Free Workflow Helpers

[mesayre]

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!