Tired of needing xx more knobs or yy more pads or a specific feature in your control hardware? Ready to dive in and build your own? You’ve had a variety of options for some time that can help get you started, but Livid’s new Builder set of modular platforms is uniquely well-suited to the kinds of gear people now want to build. It’s loaded with inputs and outputs – necessary for the button- and knob-laden controllers of today – while at the same time uses modular boards and smart software to ease the learning curve. It’s probably still a little advanced for your first project (for that, you might try connecting a few knobs to an Arduino first), but if you’re ready to build something fancier, this should definitely be high on your list. We’ll have a more detailed look at this hardware in the coming weeks, but here’s a first look.

• The Brain: USB-powered, bi-directional MIDI board – class-compliant, with no drivers needed (including on Linux). Use open-source software to configure and program it, then connect what you need – even more-complex features like multiplexing buttons and LEDs. (Hint: it’s tricky to do on your own unless you’re a pretty advanced hardware person.) Connect to your computer or hardware via USB and standard MIDI in/out DIN (so yes, this works for hardware synth and drum machine fans, too). Note that this chip also supports OSC (OpenSoundControl), so support for that in the future isn’t out of the question.
• Add-on boards: Push, Slide, Turn, and Breakout modular boards make it easy to tack on features, like buttons, faders, pots, and monome-style grids, in any combination you desire. Once you use the board, you can choose an arrangement you desire – including even deviating from the grid.
• Components: Finding the right parts can require some trial and error, so Livid will also sell the ones they use on their control surfaces. Sure, LEDs aren’t difficult to select, but getting the right rubber keypad or potentiometer can be a lifesaver.

More information:
Blog post
Product page
Parts

Wiki for the Brain
Brain Quick Start

Pricing is actually (happily) a little south of where I expected – in USD:
Brain $189
Push $12
Turn$12
Slide $12
Breakout $12

By the way, Livid, I hope you realize you now have to do a simple side product called Pinky.

Looking at the monome hardware, it could be difficult to understand how a simple array of buttons has become the most important musical design of the decade. It’s been the software that has brought this to life, not least the work of stretta (aka Matthew Davidson).

In the early days of electronic music, the creation of modular systems for synthesizing sound was a major breakthrough. Today, we can produce modular systems for composition, for assembling the music itself. And in a world in which “more” is the key word, many of these systems, by design, do less, focusing on the essential.

stretta reached a major landmark late last week, with the release of the maxforlive monome suite. It’s a set of seven Max for Live devices, with variations, which can be dropped into Ableton Live for use in musical projects. But it’s also more than that – it’s a modular model for how stretta thinks, and each module is designed to be used with the others, all without ever having to take your hands or eyes off the monome controller. Included in the pack:

• obo matrix step sequencer
• pitches for playing notes on the monome
• polygomé 64 for polyphonic, step-sequenced, transposing pitches
• press cafe for repeating patterns of pitches
• spectral display for blinking lights to visualize sound
• step filter step-sequenced filter bank
• automatorgator MIDI- and audio- and OSC- controllable pattern gate

Details and download link (no explicit license coming yet, but Matthew has promised an open license):

maxforlive monome suite released

I got the chance to talk to Matthew about the project, how he created it, how to approach using it, and what it was like working with Max for Live.

All photos by Matthew Davidson; released under a Creative Commons attribution license. Click the images for full-sized versions.

CDM: Can you talk a little bit about what these modules are, and how they fit together, for someone who hasn’t seen them before?

stretta: Obo is like tonematrix as a MIDI plug in. I like analog sequencers because they are tactile. They’re limited, though, so the natural tendency is to add memory to them. I’ve never enjoyed the experience of an analog sequencer with memory. As soon as you add memory, the fun evaporates. You can’t tell where the data matches the knobs, you’re looking at LCD menus… bleah. I’m not saying obo is the answer, as it is a very simple device, but obo (with a monome) does provide a pleasing combination of tactile control, visual feedback and multiple patterns.

Pitches turns the monome surface into a MIDI device. Press a button, get a note. The only issue to resolve is how do you map notes across the grid? One of the first things I did with my monome after I got is was create a pitch grid in columns of fourths and chromatic rows, much like a guitar, but more like a touchstyle instrument like a Warr guitar. I liked the strict grid as it made the geometry of harmony completely portable. The pitches application allows you to customize the interval relationships of the rows and columns and optionally add a modal scale filter on the output so it is pretty much impossible to produce a ‘bad’ note.

