[LAU] 1625 [music]

[Dave Phillips]

Greetings,

A little moody ambience from a work in progress exploring automatic
melodic generation with VCV Rack modules.

Still working on it. :)

Best,

dp

[Paul Davis]

Post by Dave Phillips
Greetings,
A little moody ambience from a work in progress exploring automatic
melodic generation with VCV Rack modules.

if you could:

(a) do the hour long version
(b) come over and run my VCV Rack install for me

that would just fine. Lovely work, as usual! Such nice tone taste.

[Dave Phillips]

Hi Paul,

Post by Paul Davis
(a) do the hour long version
(b) come over and run my VCV Rack install for me
that would just fine. Lovely work, as usual! Such nice tone taste.

Thank you ! I'd be happy to do both, but alas, my time is limited, we're
moving into new digs this week. Sorry about that. :)

I had you and Will Godfrey in mind after working on this one, I hoped
you'd enjoy it. I do have a second section prepared - it adds about
another four minutes to the piece - I just have to figure a way to merge
the essential aspects of the continuation into the original patch. Rack
is not yet optimized nor does it support multicores so I have to be
careful about patch size, there's a tipping point that sends its
performance into xrun hell.

Regarding the sounds: I use fairly simple modules for sound creation in
Rack, doing so makes me think about ways to subvert their simplicity. I
also use only a few straightforward effects (reverb, chorus, tremolo), I
find it helps to keep the textures clear.

I had hoped to present a "composing with VCV Rack" paper at LAC 2019 but
our move puts that notion to rest. Dang.

Best always,

dp

[Louigi Verona]

Enjoyable work.

I am also one of those people who wonders how you managed to make VCV Rack
work. On my machine all it does is generate XRUNs.


Louigi Verona
https://louigiverona.com/

Post by Dave Phillips
Hi Paul,
(a) do the hour long version
(b) come over and run my VCV Rack install for me
that would just fine. Lovely work, as usual! Such nice tone taste.
Thank you ! I'd be happy to do both, but alas, my time is limited, we're
moving into new digs this week. Sorry about that. :)
I had you and Will Godfrey in mind after working on this one, I hoped
you'd enjoy it. I do have a second section prepared - it adds about another
four minutes to the piece - I just have to figure a way to merge the
essential aspects of the continuation into the original patch. Rack is not
yet optimized nor does it support multicores so I have to be careful about
patch size, there's a tipping point that sends its performance into xrun
hell.
Regarding the sounds: I use fairly simple modules for sound creation in
Rack, doing so makes me think about ways to subvert their simplicity. I
also use only a few straightforward effects (reverb, chorus, tremolo), I
find it helps to keep the textures clear.
I had hoped to present a "composing with VCV Rack" paper at LAC 2019 but
our move puts that notion to rest. Dang.
Best always,
dp
_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-user mailing list
https://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user

[Dave Phillips]

Hi Louigi !

Post by Louigi Verona
Enjoyable work.

Thank you, I caught your comment on YT too. :)

Post by Louigi Verona
I am also one of those people who wonders how you managed to make VCV
Rack work. On my machine all it does is generate XRUNs.

I urge anyone interested in VCV Rack to join the Facebook official group
page. Yes, it's Facebook, and yes, it's chaotic, but it's also packed
with information for and from users on all platforms, including Linux.
If you can use FB's Search function you can usually find what you're
looking for. Otherwise it's a pretty good read, lots of news on a daily
basis. There's also a large and growing larger library of patches
available at patchstorage.com, a very helpful resource.

So, a few questions for anyone having problems getting Rack up and running:

Are you using the precompiled Rack or did you build it yourself ?

What's the last version you tried ? It's currently at 0.6.2c coming up
quickly on a 1.0 release.

I assume you're using a low-latency and/or realtime system with JACK ?

Do you have a multicore CPU running in performance mode ?

And a few suggestions, again to anyone interested:

Start with extremely simple patches, i.e. patch together a Fundamental
VCO-1 and VCA-1 (level set to 0) by running a cable from the oscillator
sine output into the amplifier and onwards to the Core set's Audio module.

Make sure that the project sample rate matches your system audio sr
(it's listed under one of the top menu icons).

