First day of the month, so regular backups and computer tidying. I freed about 25Gb from the Recycle Bin. I delete everything older than 6 months. I also listed my sound effects on the new Scirra 'Construct 3' store. This took several hours, as I expected.
I began thinking about my audio plug-ins, particularly how the sine-wave generators and the new Zeitraum effects use look-up tables for the frequencies. Originally this was for speed reasons. The calculation is:
harmonic=2.0f*sinf(PI*pow(2, i/1200)*MIDDLEC/44100);
Where 'i' is a cent of a semitone.
But, a table of the "pow(2, i/1200)" part is already precalculated and available in the main program. Not only that, that is altered depending on the tuning or scale of the system (I can 'tune' the whole sequencer, or even create alternative, non-ill-tempered, scales). The look-up tables are not only not strictly needed but potentially invalidate the tuning. So, this evening I've recompiled the 8 plug-ins that used look up tables and referenced the main program instead. Doing this involved painstaking checks for each one to ensure that the new plugins are mathematically identical to the old ones: creating two songs with new vs. old plug-ins and mixing the wave of one song with the inverse of the other - the result should be exactly zero. Each plug-in had 4 variants to check: normal, anti-aliased, 6-channel, and 6-channel anti-aliased. A tedious but important job.
In speed terms it's hardly made any difference; in fact, sped up some because the old code wasn't as efficient as it could have been, so those tables were really of no use anyway.
This sort of programming O.C.D. can be a distraction. I'm reminded that programming, like painting, can switch off emotions. I'll get back to music next. Just as I feel I've made a breakthrough in my music creation abilities I'm faced with the realities of the current music industry and art world. In literature, e-books never really took off, and probably never will. I still feel that the music industry too quickly capitulated to the ephemeral forces of downloads and non-physical music. I want my music to feel and be permanent. My goals are artisic and long-term, like Beethoven's. One advantage of painting is its longevity, and age lends a unique and special feeling to the physical. To see a 400-year old painting up close and see the strokes made by that ancient hand. The same is true of music, just, when we hear the voice of Caruso or others, but the digital era makes music feel so much more worthless because of its ubiquity and a false feeling of it being ever-present, when so much is lost forever on a daily basis.
Perhaps tomorrow I can start on the final vocal recordings for Sisyphus.
