Photosounder Spiral development updates

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I'll post about the development and new beta releases of Spiral here.

The release of August 16th was the first public release.
The release of August 27th adds the following:
-A pan gradient viewing thing (the thing that looks like an absorption spectrum, the rainbow with the black bars). Helps you visualise the gradient, the windowing you can apply to it, the black bands over it show you where in pan most of the stuff is (helps you tremendously when positioning the pan window to black out parts of the pan). Also it shows you in a pretty precise way what is globally happening in pan, which might be interesting, like in some cases I've found out an effect on drums was rapid pan going from left to right.
-The harmonics overlay, which is the black and white dots you see. The screenshot is a pretty good example, it's a chord (the first chord of David Axelrod's The Edge), using the harmonics overlay we see all the harmonics belonging to the D2, and we can deduce what else there is (besides D2 seems there is a F3, E4, G4 and C5). It works simply by clicking on the display exactly where you think the note starts, and as long as you hold the mouse button down it follows your cursor. The harmonics overlay display persists until you click outside of the visualisation area, but not on the knobs, so you can tweak some knobs and still have the overlay.
-The "Key" knob (couldn't think of a better label for what it does). It allows you to rotate the visualisation so that you might have another note than C on top. So for example if you're analysing something in E minor, you can put E on top, and you know you'll always find your notes at 12 o'clock, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 and 10 o'clock. The left half of that knob does something else, instead of rotating the display it changes the writing on the circular frame to chromatic integer notation, something I always wanted to have but which is probably not as great as rotating the whole thing to have the key on top.

The release of January 7th adds a playback for recorded sounds which is either time-stretched or played back normally at the normal rate.

I'd like some feedback, mostly on the harmonics overlay, how it looks and how well it works. The black and white circle thing was kinda random but I guess it does the job. And I was wondering if it would be a good idea to be able to have several such overlays at once to keep track of everything that's going on (like when trying to resolve my 5 note chord) and make sure nothing's been left out.

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http://photosounder.com/spiral/
Developer of Photosounder (a spectral editor/synth), SplineEQ and Spiral

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Looks good! Just the price could be a bit lower... :(

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Tricky-Loops wrote:Looks good! Just the price could be a bit lower... :(
A bit? Well, do you have the Computer Music Magazine issue #195? :)
Developer of Photosounder (a spectral editor/synth), SplineEQ and Spiral

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A_SN wrote:
Tricky-Loops wrote:Looks good! Just the price could be a bit lower... :(
A bit? Well, do you have the Computer Music Magazine issue #195? :)
No, but the FULL version costs $99, doesn't it?

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Tricky-Loops wrote:
A_SN wrote:
Tricky-Loops wrote:Looks good! Just the price could be a bit lower... :(
A bit? Well, do you have the Computer Music Magazine issue #195? :)
No, but the FULL version costs $99, doesn't it?
Yep ...unless you have CMM #195 :) (then it's $69).
Developer of Photosounder (a spectral editor/synth), SplineEQ and Spiral

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A_SN wrote:
Tricky-Loops wrote:
A_SN wrote:
Tricky-Loops wrote:Looks good! Just the price could be a bit lower... :(
A bit? Well, do you have the Computer Music Magazine issue #195? :)
No, but the FULL version costs $99, doesn't it?
Yep ...unless you have CMM #195 :) (then it's $69).
Which is pretty much given that Spline EQ only costs $19. And while Spline EQ really affects the sound (positively), Spiral doesn't, it's a visualization tool only.

Really great would be an EQ (like Spline) with the visualization of Spiral! :)

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Tricky-Loops wrote:
A_SN wrote:
Tricky-Loops wrote:
A_SN wrote:
Tricky-Loops wrote:Looks good! Just the price could be a bit lower... :(
A bit? Well, do you have the Computer Music Magazine issue #195? :)
No, but the FULL version costs $99, doesn't it?
Yep ...unless you have CMM #195 :) (then it's $69).
Which is pretty much given that Spline EQ only costs $19. And while Spline EQ really affects the sound (positively), Spiral doesn't, it's a visualization tool only.

