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Hi All

This is just to let everyone know that we've just (late last night) made a very early prerelease version of EigenD 2.0 available to developers who are attending the EigenD Devcon in several weeks (with the inclusion of Mike Milton who has been helping us with testing for some time). This is based on the code that they'll be working with there, so we wanted them all to have the opportunity to play with it beforehand.

This is what is best described as 'very experimental' and is a version that isn't yet suitable for general release. It has bugs (several of which cause it to crash) and lacks some features that are due to be put in before our first public 'Experimental'. It's not yet in a state that we think is suitable for general release (and certainly not to ask for money for access to). It has no factory setups, so you pretty much have to start from scratch each time and the documentation is still incomplete.

It's very close to good enough though and we think that we'll probably make it available for the next release or perhaps the one after in the New Year, certainly in early January, so it won't be long before you'll all have the opportunity to suffer with an early version of 2.0. In the meantime please bear with everyone who is experimenting with it in the developer community - it won't be long before it's ready for more general and critical stress and we're hopeful that this little bit of wider testing will make your early experiences much nicer.

We're all off on holiday now until the 3rd (and the dev team have been putting in very long hours getting 2.0 ready so I think they're going to enjoy a well deserved rest) but we'll be keeping in touch over the next couple of weeks from time to time.

Have a great Christmas, and enjoy playing your 'harps!

John

Hi Larry

We had both the Eigenlabs Christmas dinner here yesterday as well as trying to get that pre-release out to developers before everyone went off for the holidays so I'm afraid I didn't get around to a public post 'till this morning. My apologies for not sending one out yesterday evening but I was pretty tired by the time we got done and I forgot (if I'd remembered the G+ hangout I'd have let you all know). If we had a PR person then you're right, it'd be bad PR and I would go shout at them. You'll have to make do with shouting at me I'm afraid.

There really isn't an 'Eigen Elite' BTW (and if there was one you'd be in it anyway I think), we just wanted the software developers to be able to have a go for a while before they have to code with it in early Jan at the DevCon. 2.0 really isn't in a good enough state yet for general release and we simply don't have the resources to manage the huge flood of feedback and bug reports that such a thing would generate, especially over the holiday. No Factory Setups also means that it's really not for the non-technical as yet, you have to be a bit of a coder or very experienced Belcanto person to use it without good examples to follow, which won't be ready until Jan.

On a separate note, you shouldn't be too concerned that it's all got too techie as of late. We've had to spend a little while getting the open source approach off the ground and this has made a lot of discussion very software development orientated rather than about music and playing. After the DevCon I'm looking forward to getting back to the music, playing and things not related to bits a bytes as I'm sure you are too.

John

Hi Larry,

it's less that we got something that you didn't get but more we were kindly asked for help regarding feedback, bug reports etc. The current version can be used to learn the inner structure of EigenD2 - for end users it's not that interesting: Most new agents and content is not included, you can't import or export things between setups yet (only modify one of two demo projects or start up from scratch), whatever you build will not unlikely be incompatible to the stable version and you can't load the existing setups (so it's use as "information source" to find the right EigenD 1.X Belcanto phrases is also limited(*)).
So it's essentially interesting as a "sandbox" for developers,. Believe me, you will get more satisfaction out of spending your spare time with playing and practicing the instrument :)
And for "just playing" (which I look forward to in the holidays way before any "code tinkering") I'll also use 1.4.8 - it "just works".

With the things above in place it *will* be very interesting though - so you and we can look forward to better, more approachable Eigenharp times in the year to come :)

All the best,
Ferdinand

(*) One interesting aspect of the existing Workbench is admittedly to get a first feeling for how things are usually connected up based on the new demo setups. Eigenlabs allowed us to speak about all aspects of this demo release so I guess they wouldn't have objections if the testers post a few screenshots if you are interested in an overview or specific aspects. Just tell me.

Wow guys! Nice work.

This UI concept is excellent. I really feel like the latest UI and core structural changes are miles ahead of the old stuff. Stage and now this.

Fantastic!

You guys are on a roll.

here's appreciation!

Will be building a Tau setup today - should be easy. Take demo setup 1, replace Alpha keyboard with Tau keyboard, adjust setting e.g. in kgroups a little. done.
For the keyboards it would actually be more intuitive if they were "just normal agents" that can be added with the "add agent" feature as desired. The indirection via the alpha manager and the fact that the keyboard agents are only visible when the instrument is connected are slightly less intuitive..

Found a neat little detail yesterday: The audio units have a new plugin browser now that is integrated into Workbench, so you don't need the EigenCommander+Eigenbrowser combo anymore for the task of choosing the plugin. (Currently it seems that you still need the EigenCommander to get rid of the plugin again though)