#846

i’d love to have one of the encoders act as fast-forward and rewind while play = true on the TAPE page :smiley:

13 Likes
#847

Did you find a piano roll sequencer in the end?
Just finished my DYI Norns, this is the first thing I though about but can’t find one :man_shrugging:

1 Like
#848

Nope. Awake is an idea of it, but monophonic and very limited in expression (non-existent). Kria is a powerful midi sequencer, but it’s also the equivalent of a missile launch to kill a mosquito :blush: it’s like cool and all, but really makes a very straight forward thing much more messy than it needs to be.

1 Like
#849

lol i was also in that thread expressing interest in the idea of an always on buffer. it’s been an itch in the back of my head since and i finally broke down and pieced my take on the idea together from the softcut studies and various other scripts:

as mentioned above, softcut is not going to get anywhere near the the OB-4 in terms of buffer time. you get ~5 minutes at full quality stereo. but you can crank down the (sample?) rate on the first line of the code to increase the buffer time. how far you can take this is a matter of opinion. most scripts seem to tap out by .25 but honestly i was running it at .1 last night to get an hour buffer and while there is no sane context where that level of quality loss would be acceptable, it actually sounds pretty dope with certain material, prompting me to make sure “lofi” goes in the title.

this is not ‘library ready’–but it’s mostly working. posting it here in case anyone wants it anyway or wants to use it as a jumping off point.

in my mind, the next steps would be:

  • figure out, like, one higher level of abstraction for interacting with the concept of an ‘always on buffer’. when you should be allowed to rewind. how you can interact with it. (all of my bugs are related to the insanely dumb way i’m dealing with what should happen when you rewind past the start point of the buffer)
  • some concept of markers and in/out points to be able to mark sections you may want to revisit
  • use said i/o points to write the buffer to disk.
  • make it feel more ‘tapelike’, slew+direction change on scrub, rewind faster longer button is pressed, etc.
  • transport controls that scale for working with the 57 minute .1 samplerate version.
  • maybe a way to visualize the amplitude of content in a buffer to help find what you’re looking for.
  • looping + the rest of the ob-4 features.

i am going to keep working towards those things but can’t promise that i’ll actually ever finish any of them––as a part time hobbyist, the stage of coding when you’re into the “last 5% polish”–having to add more and more bandaids until you realize you have been thinking about it all wrong and need to completely change your conception of a key aspect of the script–is extremely frustrating for me, lol.

(if anyone has any tips of specific feedback on this script, would love it, obviously! first time doing anything with softcut and assuredly have done some things very wrong)

6 Likes
#850

Since I first got Norns / Crow I had a vision about linking Crows inputs to parameters in Map like you can
with a midi device. This might have been discussed before? I think this would be a nice way of further integrating Norns and eurorack.

5 Likes
#851

I have not checked how softcut works (ram i guess), but in the context of the script maybe it is okay to “write to disk” as it is same as writing with tape anyway?

#852

Continuing the tape topic, I wonder how many people use tape playback option frequently? I have not use it a single time, only recording, so I wonder maybe it is better to have record on the top of the screen for faster access? (Of course if most people use case is same)

Edit: by on the top I mean that playback is the first option on the top and record is below

1 Like
#853

I use tape a lot :slight_smile: like, every time I make something with Norns :sweat_smile:

I’ve even been kicking around a mixTape/playlist idea

5 Likes
#854

You mean you use it to “playback first” right? What is your use case?

1 Like
#855

I record with tape and also listen to tape. I consider it a critical feature of Norns. Recording and playback available at whim, allowing for layers of textures and sounds.

3 Likes
#856

I use playback very frequently, I build songs in additive layers, recording while playing back and performing new layers.

The change I would love is being able to toggle looped playback on and off.

@Justmat playlists would be cool!!!

3 Likes
#857

Sorry maybe I have not explained it more clearly, I mean that in my case i mostly use a recording feature so projecting my world to the others I think lots of people do too so I thought it might be a good idea to swap them on the screen:)

(This is comes from idea to have recording always on because I always forget to start recording:)

2 Likes
#858

Ah! I see :sweat_smile: I did misunderstand :slight_smile:

1 Like
#859

softcut is literally not designed for this sort of thing (as warned about by others here, lol) and has a bunch of other features i’m not using at all. maybe explaining my current chain would help make sense of the use case i’m working towards:

sound source (presently op-1/op-z/ipad) feeds into norns, which feeds into my newest big dumb splurge, elektron analog heat. this is set up as a soundcard for ableton (which still seems to allow you to use overbridge as a send effect even as it acts as a soundcard despite that not being an option in the elektron settings.)

so the use case for me is really just taking the pressure off to catch every “happy accident” one might find, or as noted in that other thread if you’re listening to something and think “i should sample that”, if you were running through the script, you already did.

like if you were to notice that your local least-bad iheartradio station had changed its tagline to a platitude which, the first time you heard it, sounded awkward but positive, but as it kept repeating, over and over, without any further clarification or explanation, began to take on an weirdly dystopian tone, you could go back and grab a bunch of instances of that thing:

for this case, even when i had the buffer set to run an hour i found i was rarely if ever wanting (or indeed even remembering) to scrub more than 5-10 minutes back to grab something for ableton. and honestly the saturation options on the heat mean i can run softcut at super low sample rates and still get pleasant or at least interesting results. but i am still working with a pretty limited set of sound sources which i know are going into a DAW. so i’ve kind of stumbled upon the rare use case where (to me at least) it actually makes sense to use softcut in this way.

looking at the API, possibly a more traditional version of this concept could be done with the existing tape commands (start tape on script launch, flag things to revisit in lua layer, then maybe interact with the interesting chunks via softcut?) if the tape functionally could be expanded to include commands for playing faster/slower/backwards, it would be an no brainer. but i’m in absolutely no position to comment on how that would work.

1 Like
#860

is there any way to edit clips from tape on the device (besides recording tape to tape)?

#861

depends on what you mean by edit :slight_smile:

there’s sam, which can load or record samples, manually trim them, and save it back to your tape folder.

2 Likes
#862

Have been thinking for a while that a version of timber with devoted record and playback controls on a portion of the grid would break me. Sync them to Crow clock output to seamlessly record phrases of a sequence (stop/start style) and then finger drum variations.

#863

What kind of loop length you looking for? Cheat codes sort of does this 3x and it is way fun

#864

Yeah! I’m definitely looking at it once my Norns gets back from repairs. I tried it before and was impressed but didn’t really know enough about music in general to use it in an interesting way. I think it’ll come pretty close to doing what I’m looking for – and we find out next week!

#865

Hi all,
Is there anything for Norns to make visuals on the grid?
Like this https://vimeo.com/95710911

1 Like