[Buzztard-user] buzztard project status 01/11/2012

[Stefan S. <en...@ho...>]

Hi,

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 [1].

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.

[1] http://buzztard.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=buzztard/buzztard;a=blob;f=design/gobject/propertyproxy.c

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

Have fun,
buzztard core developer team
--
http://www.buzztard.org