Polygomé is one of those things that is most easily explained to people by shoving a monome in their hands. It is kind of like if you took ‘pitches’ and added a step sequencer. You recall the sequence by pressing a button, the sequence is transposed based on which button you start on. Then you can play the sequences polyphonically. Polygomé grew out of this massive, overly complicated project for the 256 I was working on called gomé. The idea was you’d create these geometric patterns then define a ‘path’ or vector across the monome surface that they’d walk across; kind of like how gliders move in the game of life. I was describing this on the monome forums and someone said, "boy, I hope you make this so it works on the 64." I didn’t think there was enough room on the 64 so I re-thought the idea and polygomé was born.

Spectral Display is a non-interactive device that turns the monome into a graphic… well.. spectral display. I developed Spectral Display from vu_spec by [monome creator] Brian Crabtree so this is all his brilliance on display. I merely adapted it to maxforlive.

Press Cafe is another MIDI instrument. The original brilliance of the monome is the fact that the buttons are completely decoupled from the LEDs. Nobody had ever produced a device that did that before. There was always some internally programmed or proscribed functionality that was never entirely suitable for much of anything. So I brainstormed about various ways to leverage this unique ability. Press cafe is a pattern trigger sequencer. It works on any size monome, but if you’re using a 256, you get 16 rhythmic patterns of 16 notes. The rows select which pattern you’re triggering and the columns select which note you’re playing. Naturally, you can use the monome surface itself to edit the patterns.

Step Filter is eight independent sequencers, each triggering a band pass filter. The sequence is edited directly on the monome surface. The real fun begins when you start specifying various loop lengths for each of the filters so they loop independently. You can have one band looping in 7, another lopping in 6, etc…

automatorgator comes in two flavors. One is a MIDI plug in that produces MIDI and OSC automation. The output can be smoothed or stepped. The audio plug-in produces gating effects, or cyclical amplitude modulation.

CDM: What was it like working with Max for Live? How did that impact the way you work?

stretta: I’ve always wanted something like maxforlive. Max lacked a powerful timeline. Most DAWs lacked user-directed internal customization akin to a modular synthesizer. I think this is important for a DAW because it is impossible to be all things to all people. I’d hesitate to say much more because my experience with maxforlive is limited to a couple months thus far and there is so much yet to explore. I would be seriously happy for years on a deserted island with this tool, provided there was some mechanism to share my work with others.

Max 5 brought some concepts like a global transport and the ability to specify time values in a metric-centric way. So, instead of milliseconds and samples, you can think in terms of quarter notes and eight notes. Then maxforlive brought all this inside of a functional DAW which made everything more powerful. It is one thing to be able to manipulate audio like play doh. It is another to be able to do it inside a real production environment, using musically-sensible units.

So, maxforlive is a huge leap forward, but the needs of the monome community were a bit more dire. There are applications for the monome that are functional enough to produce a complete musical statement in real time by itself. A good example of this is mlr. You don’t need anything else. My monome applications are not so clever. I never intended for anyone to sit down and try to express something using polygomé in isolation. I figured it would be one tool you’d use in the context of a greater whole. The problem with this is it relegated polygomé and others to the recording studio.

What the monome needed, was, in my opinion, a meta environment that could host multiple monome applications, ensure they were all running in sync, and switch between them on the fly. It would route audio, host virtual instruments, mix everything and add effects. Then you could save a setup and recall everything by opening a single file. If that could be done, then the monome is transformed from this monolithic standalone device, to a piece of integrated performance hardware.

CDM: Many people are now getting started with Max for Live. Any tips for new users?

stretta: The best tip I can offer so far is adding '---' before any data objects. On run, the --- is turned into a unique identifier so the instance is unique. This allows multiple instances of the same maxforlive device with access to their own data. Of course, you may not want to do this, you may want to retain the ability for multiple maxforlive devices to ‘talk’ to each other and share data which is a cool feature. I’ve uploaded a example patch detailing this at the monome wiki called ‘thisinstance’

http://docs.monome.org/doku.php?id=app:thisinstance

CDM: What if someone is interested in this download, but they don’t own a monome? Is there anything they can do with this pack without the hardware?

stretta: Not much. The only application that operates monomeless is obo. However, there may be enough about obo that is interesting to people to justify the download.

