Re: [Om-synth] It's alive!

[Dave Robillard]

Atte André Jensen wrote:

>Hi
>
>Played a bit with om and I managed to get sound. I attached the most 
>basic patch I could come up with (clicks and is always on, but it works 
>and is simple) that reads midi and plays audio, hopefully Tino (and 
>others) can verify their installation with this patch...
>
>Now the fun begins:
>
>1) What's the differences between blue and green connectors? I couldn't 
>make the green ones connect to the blue ones of the internal modules. 
>Control signals? Different range?

Blue is audio rate and green is control rate.  You can convert control 
to audio through the ladspa 'Control to Audio rate interpolator' (or 
whatever), but the other way around doesn't really make sense.

I've been meaning to put a little legend in the status bar at the 
bottom of the patch window.  Good idea?

LADSPA is a little bit lacking in the dept. of audio rate signals 
intended for control, which is what modular synths are all about.. 
hopefully LADSPA2 can address this.  Many new users have this problem, 
but it's basically unavoidable. :/

An audio rate signal is an entire buffer of values (say, 512, or 
whatever your jack buffer size is), but a control rate signal is just a 
single value for each block.  Once proper end user documentation 
exists, I'll try to explain this well..

>2) Was quite confused in the beginning that the audio outs were mono, 
>maybe a mention of in the doc?

Om isn't at a high enough level for "stereo" to make sense.  An audio 
connection is a /single/ stream of audio.  This is much better, as it's 
less limiting.  You can define an arbitrary number of inputs or outputs 
for your patches and do whatever you please with them, whether it's 
simple stereo stuff or something crazier.  (This is one area where Om 
is superior to AMS..).  If "stereo connections" were built in, this 
flexibility would be lost.

Ditto for the documentation thing..

>3) Seems that sounds stays on the server after the client is closed. At 
>least a reload compains that the patch is already loaded... How this 
>works should also be mentioned in the documentation.

The server is a persistent thing.  Whether or not a client is around at 
the time is completely irrelevant.  I admit there is a bit of a lack of 
'polish' in this area - but if you try to load a patch that already 
exists in the engine, yes you will get an error.  The patch should be 
showing up in the client already, making this clear?  If not, something 
is going wrong.

Some day I will get around to making the connection to the server a 
nice graphical thing where it's clear what's going on - as well as 
allow the client to launch the engine.  I don't like the steep learning 
curve to get the thing running at all.  Having the client (optionally) 
launch the engine is definitely in the books, for one thing.

(Note that you can load a patch from the same file with a different 
path (name), so you can load multiple copies of the same patch file if 
you want.  The paths just have to be unique)

>4) I can take om down in quite a lot of alternative ways. Would you 
like 
>the bug reports start comming?

Yes, absolutely!  The engine in CVS right now is waay more stable then 
the released version, but I would still definitely like bug reports.  
Making Om bulletproof is a very high priority right now.  You can 
report things either here on the list or the savannah bugs page.  
Having it on the bugs page will probably better assure that I'll get 
around to it eventually ;)

>5) I also have a few suggestions, but maybe after some smoke has 
cleared?

Probably best to just start a different thread for them, depending on 
the significance of the problems (and how different they are)

I'm happy to have some people with a completely end-user perspective, 
to help me sort out these usability issues.  I've just recently gotten 
Om to the point where it's relatively solid on the technological level, 
so now it's time to make it as easy to use as possible, and /stable/.

And, well... yes... the whole documentation thing.... a little 
assistance in that area would be quite nice, I have to say. :)

Cheers,

-DR-