I finished the initial implementation of the choke region recoloring effect. The way it works at the moment is by recursively generating textures for each lane starting from the bottom of each track and moving up one by one. Each texture is added to the one generated by the lane below.
Assuming each block has choke turned on, the above configuration will generate a set of choke textures that lo...
2021-04-04 16:21:15 +0000 UTC View PostDiscord link for new people:
Over the past few days I fixed some horrible new audio engine crashes that I discovered while testing things, and I re-implemented the snapshot system that I previously disabled and got bouncing working again.
I also spent some time trying to solve some design and technical issues with the new "always visible" envelopes featur...
2021-04-03 00:52:14 +0000 UTC View Post
The envelope editor is now fully reimplemented and I added lots of improvements. The most obvious ones are:
I have been working on hooking up the modulation editor UIs to the new system, in particular the modulation selector in the header and the footer controls. Some of these controls have been re-used but a lot of it has had to be rebuilt. The way these controls would populate themselves previously was really hacky. Now everything is much cleaner but also much more complex internally due to parameters all being dynamically generated.
This video mainly just shows off some small visual improv...
2021-03-26 16:11:22 +0000 UTC View Post
I like having block parameters visible at the front rather than hidden in menus but there is always going to be limited space available.
To make the spin-box controls a bit smaller I made a standard set of icons for amp, pan, pitch and sample offset. The sampler plugins can specify which icon to use for each parameter or otherwise just display a text label. In the future I could also load additional icons directly from the sampler DLL.
I also created a custom container to display ...
2021-03-19 16:01:49 +0000 UTC View PostThe last one I posted is pretty out of date now. Things changed a lot because I decided to abandon those plans for the modular effects system in favour of something which I think will be much better in the long run.
1.1 Finish modularizing the sampler engines
I was previously thinking of putting this on hold and reverting back to the old system because it was giving me so much trouble but I struggled through the worst part and I'm feeling a lot better about it now...
2021-03-17 15:02:45 +0000 UTC View PostBy double-clicking anywhere on a lane it toggles an "expanded" mode on and off. There's no official name for this state really. When a sampler block is on an expanded lane all its controls are visible, otherwise it only shows the waveform (and in the upcoming version, the choke envelope).
Only one lane on a track can be expanded at a time. When a lane is expanded all the other lanes on the trac...
2021-03-12 17:34:23 +0000 UTC View PostI've been working on a lot of different things over the past week. The data structure of projects has changed completely since v0.12.1 alpha so for a long time saving and loading has been broken. This makes testing things annoying so I finally got around to making it work again. The worst thing about the old project structure was the really stupid way I was storing effect rack data, but those are now removed in preparation for the new effects system so I was happy about not having to worry ab...
2021-03-11 17:05:35 +0000 UTC View Post
The new version of the audio engine will have the audio signal of a single track being routed downwards through the lanes with blocks being able to manipulate the dry signal coming from above them in various ways. After the work I did properly implementing the fade-in/fade-out periods at the edges of blocks I realised it was now trivial to take the resulting amplitude curves and generate gate signals.
The ter...
2021-03-04 14:01:05 +0000 UTC View PostTo avoid clicking at the right edge of a block, Blockhead automatically adds a short fadeout to the end:
(I am drawing these lines freehand in MS Paint so they won't be accurate.)
This fade-out is very short but enough to eliminate nasty sounding clicks that can occur when a sample suddenly stops playing back.
During regular playback, no fade-in is...
2021-02-17 03:00:13 +0000 UTC View PostI have been having health problems for the past few weeks and have only been able to work on Blockhead for a few hours a day due to tiredness. I spend a lot of time sleeping for 4 hours at a time and feeling fatigued all day. There is a lot of stuff that I wanted to have finished by now that I haven't managed to do so I am very unhappy and frustrated.
I have spent a lot of time working on modularizing the sampler engines and still have not managed to figure out how it should be architec...
2021-02-01 13:08:05 +0000 UTC View PostThere is something about music software that doesn't feel right to me. Maybe you agree and that's why you are here. It's hard to explain this feeling of wrongness when I'm such a terrible communicator so I have to rely on this combination of vague handwaving and broken analogies.
