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Greetings,

I almost totally gave up on the Pico some time ago because almost nothing I asked for back in the early days got done, and I dont think you liked me posting anything less than positive on the forums so eventually I just shut up completely.

Well now quite a lot of time has passed and Im seeking some signs of hope.

Some of my past requests:

use all 18 of the Pico keys as playing keys.
Better midi out from wiggling keys left and right
More than one midi instrument, with each instrument sending on different midi channels or interfaces (dont mind which)

I can fully appreciate the delays in releasing workbench, after all I think you had to rethink the UI of this app so that when it does come out it will be useable by a wide range of people.

What saddens me is that these requests often used to meet with a response that suggested that alternative factory setups would be released. The failure of this to happen, along with the extremely poor efforts to document the brainmelting belcanto system, leaves me frustrated. I kept quiet for as long as I could because I really want Eigenlabs to succeed, and I maybe should have kept quiet a bit longer if new software is imminent which will solve most of my woes, but a post on the CDM blog got my mind back into Pico mode and all the bitter disappointment has come flooding out.

Also whats happening to the efforts to opensource stuff?

Please help set my pico free from its restraints!

Hi Steve

Nice to hear from you again. Since you were last playing with the Pico and EigenD there have been a lot of changes. There is considerable documentation about the Belcanto environment on the Wiki now and all of the significant Agents are now fully documented. Quite a few players have been experimenting with Belcanto, both in interactive and scripted form. The original delay in documenting it (which now dates back a year or so) was largely because we wanted to make a substantial change to the syntax. After we had accomplished this, we ploughed into documentation, but there wasn't much point beforehand. What has become apparent is that Belcanto is fantastic for some things but very difficult for others, mainly connection management and control. This is precisely what the new Workbench is designed to do and several of your desired features need this.

I don't know which version of EigenD you are using right now, but the current Testing release (which is due to become the new Stable, if we don't get any show stopper bug reports against 1.1.19 it this will be promoted next week) is a very improved animal over the 1.0 branch. It doesn't yet have Workbench or Stage, but it's UI is a nicer and it does have a significant one of your feature requests, a GUI routing matrix for AU/VST MIDI as part of the AU host. It is available from download from the website in the software section, it was released last week.

We had hoped to have Workbench out quite a while ago, but Windows proved be a much tougher port than we had anticipated and really took us out for most of early 2010. We didn't have a lot of choice about this as it is such a commercial driver. Workbench is looking good in development though and we think it will be the foundation of the 2.X series of software. The principal reason that you haven't seen a lot of additional setups released (which as you rightly pointed out we originally intended to do) is partly down to this - for some unavoidable technical reasons the 2.X setups will not be backwards compatible with 1.X setups and we have been trying to avoid too much proliferation before we get Workbench out for this reason. The other reason is that Sam has been able to use the scripting feature to provide quite a few players with ways to customise their setups and this has often proved enough, not needing alternative setups at all. If you are getting back into your Pico and have a need that can't wait until Workbench (and isn't addressed by improvements in 1.1) then please get in touch and I'll see what we can do.

The new upcoming Unstable branch (1.3.X) will not yet feature Workbench (which as I have said is now slated for the 2.X series) but will have a couple of very nice features, among which is Stage. This is a very significant development for us, uses OSC natively and is the beginning of a very different player experience, particularly in live situations. I think you'll enjoy it a lot and we hope to have an early Unstable release with this in for 1.3.X in the next few weeks. The other thing that 1.3.X does is unify the Mac and Windows code, so that the features will largely track each other from that point on, which is not the case at present.

In terms of future plans we are obviously very focused on getting the 2.X release ready in the next quarter. Part of this process may well involve a broad 'OSCification' (if that can possibly be a word) of EigenD internally, which I think you will find interesting. We've had a lot of good discussions with a number of AU and AU host vendors about OSC and MIDI extensions or idioms to enable discovery, zero configuration and bi-directional communication, all of which are needed to really make things work well. It turns out that our current proprietary network protocol (which all EigenD Agents use to to talk to each other) can probably be turned into OSC without a big rewrite if we choose our idiom well. This is good news, and I'll try to keep people posted as to progress. The upcoming release of Stage is a big step towards this as its our first native OSC application.