CDM: You should be able to adapt to other controllers, though, with some work – correct?

stretta: Sure, it really is simply a matter of tapping into the matrixctrl object and routing to whatever device. My stuff rarely makes use of monome-specific protocols like ledcol, but I’m doing more of that recently for performance reasons.

CDM: Have you seen other Max or monome work that has inspired or impressed you?

stretta: 7up [SevenUpLive 2.0] is an amazing piece of engineering, although it is mostly Java wrapped inside a layer of maxforlive. Buffer Shuffler was the first example that really blew my mind, and the cool part about this is you can open this stuff up and see how it ticks. When I opened up Buffer Shuffler, I was amazed at how little there really is to it, which says a lot about the level of sophistication of the max objects themselves. I still haven’t explored or opened all the devices that are included with maxforlive. It is a simple matter to lift small sections of max code and repurpose it. It is really early on in the life of maxforlive, so I anticipate the learning process to continue and expect to see more interesting creations as the ideas cross pollinate and everyone starts editing everyone else’s work.

Thanks to Matthew for these thoughtful answers. If you have follow-up questions, definitely let us know. And we’ll be interested to see how you work with these tools, or modify them in your own work.

For the latest, be sure to check out stretta’s blog, The Stretta Procedure:

http://stretta.blogspot.com/

maxforlive: monome integration from stretta on Vimeo.

maxforlive: obo from stretta on Vimeo.

Autonomous bassline generators? Wireless, modular, infrared sync? Tiny drum machines networking together? Welcome to Texas, and the minds of Eric Archer, Bleep Labs, 4ms Pedals, the Church of the Friendly Ghost, and Andromeda Space Rockers.

One look at a floor full of blinking circuits, and most ladies and gentleman might assume they’ve stumbled upon some alien technology. “Imagine the things we could learn from this civilization – advancements far beyond our own,” as the stock line from sci fi goes. “Man and woman are not meant to learn such things. You’re meddling in things beyond your comprehension.”

In other words, you couldn’t build something like this, right?

Or could you?

In Austin, Texas, Eric, Dann, and Dr. Bleep are launching a new Handmade Music series, kicking it off with kits and classes so that anyone – including beginners – can start building stuff. For the 101 crowd, there’s a free beginner class even if you’ve never touched a soldering iron, so you can build your own analog drum. “I’m no n00b,” you say, “impress me.” Sure – the “upper division” gets to talk more advanced synth design and walks through the full-blown modular, networkable kit.

At the end of it all is an open jam and featured performance.

If you’re anywhere near Austin, Texas – or can find a bargain plane fare – you’ll want to clear your calendar for October 18!

Full Event Details, October 18 Handmade Music in Austin [Handmade Music @noisepages]

That’s just the first of more events to come, so stay glued to the Handmade Music site for events in Austin, New York, Portugal, Germany, and beyond.

“That’s right / you’re not from Texas / Texas wants you anyway.” For those of us in New York, Lisbon, Rio, Sydney, and Jakarta, there’s still hope. The kits will be online, and I”m looking at ways of putting together a full Handmade Music curriculum of projects online for all of us on the site we’re developing this fall, noisepages – ideas welcome.

I certainly didn’t expect to get deep into these geekier topics in high school while I was busily trying to fail Calculus and screw up science lab results in ways that baffled my teachers. But it’s a glorious age we live in, in which we get to assimilate alien technology as our own. Stay tuned.

So, you’ve seen lots of interesting looking iPhone apps, but most of them strike you as gimmicky. Others have interesting workflows, but limit you to working on the mobile device, not switching back to a computer. And maybe you’re perfectly happy with a phone running Windows Mobile or Palm OS.

Enter SunVox. This is not a mobile music making app for the timid. It’s a powerful suite of soundmakers and sequencers, baked together into a modular environment that lets power users tweak to their heart’s delight. It’s small, it’s fast, and it looks – and sounds – a lot like early computer music programs. It’ll run on iPhone now, but also on Palm, Windows Mobile, Mac, Windows, and Linux. It’ll run on your netbook, your MacBook, and your ThinkPad.

