Lindon
VST/AU Developer
Hello everyone,
My name is Lindon Mulcahy-Parker from Channel Robot (www.channelrobot.com). You may have heard of CR - we offer a range of Kontakt (and these days)VST and AU virtual instruments and ROMplers.
So at the moment I'm busy building two new audio engines - which we will use to ship new products that will include sample material from ourselves and possibly other audio designers; if you are an audio designer and want to see your work in a stand-alone VST/AU ROMpler please get in touch, but this post isnt really about that.
This next generation of ROMpler engine is about twice the functionality of our existing products, so 4-voice systems with a LOT of sophisticated and dedicated modulation options, so twice as powerful as the engine we used in Orchestral Dust, Folio Bass, Keytone etc. As a consequence there's a lot of functionality to use/learn, and I've been trying very hard to keep the UI as fast, usable and simple as possible.
But there's always the temptation to add more....so here's my questions (there two..)
In-bound modulation sources: and by this I mean MIDI CC messages of one sort or another. Right now almost every control can do the "normal" MIDI learn trick - but assigning a specific CC message to an on-screen widget means that the results are linear. You tweak your physical control and it will send numbers 0 to 127 and the on-screen(and back end engine) will respond in this strictly linear way - you cant invert these values, you cant use a curve of any sort. Right now the exception is Velocity - where the engine allows you to draw your own velocity curve (any shape you want really). So.... I can add in the ability to by-pass the MIDI learn functionality and allow the user to draw a curve to apply for any named CC message, so (say) channel aftertouch could be limited to the range 80-120 when applied to (say) the filter frequency control, or a CC value could be used in an inverse way; the higher the value of the inbound CC the lower the parameter is set. I hope you get the idea. So yep its nice to have but it will add extra UI widgets and thus more stuff to learn. Thanks for getting this far, at last a question.... Do you think this sort of user-drawn response curve for MIDI CC values is worth the effort?
Phew, most complex question out the way, Q2:
Assigning CC messages to specific UI widgets is fine, but I could also build a Macro system - where you would have (say) 8 controls that could each be mapped to a number of other UI widgets. Tweak the Macro control(either by hand or with its own assigned CC) and it will modulate its assigned widget set. Again this adds power but at a cost of additional UI stuff to learn - So question: Do you use these Macro systems? Do you think they are worth it? (OK technically 2 questions in one there..)
OK fire away....
My name is Lindon Mulcahy-Parker from Channel Robot (www.channelrobot.com). You may have heard of CR - we offer a range of Kontakt (and these days)VST and AU virtual instruments and ROMplers.
So at the moment I'm busy building two new audio engines - which we will use to ship new products that will include sample material from ourselves and possibly other audio designers; if you are an audio designer and want to see your work in a stand-alone VST/AU ROMpler please get in touch, but this post isnt really about that.
This next generation of ROMpler engine is about twice the functionality of our existing products, so 4-voice systems with a LOT of sophisticated and dedicated modulation options, so twice as powerful as the engine we used in Orchestral Dust, Folio Bass, Keytone etc. As a consequence there's a lot of functionality to use/learn, and I've been trying very hard to keep the UI as fast, usable and simple as possible.
But there's always the temptation to add more....so here's my questions (there two..)
In-bound modulation sources: and by this I mean MIDI CC messages of one sort or another. Right now almost every control can do the "normal" MIDI learn trick - but assigning a specific CC message to an on-screen widget means that the results are linear. You tweak your physical control and it will send numbers 0 to 127 and the on-screen(and back end engine) will respond in this strictly linear way - you cant invert these values, you cant use a curve of any sort. Right now the exception is Velocity - where the engine allows you to draw your own velocity curve (any shape you want really). So.... I can add in the ability to by-pass the MIDI learn functionality and allow the user to draw a curve to apply for any named CC message, so (say) channel aftertouch could be limited to the range 80-120 when applied to (say) the filter frequency control, or a CC value could be used in an inverse way; the higher the value of the inbound CC the lower the parameter is set. I hope you get the idea. So yep its nice to have but it will add extra UI widgets and thus more stuff to learn. Thanks for getting this far, at last a question.... Do you think this sort of user-drawn response curve for MIDI CC values is worth the effort?
Phew, most complex question out the way, Q2:
Assigning CC messages to specific UI widgets is fine, but I could also build a Macro system - where you would have (say) 8 controls that could each be mapped to a number of other UI widgets. Tweak the Macro control(either by hand or with its own assigned CC) and it will modulate its assigned widget set. Again this adds power but at a cost of additional UI stuff to learn - So question: Do you use these Macro systems? Do you think they are worth it? (OK technically 2 questions in one there..)
OK fire away....
Last edited:
