Now that bleep!BOX has been submitted to the app store, I’ve been relaxing a bit and thinking about my next project. Some of my old plugin users have asked when Doppelmangler or Zero Vector will see an update. Honestly, I haven’t touched those plugins for years and some of the code is pretty bad or difficult to maintain (esp. in Doppelmangler’s case). Those plugins were compiled for vst 2.3 and we’re up to 64-bit and vst 3.0 at this point, so some updates are in order. With Doppelmangler, I’ve always wanted to do a full re-write since I’ve never been totally satisfied with the quality of the resynthesis and the amount of CPU it consumes. I’ve actually been brainstorming about how to revamp it for quite a while now.
Zero Vector also presents some challenges. I would love to port all my plugins to the Mac, now that I’ve gotten comfortable with XCode. However, Zero Vector contains massive amounts of SSE assembly code and I’m not sure how well that will port (maybe it will be fine.).
In general, I’ve developed my own audio framework for writing portable modules. This is used in Genome Studio and also in bleep!BOX. I’d like to port both those plugins into the new framework.
Finally, I do want to get back to working on Genome Studio. I’ve put way too much work into it to not finish it (plus I’m getting fairly close to being able to beta test it). Genome will need some more instruments built into it, and I always intended to include some variant of Zero Vector and Doppelmangler. So, maybe now is the time to update those plugins, rebuild them in my new audio framework so they are ready to include in Genome. At the same time I can produce up-to-date plugins for them.
Doppelmangler is the most interesting problem to solve, so I think I’m gonna tackle it first. ZV will be a more straightforward port (though not trivial..). The direction I want to take Doppelmangler is to focus on high quality sample manipulation rather than all the crazy spectral stuff. Warping and modulating sounds is still the focus too (just that DM2 won’t use spectral resynthesis per se). It may be something that is more like specialized granular resynthesis synthesis (not wacky artsy fartsy granular ;). As always the motto is to be able get greater control over your samples and to use them in new and creative ways. More soon - need to do some experiments.
Oh, and I nearly forgot. I have a few updates planned for bleep!BOX. Those will happen first and they will mainly be centered around performance features, patch sharing, and synchronization (read: DSMI - wifi midi).