Yes, I think Meander is special in that it allows more music performance-like creation within modular. I’ve only scratched the surface of its potential myself.
I think the other thing I half envy in Meander compared to Proteus is its size, which allows it to be rather comprehensive. I have intentionally limited the the size of Proteus because it is really a software prototype for an (in-progress) hardware tool. For a VCV-Rack module there’s probably no inherent reason to keep it small since rack space is unlimited and free. But having that constraint forces one to make hard decisions about what says and what goes… which does also come with benefits. As always, appreciate your input.
Believe it or not, the original Meander of 34 years ago was a lot “bigger” than the current Rack module. The original Meander was a unlimited page sequencer, and unlimited page drum machine and a MIDI file recorder and player as well as sound file player. The current Meander is a lot more capable in terms of music theory. So, I come with a lot of baggage But I was already 15 years into modular hardware when I began Meander.
I am working on an expander for Proteus that adds a Pattern Bank where you can save melodies that you would like to return to. Also adds Transpose and Rest controls to add rest notes between loops.
I have a second new module which is a tanpura simulator called Jawari.
Looking to get as much testing of these as possible before submitting them to the library, so if anyone is interested in trying them out, please have at it
Thanks, that sounds really interesting. I love the sounds of the Tanpura so really looking forward to giving Jawari a spin. Will try and get some testing done.
Lucky me I’m on Mac so I got it and it loads. The first issue is that Jawari uses 12% CPU which is way too high… An acceptable max. level, as measured on my machine, where people would actually use this is 2 max. 4% I would say.
Here on this M1 I have not even a fully loaded Mixmaster 16 channel using 4% CPU. Jawari uses 11.9%, Are you doing major calcs every single sample @abluenautilus ? Definitely needs some major optimization work, run some profiling tools on it to see what chews up that much CPU…
Agreed that’s way too much CPU, will investigate. Thank you!
edit: thankfully it’s not the sound processing itself, it was some inefficient and way-too-frequent calculation of the frequency changes based on the transpose and octave knobs.
Jawari CPU hovers around 30% on linux.
Also, sometimes when adding a duplicate, the original stops making any noise and the duplicate is constant and distorted.
But I was already 15 years into modular hardware when I began Meander.
