Orac , coming soon to bela

thetechnobear

Its a busy day for me today, I release Orac into the wild, first on the Organelle , but it will be coming very soon to Bela...

to whet your appetite...

Its free, its open source and available on patchstorage, thanks to loopop to doing a video to help spread the word

Ive got a more detailed how to video too, not as good as loopops 🙂

status for bela?

Ive already got it running on Bela Salt in my case , and its alot of fun
the dev version (1.1) has a new feature which allows (obviously) full control via the CV inputs.
its quite 'meta' having a virtual modular in a modular, and having 50+ modules means my Salt is already very busy 🙂

current module list

Its still in development for a few reasons, (aka things to do)
- I only got Salt last week 🙂
- currently it can be controlled via a Push 2 or editing config files, I want a more approachable solution
- Ive plans for some bela specific modules e.g. for CV out,

the interface solution I have planned is a 'web' interface, so that you can setup and control the rack over wifi, on your phone/pad/computer.... and of course once its setup, you'll then be able to disconnect that if you wish, and just control via CV / midi or OSC 🙂

the whole project is open source, so if you want to get involved give me a shout
In particular if there is someone with experience in browser development, that could be handy to speed things up a bit.

AndyCap

Very neat, I can see why you wanted some improved performance on the Bela now.

thetechnobear

oh the other thing thats neat with Salt, is im going to have the buttons doing preset switching.
so you'll be able to switch from simple utility modules, to full blown rings with clouds 🙂

AndyCap

Sounds good, I like the idea of a web interface as well. Have you thought about controlling it over OSC as well?

Also is it just PD this works with or does it support modules written in C/C++?

thetechnobear

AndyCap
already supports OSC control 🙂

(Im considering a quick Lemur template as a stop-gap solution for Salt)

Also is it just PD this works with or does it support modules written in C/C++?

sort of...
so actually this is all built on an API I built called 'Kontrol' , this is actually C++ , and handles all of the parameters sharing , which is what the UI/midi learn/presets is all about. basically a kind of object model, with remoting via OSC over UDP (though could be serial i suppose)

then what we are referring to Orac sits on top of that.
it basically comprised of a couple of PD externals which basically re-patch PD.

so.... if you wanted to do a similar thing in C++ you'd have a couple of choices

a) write the modules as PD externals , this is basically what the MI stuff is, PD externals , so PD is just a glue.
b) write a C++ host, that exposed parameters via the Kontrol API.

if you look closely at the OSC messages passed around, you will see that Kontrol supports the concept of multiple racks ... so you could have a UI that which controlled many 'racks' one of which was a PD , another was C++.

but really the focus was on PD , primarily because its a pretty creative platform, theres a lot of patches out there, so to be able to easily reuse these and have a common control framework was really my primary aim.

another platform that would be interesting to play with might be supercollider esp. given it already uses OSC between the sclang and scsynth

but first things first 🙂

AndyCap

Thanks for all the info.

I did look for the code on your GitHub but couldn't find it, where would I go to have a look?

thetechnobear

AndyCap
the main C++ is in MEC (sub directory mec-kontrol)
I need to move the Orac (PD) stuff over to a public repo, will do that this evening.

it was private, just to keep the 'cat in the bag', as Ive a few watching people my repos 😉

(you can actually now see all PD code, however, just by downloading from patchstorage, the zop file is just a zip 😉 )

AndyCap

Thanks, I will have a look after I have had a few pints down the pub...

discohead

@thetechnobear what's the current status of Orac on Bela Salt?

thetechnobear

not done much on it in the last few months (in fairness not much on orac at all 😉 ) , but its basically done,

https://github.com/TheTechnobear/Orac/tree/dev

though its still subject to change, when I get around to really putting it through its paces.

I'll be honest though, I was pretty disappointed when I found the general performance of bela didn't match the Organelle (see https://forum.bela.io/d/545-bela-performance) ..
whilst we talked in that thread about optimisations it was clear Id not be able to apply these to the mutable instruments code without a huge amount of work ….
then I think just after than I tried using the new remote interface over wifi and that was pretty slow, due to bela being too heavily loaded.

so the code is all there really, but I just need to review it, and really think how its going to be useful in a bela/salt context... I guess i'll just have to limit my expectations of what and how many modules it can run.

the main code base is the same as the rPI, its just how its compiled, and then a couple of particular modules, written in PD that interface to the salt cv io , so dev on the organelle/rpi will automatically get into the salt version.