freeform jam with brennewt

freeform jam with craigbrenjoshdanchr

freeform jam with brenchr

freeform jam with bidersteve

brenchr - 1 -- [4:12]
brenchr - 2 -- [111:27]

chr - 1 -- [25:43]
chr - 2 -- [24:14]

kevwienercraig - 1 -- [37:45]
kevwienercraig - 2 -- [9:51]
kevwienercraig - 3 -- [34:39]
kevwienercraig - 4 -- [13:46]

loopgayness

freeform jam with biderman

freeform jam with brenfritz

somenewloopinpoo

freeform jam with fritz

freeform jam with craig
ebola-edit
ebola

freeform jam with kevin

(9/10 on the boring scale)

So I just spent the last day or two (I honestly can't remember) getting Jesusonic to run on OS X/x86. I already had it running on OS X/PPC, so I figured it would be easy. Wrooong...

Jesusonic works by compiling code on the fly into native assembly. It actually does this by glueing together stubs of functions (the most critical which are written in assembly for each platform) into code that it can execute. Overall the code it generates is not terribly optimized, but it's definitely not slow either.

So this is what I found in porting JS.

1) the compiler bitched about my assembly code trashing EBX. Turns out, EBX is used for position independent code (PIC) addressing. So I figured I should probably not be messing with EBX, and that the OS needed it. With a bit of additional work on the compile side I got it to not use EBX, but in the end it turned out that EBX only really needs to be preserved within functions that use it, and for my uses I really could use it. Oh well. Time wasted, but hey kinda useful. Stuff still wasnt working right.

2) Many of the assembly stubs for particular functions needed to call C code, whether it be a C library function like pow(), or some of our own code (FFTs, file reading, accessing memory, etc). Since GCC was generating my functions as PIC, the extended assembly syntax failed to assemble (ending up with assembly like "movl ((symbolname-$LABELBLAHBLAH(%ebx))), %edi", etc. So turns out MY compile step needs to actually go generate absolute addresses at runtime, instead of at compile time. Fair enough, that took an hour or so, and a bunch of testing/fixing to make sure that nothing broke.

3) And this was the big bitch, and it took me a long time to figure out. Turns out, and this is well documented, you have to keep the stack aligned to 16 bytes. I would call pow(), and it would end up trying to do an sse load/store at an unaligned address, and things would proceed to blow up. So I had to go update all of my stubs and functions to keep the stack nicely aligned, which is probably not a bad idea anyway. Once I finally got them all correct, I tried it out, and... IT still didn't work. So I ended up spending a lot of time with GDB (Xcode's debugger won't let me see registers, argh), and figured out that, indeed, the stack was aligned when I called my generated, code, but no, the stack wasn't aligned when it got to pow().

After changing some build settings, I found that with -O0, it did in fact work. So then I did some gcc -S -O0 file.c and gcc -S -O2 file.c and compared the generated code for the assembly stubs, and it seems that with -O2, gcc itself would let the stack get unaligned , as long as my stub wasn't obviously calling another function.

I looked for a long time to see if I could disable this in gcc, and I gave up, so on OS X/x86 Jesusonic will have this code for each stub:

pushl %ebp
movl %esp, %ebp
andl $-16, %esp

(run code)

leave

that way, whenever I call out, I can ensure that the stack is aligned, no matter what kind of crap GCC is generating for the function.

The better way of dealing with this would probably be to write these functions in assembly directly, or improve the code that cuts up the stubs to have it filter out the stack frame setup that GCC produces anyway, but hell I'm too lazy and this works and it's reasonably fast enough as it is. And most importantly, I get to get back to the fast, satisfying building of UI and porting of easy things.

4 Comments

In August I began cleaning up REAPER's source code, and began separating the platform-specific code (mostly UI) from the mostly-portable code. Ten days ago, after 3 months of doing that while also adding new features and releasing new Windows versions every few days, I began spending a great deal of time actually writing a bunch of Cocoa code so that we could have it run on OS X.

It has gone very well, expect some preview version around Christmas.

I love it when this stuff goes faster than I had expected. I'm going to detail some of my experiences here.

There's a lot to like about programming on OS X, but there's also plenty of idiocy.

CAUTION-Boring programming discussion follows. These are mostly things that I have sort of, but not completely correctly, working.

