BulkDump

Sometimes I kind of forget my blog. Sorry about that, I’ve never been good at keeping journals. Especially now that I disabled usage of any links in comments. Was getting like 10 spams into moderation queue per day, so I added few keywords into the blacklist, and now almost forgot my blog because it’s been so quiet after that. Hehe.

My cat created small accident couple of days ago. Shame I didn’t take picture, but I was more concerned about the Tascam US-2400 at that time. My other cat, Viivi, jumped over the Tascam US-2400 quite hard and it dropped from the spider stand. I just heard crash and went to see what happened; there it was, one end of US-2400 in my cat’s soft bed and the other end pointing up to the ceiling, the controller was leaning towards the stand. Fortunately it survived the crash unharmed, not even a scratch. It’s really quite well built with metal casing. However the cat bed suffered slightly, but nothing too big. Now I’ve positioned the controller slightly better, so this should not happen again. Now Viivi is sleeping in her favourite place - on top of my amplifier (it’s warm) and next to Genelec 8040A. I sometimes wonder how she can sleep there, Genelec playing directly to her ear. I guess it sounds that good

Now the real subject I was thinking about to write about. That is overhauling the Orion’s MIDI input and output handling into something more “modern”. There are some issues and big limitations with the current implementation which I’d like to get rid off. Considering the MIDI input might crash Orion very randomly when deleting generator you’re controlling with MIDI controller at the same time. Hopefully 7.2 fixes that, but the quick fix most likely affects the performance a bit. Not to mention the limitations; for example motorized controllers don’t work, no endless knob support, no customizable transport controls. Midiout is limited to assigned 4 parameters, no real deal with Midimaps. Oh, and no sysex support or automateable program change events.

I know Orion was not originally designed to support those, it was mainly ment to be software virtual studio. However time has gone forward and we’d atleast need support for motorized/touch sensitive controllers and some special controllers such as Novation Remote SL. Some have asked for Mackie HUI protocol support as well. My personal needs go forward with US-2400 native support and better Midiout to support several hardware synthesizers.

I’ve tried to think ways to implement all this with the easy-to-use Orion way. I’ve done some industry “spying” by taking a look at Cubase, Sonar, Reason, Logic and few others. They all work a bit similar way, you setup your enviroment and tell what kind of controllers you have available. For special controllers there exists presets, possibly with some special functionality programmed in. Such as HUI or US-2400 would need for time displays and VU meters and other status leds. I was thinking something into this direction with few quirks. By default there probably would be chosen port assigned as Generic Midi controller, which would be corresponding to midi input and output ports Orion has now.

I also would like to close the gap between Midi-out synthesizer and Midi-in controller, after all, all are just devices. What I don’t want to do is to go to Cubase way of using midi recording. It’s just so confusing. What I’d like to get rid of from Orion is the Easy/Advanced midi mode selection. One mode is enough with best of both worlds. Mixer surface controllers support with automatic mappings to Orion’s mixer. Automatic knob assignments to generators (VSTs too). Yet, leave all that learning assigment support, modwheel is the universal controller . I really don’t want to see CCs and other stuff when making music, when I left tracker programs behind, I wanted to leave numbers and hex codes behind too.

Maybe some of you have ideas how it should work? I have quite clear picture about it (a lot of it not listed here), but it’s mainly guided with my way of working in my studio. I wouldn’t mind having some discussion about this, you never know if it brings up some good ideas I haven’t though about yet.

Happy christmas for all of you!

I wrapped some last presents for my sisters and tomorrow (well today if being precise) it’s quite traditional christmas day atleast for our family. Some rice porridge (one almond hidden in it, who get’s it can make a wish) for breakfast and then my sisters and I make fruit salad for the evening. No turkey, but ham, potatos and the secret sauce recipe by my mother. After eating santa claus comes and gives the presents (don’t tell my little sister that it’s just me in disguise). I wonder what he’s giving for me this year..?

Other than that I’ve been fixing tons of bugs from Orion in the last few days. I’ll put up new beta for the testers and maybe they have some free time to test in the next few days before I can get back to do some work again.

So Orion Platinum was released couple of days ago. All went pretty nicely considering the size of the upgrade. Few small issues already reported, but nothing serious what couldn’t wait for next release. One user had problems with Wine (that is Linux) and Orion, but I was able to fix that problem and provide a patch for him. If someone has crash problems when starting Orion and preventing Orion startup, I can provide the same patch, but otherwise the fix will be on next release.

Next will be the Orion Pro 7.1. All of the fixes Platinum 7.1 upgrade should be in Pro too (except for the things not already in Pro of course).

What’s after that someone might ask. Infact we have created list of all requested and insane ideas and that list needs to be sorted out. Most likely next upgrade will address the long due Midiout and handling of Midi devices for better support of hardware synthesizers and different midi controllers (ie. motorized controllers). Atleast those are important for me personally. After all I do have 10 hardware synthesizers and that Tascam US-2400 controller here.

As in my earlier post I told I was installing Virtual PC and Windows 98. Luckily I was able to sort out the problems with some Windows 98 driver reinstallations. Orion works great, although maybe slightly slow, but that’s understandable. Now the problem Orion was having was that we updated the ReWire installer on Orion installer (people have been having problems on ReWire not working - but now it should). Seems the latest ReWire 1.7 doesn’t work with Windows 98 and crashes right away when ReWire host is initialized. It’s been solved now by the installer so that it will use older ReWire.dll for those legacy Windows’.

Orion 7.1 getting closer

Seems there’s some problems with Orion and Windows 98SE. Honestly people should already forget those old Windows’. Those just don’t cut anymore on driver support and are very problematic for programmer, especially if you’d want to use new features of Windows XP and later. I don’t know if WDM works that well on 98SE, ie. the DirectMIDI interfaces in DirectX for better MIDI.

Officially Orion Platinum/Pro doesn’t support Windows 95/98/Me anymore, but right now the problem is probably just something small. So, I downloaded the free Microsoft Virtual PC and I’m installing now Windows 98SE into it. I didn’t remember how horrible the installation was.. having tons of problems. First it didn’t work at all with larger virtual harddisk and then it lost the installation CD-rom and couldn’t install all dlls and files, so several errors when starting up the Windows. I just hope I can solve those quickly or this experiment takes too much time

Overall must say it’s very pervertic to see Windows 98 running in a window.

Good news is that beta team hasn’t reported any bigger problems with 7.1 beta (except for few problems which might not be put to 7.1 if I can’t get them fixed soon), so it maybe out sooner you think … !