[Bluemusic-users] blue brainstorming

[Steven Y. <ste...@gm...>]

Hi All,

Some random thoughts on blue to follow as a brain dump about things
related to blue.  Please feel free to add your own thoughts on what
would be useful either as further wants for an idea mentioned or new
ideas.  I would like to collect it all and then separate into
manageable sub-projects so that new releases can have some goal of
features to implement and to help build roadmaps.


I'm wondering now what are the areas of blue that you feel are the
most deficient in terms of built-in support for common musical needs.
My guesses are that currently the most deficiencies are in areas
related to sampled audio.  By this, I would imagine audio files on the
timeline, but also sampler instruments.  We have some simple sample
players in blueShare which are great for a single audio file, but we
have no real sample set system that can get mapped over integer keys
(like MIDI) or respond to frequency, have values like LFO, filter
envelopes, etc.  I imagine a sampler instrument made particularly for
drum samples would be useful.  Not that it'd be limited to drum
samples, but sort of like how SP1200's or other hardware samplers are
used.

For audiofiles, incorporating transposition and looping as is commonly
found in MIDI-based systems that support loops seems like a useful
addition.

I still need to do experiments with the Csound API so we can start
doing modifications of parameter values in realtime while a project is
rendering.  Last I looked at it I was going to hardcode to work with
the 64-bit version of Csound that I use, as I have no idea how we
would go about supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit csound from API.  (I
don't think other programs that use API allow switching between 32 or
64).

I have started to look at JMask again.  JMask is a visual version of
CMask and is based on the CMask code.  It was quite far along last I
left it, so am looking to start working on it.

Automation now seems to be coming along quite nicely and I feel much
better about it's status.  There's still more work to do, but I think
it's developing nicely.

Instrument metadata that defines what pfields the instrument uses,
much like the Tracker's way of setting pfield columns, is also very
pressing on my mind, as with that information it opens up a great deal
of possibilities for all of the objects in blue.  With csound API, one
can imagine selecting an instrument and choosing "Test Mode" where it
plays an auto generated score fragment over and over while allowing
parameter modification live.  This kind of thing I think would be very
useful.

In other areas of musical concerns, I would still like to build an Arc
module similar to Xenakis's UPIC.  A pvoc soundObject that would allow
editing or partials would be very nice too, especially if it could
load wav, sdif, spear, etc.

MIDI has been mentioned and there is code I had started about a year
ago for recording MIDI.  It would be good to get the instrument
metadata system in and to get MIDI input connected to that.

I also started a notation soundObject maybe 5.5 years ago that was
able to draw some notes in a rudimentary way.  This may be an area of
blue worth looking at implementing.

Instruments organization using tags instead of categories seems very
useful.  Systems like Native Instruments Kore and the classification
system there seem very useful, and I see no reason why tagging should
not be implemented in blue.


As for outside of blue, I would like to imagine ways to increase the
value and community of blueShare.  Would it be useful to add social
network type features for blueShare?  Would a blue podcast be useful
where users could post links to their blue/csound mp3's?  What about
user home pages, adding music, allowing comments, links to
instruments/effects contributed by user, etc.?  I'd really like to
make the community offering in a way that it would be convenient to
share our work with others and allow communication.


Another big area to update and fix would be documentation.  I've been
thinking of restructuring the documentation altogether, though am not
quite sure what would be the best for users.  Does anyone have any
suggestions as to how you might want to see documentation go?

I was also thinking of asking for example .blue project contributions,
lasting 1minute or less.  Could be a sound effect, a musical snippet,
etc.  Something that a new user could open up and try and see a way of
working with blue and perhaps to get some ideas.  Also, would be nice
to assemble the example output as mp3's and add as a flash jukebox of
examples on the blue homepage, which I'm contemplating might need to
be redone altogether too.


Well, just a whole lot of thoughts on things that blue could maybe use
in improvement.  I'd love to hear everyone else's ideas to get an idea
of what people are doing with blue and what they want out of using
blue, and hopefully can start to work up a big game plan.

Thanks!
steven