With regards to the absence of our open source release, I have to confess that this is my fault. I just haven't finished all the work we need to do to get it done. Quite a bit of the work has been accomplished (most of the legals for example) but the website, bug tracking etc etc is not there yet. We have just completed a major step towards the goal by moving our version control from Subversion to GIT - we decided this had to be done prior to release and it's only really settled down in the last few weeks. So all I can tell you is that its probably Real Soon Now. Unfortunately I am critical in that path, and the manufacturing side of Eigenlabs is still using up a huge amount of my time and probably will continue to do so for most of 2010, I will probably need to be in China for most of November for this reason. I'll try to keep you posted.

Oh, and the other thing I should probably mention is that we will be launching 1:1 lessons online shortly. You'll be able to book a series with Sam, Dave, Mark Finlay or Geert. If you are interested in playing with Belcanto then some lessons with Sam would be a great start. A couple of those and you could probably sort out the setups that you'd like to build, even without Workbench...

Best regards

John

John,

Thanks for taking the time to give us insight into what you guys have been working on. Sounds very promising. This kind of transparency is always welcome and we appreciate it.

I'm interested in the 1:1 lessons - what form are these likely to take (Skype? WebEx?) and do they fall under general support or will there be a charge?

Many thanks for the very detailed response to my pleas, sorry I havent had a chance to respond till now. The future sounds good, there may be a couple of details where Im not 100% sure that stuff you say will solve my problems actually will, I suppose it depends on the detail when it comes to things like OSC. Its very very great to hear OSC being mentioned, its not a perfect solution for everything but it makes a lot of sense to go that way as much as possible and I look forward to seeing how this evolves.

Id fallen a bit behind with which version I was running but have the latest unstable mac version now. The matrix for tying eigenharp data to plugin controls is better than last time I tried it, though Im afraid it does not solve all of my issues, especially as Im often talking about midi out from Eigenharp to standalone music & visual apps, rather than plugins, but rather than go into the tedious details I will wait for the next software and see what issues I may still need to discuss further.

Cheers :)

You covered a whole lot of ground there in your reply John, thanks for that!

Since you're unifying the Windows/Mac code in 1.3.X - does this mean we'll get Alpha support on Windows?

Hi Steve

The best version is now the latest Testing - it's got all the features of the latest Unstable in and has had a lot of steady bugfixing in the last couple of months. That version (1.1.20 I think now) is about to be the new Stable. There will be a new Unstable shortly, to which we'll be adding features for a month or so prior to it going into Testing.

John

Cheers for the info.

Aside from the multitude of improvements that are no doubt coming in software one day, Im still rather interested in when I may expect any of my specific requests to be do-able.

Listed in order of importance to me at this moment in time:

1) I get no midi out at all when bending a key to the right. I dont really mid what it outputs, but it needs to be something!

2) Its possible to touch keys without accientally sending pitch. But it seems impossible to touch keys without sending out some control signals that you would get by bending the keys to the left. Perhaps the sensitivity needs to be adjusted slightly?

3) The value that is sent to plugins or out via midi does not return to 0 when the key is no longer touched, it stays on whatever the position of the key was when pressure to the key ceases. There are a number of scenarios where this does not matter because it gets set again the next time a key is pressed. But depending on the parameter being controlled and the nature of the soft instrument being played, it can cause unwanted erratics.

4) I would like more than one midi instrument slot, with the ability to output the midi from each of these to either different channels or different interfaces (I dont mind which)

5) I would like to output something other than pitch when moving a key up or down. Your matrix idea would solve this, but I dont absolutely have to have a GUI, any method would do if its possible. I can use 3rd party software to work around this for now I suppose, will try.

6) I want to use all 18 keys as playing keys.

