control over note, instrument, velocity.

Likewise if I were doing MIDI mapping in a DAW; if I wanted to be able to change song settings, swap instruments, etc in Renoise using MIDI mappings it would be much easier to verify the set up by typing at the command line then in trying to use a controller or a GUI appliction. It also helps narrow down possible issues. If I don't get the results I want when using a controller I know the issue is not in the MIDI mappings because I was able to verify input with a command-line tool.

(I find command-line OSC more useful than MIDI, but that might be that my tools of choice all have built-in OSC handling.)

In general, if you are using a computer to make music and you don't take the time to learn some general programming (Ruby or Python or Lua, etc.) you're cheating yourself. Pretty sure that every notable DAW or music program allows you to write custom scripts and to interact using MIDI and/or OSC.

Re: Send MIDI messages faster than ever, right from the command line

James Britt / Neurogami — Mon, 16 Jan 2017 14:17:37 -0000

Command-line device interaction is very handy. That's why I wrote midi-repl (https://github.com/Neurogam... ) and osc-repl (https://github.com/Neurogam... ) a few years ago.

I've been using osc-repl to control complex operations in Reaper from the command line. Very handy for mixing, comping, and so on.

Re: Class: File (Ruby 2.4.0)

James Britt / Neurogami — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 18:18:39 -0000

That seems to be a poor example. It doesn't explain why it resolves the parent of __FILE__ (which usually refers to the currently executing script). Does this mean that the dir string can be a literal file name or file path? Doesn't say. (Turns out you can, with some interesting results.)

It also says the goal is to get the absolute path to a file but the results show a relative path.

I've tried playing around with the use of __FILE__ as the dir string and I get unintuitive results. It appears to be doing some blind path-string additions. It's possible to get back a result that is not the path to any file.

Re: Class: Regexp (Ruby 2.1.1)

James Britt / Neurogami — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 10:39:43 -0000

first, `/[abh-w]/` does not include `z`, obviously

Have you tested your version? I have, and it does not produce the same match results as the original.

The compound pattern is using the && operator, which does set intersection. The resulting set not include the z.


re1 = /[a-w&&[^c-g]z]/ 
re2 = /[abh-w]/
re3 = /[[a-w&&^c-g]z]/

strings = %w{
  abcz
  az
  abxyz
  abgz
  z
  b
  d
}

print 're1: '
puts( strings.map { |_| re1.match _ }.join '; ' )

print 're2: '
puts( strings.map { |_| re2.match _ }.join '; ' )

print 're3: '
puts( strings.map { |_| re3.match _ }.join '; ' )

Gives me

re1: a; a; a; a; ; b;
re2: a; a; a; a; ; b;
re3: c; z; z; g; z; ; d

Re: Module: Enumerable (Ruby 2.0.0)

James Britt / Neurogami — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 13:39:10 -0000

Zip takes arrays and groups them.

For each element in the receiver, zip pulls the corresponding element from each of the arrays passed in as argument.

If the receiver has three elements, then the results will be an array of three child arrays.

If the receiver has N elements, then the results will be an array of N child arrays.

In the example, a is the receiver, and has three elements. The results of zip will therefore have three child arrays.

If you pass in one array as an argument then each of the child arrays in the result will have two elements.

If you pass in two arrays as an argument then each of the sub-arrays in the result will have three elements.

If you pass in N arrays as an argument then each of the sub-arrays in the result will have N+1 elements.

If any of the arrays passed as arguments have fewer elements than the receiver, then a value of nil is used when creating these child arrays.

a .zip is called with two arrays as arguments. a has three elements, so the results will have three child arrays. With two arrays passed as arguments we have three arrays in total, so each of these child arrays will have three elements.

However, the arrays passed to zip have fewer elements than the reciever. In this case, where there is no corresponding element, a value of nil is used.

Another example:


a = %w{ a0, a1, a2 }
a.zip %w{x0, x1}, %w{y0}        # => [["a0,", "x0,", "y0"], ["a1,", "x1", nil], ["a2", nil, nil]]

Re: A bit of what you should know about event power and electrical safety

James Britt / Neurogami — Sun, 11 Dec 2016 12:34:01 -0000

Will people who read this article also read the comments? I think that's iffy. Think of the people who block JavaScript, or 3rd-party stuff like Disqus.

If the advice in the article is bad then perhaps the article should be removed until a corrected version can be posted.

Re: Class: Hash (Ruby 2.2.0)

James Britt / Neurogami — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 12:02:22 -0000

Did you run the code?

Did you look at the code closely?

Here, with comments:


# Make two variables that will evaluate as equal to one another.
# Look at how Book#== is defined
book1 = Book.new 'matz', 'Ruby in a Nutshell'
book2 = Book.new 'matz', 'Ruby in a Nutshell'

# Create an empty hash
reviews = {}

# Assign items to the has using variables that evaluate as equal to each other.
# I.e. book1 == book1 # => true 

reviews[book1] = 'Great reference!'
reviews[book2] = 'Nice and compact!'

# Note that there are no symbols used in the examples.

It's a fairly roundabout example making a point about object equality and hashes.

Re: Class: Thread::Mutex (Ruby 2.3.1)

James Britt / Neurogami — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 20:09:33 -0000

The code for Mutex moved from thread.c to thread_sync.c, and while thread_sync.c has that example in the docs it is no longer getting rendered. I assume this is an RDoc bug because it is also missing if you generate the docs using the default templating.

Re: Class: Queue (Ruby 2.3.1)

James Britt / Neurogami — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 11:35:58 -0000

This appears to be an issue with the RDoc code.

These docs from a combination of thread.c and thread_sync.c. thread_sync.c defines a number of method aliases. The last in the list is the aliasing of size and length. If I move that up in the list then the rdocs no longer say it's an alias for pop. But the other mistaken alias comments remain.

I've opened a bug report for rdoc.

https://github.com/rdoc/rdo...

Re: Module: Enumerable (Ruby 2.3.3)

James Britt / Neurogami — Thu, 24 Nov 2016 16:05:13 -0000

Those are one and the same method. It just has multiple names. Unfortunately, the docs do not make clear that the same code can be called using different names. map and collect is another example of this.

Re: Class: OptionParser (Ruby 2.3.1)

James Britt / Neurogami — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 23:58:43 -0000

The example is broken. Bug reports have been opened for it, and while those bugs get marked closed, the issue seems to come back.

There is a working version at https://gist.github.com/Neu...

Re: Class: OptParse (Ruby 2.3.1)

James Britt / Neurogami — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 17:12:52 -0000

Thank you for submitting the bug report.

That's weird, though, about it reportedly having been fixed. Looking at those issues on the bug tracker it isn't clear to me just what was done to fix the problem, or why it keeps getting reported.

Someone submitted a working example with their bug report, so perhaps I should just post that as an addition to the docs.

Re: Class: OptParse (Ruby 2.3.1)

James Britt / Neurogami — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 00:20:52 -0000

Yeah, that example is pretty screwy.

Did you file a big report at https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/ ?

Re: Tumblin', Just wanted to do a quick review of Mischief now...

James Britt / Neurogami — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 00:36:22 -0000

Note that in addition to the price drop features have been dropped as well. Be sure you run the latest demo and find a current review.

While I am a paid user of Mischief I miss having a smuding tool, for example.