Incredibly, all this goodness is yours on all those platforms for ten bucks and on iPhone for $5, easily making SunVox the biggest steal in music software I think I’ve ever seen:

• Flexible architecture that adapts to slow and fast CPUs
• Synths and generators: FM, virtual analog, FFT-based “SpectraVoice”, Kicker
• Effects: Delay, distortion, filters, LFOs, reverb
• Sampler with WAV support
• WAV export when you’re done

http://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

And for fans of computer music in the 90s, it’s a chance to get back to some of the no-nonsense, powerful creation of that era, without some of the distractions you may find in modern apps.

To see SunVox in action (and start to make sense of how to use it), check out the YouTube videos from Alex Zolotov (among others). They’re not the best video quality (I wish we had iPhone screencasting software, darnit), but they will give you a sense of what the app is about:
http://www.youtube.com/user/NightRadio2007

The videos made their debut on the excellent PalmSounds Google Group:
http://groups.google.com/group/palmsounds?hl=en
CDM isn’t exclusively about mobile apps, so check out PalmSounds the blog, too, if you like your music making handheld – the site has been on fire lately with updates.
http://the-palm-sound.blogspot.com/

Here’s an example of how SunVox can be used for live playing:

Here it is being used to produce lovely FM synthesis noises:

If you’re new to trackers, especially, you’ll want to brush up on the tracker workflow in SunVox:

In some of the news I’ve missed in the last couple of days are some unusual announcements. Urs Heckmann can be fairly considered one of the great soft synth designers, with accomplishments like Zebra. His latest, Bazille, like many recent soft synths, is a hybrid: FM synthesis plus phase distortion plus the obligatory subtractive synthesis. In an early teaser video (he apologizes for audio quality), he shows off its modular design. Now, modular routing is something we’ve seen in some form in other recent synths, from Maschine to Future Audio’s Circle. But for Bazille, the layout of the whole synth is clearly set up with rack-style modular routing and free-form patching in mind. There’s definitely some promise here. Oliver Chesler of the utterly brilliant wire to the ear found this first and has some other good thoughts.

The surprise news, though, is that Fairlight may be re-releasing the Fairlight CMI, their original digital sampler. The Fairlight Instruments site teases a “CMI Series 30A (Thirtieth Anniversary) Limited Edition.” Peter Vogel’s CMI, ubiquitous sound of the 80s, established many things we take for granted in computer music. Heck, it even had a light pen. So, too, will the 30A re-release. They’ll make 100 of them, you’ll get WAV import and improved sound quality, and… no, you won’t be able to afford it, though Vogel says it’ll be cheaper than the original. (In other words, it’ll be cheaper to get a new Fairlight than a new Buchla.)

Sonic State scoops the details from the man himself:
More Anniversary Fairlight Details: A little more information from Mr Vogel

Of course, I dream of a successor to the Fairlight CVI, their ground-breaking video instrument.

Alternatively… Synclavier: The Next Generation, anyone?

Voltage from Bam Studio on Vimeo.

Oh, sure, it’s all fun and games until your modular robots have a little too much fun and your rig erupts into a fireball.

But then, modular synthesis fans – you understand, nonetheless.

William Paiva sends us his work as one of the animators and writes:

Hi everybody. I’m a reader of both Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion, and I’ve just uploaded to Vimeo and to YouTube a short animation film about robots and synths. I think you might like it. Reards.

And you have crazy, crazy dreams, man. Brilliant work. Here’s the team:

Directed by:
Filippe Lyra e William Paiva

Produced by:
Barros Melo Animation Studio

Director of photography:
Filippe Lyra e William Paiva

Animation:
Filippe Lyra
William Paiva
Marcio Vieira
Felipe Soares
Leo D.
Tony Farias

Design:
Filippe Lyra
Marcio Vieira
Felipe Soares
William Paiva
Natalia Franca

Illustration:
Filippe Lyra
Marcio Vieira
Felipe Soares
William Paiva
Natalia Franca

Editor(s):
William Paiva
Leo D.
Filippe Lyra

Sound:
William Paiva e Leo D

Music:
William Paiva e Leo D

Just like modular synthesizers, people connect with each other in order to achieve diverse objectives. In Voltage, robots, half-human and half-synthesizer, powered by a huge amount of energy, connect to each other in an electric and chaotic trance.

Be sure to check out William’s blog. [in Portuguese, which may get named as 2009's Language of Awesomeness on CDM.]

