Re: [Octal-dev] Re: timing

[Brendan Howell]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Dave O'Toole wrote:

> This can be done easily. You want to divide a beat into four parts (for
> your 16th notes) and also into three parts (for your 8th triplets.) So
> the beat's size needs to be evenly divisible by both four and three.
> Conveniently, 4 * 3 = 12 is such a number. So tell the tracker that you
> want 12 ticks per beat (Buzz has a setting for this but it doesn't seem
> to be connected to the interface highlighting, which I plan to correct.)
> A beat is a quarter note, 4 ticks is an 8th triplet, and 3 ticks is a
> 16th note. 
> 
> You can apply it to other situations too. Does this work for you? 

Yes, this was essentially what I was getting at when I brought up the
subject initially.  I guess as long as the highlighting is flexible, we
can support most any non-wierd time signature.  Even odd bases are not too
hard to support.  Just multiply by two and double the tempo.

> Forget about the fooling with block sizes, that won't really work
> anyway. Use ticks as your unit of measurement and we can do 95% of what
> we want. 

Yeah if we get too fancy with the timing we'll lose a lot of the speed and
elegance of tracking.  I don't think Octal should be the be-all and
end-all of composition software.  If you want something extra ordinary, do
it in csound or rhythmlab or pd (a free clone of MAX) and then yank the
sounds into the wavetable in Octal.

So, the question I have now is, when should we start writing some
machines?  I wanna start making noise!  

-Brendan