5 responses to “Upcoming feature - pattern storage”

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  daviD June 1st, 2008 at 15:44

  Hi, and thanks for your excellent software. Cellular automata and music usually don’t mix well as far as I’m concerned, but your interface is really well thought out and can lead to great results…

  I’ve got a few suggestions for possible improvements :

  - having some soft of visible grid (a thin grey line each 4 squares for example) would be a nice visual help and would be useful to correlate the cellular automata screen & the triggers screen.

  - would it be possible to alter the rules somehow (i.e. not only using conway’s game of life but having a more generic cellular automata) ?

  - another useful thing would be to have an option to use a toroidal grid (i.e. top and bottom connected, left and right connected). It’d be particularly nice for gliders and other repetitive shapes.

  - as you mentioned, individual volume per step would be great.

  - an option to ‘move’ the entire trigger screen in any direction would be nice too (also on a toroidal screen), it’d allow easily revertable variations on the same patterns.

  - pattern length other than powers of two would be cool to have, too.

  - mute/solo buttons for each channel could also be useful.

  Feel free to send me an email if what I wrote above is not clear enough :).

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  haj June 2nd, 2008 at 03:52

  Superb proggy! Thanks a lot for your effort and having this available to us.

  I hardly know about lifegame before so when I first tried I thought this is more like playing blindly and hope some cool result mostly by chance. But studying a bit about UI and lifegame it’s getting much more interesting to logically programming - more controlled sequence and playing. And as getting more feature rich it’s getting more capable of doing so!

  I’ve been successful with putting a 2-phase oscillator (simplest for a set of 3 contiguous blocks either horizontal or vertical) for say hi-hat like sequence. Putting a trigger for every up-beat and perpendicular to down-beat (putting both makes double beat), putting trigger symmetrically to push the volume of the swatch double (at the beat, of course). Putting a pentadecathlon or combination of some “L” shape (I don’t know the name of this cellular - if it has one - form an L with 4 blocks) to interact with it to create more complex rhythm etc.
  Unfortunately the space is not too big we

  In the above post daviD has suggested well thought feature requests obviously in this kind of playing (controlling) in mind. I do think it’s very hard to implement some of them but let me add a couple of more…

  - as daviD said a visible grid for both sequence and trigger screen will make programming easier. If it makes things ugly how about some kind of on-off switch..

  - the idea of mute/solo buttons for each trigger would be fabulous. (in addition to we having pattern selector!)

  - as 0xtob said in the comment of first post, would it be possible to play back the cellular automaton in the background so I can see which triggers get triggered at which point? That would REALLY help programming, though I guess it takes lots of work…

  - I’d like to have some very quick way to switch bpm mode and strum mode - for live play. Maybe “holding” Y button interrupts bpm mod; only when holding Y button strum mode is activated (then it certainly shouldn’t be “Y” button for right handed person tho!)

  - daviD’s idea for toroidal grid is because unfortunately the whole space is small and we can’t effectively put larger cellular automatas. I can imagine very hard work for this so I’m not holding breath tho..

  - how about putting boxes on bottom of screen (or more easily numbers) representing say, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12, 16, 32 of which each determine the life of length; much easier for realtime playing via directional pad.

  BTW, with v1.1 I still seem to have noise problem with frequency modulation. It was also present in the first version (I’m using R4 with latest firmware)

  Anyway, thanks again for great program.

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  admin June 2nd, 2008 at 09:27

  Hello haj and daviD,

  Thanks for the feedback! I’m going to try to get some of your ideas added as new features. Please be patient though. I’m focused on getting some of the basics done first such as directory support so your /sounds folder doesn’t become too huge. I tried once to fix the noise problem but failed. I’ll have to revisit this later on.

  I’ll keep you posted of my progress!
  - Bret

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  ioplong June 2nd, 2008 at 10:36

  hey, cool program, thanx!
  i’d find it very useful if one could pitch the samples - in semitones - as part of the sample-settings.
  cheers

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  killbot June 3rd, 2008 at 16:48

  thanks a ton for the ability to control loop length. it makes it very easy to make short strange beats. ive notived several people complaining about the “noise bug” but i think its very cool, and if played with enough, can create some very interesting background noise.

  i think it would be very cool to be able to switch the frequency modulation page to a decay type page. being able to change the decay for each step. that would allow for some very interesting results!

  i also think that it would be pretty neat if you could change the loop length for each track. ah the possibilities!

  thanks for actually listening to what people have to say, too. this is a very amazing and creative product!