cleaning out the cobwebs

Man, it's dusty in here... haven't written an entry for ages.

My current song is coming along slowly. I like the basic thing I've got so far, but every time I try and add some texture over the top of it, I don't like it and I wind up tearing it all back out. I know it needs something more interesting but nothing I try works out right.

A couple more plugin projects got suggested to me, one of which I can't believe I never thought of before. Wacom graphics tablet. MIDI. You move the pen on the tablet, it sends controller data to a MIDI target. So simple. This is meriko's first week off in ages, though, so that project waits. I'll sneak in a little work here and there while she's distracted with her own projects...

The other plugin is really pretty basic — a tempo-synchronous delay line with a longer limit on delay time than the Mulch-builtin one — like up to a minute or more. It'll be memory-hungry, like 10MB per channel-minute. Probably one of the knobs should be "max memory to use" so that if you accidentally swat the tempo or the delay time controls, it doesn't suddenly start swapping to disk. Of course, this is something Ross should do as a builtin. Of course, Ross has a huge list of enhancements on his plate, and I believe Mulch is not a full-time endeavor for him. With few exceptions, writing this kind of audio software is not in and of itself a way to make a living.