Really great would be an EQ (like Spline) with the visualization of Spiral! :)
I don't think it would be very practical to have a spiral for an EQ though. And Spiral will (eventually, probably with the next beta since that's pretty much all there is left to add) have time stretching/freezing so it will indeed effect the sound. I chose to make SplineEQ obscenely cheap just to see what happens, I'm not gonna try the same thing twice ;). As absurd as it may be $99 isn't even that much for a visualisation plugin, here look at that for instance http://www.kvraudio.com/product/paz_psy ... r_by_waves or idk, that http://www.kvraudio.com/product/ppmulat ... -by-zplane :lol:

EDIT: Jesus F. Christ! http://www.kvraudio.com/product/vislm-by-nugen-audio and http://www.kvraudio.com/product/insight-by-izotope-inc :shock:
Developer of Photosounder (a spectral editor/synth), SplineEQ and Spiral

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Overlaying the display with all those dots looks a little busy. Have you considered a "hide harmonics" option? Hard to program, but simple to look at :)

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busywait wrote:Overlaying the display with all those dots looks a little busy. Have you considered a "hide harmonics" option? Hard to program, but simple to look at :)
:?:

Do you mean as in 'don't have the harmonics overlay in the first place' or as in 'how do you make it go away once it's there'? For the former just don't click, for the latter just click away in the blank part of the interface :).
Developer of Photosounder (a spectral editor/synth), SplineEQ and Spiral

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As an alternative to the overlay have a "hide harmonics" mode.

When I'm looking at the UI, I might be trying to work out "what notes are being played", and the harmonics get in the way, so I don't want to see them. Let me choose "show me only the fundamentals", and then the harmonics disappear from the circle.

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busywait wrote:As an alternative to the overlay have a "hide harmonics" mode.

When I'm looking at the UI, I might be trying to work out "what notes are being played", and the harmonics get in the way, so I don't want to see them. Let me choose "show me only the fundamentals", and then the harmonics disappear from the circle.
Ah, I see what you mean, you mean basically pitch detection. I've addressed the issue of pitch detection before I think, the bottom line is that it would be unreliable in a polyphonic mix and practically useless with a monophonic sound, so that's not very interesting. It's one of those things that you'd think computers should be able to do as well or better than us but they just can't, like speech recognition, computer vision, character recognition (those last two things actually have a lot in common with the problem of pitch detection), text translation and so forth.

If you're trying to work out what notes are being played like in a chord then the best course of action is to freeze it (with the REC button) and then use the harmonics overlay to trying to figure out what harmonics belongs to what notes. Not simple but the automated alternative really sucks, algorithms typically have a hard time telling two notes at consonant intervals apart, like a fifth or worse an octave.
Developer of Photosounder (a spectral editor/synth), SplineEQ and Spiral

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In case you're wondering what I've been doing, I thought the Key knob switched/rotated things way too slow, so I set out to optimise that, which sent me on a two week long wild goose chase where I made lots of very fast yet very precise integer trigonometric functions (which will also be the basis of the time-stretching thing, since it's dramatically faster than floating point stuff!). So now that key thing changes about 3 times faster (which finally makes it decent on my weak machine) and since I was getting good at optimising stuff I saw what else I could optimise and basically made the FPS jump from 30 FPS to 50 FPS on my machine! So I thought about the complaints that it takes a whole core of CPU and since no one has a machine that's any weaker than mine nor does anyone need 50 FPS I throttled the whole thing to about 38 FPS, which means it consumes a lot less CPU now, if you've got a powerful machine your CPU probably won't even feel it :hihi:

tl;dr I made everything faster and use less of the CPU.

I'll release the new build tomorrow as it would take too much time right now, although before that I have to optimise a thing in the audio thread too.
Developer of Photosounder (a spectral editor/synth), SplineEQ and Spiral

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I love lower CPU load - look forward to trying out the new build :)

I also love focused controls - can you do a mode that hides everything except the Key control?

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busywait wrote:I love lower CPU load - look forward to trying out the new build :)

I also love focused controls - can you do a mode that hides everything except the Key control?
The new build is out by the way!

And no, I mean, why would you want only the Key and not Gain for instance? Also I'm not sure yet how to resize the interface, so I'd have to look into that. Bottom line, it would be a pretty distracting development.
Developer of Photosounder (a spectral editor/synth), SplineEQ and Spiral

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Thanks, I grabbed the new build. It works fine for me in Tracktion v4 as an x86 VST on Windows 8.

It also works in SAVIHost, but seems a bit stuttery, and has a message at the bottom that says "Low frame rate. Set your hosts buffer to <1700 samples (40mS)"

I didn't notice any difference between the CPU load of the SpiralCM and Spiral (mono): both pretty low CPU.

Why don't I want gain? Because my gain is set up right :) If it isn't I'll adjust the controls in the DAW.

Actually gain in the plugin could be useful, but IMO, SpiralCM is a thing of simple and functional beauty, but Spiral risks looking too big, confusing, and complicated. Features vs Complexity trade off.

Though maybe you could keep the features. Really, how many colour controls does it need? Just choose some nice colours for me :) And it's a visualizer, so why do I need the controls on the screen after I set them anyway? Can't they go in a modal pop-up?

Anyway, it's great. I'll be showing it off to anyone who'll look, thanks for your work :)

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