[Octal-dev] delay length unit choices, distro issues, etc

[Dave O'Toole]

Neil Nelson wrote:

> Although the name soxechos.c is similar to soxecho.c just released,
> this program has a decaying reverberation effect; whereas soxecho.c
> provided only 1 echo for each of the 7 echo parameter pairs used.

Neil, I'd like to thank you once again for your fabulous work. This is a
bad week for me so I haven't had time to check them out personally, but
someone did give good feedback on how they sound. :-)

* delay lengths. 

One thing I wanted to point out, that I consider very important (but
forgot to put in the docs :-) is the fact that an essential feature of
most echo/delay Buzz plugins is the ability to automatically select
delay lengths as a function of the size of a tick (sequencer row) as
well as other unit sizes. One control selects the unit size (tick,
tick/255, ms, sample, etc) and the other selects a particular value
within the range. I suspect that I can wrap this into a single "length
selector" control, but this isn't definite yet. 
But this ability to automatically calculate delays (and decays, etc) so
that they're related to ticks is very important, and I would encourage
its use in OX_API plugins. 

* questions. 

Here is a questionnaire I first wrote after Avelino posted his plugin.
I'd appreciate it if you could offer some thoughts/feedback on your
experience with OX_API. 

> 1. did you use raw OX_API, or ox_wrappers? (c or c++?)
> 2. have you been able to test it out? 
> 3. as a programmer, how does the API feel? it is easy to use? are there
> clunky parts? if you could change something about OX_API to make it
> easier to program, what would you change? 
> 4. was the API documentation good? were there any parts that weren't
> explained well? 

* distro issues. 

Neil, the system may have notified you that several of your recent posts
had to wait for list admin approval because they text was too large. I
didn't mind doing this, but it does remind me that mailing lists aren't
the best way to distribute software :-). 

For legal reasons it would be a real pain to have them distributed
through GNU itself, because they're by many different authors who may
need release from "work owns my code" agreements with their employers
(this is made worse by the fact that some of these are ported.) So,
several options are before us:

1. you could put your plugins up at your webpage/ftp site, and I would
link to them from the Octal page as a directory of "octal people". This
would also be a fine stopgap solution, because I would like to start
putting up the names/homepages of people who are developing with
OX_API... sort of a community-building thing. 

2. octalmachines.sourceforge.net (this is a nice idea, anyone know how
much of a headache it would be to allow anonymous/multiple checkins?)

3. someone offers some hosting space / ftp for a quick+dirty repository. 

-- 
@@@ david o'toole
@@@ address@hidden
@@@ www.gnu.org/software/octal