Composers Desktop Project Forum

Hey all,
   I was first getting into CDP about a year ago, and used it heavily in the creation of an album I released this summer called Music for Icebergs.

Music for Icebergs is am ambient/soundscape album that places the listener in the Antarctic. I've been describing it as a modern-day tone poem because it has a loose narrative, beginning in pre-history with the formation of the ice pack, going through human exploration/exploitaion, through to the present day. It's a little bit Eno, a little bit Aarvo Paart, a little bit contemporary film score.

I used CDP's Texture, Spectral morphing, and Varibank programs for some of the signature sounds, and blended it with synth VI's, guitar, and my French horn.

It's for sale on iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/music-for-icebergs/id1231304327

Or is also on most major streaming services, if you subscribe to those: (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc. )

Hope you like it!

Thanks for the response.

I ended up just simplifying my idea and using one motif at different pitches - I found I was able to get the musical effect I wanted using Texture Ornate, looping through a set of only two pitches, which gave me the alternation I was seeking (same interval sequence, but transposed).

Perhaps your front end would be helpful in a situation like this, as the chief difficulty in creating multiple textures and mixing them would be coordinating the breakpoint files so they line up as intended. Handling this inside another program would take care of that.

This is Lua, right? Is there a place where I can find documentation/setup instructions for that front end? I admit I'm a total Lua noob. Perhaps I'll give it a try down the road.

Thanks

Hey all,
   I'm working on a piece that makes quite a bit of use of CDP's texture programs.

   I would like to create a texture that alternatives between different motifs, and still allows all the various parameters that are part of the TMOTIFS program.

   At the moment, the best way I can think of to do this is to assemble each of the motifs on their own, then combine them using one of the texture programs. But this sacrifices some flexibility. For instance, I would like to repeat the motif at higher and lower pitches without necessarily changing its duration. This is possible with TMOTIFS but wouldn't be if I used a pre-made motif and pitched-shifted it.

   I suppose the other method is to create two separate audio files and mix them. That's probably what I'll do for now, but it's not ideal.

Perhaps I'm missing something here. Is there a way to do this that I'm not seeing?

Quote from: djeroek on October 09, 2016, 11:09:40 AM
Oh snap, what's this!? Behind the scenes development of v2?

The gui in the screenshot is incomplete, but a teaser;
cdp teaser by Hiek A Matiek, on Flickr

That...looks...awesome!

Thank you!

At the risk of seeming ungrateful, at the moment I'm not able to get any output from the Renoise tool. I get "An output file was not produced. Check your settings". There is no terminal output displayed in the CDP tool. When I use Soundshaper, things work as expected.

This is with Renoise 3.1 and CDP 7.1 on Windows 10, using the recent 0.63 release of the tool. The 0.62 version wasn't working either when I tried it today, but I seem to recall it working before.  It's possible I'm doing something basic incorrectly, or that a recent windows update broke something. Any ideas?

Thanks again,
Mike

ooooo!

Intriguing!

Hey all,
   Been exploring and using CDP for a couple of months now, and I'm loving it. I've discovered a couple of helpful things that you might also find helpful.

Midi->CSV converter
http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/midicsv/#Download
I often need to go between my sequencer and CDP's texture and filterbank programs, and sometimes it takes a lot of time to do the math to construct a suitable breakpoint file for the musical effect I want, or it's difficult to make the values 'human'. Enter this tidy little comand line tool, which will convert your sequencer's SMF to a CSV, which you can then manipulate using a spreadsheet program. So you can, for example, automate a MIDI controller in your sequencer to "record in" the shape of a filter change, then convert to CSV and use that data for CDP's filterbank. Imagine one of you clever coding types could even alter the source to spit out the data in the right format (seconds instead of MIDI beats/ticks).

LibreOffice
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/
I hadn't used this for a few years, as I'm nearly fully 'in the cloud' these days, but having this program (or another spreadsheet) is immensely helpful for creating breakpoint files. You can create a template in Libreoffice with all the parameters, then simply paste the data into Soundshaper's UI. You can also export as Tab-separated-values if you're working from the command line. It's also nice, when you want to go back and make changes, to have an easily-readable sheet that contains all the data for a particular CDP function, rather than having to look at all the individual breakpoint files to see what's going on.

Iannix
http://www.iannix.org/en/
I've recently started sketching things out on plain paper before I start making any noise, and have found it really helpful to have a visual representation. This program is an interesting complement to that: it'll allow you to specify arbitrary curves, arbitrary data scales, and arbitrary durations for those, then will actually "play" the curves and events in real-time, outputting the values as OSC values or MIDI data, which you can then pipe directly into your sequencer. You can also import SVG drawings created with your vector drawing program of choice, and then have the program "play" the lines and curves in that drawing.

Hope you find those useful!

Thanks for the responses.

I am using Win 10x64.

The 7.1 update has also resolved the issue for me. Wow, what a great tool!

Thank you,
Mike

Hey Simon,
   Thanks for looking into it. I'm using Chrome on Windows 10x64. I also tried opening it in Edge browser and got the same result. I don't have firefox installed to try it there.

But the Unstablesound link is working for me. Downloading now.

Thank you!
Mike

Hi Simon,
   Thanks for posting. However, on my end those aren't showing up as valid links (they just go to http://for%PC). Is there another place I can download from, or could you post again?

Thank you,
Mike

Thanks for the response. I was digging around to see if there was a newer version that might resolve the problem, and I found a demo of version 1.11. It seems to work! But it's a demo so the you can't save the output.

Hey all,
   Happy Saturday. Thought I'd tap the collective brain trust regarding a basic thing with the Soundshaper data editor that I'm just not getting, and can't find in the documentation.

Is there an operation to trim a list to a particular length? For instance, I was doing some spectral pitch shifting, and wanted to use a recurring list of midi pitches at regular time intervals. I used the data editor to duplicate the note list many times, but I ended up with a list that was slightly too long - my audio file has 33 evenly-spaced breakpoints on the "time" axis, and my list of pitches is 38 notes long. So when I bring those values back into the breakpoint editor, I have extraneous data. I can't find a way to trim it down to the same length, other than manually editing.

In this case, it's only a few extra values so I can do it by hand, but it seems like a data cleanup task that there must be a function for somewhere. Is there a way to do this I'm not seeing?

Thank you!
Mike

Hey all,
   Completely possible I'm doing this wrong, but I'm not able to get Grainmill to produce any output. I get the following error using the default settings.

"Error creating temporary file. Check available disk space."

I've tried changing my working directory and running GrainMill directly from the CDP progs folder, as administator. Still the same error. Any tips on what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks,
Mike

Win10x64

Hey there,
   That sounds like an interesting idea - though I don't know that I personally have the coding or DSP expertise to contribute in a meaningful way at this point. Would have to study the source for a while.

Can you throw out a couple of processes that you think could be added? Or tweaks to existing ones? I can't make your dreams come true - just curious.

Mike

I recently got hip to CDP through someone's mention of it on a YouTube video, and I am just beginning to explore the incredible stuff it's capable of.

Wow, great software! It's so nice to work with something so complete, and NOT realtime or DAW plugin-based. Definitely a bit of a learning curve, but I'm working through the tutorial worksheets and am already quite impressed.

Just wanted to say hi, and say that I hope to contribute positively to the community and maintenance of the tools once I'm up to speed.

Best,
Mike Sayre