When I brought some of the above up at the end of last year or the start of this one (cant quite remember), I got the impression that I might get at least a few of these things long before workbench arrived, either via some alternative factory setups, or via belcanto scripting. Is this true, can any of these be solved in the meantime before new software is written? If any can be done with belcanto, please let me know and I will make the effort to read all the belcanto docs, but really dont want to to do that only to find that nothing I need can presently be achieved inthat way. If some of the above can be done with an alternative pico factory setup then please consider this a formal request to get an alternative setup. For whilst I really do fully appreciate your need to focus on windows and a whole bunch of other issues that affect players, and I know how long software dev can take in practise, your company did suggest several times on these forums that alternative factory setups were on offer and would not take all that much time for you to create, at least not compared to the task of writing new software versions.

Any feedback to my above post where I get far more specific about the things I am waiting for. Because although the general direction your software is going in sounds good, Im still no nearer to having a proper sense of when the software may make possible any of the things Im asking about. I think for now I am going to have to set my expectations to a suitably low level, and presume it will be some time before its possible.

HI Steve

I've now had a chance to discuss your points with the software team. I'll go through them one by one. Part of the problem you and a couple of other players are experiencing is that most people these days are using AU/VST's and the MIDI out bus does not get as much use as you'd think. Having said that, we are working on improving our Eigenharp -> MIDI translation for external devices, answers are below.

1 - You're right, the Yaw value on the MIDI out is one sided. This is because our Yaw signal is a +/- value and the MIDI modulation wheel signal is + only. We're going to put something in to address this, but there are a number of options and we haven't yet decided which one to do first (the obvious one, to just send the same values is a bit boring to be honest - I favour something a bit smarter, perhaps being able to set an offset around which the key pushes the mod value or more radically, a different controller on each side). No ETA on this, but its simple so it may make it into the 1.2 series that is now running in Unstable.

2 - You can turn the sensitivity of the keys up and down - I believe Dave covered how to do this in a recent seminar (I think the first one). People usually want to turn it up though, as they get better at playing. It's certainly not set that high in the default setups.

3 - We set the Pitchbend to zero just before we start a new note on event in MIDI. It's really not a good idea to move this value around right after a note off as any decay may get altered on the note - some instruments do this, some don't, but it's generally a better idea to reset it just before a new note. In general the behaviour we have now doesn't seem to cause any problems (it went through quite a few changes in earlier releases) and we haven't had any complaints about it. Did you have a specific circumstance in mind where it has caused problems? If so, we'd love to know.

4 - This requires a whole new setup on the Pico. This is quite possible, but all current setups are not going to be compatible with the 2.X series (which we are literally just starting work on internally) so we are really trying to avoid building any more before this comes out as we will have to rebuild all the Factory Setups in Workbench at that time.

The 2.X series will have the first cut of the Workbench which will make this setup change very easy for you, but if you can't wait (and don't mind throwing the setup away as soon as Workbench is out) then your best bet may well be to book some lessons with Dave who can help you create what you want. You could probably do most of what you want (including making all 18 keys play notes) in two or three sessions, and it would leave you with a great understanding of the fundamental system.

5 - This is in the works now, and may well be in a release in the next few weeks. If you start running the new 1.2 .X Unstable series as soon as we have the next release out (at which time it becomes Windows and Mac rather than just Windows) then you will benefit from this as soon as it appears (at the cost of running experimental code though - I'd stick to the new 1.1 Stable (the 1.1.X series) if you're playing Wembley.


To answer your broader point, you are quite correct, it was originally our ambition to have a lot of different setups available, to suit different players. This was thwarted by the realisation that, for a number of dull but difficult technical reasons, setups created with Workbench were not going to be compatible with existing setups. This led me to put off the creation of bespoke setups in any quantity (we have made a few but I know we're probably going to regret even those after Workbench comes out and their players want to use it to edit them). If I'd known quite how long Workbench was going to take we might have done this differently and sought a viable upgrade path as part of the design, but hindsight is a wonderful thing and sadly I had no idea quite how long winded it would end up. It is going well though, and I am probably looking forward to it as much as everyone else, it will be very cool to be able to see a graphical overview of setups and manipulate their wiring directly.

I hope that answers your questions..


John