11 Nov 2012 ensonic   » (Master)

buzztard

Finally pushed the pattern control-source: 26 files changed, 1204 insertions, 1333 deletions. It looks like only a little gain in code size, but that is not true; we added more tests and splitting up a large class always comes with some boilerplate for the new class. There are still some opportunities for optimizations, which I'll probably try some soon.

In the UI I improved the interaction controller workflow. For controllers that implement control discovery the dialog from the context menu will also bind the new controller. The settings are now finally useful, as there one can do mass-learning (tweak all knows and then go through the list and name them).

Writing synth plugins for buzztard would be quite a bit of copy and paste. I chopped simsyn into pieces as reusable objects in libgst-buzztard. We have a few oscillators, envelope objects and the svf-filter. The gst elements would proxy some properties of the synth component. Unfortunately that means copy'n'paste of the property setup. I've tried this code, but it shows no effect :/

GObjectClass * filter_klass = g_type_class_ref (GSTBT_TYPE_FILTER_SVF);
g_object_class_install_property (gobject_class, PROP_RESONANCE,
g_param_spec_override ("resonance",
g_object_class_find_property (filter_klass, "resonance")));
g_type_class_unref (filter_klass);


A full standalone example can be found at here.

We also have a new element called wavereplay. This is mainly for testing the wavetable oscillator, but also has a nice property compared to tracker elements. It only has parameters to select the wave to play and it will play it from start to finish in syn with the song. That is if you seek to 2:00, the wave will play content from 2:00. This is unlike tracker elements that would only play what gets triggered from the new time position. One practical use is doing a mixdown of the music rendering with the vocal recordings. In such a song you load two wave (song, vocals), use two wavereplay elements, add effect elements to the one for the vocals and re-render the song to create the mixdown.

I thought I knew pretty much all about gobject. This month I discovered something old I did not know about. It is supported to calls g_object_class_install_property() for a property inherited from the baseclass to e.g. narrow down the value range. This is very useful for the "children" property of polyphonic elements (where children is the number of voices). The interface does only limit the property to the full int range. With this feature elements like e.g. sidsyn can override the range to 3...3 (sid has always 3 voices).

The last bigger change this month was a refactoring cleanup in sequence and song-info. This was quite a big of code shuffling, but now all the timing info is in song-info (which already has bpm an stuff). This change helped with an optimization in the pattern control-sources.

132 files changed, 2417 insertions(+), 2138 deletions(-)

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