Coding

At least the MOD Duo X isn’t focussed on the guitar player market, because there is not a single stomp switch on it … :wink:

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Yes, sure, “just do it yourself” is always an option, I was not arguing about that :wink:

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The.TBD from Instruments of Things. Another Eurorack platform for developing or learning about DSP code. Setup for C++ and reasonably priced this makes another entry point for those interested in developing their own DSP algorithms.

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I’ve found Ornament and Crime (particularly Hemisphere Suite) very quick and satisfying to modify. A fully functional and quite popular (easy to flip) modular that also is my own little Teensy-based playground. Radio Music/Chord organ is another to check if you want something pre-built but ready to hack.

New product on Kickstarter-- WVR (said waver or weaver you pick) is an open source open hardware product. You can compare it to the Daisy product from Electrosmith (linked above), with the prominent addition of wireless (Bluetooth or WiFi) built in. They’re really pushing the sample playback (pick your format) features, and the diverse peripheral interface options. The other big feature is it is very inexpensive and small ! I won’t go into a lot of detail, there is a ton of that, this thing can do a lot, but here are a few simple facts.

  • Dual core 240 MHz processor
  • 16 MB RAM
  • 8 GB eMMC storage (that’s a ton of audio)
  • Playback up to 18 stereo wav files simultaneously, with ~1ms latency.
  • Opto isolator for serial MIDI input
  • Optional USB backpack for either USB host or device interface
  • Built in WiFi and Bluetooth radio.
  • Extensive and well feature development environment
  • Available hardware options from bare to filled out for purchase
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I’m a superb noob at coding, I thought myself some c# to use with Unity and I’m loving it and I’m now learning Sonic Pi. It’s an odd experience to code a song, very close to an Elektron sequencer sometimes, but I love the logic/though process behind it and the idea of carefully planning a song Vs jamming.

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So it seems like Max/gen~ is running now on the Daisy, albeit in beta form.
Looks pretty cool.

Kind of torn between that and the Mod Duo X to get some laptop free Max action.
Anyone got any experience of using gen~ on either platform yet?

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That s pretty neat. But no, haven t got experience with either.

I’m currently writing a sequencer in Go, with plans to initially release as a cross-platform FOSS desktop app, but the real goal is to build on top of ElkOS and make a proper groovebox. Go seems like a great language for this so far, but I’m considering trying out Rust if I run into anything that requires a lower level language. If anyone here has experience with anything like this and wants to get involved I’d love to collaborate!

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Just 67 hours to go on this neat looking project, I’ve a couple ordered.

Looks like a more flexible, less expensive take on the Tsunami WavTrigger so plenty of DIY gadgets come to mind.

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I stopped coding a while ago, but the last language I learnt was Go and I remember it was awsome. The simplicity to code parrallel function (goroutine) is exceptionnal. I used to code in C and C++ and Go is a big step above.

Can’t help you on this project but let’s go Go :slight_smile:

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Cheers! Yeah it’s really nice to work with, and goroutines are proving especially helpful for concurrency in this sequencer so far. Compiles almost instantly as well which is really handy!

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Just out of interest, does anybody still use machine code?

I think you’re right that you’ll need something other than go, as garbage collection is probably gonna be problematic with real-time audio. Rust seems like a neat language but the nice thing about c++ if you can stomach it is the abundance of existing tools that do a lot of the legwork for you… Like JUCE.

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If you can get your head around Faust (which I personally find totally backward) it seems to be able to automatically generated efficient c++ for audio DSP stuff.

People still write assembly, which is a step above actually writing the opcodes manually. I can’t imagine anyone is still doing that except as an exercise.

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At the moment I’m not dealing with any actual audio - just the actual sequencer itself. I’m using Elk OS which handles the audio and I’m just writing a program that interfaces with its headless DAW; Sushi. I can also get time and transport from Sushi, so that’s taken care of too. You’re right though, I am conscious that sooner or later I may run into issues with garbage collection and will either need to write some features in lower level languages or port the application to something else.

Faust looks cool - I played with it a while ago but DSP in general is still way out of my league. It’s on the list!

That sounds very cool! I’d briefly read about Sushi but hadn’t really understood what it was. Do you actually have a working elkos setup?

I have it running on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a cheap HiFiBerry DAC hat, but I’ve also had it running previously in an Ubuntu Studio VM. It’s really quite an incredible platform that for some reason doesn’t seem to have had much uptake. I think their initial selling point was about running hardware versions of VSTs, but that idea brushed over the fact that they actually had an entirely headless, realtime DAW running on a custom kernel with <1ms round-trip latency. For me, that says it should be a groovebox.

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I’ve actually been working on a sequencer myself, running on teensy, but was considering moving to an rpi. Sounds like it would be pretty easy to get up and running using this headless daw!

What’s the sample block size that you’re running with hifiberry?

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