Share Your Content: Thread

alexs1

Been giving more audience to your 'musical entomology.' One question I'm interested in about your approach is whether you guys monitor your instruments silently in headphones first before coming in, or it's more you pick up an instrument and act on whatever comes to mind unmuted. I can hear it both ways as a listener—in the former you get a little time to practice in the background before committing to the recording, and the latter you just kinda go for it.

Leftyloopy

alexs1 ha! It's a bit of both, tbh. There are definitely instances in which you (we, I) can hear the lack of prethinking and we go all live with ideas on the fly. Some times, it's more like pre production ( in choosing the sound, effects, or wanting to bring something with a fade in, we might "pre" do like you say before bringing it out.
The catch is that either with monitoring or bringing it out to the tacit PA, is done through headphones. Mostly so that if we need to record a quiet kalimba there's no bleed from real speakers. The "PA" is a stereo track recording everything that's played live and on mobius, minus things that we monitor privately. The main reason for this is that because it all ends on a stereo track as we go, there's no fixing, or remixing anything. What goes out, stays that way. So, even when going out without much thought, most times I grab an instrument, or sit on the drums, I need to pre check volumes, for example, as mixing is done on the spot. The only editing would be old school "splicing" a section if we suffer a glitch on our unstable combo of devices that either loose midi clock, or stuff like my dog above the basement gets accidentally captured by a microphone. (!)
Cheers.

trevorn1

alexs1 I go for it 100% and work with whatever comes out.

trevorn1

manymanyhaha thanks! Yes it's Touchdesigner, good eye, and pulling live video via Zoom actually. I connected my audio and video patches together, mostly using loopback through my RME interface and doing audio analysis when it comes into TD.

I'll check out Helen's music, thanks for the recommendation ✌🏽

gustebeast

Anyone want to try importing my snapshot? It's a pedal steel + bass loop (track 1 is silence)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1C7WmjtzhoJw5q3dzTpTPuurkGtcHSWAY/view?usp=sharing

jeff

Imported, thanks!

This was a good exercise as it raises a few issues around sharing snapshots. I used File->Import Snapshot to load it, and that went fine, but only because I had your session loaded, with audio tracks in 1-7. My usual session has MIDI tracks in 2 and 3, so it would have failed to load those tracks since the file types didn't match. Snapshot folders aren't completely self-contained, they need to be loaded into a compatible session. Two things would be nice here:

1) A more relaxed snapshot loader that tries to find the best target tracks for each snapshot track if they don't happen to line up by number. So in my case the snapshot track 1 would have gone in track 1, but snapshot tracks 2-4 would have gone into my tracks 4-7, skipping over the two midi tracks I have in between.

2) A snapshot export package that includes the definition of the session it came from. It wouldn't need everything, just enough to recreate the track organization that the snapshot expects. This would actually be more of a session export, or rather a "slice" of a session that contains a single snapshot. Loading that isn't exactly the same as loading a snapshot, it's more like importing a session, that has a snapshot in it.

Once the snapshot was loaded, we're now faced with what to do with all of these stopped tracks. I assumed that tracks 2,3,4 were intended to be started at the same time, and yes they played together when I used GlobalPause to unpause them all at the same time. But I think it's kind of non-obvious that you're supposed to use GlobalPause for this. Maybe a menu item like Snapshot->Resume and a SnapshotResume bindable function instead.

BTW, if you're ever in need of a quick way to do something to several tracks at the same time without stopping and writing a script and assigning a binding to it, you can use the Script->Console window. I don't talk much about this but it's basically an interactive script that I use all the time for testing. After loading this snapshot, bring up the console and type:

> in 1,2,3,4 Start

and hit Enter. The tracks all start.

gustebeast

I like the idea of keeping your session as similar as possible and having snapshots just change track contents. Ideally it wouldn't make any settings/session changes. The MIDI tracks seems like an issue that could be solved with your suggestion #1, just fill in tracks as best as possible and skip tracks that don't have slots. If the snapshot has two midi tracks but your session only has one, just import one and show an error modal.

For snapshot loading I like the idea of having everything load in a playing, muted state. That way it doesn't shock you with a bunch of sound at once but everything is synced up properly. I think I left that feedback in a previous thread where I was hoping we could have separate snapshot load settings like:

Playback mute status: muted vs unmuted
Playback transport status: playing vs paused

Personally it seems most useful to have the default be mute/playing but maybe that's just me.

jeff

Yes, that's good...snapshotRestoreMode=Mute which is the same as Play but with a GlobalMute active.

I'd like to keep this to a single parameter if possible. Breaking the behaviors down, there are three:

     pause vs play
     mute vs unmute
     rewind  vs stay where you were

The meaning of the current restore modes are:

     Stop: pause + rewind
     Pause: pause + stay
     Start: play + rewind
     Play: Play + stay

Adding a single Mute option gives you Play+Mute, but it wouldn't give you Stop+Mute or Pause+Mute or Start+Mute.

I'm not sure it's that useful to have Stop+Mute and Pause+Mute, you're already paused so the Mute isn't accomplishing anything and you have to remember to turn it off as you resume tracks. Start+Mute is however useful, so I'd probably add PlayMute and StartMute as options.

jeff

For snapshot load adaptations, I'm thinking that if the tracks all line up, and they are in Reset, it loads with no questions.

If the tracks don't line up but there are enough of each type, load into the next available with no questions.

If there are enough target tracks, but some of them are not in Reset, then it gets a little less clear. Would it overwrite your existing content, or try to find empty tracks? Or said another way, is loading a snapshot a GlobalReset followed by a load, or does it try to integrate with what you already have going? I can see use cases for both , you're either starting over with fresh content, or you're incrementally loading supporting content into something already started. This would need a popup prompt to select an option.

Then finally, if the session does not have enough tracks of each type, there are three options: do as much as we can and ignore the extras, locate and load a different session that has compatible tracks, or synthesize a new session that can accommodate the snapshot tracks. I wouldn't want to modify the existing session to inject the new tracks, since you may not always want that and it can mess up scripts and bindings that were written with a particular track layout in mind. But I can create a new session, copied from the existing one with all the right tracks and leave it behind. You can keep it around or delete it if you decide you don't want it. This would require prompting.

gustebeast

I would expect that loading a snapshot would start with a global reset and nothing would be retained from before.

If there are not enough tracks I think it would be cleanest to just block the load and show an error that there need to be X more audio tracks and Y midi tracks. I suppose you could add a button there to do it for the user so they don't need to do it themselves but that may be overkill.

alexs1

I submitted an entry for Internet Archive’s Public Domain Remix Contest using my streaming rig! Check it out

gustebeast

good stuff

« Previous Page