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I thought I'd start this thread to get a discussion going around using the Eigenharp to play gigs live.

I'm trying to think how to handle different setups with different songs. It seems to me that the Eigenharp isn't ready yet to actually handle setup switches graciously. There are several reasons for this:
* setups randomly take a very long time to load (with the Pico this is somewhat reasonable, but I hear that the Alpha setups can take ages to load)
* setups can't be switched remotely (you have to go to the computer)

I thought I might use one setup with some AU instruments pre-configured that would respond to program changes on a MIDI pedal, however that's very limiting in the Eigenharp world since you'd ideally also program drum loops, rhythms, scales, tonics, scheduler parts, ... differently for each song. So it really seems to me that Eigenlabs should optimize the setup loading.

I'm wondering if there isn't a different approach that could be taken. Currently, each setup contains everything that is needed for an instrument to function, all the talkes, scalers, etc, ... However, the user configuration is only a part of this. It seems to me that this should be possible to not reload the Belcanto features that make the Eigenharp function, but only to change the user-configurable parts. This gets of course increasingly complex as people start to use Belcanto to modify existing setups, but there could be something in the language that allows 'base functionality' to be marked as such and to only replace what's not part of that. Another possibility that I can imagine is that each setup has a 'switch' functionality that would actually look at another setup, parse it, and only apply the parts that are considered switchable. The latter could then also include custom Belcanto logic that is executed on switching.

What do you think?

Geert

We've just done some incremental load testing (which is what happens when you change setups) with setups that have normal, song type differences between them (recordings and scales changed, for example) and these loads generally seem to take a few seconds at most, so this should fit the bill for you well. This does not mean that you will be able to change AU plugins as quickly though - we have no control over how quickly these unload or start up and some of them are really slow. If you have two setups where you have different plugins this may well take a while, there is little we can do about that unfortunately.

Sam is going to add some Midi driven setup load talker phrases to the midi talker for you.

Please experiment with this and let us know how it goes...

John

Yes - I guess what you'd like is the ability to preload an AU host with several AU's then dynamically switch between them. This would eat memory and resources (not a problem if you have plenty of RAM), but be quick to switch. Just been talking to Jim about this and apparently Dave has been asking for something like this too. We'll have a look into putting some kind of plugin banking into our AU/VST host Agent and let you know the prognosis.

John

I did some testing yesterday and it is indeed a lot faster when switching between setups when EigenD is already running and that were created or upgraded to the same version of EigenD. And indeed, as expected, loading the audio units takes to most of the time there.

Hi Sam,

Actually, I'd say it would be intuitive for this to be in the lowest octave since that's where key switches for instruments are usually located. It feels kind of logical to situate setup switches there also.

Anyway, I don't think it's particularly important where they are located exactly.

Take care,

Geert

yes all this is possible, I've responded on your google plus post:
https://plus.google.com/+NebojsaDjogo/posts/6mCbhgWb4hy