Development update (January 10)

Development made had a small hiatus in second half of 2018, but in December - thanks to a lot of spare time - I picked coding up again.

The biggest and most visible change was that I completely rethought the general idea behind noisicaä. In the beginning I started out with something that should resemble a piece of paper with staves on it, that lets you easily create, edit and play music, and I only envisioned basic audio processing features. Over time that turned into something much more like the typical DAW with tracks and plugins and all that stuff. But I wasn't very happy about the way DAWs typically manage the audio processing. In my mind manipulating the actual processing graph feels like the most intuitive way, something like Pure Data or a modular synth. Which also happens to be the way the engine works internally. I didn't quite know how to make this properly accessible, so I just had something basic in place.

At some point I came across a video demo for BespokeSynth and I really liked the general approach of that UI. Eventually I started thinking more about what noisicaä should actually be. The primary use case has always been musical composition, and that doesn't change. But most apps have some kind of metaphor to the real world that they're built upon (e.g. sheet music for MuseScore, recording studio for Ardour, etc.). And I simply decided that noisicaä's foundational idea should be the modular synth.

So made did a major refactoring, putting the processing graph onto the center stage, both in terms of internal code structure, as well as on the UI. There are still tracks, and they are prominently featured on the UI, because time and temporal editing remains to be a central ingredient. But e.g. now you add a 'Score Track' node to the processing graph, which will also add an editable track, instead of the other way around.

Another major change during the past weeks was that I finally got around to purge all Python from the critical path in the audio thread. This is now all C++ and hopefully realtime safe. Now playback even at smaller block sizes is much more reliable.

Finally on the more organizational side, I adopted a scheme of doing "sprints". Well... I know that there is some development methodology, which uses the term "sprint", but I don't even know which one that is, what it exactly means by that word, nor do I intend to adopt any methodology or become serious about project management or anything evil like that. But it seems to work quite well to structure that gigantic pile of ideas, which I want to implement, into reasonably sized chunks, and then spend a week or two tick off all the boxes for one of those chunks. And I just call those chunks "sprints".

And maybe, just maybe... if every other week or so, when I merged all the changes for a completed sprint into the master branch, and have that nice feeling of accomplishment... maybe that also makes me want to write a post with a short update of what I did. Otherwise this blogging thing simply doesn't seem to work for me, as you can tell from the frequency of postings.