motionLoop is out

    Julien Bloit
    Oct 27 2012 | 2:12 am
    Hi, I'm excited to release my first m4l device. "motionLoop" draws inspiration from Scott Snibbe's Motion Phone, Len Lye's Particles in Space, and the Lemur controller. I started this device as a project to explore control visualization in max, and thought it would be a good fit for M4L too. I feel like this is in beta stage since there's plenty of features that could be added, and maybe plenty of unexpected crashes too.
    Anyway, I'm happy to get as much feedback as I can at this point : you can watch a screencast and freely download the device on the project's page : http://jbloit.com/2012/10/motionloop
    On the programming side I've struggled a bit with jit.pwindow and jsui in M4L before switching back to LCD for the UI. Also the device loads an mxj external (through a jar) that I couldn't figure how to freeze effectively. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated!
    Thank you! Julien
    • spectro
      Oct 27 2012 | 2:56 pm
      Cool Device. Thanks for posting. Haven't used it much yet, but the first thoughts that arise are: Do you intend (or have) any documentation (even if just with the built-in tooltip help in live). Also 'longer' gestures seem to get truncated to the last portion (couple of seconds or whatever). And it's not yet clear to me how the scale gets played. If you're looking for requests (or demands!) for features: Mute/Solo of layers (or channels, voices or whatever you prefer to call them) and separate quantisation for each layer would be nice.
      Cheers...
    • Julien Bloit
      Oct 27 2012 | 9:59 pm
      Hi Spectro, thanks for testing.
      I'm not sure whether the gesture truncation you see is either a bug or a feature : it is intended for the gesture to be looped after one bar. If you start a new gesture in the middle of a bar the end of it might get cropped if you continue for too long. Does that explain what you experienced or do you think it was something else?
      The scales : each layer controls five particles and each of them trigger note events : the scale multislider can specify a different note for each of the particles. Each of the five bars in the multislider represents an interval from the current layer's midinote value to the corresponding particle's note value. Is it clearer, or did I miss the point of your question?
      You're right, I'll try to document this version a little more. Thanks for the features suggestions, the separate quantisation for each layer is already on my todo list for the next version.
      Julien