[Octal-dev] re: stereo machines + design question

[Dave O'Toole]

> 2. Mixers and diffusion. As we read here these days, there are many 
> not-so-trivial ways to mix signals. With the stereo design, i can not write 
> a more than two tracks mixer as a machine. And what about a height tracks 
> diffusion, often used in concrete music ?

There's no use to writing a "mixer"
plugin. As in Buzz, the engine in Octal manages mixing and routing of
signals, so there is no need to have a plugin do it. This is great,
because in Buzz you don't have to have a little mixer plugin at every
single little point where two signals come together, which is almost
everywhere. Having to place a mixer plugin at each point, when this is
such a commonly-used feature, would be an enormous pain. 

Could you explain a bit more about "height tracks diffusion"? Is this a
real-time calculation? 

> mixer but I undertood octal machines were planed not to be to elementary. 
> Let's considere a stereo vocoder, for instance. If we want a stereo output, 
> we will have to use two mono vocoders machines and a complicated route scheme.

No. the OCTAL API supports machines with full stereo in and out (and the
Aux input for special tasks such as vocoding, coming Real Soon Now), so
there is no need to use two mono vocoders. The relevant fields of
machine_type are "input_channels" and "output_channels". 

-- 
@@@ david o'toole
@@@ address@hidden
@@@ www.gnu.org/software/octal