For example, if you wish to draw text, there are countless ways to do it, and at least for what I wanted to do (emulate DrawText for our GDI emulation layer), I still haven't found a way that works as I want. The first way I tried was using CGContextShowText, which worked, except the only way I could find to measure the text before, or after drawing it didn't seem to work (using CGContextSetTextDrawingMode with kCGTextClip to modify the clip path, then get the bounding rectangle of that). So without any way to measure the rendered text, I had to find another way. I could use NSAttributedString to draw, but the first problem is that I wanted to supprot drawing to an arbitrary CGContext, which may or may not be the "active" context. Then, suggested to me, was to use Carbon's HIThemeDrawTextBox etc, which isn't really documented at all (other than in the header file and some examples). HIThemeDrawTextBox works, except the font I selected using CGContextSelectFont isn't used. It appears I could use some other API to set the font, but I havent spent that much time on that. Why can't there just a be a simple, working way?! At least win32's DrawText just works (though I hear the internals are a nightmare).

OK I won't go too much more into those sort of things. The good things are some things are just easier. Anytime you want to modify the behavior of something, it's WAY easier, since you can do a simple objective C subclass, rather than having to do the tricky hacks we do in Windows. Porting the customizable keyboard code to OS X took an hour or so. Getting it to work originally on Windows took many times that.

Rendering with Quartz just looks nice, too. The plain Windows GDI calls just look harsh and cruddy in comparison.

Here's an interesting challenge: on Windows, REAPER renders its play cursor (the line that moves constantly with playback) by using XOR drawing. It renders it by flipping all of the bits in the line, then when it needs to erase the cursor (in order to draw it in the new position), it can just XOR again. Win32 makes this available by using DrawFocusRect(). Anyway, on OS X this isn't possible, to my knowledge, because the system handles so much of the drawing process. I didn't want to be responsible for updating any of our track view at 30fps+, so I had to come up with another solution. After some experimentation, I found that you could create a new NSWindow, make it a child of the main window, and move it around as the play cursor. And it works, the system handles redrawing the track view, from its cached rendered version, so it's FAST, probably hardware accelerated, and you can do neat things with the alpha channel of the cursor. The verdict: while you can't do oldschool things like XOR drawing, you can do things sexier.

So to aid porting, I've created a new part of WDL (our general reusable code library, pronounced "whittle"), called SWELL (Small Windows Emulation Layer Library or something). So far it emulates (at an API level), portions of the Windows GDI, menu API, MessageBox, ini file (GetPrivateProfileString etc), and a bit more. Eventually we'll probably BSD license SWELL, too.

One interesting thing in SWELL is a set of macros and small functions that let us paste in menu definitions from a .rc into a C++ source file and have it generate a HMENU for it. Fun use of the C preprocessor, if you ask me.

Anyway, this is all challenging, and as a result, mostly fun.

I previously said I was planning on writing an article on coding style etc, and while I haven't gotten around to finishing it, I'll go ahead and discuss some of it.

1) If you program, and you're working on something that you expect to be working on for more than a couple hours, use version control. The benefits are countless. Safety, yes, but also, it gives you the ability to easily see everything you've done (if you're religious about checking your code in often), and even more importantly (to me), it lets you diff and review your changes before checking in. I do this all of the time, to make sure everything I did was everything I wanted, and that I didnt fuck anything up.

2) Don't be afraid to let things get messy. A very common (and valid) sentiment in programming is to avoid "premature optimization", where the programmer spends too much time too early on some part which may or may not even need it, introducing complexity for the sake of possible speed improvements etc. I don't hear people say this much, but I think you should take the same stance on organization. If you're programming software, and you need to add some new function for some task, don't be afraid to just toss it in near where you need it, and see what happens. Don't go creating tons of new files every time you need them. Moving code around for organization later is easy, and if you don't do it too soon, you'll a) stay focused, and b) save time in the event that the code you added wasn't used. Which brings us to the next point:

3) Don't be afraid to toss out code that you've written. Sometimes you have some problem and code a solution for it, and at the end of it, you just don't like it. If you don't like it, and think you could do it better the second time, do it the second time.

4) Going back to point #2, don't obsess from the beginning about reusability. Write code that you need, and once you're using it and see how you actually need to reuse it, then go make it reusable.

5) Finally, evolve your code. Getting something to the point of limping is the hardest part, so you should try to get to it as fast as possible. Once you're there, progress is much faster. It's like waiting for a minute to pass. If you look at a clock with a seconds hand, it goes quick, but if you just stare into space, it takes forever. Get to the point where you can see progress, then enjoy it (and test your work often).

More later, perhaps...

I added a super simple thing to prevent spam on these comments, and it has worked perfectly. We'll see how long that lasts...