AudioMulch 2.0 live patching screencast from AudioMulch on Vimeo.

Wonderful things come from Australia. Developer Ross Bencina has released AudioMulch 2.0, the audio patching environment, now on both Mac and Windows.

Audiomulch is all pretty in black now with a new UI. But why is it special? AudioMulch has always been distinguished in its quick workflow, its ready-to-use objects that allow sophisticated patches with relatively simple structures, and its idiosyncratic soundmakers. The Metasurface multi-parameter controller is also a favorite.

The price is higher, which may scare away some – US$189, or $89 upgrade. There’s a 60-day trial that you can try out.

But the best part of this launch is that, instead of releasing a flashy demo with pans over girls in bikinis or booming drum beats and type flying through that says something like “THE FUTURE OF MUSIC IS NOW … HOLD THE SOUND IN YOUR FIST … BE THE MUSIC … WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?”, they just released a video showing someone making a piece of music. (What a concept!)

The video at top is a live-patching video, and it really reveals how, powerful as many interactive music environments may be, having some objects that get straight to what you want musically makes a real difference. (That’s something to keep in mind even as you create macros or code in other environments, too, I think.)

I like the idea of other people doing live-patching videos that work as music and not just tech demos, not only in AudioMulch but whatever your tool of choice may be.

If you give AudioMulch 2 a try, let us know what you think.

http://www.audiomulch.com

Imagine friendly creation of custom synths and sounds by dragging visual nodes. Now imagine you can do that on a mobile device and your computer – and eventually combine the two. That’s the vision of Jasuto, and while it’s not quite there yet, it’s incredibly promising.

The laws of combinatorics predict that, on a regular basis, you’ll see countless soft synths that are slight variations of one another. With the iPhone/iPod touch gold rush in full swing, we’re starting to see the pattern repeat itself, just as it did in Windows and Mac plug-ins. Some are brilliant; others are just the usual variations on a theme.

Of course, even better is the ability to build exactly what you want out of the same buildings blocks. Powerful toolkits like Max/MSP, Pd, Reaktor, SuperCollider, SynthMaker and the like let you do this, but they qualify as the more-sophisticated Erector Set of synthesis. Sometimes you just want some simple, LEGO-style building blocks that cover the basics.

That’s why Jasuto looks so promising. It’s actually two pieces of software – a plug-in for Mac and Windows VST. Combine basic modules, and you get some powerful features, even on the iPhone:

• Multiple synthesis methods: additive, subtractive, FM/PM/AM, hard-sync synthesis
• Basic math functions: add/subtract/delta/constant values
• Filters: LP, HP, BP, and a Moog emulation
• Signal tools: envelopes, dynamics processors, and an envelope follower
• Effects: Delay, reverb, saturation, digital distortion
• iPhone hardware features: Accelerator and mic access (and of course mic access on your computer, too)
• 16-step sequencer with looping, pattern manipulation
• Performance options: a tappable keyboard, glide functions, and so on

That’s just the specs, though. To me, the most interesting thing is the zoomable, nodal design, reminiscent of the reactable. There’s also the ability to record “motion” anywhere in the app, and to modulate everything with everything else. And I especially like the idea that “patches” and “synths” are one and the same: just as on an early modular, creating a new “patch” really is about connecting modules into something unique.

I can’t imagine it being the last computer instrument you need, but if successful, it could well be the last iPhone synth you need. I like the idea of

It’s under “heavy development,” so expect some bugs. The software can be yours for all of US$1.00 on iPhone. The PC/Mac VST looks a little rougher, but it’s available for free download.

Jasuto Site

VST Plug-in

iTunes Link

Thanks to sublamp for turning us on to this via comments.

Touch interfaces abound on this site, but Usine has one edge: it’s built right out of the box to enable touch interfaces with custom, modular creation of whatever you might like. And there’s now an Ableton Live template in testing, with a lovely 5×5 controller.

The advantage of working this way, as I see it, is that you can begin to expand Live sessions beyond endlessly-looping, pre-built audio clips or DJ-style mixing.

Discussion on the Sensomusic forum:

5 x 5 Live Control Patch

More on Usine:

Modular Sound by Touch: Usine

And for two significant new multitouch tools, from last week:

Roll Your Own Multitouch Screens, Tables: Max Multitouch Framework, PyMT

The DJ Booth at Bily Kun where Bidule was first conceived.

