All in one

[Marco Ballini]

I've been following with much interest the development of OCTAL, and I've seen that it's moving toward the kind of music (or noise) software I've always wanted: a composition platform where I could develop my music pieces from scratch to a finite product. I don't use B*zz, because even though it has great features, composing music on it is not so fast. I know it is my limit, while others have written good music with it, but I think that the realization of an idea could be more immediate. I' ve been using Fruityl**ps and I immediately appreciated its ease of use: you can import samples and edit a complex a drum pattern with few clicks on the mouse. But also Fruityl**ps has its limits.

 

Do you think it will be possible to have OCTAL behave *also* like a traditional sequencer (with MIDI tracks, quantizations options, etc..)? How will be the format of its songs? I was just wondering whether it will be possible to have :

-- Patterns with a free number of tracks (like in B*zz).

-- Each pattern with a different length.

-- Different tracks in the same pattern using different machines. So that, for example, when editing a pattern you have track 1 and 2 assigned to machine 1, track 3 assigned to machine 6 (bassdrum), track 4 and 5 assigned to machine 4 (hihats), track 6 to machine 5 (snare). Another pattern may need to have machine 10 on track 1 and its cascaded machine 11 effect on track 2. This way you wouldn't need to continuously switch from a pattern to another to edit things that your mind suggest that must go together.

-- Track view in decimal numeric style or (letting the user decide) graphic style (with lines)or in piano roll style or step sequencer style (like a drummachine).

-- A song view where each line correspond to a pattern and the presence of  visual blocks indicating whether at a certain time it must play or not (treating it as it were a wav, like in multitrack mixing programs). (This is the approach Fruityl**ps use).

 

You discussed ("Big picture stuff") about the GUI of the machines. It seems to me that it won't be possible for machines to show envelopes (for example an ADSR filter envelope) in a graphical way that correspond to the knobs and slider settings.

I used programs that have this feature and I think that it's not only an ornament but a useful and fast mean to see what happens on your machine while you turn knobs (it is easier to read a graphical envelope than ten knobs or sliders). It also seems to me that machines won't have the opportunity to load data from a configuration file specified by the user (in a text box or something) in the GUI of the machine. Am I wrong? Do you think this will ever be possible?

 

Thanks for any answer.

Best regards,

 

Marco