A new tax year begins, so Sunday was spent working on that. I put birthday cards, Christmas cards, leaflets from exhibitions, letters and other personal memories in my tax records. This means that I can look back at them 7 years later. Some of this year's memories included an early mention of Fall in Green in a magazine, in Acton Church's magazine, and the first publication of 'Sunchild' which is about to be released as part of our next album. Stephen Barry's funeral too, fond memories of him and the old art club. He came just about every week. The painting is by his friend Bryn Sutcliffe.
After that, dived into upgrading Prometheus to 64-bit. This is a major upgrade mainly because most of the program structures are saved in files, including pointers (obviously, the pointers are invalid, they're there just because it made saving easier). This means that a lot of structures now need replacements, yet old 32-bit ones need to import correctly. This is Prometheus's 6th file format. It took me while to realise that HANDLE variables are pointers, therefore bigger on a 64-bit system.
As part of this, I've upgraded the Modulator pointers and loops to double precision resolution. This isn't as useful as double pointers in Samples, but the better resolution means more accurate timing, and the memory cost is low, just a few extra bytes per modulator and there aren't that many modulators per song. I considered increasing the timing resolution of fades and parameter settings, but those are per-engine; 12 engines per instrument, 12-per track and many more. This small change would increase the memory footprint by 20% with a minuscule benefit.
I also thought about reducing the bite-size, the processing chunk in plugins, from 64 to 32 samples. Lower numbers means better resolution but slower processing; but 64 samples is fine. I can't say I'd noticed or wanted more.
One last step was finding a way to batch-compile all of the 100+ plugins. Normally I'd copy over the source file, compile it by hand, then rename it and copy it over by hand, but I thought I could automate this via a script and the handy CONCATENATE command in the Libre Office Spreadsheet. I've done this this morning.
The stock market turmoil is a cause for concern, I'm sure that global markets are artificially high, and the markets are assuming the tariffs will not continue. I can understand Donald Trump's desire to make more things in America, but I don't think most Americans would consider working in a factory sweat shop an ultimate dream. The whole point of importing is not to need to do that sort of job. Most countries want more imports than exports. Consider an opulent king's life; more is done for him by servants that he does for them.