Ed.: Music creation is all about the special relationship we have with certain, powerful tools. And one app that gets very little attention is unquestionably the deep but elegant modular patching environment Plogue Bidule. CDM turns to power user Primus Luta to kick off a series on learning this tool, starting with an exclusive interview with Bidule’s creators. And if the interview sounds, at times, more than a little pro-Plogue in bias, make no mistake: this is love. Primus Luta takes it away, as we look forward to his upcoming how-to series. -PK

In the modular future, the Bily Kun will be a leading tourist attraction for Montreal. Patrons will come with laptops tucked under their arms sporting fork bomb t-shirts. The bartenders by then will be used to answering the question only tourists ask with a slight wave of the hand toward seats on the other side of the bar. The tourists will follow that wave to the ultimate destination of their pilgrimage, open their laptop, and broadcast their location to bidulers everywhere, before reenacting some sort of virtual cabling ritual to mark their presence at the conception place of Plogue.

“It all started what seems a long time ago,” Sebastien Beaulieu, Plogue co-founder tells me. “David (Viens of Plogue) was coding a few VST plugins to add new toys to Ross Bencina’s AudioMulch. We would meet up one evening a week to code a few cool bits then head up for beer afterwards at the minimal techno pub in Montreal called Bily Kun, where most of the ideas for the future came into place.”

It was the late 1990’s. Modular audio was just coming out of a clumsy adolescence. Miller Puckette rewrote his then decade old MAX software in a new open source format to create Pd. David Zicarelli founded Cycling ‘74 to continue development of the original MAX codebase beginning with a new audio processing engine – MSP. Ross Bencina released the first of thirty six public beta versions of AudioMulch. It was a developing frontier, still early enough that the horizon couldn’t completely be made out. And while working on what would be the first Plogue product, the VST plugin ReBuilder, what would become the Plogue team started envisioning a horizon they could paint themselves.

“Once we had one completed VST,” Sebastien continues, “we decided we needed some kind of entity to release them. We ditched our temporary name while(1)fork();, used to provide a ‘label’ name for our various IDM/Minimal DJ sets. Found a Quebec anglicism/slang word for ‘plug’, some nice chaps to design our logo, and so Plogue was born.

Plogue Bidule

We did another VST plugin (MixedGrains) and then started on Bidule, which, at the start, was to be an app that would improve on both AudioMulch and MAX/MSP, in terms of providing the user with a smaller learning curve to do more. An application that could both be used as an easy modular application, because of high-level objects, and a more advanced one with low-level objects that, depending on your usage, interest or knowledge, you might never need to even look at to get you going making sounds.”

An ambitious endeavor to say the least, starting from scratch in an attempt to improve on a technology while decreasing the learning curve. All of this with a core team that in the decade since founding would only grow to four members, only three of whom are coders, and of those three only Sebastien spends 100% of his time on Bidule.

“Bidule was coded from the start with portability in mind,” he explains, “so the code is mostly C++ and STL. It uses OpenGL for the patchbay rendering. The ‘graph traversal code’ is optimized for various connection types and feedback paths. XML is used to ‘mirror’ the processing graph for serialization.”

Simple, but quite powerful. Powerful enough to attract the attention of some of the bigger names in audio software, such as Garritan and Sibelius, who came to Plogue looking for licensing opportunities. When asked if this was always a part of the Plogue business plan Sebastien firmly states, “Definitely not, but once the opportunity presented itself we thought of it has a good way to sustain and grow. The ARIA Project is a different case because we are developing that in collaboration, which means it’s something we can also use for our own products. This explains why it was developed as a sample playback/synth hybrid engine rather than a straight sample playback one.”

With a reliable buisiness to business revenue stream one can’t help but wonder what influence that has in the development of Bidule. “Our licensing work does not have much influence on what is Bidule,” Sebastien explains. “Licensing work is usually started from our base components/libraries, some Bidule-borrowed code and our knowledge from doing audio plugins and applications. There are way too many things in Bidule to use that as the basis of a licensable audio engine without ending up with either an awful amount of #ifdef or too much code separation in different files.”

On the business end of things he states, “While the added income enables us to pay ourselves and employees it also takes time to do and that time is taken away from our own projects. There’s no way to know what would have happened if we strictly worked on our stuff, would we be at the same point we are now with a physical office and employees? Would we still be working from home? Or would we have given up on doing much more interesting work for less money and gone back to your typical programmer job full time and code the fun stuff evenings and weekends?”

There’s a constantly growing community of bidulers who are thankful not to have to worry about those possibilities. Congregating in the forums, the community in many ways acts as the additional staff for Plogue. It’s an interesting model, because while bidule is proprietary the communal nature of development is reminiscent of open source. One only need look at the Feature Request section of the forums to realize the high percentage of requests that end up in future releases of the software.

“There are several possible way to use Bidule,” Sebastien explains, “and we obviously cannot think of all of them. That is where the community input is important. We can’t even count the number of times forum posts, discussions and emails have led to new features in Bidule or changed the way we were going to approach a specific feature.” As such, you can find Seb (as he’s known in the community) in the forums regularly logging bugs, discussing problems, and ensuring user needs are met. Three years ago those user needs resulted in an SDK. “The SDK came up as a quick way to add new modules. There are times when users need something totally specific to their use or setup and it doesn’t make sense to add it inside Bidule. With the SDK, anyone having some basic code skills can add their own module.”

The true testament to the power of Bidule are what the users are able to do with it. When asked for example use cases Sebastien replies, “Building a setup for an art gallery installation where control comes from external sources. DSP companies using Bidule for quick prototyping of larger algorithms and systems through building blocks and SDK-built modules. People playing live in all sorts of music styles from experimental to jazz and even faith gatherings!

“Some things have just surprised us to find out that they were even possible with Bidule,” he continues. “For example Bram de Jong made a basic time-stretching algorithm out of basic bidules. Someone else made some noise reduction algorithm out of side effects of Bidule’s FFT algorithms. There’s also what you’re doing, which we found interesting because you’re basically building a complete instrument within Bidule and documenting the process.”

All of this with a software still in beta. Easily surpassing the thirty six beta versions of Audio Mulch and going into its seventh year of public beta, perhaps the Guiness Book of Records should be contacted. When asked whether the 1.0 version of Bidule would see release this year, Sebastian navigates his web browser to a virtual Magic 8 Ball site and types the question. The answer is: Very Doubtful.

“Bidule 1.0,” he explains, “has been a long standing internal debate in here. If you made a list of programmers that can’t let go until it’s perfect, you would find us in the upper portion. Lets just say we especially dislike ‘version 6.x’ applications that crash when you just look at them and the endless cycle of pay the yearly (or so) update fee to get a few bugs fixed.” Strangely enough for active bidulers, 1.0 may not be that important. The communal style of development is perhaps the most valuable part of Bidule. Would that come to an end if it were to come out of beta?

“I don’t see why it would stop because we think it has served us very well so far. More importantly, everyone at Plogue uses Bidule as their main development/test tool for everything else they do (like ARIA and chipsounds for instance). It’s our pen, if you will. With that mindset, as long as Plogue is alive, so will Bidule.”

An Alpha Version of Bidule Running on Linux Circa 2001

If Bidule has any limitations, it is perhaps the lack of a Linux version. When asked what’s keeping the software from being ported to the open OS, Sebastien quickly responds, “A time machine might help!” As it would seem back in 2001 there was an alpha version of Bidule which did run on Linux, development on which has since ceased. “I think our main concern is that we are not yet totally convinced of the viability and welcomeness of closed-source applications to Linux. Pretty much every thing else would fall into the lack of time category (most of our other concerns would probably be answered by research and testing), chasing two major platforms is already a time-consuming task, we’re not yet ready to add a third major one.” That shouldn’t be read as the end of the conversation for Linux users. If there’s anything which cannot be overstated about the Plogue team it is that community demand moves them.

This week Plogue launches the latest public version of Bidule 0.9685. As with all public releases it comes with a three month trial period for users to demo the software. To coincide with this, I’ve been given a space over on CDM’s NoisePages where I will be providing a series of introductory and advanced tutorials in Bidule, using the instruments created for my Heads Project as examples. You can read all about the latest Bidule release and after you’ve downloaded you’re copy make your way through the first tutorial. If you’ve ever wanted to have a look at what Bidule is all about, now is the perfect time.

In the modular present, Plogue Bidule has achieved much of what it set out to do – smaller learning curve, doing more. The modular future is bright.

“Total freedom to experiment, and try ideas fast.”