Over in the Surge team, we are getting ready to release version 1.3 of the Surge XT DAW plugin (probably next week) which has loads of cool features (like full OpenSoundControl support! And plenty of other things). Quite a few of those features are relevant to VCV Rack also, so we have a 2.2 release candidate for the Surge XT rack modules, which includes new modules, bug fixes, and more.
I already sneak-peeked the unison module here, but in addition to that, we have a new tape-style distortion effect called Bonsai, which can drive into some very interesting places, a new set of digital ring modulators and non-linear combinators which can add loads of growl and texture, we exposed the Nimbus effect which is our port of a popular euro rack granular delay/reverb which you probably already have, and added a second Mixer module faceplate with sliders, because sometimes you feel like a knob, sometimes you don’t.
Oh also, there’s cool connect helpers. Sit a classic next to a VCF next to an EGxVCA and right mouse on the classic output. Even better, grab a flanger and right mouse on the inputs and outputs when you have a mixmaster and auxmaster in your patch…
You can try 2.2 by grabbing our nightly vcvplugin here for your OS/Architecture and installing it in the appropriate directory.
Great bug reports make great software and so are hoping some of you may want to beta test before we push it to the library. We appreciate any and all reports. With the plugin release next week, we’ll probably submit 2.2.0 to the library the week after, definitely before christmas.
And whether you have time to give it a whirl pre-library or just want to wait for the red dot in your menu bar, hope you enjoy making music with Surge!
I don’t have a bug to report, but I do have a minor feature request.
It would be nice if when using the port auto connect feature (very cool feature), it would be nice if you could also select the cable color. I don’t have any idea how to structure the menu to do that, I just wish it could be done.
Auto connect is a great feature! It would be neat for LFOs or modulation inputs/outputs, if it detected other Surge modules in the patch and populated those in the menu. Though I guess that could get out of hand when there are many modules, but may be it could look for modules in the same row?
Thanks Paul, lots of goodies there. SurgeXT is such a bonanza of great quality modules. I feel like it’s risen to be my most important plugin already, just love them. I’ll try and make some time for testing. Thanks for all you do!
So I je the rack “next cable color” api right now. I want to avoid menu diving since it is a quick connect. But all ears for what a ui could be. I also could t figure it out! It hppy to add ideas
Ideally it would default to current behavior. But I think it would work if you could Ctrl-click one of the VCV standard New Cable color options (doesn’t close menu) and have it remember and use that color when you then click on the custom auto connect option. But I don’t know if it is possible to augment the behavior of the pre-existing New Cable color options.
A further refinement would be a menu label “Auto connect color” that shows the currently selected color. It would default to the next cable color, and be updated every time you Ctrl-click one of the “New cable color” options.
I tested the auto-connect when multiple MixMasters were present, and was pleasantly surprised you handle that by offering both options in the menu. The problem of course is figuring out which menu option to use. As long as the MixMaster (and AuxSpander) channels have been given custom labels, then all is good. But it is a bit of a crapshoot if there are no custom labels. Unfortunately it is unlikely that you would naturally update a MixMaster channel label before making the connection.
I can’t imagine you can do anything to improve things. But multiple MixMasters is pretty rare, so I’m certainly not worried about it. I just found it interesting.
Anyone can implement it! I kept all the code in a separate MIT licensed submodule and have almost frozen the API (I will do so before I ship).
If you run the nightly-est of nightlies (that is, if you download fresh versions in about an hour) of both air windows and surge, then the neighbor connect works across module and the mixmaster connect works from aw and sxt.
And the mixmaster connection is really just a mixin you wrap around your port widget.
I’ll start a separate dev thread when it is totally finished (which will be pre-library since it is a cross module api so needs to freeze at once point once the first version hits the lib). I just need to handle some mono cases first.
yeah i tested this case to make sure it didn’t crash. But it starts getting clunky.
my rough view, from watching a bunch of yt and patches here, is everyone has either one mixmaster/auxspander or one mixmaster jr / auxspander jr in their template.
if you have two, indeed, label it up before you go is indeed the thing to do.
I don’t think there is built-in VCV ui for adding/editing available cable colors. I think there is a file (json) that can be edited (assuming it has not been compressed in VCV v2).
But there are modules that allow you to edit cable color schemes, including the ability to add new colors. Here are two that I remember. There may be others.
