Create Digital Music » Processing 1.0: “We’re Out of Beta / We’re Releasing on Time”

Nov 25 2008

Processing 1.0: “We’re Out of Beta / We’re Releasing on Time”

Sorry, had to quote the Coulton anthem for Portal, “Still Alive.”

Processing 1.0 has finished final release status. Why that matters, on Create Digital Motion:

Processing: Revolutionary Creative Coding Tool Now 1.0, No Longer Beta

In my mind, it’s certainly one of the most unusual betas in creative software history. Why this is important for music:

Recent versions of Processing include the very stable and wonderful Minim audio library
Processing makes an excellent tool for creating unusual graphical front ends for music, with tools like Reaktor, Pd, Max, SuperCollider, ChucK, Ableton Live and many others handling sound (more on that in a story tomorrow)
Updates make Processing far more predictable and flexible across platforms, particularly when using new versions of Mac OS, Windows, and Java
Better, more stable OpenGL rendering makes your software look fantastic, and this is a lot of the change that’s happened in recent builds

But it’s better to show that rather than talk about it. Stay tuned. Look at me: still talking when there’s science to do!

Buddha Machine 2: All-in-One $25 Ambient Box Gets a Sequel

Spaces and Roots: Manipulating Sound with Processing + Touch, Tangible Interfaces

8 Comments

Jaime Munarriz

Wow!
it was nice to run on beta, but now we can enjoy the absolute stable and non-changing version…

p5 rules

November 25, 2008 @ 2:34 am

nausea

absolutely agree. words are over. time to process data streams into something beautiful.

November 25, 2008 @ 2:43 am

Sebastien Orban

Nice! I like those improvement, even if I have not much time to work with it for now. I hope to get my hand dirty fast!

November 25, 2008 @ 2:58 am

Peter Kirn

Yep, and for sure, if you watch the changes made to the late beta cycle, this does mean more stability particularly in terms of how the renderers behave.

November 25, 2008 @ 9:38 am

Mike

Well, I’m happy to see this finally get out of beta. I’m looking forward to not having to transfer my libraries between versions every week.

November 25, 2008 @ 12:03 pm

@Mike: Check out the section on the CDMotion article with highlights on changes. One major change is that libraries are now stored with sketches instead of the app, which makes a lot more sense (that’s how dev projects would normally work). So no more moving, in other words, even when they do release updates.

November 25, 2008 @ 12:10 pm

Angstrom

Hey Peter, you ought to do a wee tutorial on getting up and running with the musical tools in Processing, especially Promidi. I’ve drawn a blank with it myself, I’ve never got it to output through midiyoke despite doing the obvious steps.
I’m sure many other people would like a basic introduction to using midi/audio in Processing too. Or at least point us at any half-decent tutorials.

November 25, 2008 @ 8:48 pm

Peter Kirn

@Angstrom: I should, indeed — the reason I haven’t yet is I’m waiting to get some of the MIDI stuff sorted(!) I most definitely don’t recommend ProMIDI at this time. There are too many issues with it. I’ve been using Rwmidi, but there’s some other stuff to do there.
http://ruinwesen.com/support-files/rwmidi/documentation/RWMidi.html

On the upside, yes, it’s great that Minim is there. But even then, I don’t think Minim is likely to satisfy readers here, who will probably want to turn to Reaktor, SuperCollider and the like for sounds. So that means approaching the tutorial that way.

Stay tuned, as this is for sure a high priority for me in the next couple of months.