It feels natural to draw comparisons to graphical art software since on the surface the problems of digital graphics and digital audio seem pretty similar. You are using a computer interface to generate a seque...
2021-01-17 21:53:57 +0000 UTC View Post
I am pretty happy with the progress I have made with the refactoring so far though it turned into a much bigger job than I anticipated. The second stage of refactoring (modularizing the sample playback engines) is probably going to be rolled into the first stage because it is easier and more efficient to do them both together.
This is because I am changing the way all project data is stored and manipulated and this includes the modulation system which interacts heavily with the playback...
2020-12-31 00:13:34 +0000 UTC View PostThese are just the big tasks and features. The order of tasks might change. Smaller features not listed here will likely still be worked on in between everything else.
Massive refactoring Part 1
I'm slowly going insane because the design and scope of Blockhead is becoming much clearer in my head so I have a better idea of how the pieces are all supposed to fit together and how stupidly ambitious it all is. It's necessary to throw a bunch of old code and replace it...
2020-12-18 20:54:32 +0000 UTC View Post
For the past week and a half I have been working on moving a bunch of UI code from GDScript to C++, mainly the block layout manager which handles block stamping, drag&drop, block resizing and tempo transformations.
This started with just reimplementing the actual logic for how blocks should move around, hopefully...
2020-12-16 22:17:21 +0000 UTC View PostThe process of distributing new Blockhead builds is currently quite miserable. I have tried to streamline the actual build process as much as possible but the distribution process is really painful right now because my internet connection is so rubbish, much worse than the average in my area. I don't know why I am with such a crappy ISP. It takes forever to upload the zip files and during that time the rest of my internet access stops working. This was not so bad when I was just uploading Win...
2020-12-06 16:11:37 +0000 UTC View PostUpdate Notes:
Public issue tracker: https://trello.com/b/MT1A3Zob/blockhead-issues
Planned features: https://trello.com/b/DJsP5eL9/blockhead-planned-features
Discord: 2020-12-06 16:07:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Update Notes:
Update Notes:
The default keyboard shortcuts on macOS are currently bananas due to a bug in Godot. Some of the existing shortcuts also do no...
2020-12-02 18:00:30 +0000 UTC View Postv0.11.1 should be functionally identical to v0.11.0. Many internal changes were made to get everything working on MacOS.
I am currently building only for x86 architecture however it is likely that I will be able to support running natively on Apple's new ARM processors in the future.
Edit: Seems to only be working with 10.15 Catalina and up. I will try to fix this and upload a new build tomorrow.
2020-12-01 16:55:12 +0000 UTC View PostUpdate Notes:
Update Notes:
There's a pretty bad bug in Blockhead at the moment where if you go far enough left or right in the workspace and start playing audio all the way over there then you will start to hear a sample reduction effect, which gets worse the further to the left or right you go. This is the most audibly noticeable bug in a family of related bugs that I am currently working on related to floating-point precision errors.
The engine processes audio in buffers of 64 frames. At the start of each buffe...
2020-11-24 15:37:42 +0000 UTC View PostUpdate Notes:
When a Blockhead project is saved it currently encodes all the samples as 24-bit FLAC files to save space. This means 32-bit samples are converted to 24-bit when the project is saved which is not ideal. The FLAC format does technically support 32-bit float but most FLAC encoders don't.
Thankfully there is a nice alternative - a lesser known lossless compression format called WavPack. The compression ratio seems to be similar to that of FLAC but the official codec also supports 32-bit fl...
2020-11-21 15:27:36 +0000 UTC View PostUpdate Notes:
Update Notes:
Update Notes:
Blockhead is a mixture of C++ and a language called GDScript, Godot's built-in scripting language. All of the audio/performance critical code is C++ whereas the majority of the UI is written in GDScript.
GDScript makes it really easy to prototype new UI ideas and get things working very quickly. It's no good for professional audio code because it's so dog slow but performance wise it's perfectly good for UI/event processing which is really what it's meant for. However one of the problem...
2020-11-12 12:20:12 +0000 UTC View PostUpdate Notes: