PEMF Lessons: Bidule – Direct Cabling & Your Default Layout from Primus Luta on Vimeo.

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.

Ed.: Plogue Bidule is an unusual animal: this affordable patching tool resists conventional ways of doing things, down to its hatred of the number “1.0.” But Plogue has an underground following inside the already-underground world of modular patching tools for creative music. I’ve invited Primus Luta, aka David Dobson, to give us insight into this tool – including a new release that will be big news to the people who rely on Plogue to make their productions and live performances tick. -PK

Today if you go over to the Plogue site you will see the announcement for the latest release of Plogue Bidule. In addition to a number of bug fixes, there are some amazing updates in this latest release. On the eye candy side of things, Bidule finally gets a waveform viewer module — the WaveViewer shown in the image above. There’s also a new Audio Buffer module for visualizing waveforms. These are great additions to the Bidule arsenal and also a good indication of more visual goodness to come.

In its ever-growing commitment to fully support OSC [OpenSoundControl], a new tool has been added for monitoring OSC communication. The OSC Monitor behaves like many third-party options, showing not only the OSC messages sent by and to Bidule, but also picking up any additional messages being transmitted, as well. Ed.: A general-purpose monitoring tool sounds like a great idea! A great resource when trying to get multiple OSC-enabled devices or pieces of software communicating with each other.

Perhaps the biggest update of all in this version is the introduction of Multi-Core Processing, supporting up to 8 Cores. Previous versions of Bidule only allowed for processing on two cores, but now the MP Assign command lets you not only utilize up to 8 cores, but also select which processors you’d like to use. As a bonus, there’s also a new DSP Adapter function which allows you to run a limited set of modules at a buffer size of 1 sample.

All an all, it is a very welcome update. As with all publicly-released versions, this one comes with a time-sensitive trial period, so that new users can explore Bidule over the next three months without purchase. Simply make your way to the Plogue site to download this version today. If you’re looking for encouragement, also starting today, I’ve launched the first tutorial in a series which will be utilizing instruments that I’ve developed in Bidule for the Heads Project as examples. The series will be starting from the most basic concepts and progressing toward the more complex over the next months. If you’ve ever wanted to get your feet wet in Bidule now would be the time.

Lastly, I had the extreme pleasure of having a conversation with Sebastien Beaulieu, co-founder and lead Bidule developer over at Plogue. He gave me some great insight into the origins of Bidule, the business and development model of Plogue, and some ideas of what we can expect in the future. You can read the full interview here on CDM.