12 Comments

brenchr - 1 -- [105:47]
brenchr - 2 -- [20:47]

freeform jam with brenjoshshawnjoncraignewt

freeform jam with brenchr

I wish I could say that this whole time was spent on vacation, but unfortunately it wasn't. We did have a fantastic time in England for our friends Jonathan (ha) and Catherine's (ha ha) wedding, but when we got back, after a few days rest, I got hit by a nasty something, so I've been out of commission this past week. I seem to be coming back to normal, finally...

It's been nearly a week (if I get through tomorrow it will be a full week) since I've had coffee. What should I do? I like coffee so much, but I often feel so at its mercy. It also pains me that one of the top coffee establishments in the city moved into our block. I can't live here and not get their delicious nectar! Can I?

A year ago today I started at full speed on REAPER. I had done about 5 hours worth of stuff a couple months before, but decided at this point last year that it was time. Whee. It keeps getting better and better. We'll have to do something special sometime, maybe around Christmas since that was the first public release.

Umm what else? I should update this more. Oh yes my coding guide, well, I may just do a little chapter at a time, cause I wrote a bunch of it and it's all pretty incoherent and wordy, so I better spread it out a lot. Maybe I'll do the first paragraph in a post soon.

11 Comments

funwithmidi

freeform jam with brennewtshort

brenchrnewt - 1 -- [15:00]
brenchrnewt - 2 -- [44:46]
brenchrnewt - 3 -- [7:23]

freeform jam with kevin

...begins. Hand feeling a lot better, yay.

When I get back, I'll likely finish and post an article on coding style and methodology that someone convinced me to start...

8 Comments

chr - 1 -- [28:40]
chr - 2 -- [7:54]

freeform jam with bidermanmoogfun

time to take a few weeks off. it's been a productive 11 months...

Recordings:

kevin - 1 -- [21:04]
kevin - 2 -- [10:15]

5 Comments

freeform jam with shawnjon

birthdaypartypoo - 1 -- [12:58]
birthdaypartypoo - 2 -- [28:05]
birthdaypartypoo - 3 -- [54:30]
birthdaypartypoo - 4 -- [32:21]

friday the thirteenth

brenchr - 1 -- [124:17]
brenchr - 2 -- [4:46]

funwithspeed

freeform jam with brenchr

shitdrumrec

craig - 1 -- [2:30]
craig - 2 -- [39:41]
craig - 3 -- [27:39]

brenchrdan - 1 -- [38:17]
brenchrdan - 2 -- [31:13]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BRENNAN!!!

Whee too many margaritas... Where to begin...

Damn, 20 versions since my last post.

Propellerheads finally responded and have since been responsive (though it took them 6 whole months to get there, ick), so ReWire will be in REAPER 1.21, yay! Overall I'm still very excited, and every day this feeling continues and/or grows. Christophe is working on something that will be VERY exciting for a lot of people, and I'm still planning on (though lately slacking on) the mac port.

Something I have to say is that I waited WAY too long to make REAPER support user-skinnable icons. Doing this got a few people making some AWESOME artwork, such as this, and required very little effort on my part (ok well a day of work or so). Note to self: next time just make it easy to switch icons out (on the fly) from the beginning.

Here are a couple of songs that David Wiener and I made (using REAPER, mostly), that I dig:

A Little Pop Will Save Us All (for a good time, listen closely to the lyrics)

Love Somebody

Anyway, until next time!

4 Comments

freeform jam with kevin

brenchr - 1 -- [51:57]
brenchr - 2 -- [79:16]
brenchr - 3 -- [33:47]

freeform jam with brenchr

brenbidernewtx2 - 1 -- [124:17]
brenbidernewtx2 - 2 -- [7:58]

kevin - 1 -- [4:37]
kevin - 2 -- [62:30]

freeform jam with newtnewtchr

poopieditty

newhornless
tromboning alone

freeform jam with brenchrjosh

freeform jam with brennewt

...showing how I've spent the better part of a year.

Yay for evolutionary software development.

Recordings:

freeform jam with chrnewtmayor

12 Comments

booga

brenchr - 1 -- [22:05]
brenchr - 2 -- [76:51]

freeform jam with craigbiderstetc

So apparently I can only manage to update this once a month or so. Phew. REAPER 1.0 beta 0 is out. Yay. Some of the things that I did recently with it made my head hurt, but now it seems to have turned out pretty well. yay.

I'll save dumping the things I've been irritated with here for later, I gotta run now for a day or two.