There's a minimum level requirement for OpenGL support. I figure, if you
got as far as the default display you're probably okay for the required
version.

Rack currently runs in single-core mode, so if your CPU has good support
for single-core you're better off than me. IIUC Intel CPUs outperform
AMDs in that regard. I would be happy to learn otherwise, my machine
runs an AMD FX 6300.

Good luck, let me know if I can be of more assistance. :)

Best,

dp

[Paul Davis]

On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 7:42 AM Dave Phillips <***@woh.rr.com> wrote:
[ ... ]

Following on from Louigi's question, I want to say on this mailing list a
couple of things about VCV Rack that i've said often on IRC but not
elsewhere. Really just two.

1) I want to give HUGE thanks and congratulations for Andrew Belt and what
he has done with VCV Rack. Not so much the program itself, but the
ecosystem he either deliberately or accidentally created around it. Some of
you (*cough* Dave *cough*) might remember that before I wrote Ardour and
JACK, my first foray into Linux audio was something called Quasimodo.
Powered by a reimplementation of CSound, the GUI was a lot like VCV Rack
(and other similar software). Quasimodo never succeeded, for a variety of
reasons, and it is so good to see a GPL'ed modular synth now finally really
finding and creating a community and success. The visual appeal, ease of
use, and relatively simple module API of VCV Rack have all been critical in
its success, and Andrew deserves many kudos for this. It really is amazing
to see the set of available modules (and their quality) and the dual
business model (no-cost vs. paid) for modules. I'm actually jealous.

2) All that being said, as a programmer, the internals of VCV Rack's engine
are deeply disturbing. It is really amazing that VCV Rack works as well as
it does. It isn't properly coupled to the audio hardware at all (it uses a
timer to drive the graph), and it can't be trivially modified. Thankfully,
someone has done the modification for the VST version of VCVRack (because
in a plugin, you have no choice), and so perhaps the redesign might make it
back into the mainline code. Given the lovely to use GUI and the fantastic
ecosystem, it's a little sad to see the internal code suggest almost no
understanding of how to write a realtime audio application. Maybe Andrew
had his reasons for the internal design - I don't know. But it certainly
makes it much more likely to have audio glitches and to be incapable of
operating at the lowest latencies. It works well enough for me, however
(and is a huge risk because I could spend hours playing with it).

[Dan Ballance]

Thanks for sharing those observations about VCV Rack and the internal
software design in particular.

Post by Paul Davis
[ ... ]
Following on from Louigi's question, I want to say on this mailing list a
couple of things about VCV Rack that i've said often on IRC but not
elsewhere. Really just two.
1) I want to give HUGE thanks and congratulations for Andrew Belt and what
he has done with VCV Rack. Not so much the program itself, but the
ecosystem he either deliberately or accidentally created around it. Some of
you (*cough* Dave *cough*) might remember that before I wrote Ardour and
JACK, my first foray into Linux audio was something called Quasimodo.
Powered by a reimplementation of CSound, the GUI was a lot like VCV Rack
(and other similar software). Quasimodo never succeeded, for a variety of
reasons, and it is so good to see a GPL'ed modular synth now finally really
finding and creating a community and success. The visual appeal, ease of
use, and relatively simple module API of VCV Rack have all been critical in
its success, and Andrew deserves many kudos for this. It really is amazing
to see the set of available modules (and their quality) and the dual
business model (no-cost vs. paid) for modules. I'm actually jealous.
2) All that being said, as a programmer, the internals of VCV Rack's
engine are deeply disturbing. It is really amazing that VCV Rack works as
well as it does. It isn't properly coupled to the audio hardware at all (it
uses a timer to drive the graph), and it can't be trivially modified.
Thankfully, someone has done the modification for the VST version of
VCVRack (because in a plugin, you have no choice), and so perhaps the
redesign might make it back into the mainline code. Given the lovely to use
GUI and the fantastic ecosystem, it's a little sad to see the internal code
suggest almost no understanding of how to write a realtime audio
application. Maybe Andrew had his reasons for the internal design - I
don't know. But it certainly makes it much more likely to have audio
glitches and to be incapable of operating at the lowest latencies. It works
well enough for me, however (and is a huge risk because I could spend hours
playing with it).
_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-user mailing list
https://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user