Re: big picture stuff (was re: widget)

[Matthew Itkin]

> 2. I'm going to include a section with guidelines on making machines. I
> feel this is important, since machines become part of your song when you
> save. If the new version of a machine breaks the parameter format, your
> song might become unusable. (This happened to me with Buzz machines, as
> well as doing things like installing Buzz on a new computer and not being
> able to load any of my songs, and not being able to find machines when I
> needed them.)

This is a great idea for making OCTAL a more complete alternative to standard 
modules like XMs.  If you could just load any OCTAL file into a standard type 
of OCTAL player without needing to go and collect hundreds of machines, that 
would certainly simplifiy things.  But, then if you are including all the code 
for all those machines in the track, that track would be rediculously large.  
Especially when you take into account wave storage.  Tracks would be larger 
than the MP3s would be, and then they arent really good for net transfer.  My 
Buzz .BMXs are bigger than the MP3s of the same tracks for the most part 
already.  Most of the machines will likely be pretty small in compiled form, 
but some of them might not be.  DrumMachines with hundreds of little drum 
samples in them would be a real pain-in-the-arse if you had to save them in 
your tracks.  I dont want 800 some copies of the same tracker or drum machine 
or anything on my system, so please make the option to save machines inside the 
track optional.  In Buzz its already optional to not save wave-files inside of 
the track, and thats a nice option too.  Saves me disk space, but I rarely use 
it cuz I fear I will delete the wave and then lose my track.  I can understand 
your fear of updating a machine and then basically losing your track due to an 
incompatability, but thats more due to sloppy development in my opinion.  We 
should make a new convention for OCTAL in which if you change the paramaters, 
you change the module name, even if only slightly.  So, Octal_Tracker would 
become Octal_Tracker_2 if you added new paramaters or change paramaters around.

As for not being able to find machines when you need them, I think that we are 
a bit more organized than the Buzz dude was.  We should just have a 
standardized database of machines that can be accessed from within OCTAL. So 
when you load up OCTAL, and it says "I dont have Octal_Tracker_8000" it will 
also say "would you like me to download Octal_Tracker_8000 from the Octal 
Database?"  You could even have it check the database to tell people when new 
machines are out and when their machine is in for an update etc.  I think this 
would be pretty easy to do.  I should be less lazy and make the web-end of the 
databse in PHP and MySQL myself, but Im so busy making music. :P

anyway these are just my thoughts.

-Matthew Itkin