9 Comments

alone
freeform jam with brenchr

bider - 1 -- [60:56]
bider - 2 -- [9:41]

freeform jam with brenchr

freeform jam with brenkev

tangoofballs-work

brenchrnewt - 1 -- [53:10]
brenchrnewt - 2 -- [43:32]

freeform jam with bidercraigstewart

freeform jam with brenchr

So we had an apparent power outage where this box is the other night, and since then shit's been wonky.. either someone is DoSing us, or something about the first reboot in 4 months seems to have made this box lose network connectivity. ugh. Either way, it's completely balls.

So tired of coming in to restart it...

:wq

5 Comments

freeform jam with bidernewtchrcole

oopssupermonkeyball

chrnewt - 1 -- [28:27]
chrnewt - 2 -- [63:51]

freeform jam with brennewt

brenchr - 1 -- [3:20]
brenchr - 2 -- [85:24]

brenchr - 1 -- [74:51]
brenchr - 2 -- [31:34]

foolingaround
sadsong

freeform jam with brenchrconcertforparents

I guess I let a month go by without updating. I've just been having a good time, what with all of the typing.. I'm still excited about REAPER, so shit's good.

I've been writing FX plug-ins for REAPER lately, too.. ReaGate is nearly done, ReaComp is almost working, ReaFir (FFT EQ) is nearly done, and ReaVerb is underway. ReaVerb will be a convolution based reverb, and will offer support for loading of impulses from files, as well as generating impulses from parameters, and combining and modifying any of those impulses.. I'm thinking of it like an AVS for convolution..

We (Christophe and I) decided that our goal for 1.0 release is sometime in August, which shouldn't be too hard to hit-- lots of work, but relatively straightforward. There are a few things that need to be done that I'm not quite sure how they will get done, but I'm confident enough that we'll figure it out...

14 Comments

freeform jam with brenchrjonnewtbidermikewen

freeform jam with brenchr

bditty

freeform jam with brenewtchr

freeform jam with brenchr
freeform jam with brenchrfrancisjosh

freeform jam with brenchr

biderman - 1 -- [37:29]
biderman - 2 -- [24:39]

brennewtkevcole - 1 -- [11:00]
brennewtkevcole - 2 -- [73:43]
freeform jam with newtonkevin

Can I just reiterate (really quick before I go to bed) how terrible the DXi and VSTi SDKs are? They make it impossible for people to write solid hosts, and make for tons of lousy plugins that don't handle any host that isn't PERFECT. All they need is better documentation and developer discussion (so developers of hosts can know what plug-ins use to do things, and developers of plug-ins can know what hosts are doing). For example, after one email from the developer of jamstix, I got it working in REAPER. If only the FL Studio devs would mail me (who am I kidding, but I'd love to be proven wrong)...

Since we're still waiting to hear back from Propellerheads on the Rewire SDK, we may just have to do something of our own to add rewire-like functionality. Perhaps we can call it ReaRoute, and perhaps it will work with tons of other software, without them having to do a thing. Mmmmm. Lots of code to write.

It just pisses me off to no end how all of these audio software companies don't care about their users. They care about them, but keeping them just happy enough to get some of their money. Fuck that.

6 Comments

freeform jam with chr

pointlesspooonyourhands

freeform jam with brenbidercraig

...that the rain stopped.

I think I need a few more days of not coding. Must... regenerate.. brain...

11 Comments

freeform jam with brenewtbider
cheapodrumditty

brenchr - 1 -- [64:10]
brenchr - 2 -- [60:07]
brenchr - 3 -- [25:23]

freeform jam with biderkevin
odetomack

freeform jam with brenchr
newdoodie

...where to begin. Tom got married last weekend. Was one hell of a fun weekend. I was a bit worried it would be too uncomfortable, out among the orange trees, but the weather turned out great, Brennan and Isabelle brought an RV, and we all had a good time (and punched oranges).

Got to fly the little RC heli out there too, which was fun.. so when I got back I finally installed the upgraded symmetrical rotors, new motor and heatsinks, and LiPO battery and voltage alarm. Flew it inside today, though didnt do anything fancy since I'm not that good yet.

I heard back from Mackie, with a response that stupified and angered me. They only license documentation for the MCU under NDA to select companies (as in, not us). They don't seem to care about their customers, just their own (less than obvious to me) interests. I can only hope I don't get the same nonsense from Propellerheads, because I think people using REAPER will want Rewire more than full MCU support anyway (REAPER already supports the MCU somewhat, but without doing a lot more research it can't do all the fancy things that the MCU is capable of). Sigh. The pain of trying to enter a market that is very established and saturated. But I'm only mildly deterred. If Propellerheads *does* dick me around, I will do one of two things-- either go to Stockholm and try to convince them with beer (though don't get any ideas, guys), or just do what I've been meaning to for a while, and port JACK to Windows.

