That’s not a bad idea. Thank you!
The next release has a couple of things that I’m excited about, including something to address the screen real estate of School Bus and the limitations of Mini Bus. The the biggest announcement will be Metro City Bus. I hope people will see it as innovative, fun, and useful. If my brain works for a few more days, we might be only a week or two away.
Edit: When the release gets closer, I’ll post a screenshot.
There are two new modules. Gig Bus is the result of user feedback. It’s pretty straight forward. And the upcoming announcement will talk about Metro City Bus, a mixer with polyphonic stereo spread. The updates should be ready for the VCV Rack Library after a few more days of testing and tweaking Metro City Bus.
Once the new modules are released, the plan is to develop a dark theme that can be selected with the context menu (and start organizing code behind the scenes). Testers are always welcome to build from Git. Just message me for an email request if you want to provide feedback by email.
Glue the Giant Releases the Metro City Bus Mixer
Stereophonic sound was first popularized in the 1970s. Since that time, symphonic orchestras and pianos have been recorded with at least two microphones. Using the Metro City Bus Mixer is like bringing two pristine microphones (and up to 16 silent pan following monkeys) to your VCV Rack polyphonic instruments.This release also contains the new Gig Bus Mixer module, designed by VCV Rack musicians for VCV Rack musicians. When you just need to get your sound to the next gig, a Gig Bus Mixer to a Bus Depot will do the job better than a herd of elephants.
Glue the Giant’s modular bus mixers. Now with more stereo. Now with improved 70’s cream. Now available in the VCV Rack Library.
The modular bus mixers are almost ready for another release. Here are a few of the changes:
In addition, the theme has some nice improvements. Much of the code under the hood has matured. For example, the Metro City Bus has better behavior when starting a pan follow and can be much more efficient when processing moving pan calculations on all 16 polyphonic channels.
Testers are welcome. An official announcement and a release should come after a handful of days.
In the meantime, have fun with the specialty mixer strips, the modular creation of submixes, and the colorful send effect routing.
p.s. A night theme has been designed and should be out as a context menu option on Halloween.
The polyphonic stereo spread is something I wanted but never asked for. I’ve actually simulated with Merge/Split and multiple panners, so you just got rid of like 10 modules in one go! Well played!
This all sounds great. I’ve definitely needed the first change before, I can’t wait to get started with the second (got a feeling that’s going to be perfect for drum grooves), and the third? Amazing. Opens the modules up to a lot more.
Do these mixing devices do some sort of auto-sidechaining? Whatever is going on there with the modulation of levels, I like it.
Thanks for the comment. The idea of writing a polyphonic stereo spread and pan follow rolled back and forth in my head (no pun intended) for a long time before I started using Rack. By the way, I’ve been listening to your music. The Gridseq rhythms last month were awesome and the Canon’s would be cool (Crab Canon, especially) even if they didn’t have Metro City Bus Mixer on them.
The release is out and should be in the VCV Library within a day or so. When I started using these modules in some music a couple of weeks ago, I really wanted some input gains, delay lines, and auto faders.
I hope most people like the tick marks on the new modules. I left them off intentionally at first, trying to keep things clean, but I added them because I felt they were useful to remember different knob adjustments. Now I think they look nice too.
Easy sidechaining is definitely one of the reasons I wrote these modules. Under the hood of the mixers, however, you just have sums (and gain multiplication). All the modulation goodness you are hearing is just coming from your sounds and mixes.
Just got hold of them and they are looking nice! The tick marks are a big improvement.
Hi @gluethegiant, I just checked out Metro City Bus on a poly signal for the first time and the spread control isn’t quite working as I’d hoped. Here’s what I’m doing:
Expected Result: When I think spread, I think “wide” as in sound being spread in the left AND right channels. So depending on the Spread value, I expect Spread would pan maybe voice 1 a little to the left, and voice 2 a little to the right, and voice 3 a little further to the left, and voice 4 a little further to the right, etc., round robin-style. I’d expect the amount of panning to increase based on higher spread values, until full spread hard pans voices round robin style. I’d expect negative spread values to do the same thing but reverse the channel order. For instance, when I run poly signals into NYSTHI’s 16-Mix, that’s exactly how I have my pans setup (ever increasing round-robin, left/right).
Actual Result: Positive Spread values spread the poly voices only in the right half of the stereo field and negative Spread values spread it only the left side of the stereo field.
So if it wouldn’t be too much to ask or out of line, I think the usefulness of this module would increase dramatically if there was a mode (even if a right-click menu option) to get a round-robin stereo spread and have the spread knob control the depth.
i’m fairly sure stoaudio polyspread does this, though not in the context of metro city bus.
Yep, that seems like the same functionality, I just expected Metro City Bus to work the same way. I think that type of option would make it even more useful than the current-state. At least for that particular use-case.
@funkybot For me it works as expected when I feed it a poly signal consisting of two notes and I pan the Pan knob to the left and the Spread knob to the right I get one note left and one note right, I can swap the notes with reverse channels.
When I start adding notes to the poly signal they get distributed between the left and the right channel from low-high or vice versa.
To lessen the spread I move the pan and spread knob towards the middle position.
Hi Yeager, it hadn’t occurred to me that the pan would factor in but I just tried that but it’s still not a round-robin odd-even channel, L-R distribution. Using the method you just described, the first 8 poly channels still end up spread from left to center, and the next 8 poly channels end up spread across the right. But how often are all 16 poly channels/voices actually ever actually in use?
This is why I think a poly channel 1 left, poly channel 2 right, poly channel 3 a little more left, poly channel 4 a little more right, is a more useful approach. That way, a 4 or 6 note chord will have some channels on the left and some on the right in a fairly even spread (depending on the voice stealing/priority). I’m seldom playing 16 voice chords. 
Hi Funkybot, until the Giant comes along and tells us how it works and what it should do, I leave you with this picture. On the left I used PolySpread and on the right the Metro City Bus , I used 8 channels and spread them to the max. They look/sound identical (ish) to me. and the way the chord is build up is close to round robin.
What I’m looking for is basically to replace how I use 16Mix for stereo spread. See the below example. I’ve got the 16-polyphonic channels spread from the center in a round-robin manner. This way, everything hangs out close to center in the stereo spread (using MIDI CV in “Reuse” mode), unless a lot of voices are being played, at which point it gets wider. The way I’d like the Spread control to work in Metro City Bus is similar, but just tighten up towards center if spread as at zero, or widen up from the center if spread is at 100%. At that point, I’d expect the pans to be a stereo balance panner a-la Cubase where I can keep some width, but just tighten up and the signal as I pan the balance from left to right.
I might still be wrong, but I don’t think this is quite how Metro City Bus works. How do I get a narrow spread from the center? For instance, if I set Pan to .20 Right, and Spread to -.20 to offset, Metro City Bus will still favor the right side of the stereo spread in Reuse mode and in Rotate poly mode, it will go from left-ish to right-ish. There’s never a strong center that everything is starting from.
Hope that makes sense. What I’d like to see is a spread configuration similar to the one below (see highlighted yellow box), where width determines the spread of each channel from the center point.
Ah I get you now… when not playing chords but only solo notes this whole spread thing is working weird. It starts at the left and stays there in reuse or goes to the right and back in rotate mode. But doesn’t that also happen in your Nysthi mix example? Nevermind, I know now what you want, 1 note start in the middle and the more notes you play simultaneously… the wider the sound becomes.
Yep, you got it!