Speaking of Windows, after BootCamp was released, Steve convinced me to get (at a discount at least) a MacBook Pro. So I did. For running OS X it's pretty good, but as a Windows XP laptop it really kinda sucks. There's a few driver issues that need fixing (no backlit keyboard in windows, sound always goes out speakers, using the built in camera causes BSoD, etc), but the big hardware issue is that the Mac keyboard is lacking keys. Specifically: insert and backspace(delete). I did find some good 3rd party utility that does help a lot allows all sorts of remapping, and enabled the mac's FN key. And finally, the thing gets HOT. I guess that's to be expected with 2x 2ghz cores, but still. I got spoiled by my little Sony's 1ghz P-M that runs nice and cool (and granted, slow).

Oh yes, and southpark this week was SO awesome.

Recordings:

notthefirsttimealone

9 Comments

freeform jam with robnewton

kevinbrennan - 1 -- [29:59]
kevinbrennan - 2 -- [53:47]

...while the MSO (think LSB/MSB) is out of town. As it has been at least a couple of weeks since an update I suppose I shall give updates.

Umm, lots of work on reaper done, lots more to do. Added pitch shifting/timestretch, using SoundTouch, which makes it very nearly done, on a purely feature-based scale, the main other thing needed being MIDI editing.

I went to LA to meet with one of REAPER's biggest evangelists, where it was used in a relatively well known studio:

(to make music which, while I didn't like, I am secretly hoping for huge commercial success, to give REAPER that extra bit of legitimacy. note: the laptop was just being used as a remote display to a beefy dual opteron on the floor. the reason it is there is that while the speakers in the room were great, the studios, for whatever reasons, like having the computers in places you can't hear the speakers. duh.)

When I added SMP support to REAPER I discovered the the Waves plug-ins (at least version 5) have real issue with running separate instances on multiple processors simultaneously. All of the other plug-ins I've tried work great, but when running with Waves on an SMP system, if two instances end up processing at the same time, BOOM, it crashes. I even narrowed it down to what the code looked like (it was a function that seemed to just convert double to float), and sent them an email asking to see if they had any ideas or if they would fix. That was 10 days ago or so, and they haven't responded. I ended up just detecting "Waves" and doing a critical section around that, as a hack. LAME.

Which brings me to my next bitchpoint. People expect support for software they pay for, yet software people pay thousands of dollars for, they get crappy ass support. WTF?

Spent some time debugging problems relating to some systems (some versions of MSVCRT?) enabling floating point exceptions that are supposed to be off by default. So now I turn a lot of them on when debugging, and off on release builds. Ugh.

Have a request in to Mackie to get the real MCU documentation so I can add full support for it, waiting (though it hasnt been THAT long).

Have a request in to Propellerheads for the Rewire SDK. Been a week or two, still waiting.

anyway, now to go see why SoundTouch has to require MSVCP60.dll, assuming it is STL or something. (update: yep, updated in .931, bla bla bla)

Recordings:

brenbidernewtonmayor - 1 -- [11:55]
brenbidernewtonmayor - 2 -- [113:38]
brenbidernewtonmayor - 3 -- [72:21]

4 Comments

freeform jam with brenchr

brenchr - 1 -- [6:48]
brenchr - 2 -- [38:21]

mandolinditty

freeform jam with bidercraig

So I managed to hack SMP support into reaper today. Turns out the initial getting-of-it-working was easier than I once feared, since I had a nice track buffering system already built for the send system. Now the tedious part, making everything work as expected, I just know there are going to be tons of very small things off that will make everybody very unhappy at some point or another. I could go off on a rant on how you give people millions of bits, and if only one bit is wrong...

I've been busy as of late, moving my office/workshop to a new place here in SF, but as it settles down I think I'll be getting back into the groove more (though in all honesty I do seem to end up programming way more than is probably good for me).

At this point I'm still excited about reaper, though I am also getting a touch burnt out. We're coming up on 4 months of work! Let's see, aside from fixing tons of crap, the real things left for 1.0 are midi editing and event pitch/stretch. mmmm. How long will it take? Another 3 months? MIDI editing is a problem I've only gotten far enough in thinking about to fear it, since a good MIDI editor is going to be a very extensive bit of design...

Before I go, here's an mp3 that I just rendered, that was me piling on as many effects as possible, to test how great SMP is. What was particularly enjoyable is that I went to render it to disk (which is still single-threaded), and it went at 0.7x realtime. Yay, this makes me REALLY love my Athlon64x2.

Recordings:

freeform jam with brenchr

10 Comments