SpinCAD Designer 0.98 build 1030 is released.

[Digital Larry]

First significant update in 6 years!

https://github.com/HolyCityAudio/SpinCAD-Designer/releases/tag/0.98-1030

Thanks,

DL

[Vivek]

Thank you !

[amz-fx]

Thanks for all your hard work on this, DL!

Best regards, Jack

[Digital Larry]

My immediate goal is to go through it and try to make things as consistent as possible and get rid of the "debugging" outputs on blocks and actually document some of these "as yet only understood by me" features.

The envelope block, I was just looking at it and it doesn't make a lot of sense to have the attack range overlap the decay range on the two-slope.  I may isolate those ranges and see if I can display rise time on the slider instead of "filter corner frequency" which nobody understands in that context.

I was thinking about modifying the MN3011 block to have two outputs, send every other of the 6 taps to the other one if it is hooked up.  If you only hook up the one, then they all get mixed there.

None of the blocks currently use pot skipping.  I can't remember if there's a fundamental limitation there or not.  I did have an idea for a block that would be like a generic multi-head delay with 5 or 6 taps that would bring them in as you rotated the pot.  Then you could use the control panel to set the time and level for each output.

I do think occasionally about a code optimizer, but I've already outlined how to optimize the generated code manually (which is not that hard).  If people are using this for commercial purposes I think it's OK to make them do some of the heavy lifting.

I had a really wild idea last night, which would be to make the audio flow from left to right instead of top to bottom the way it does now.  Diagrams tend to be tall and skinny and go off the bottom of the screen while leaving the right half of the screen blank.

Feel free to tell me your suggestions, your hopes and dreams for the future, knowing full well that I may totally ignore them.  But I may not!  You never can tell.

DL

[Vivek]

Could you port your app to newer processors ?

[Digital Larry]

Could you port your app to newer processors ?

You mean, like a Celeron?  Anything's possible.  It's just hundreds of hours of work.  Want to help?

[deadastronaut]

excellent, good to see your back on this great bit of kit, 

thanks for your hard work and sharing man...look forward to tweaking in spincad again...cool.

[Digital Larry]

build 1032 now available!

https://github.com/HolyCityAudio/SpinCAD-Designer/releases
   
    Fixed introduced bug (build 1030) in simulator. Simulator again works whether or not scope or level viewer is enabled.     
    New "Vee" control block.
    Audio mixer blocks all have their lower level of "gain" preset at -18 dB rather than -24 dB.
    4 to 2 mixer is now based on SpinCAD builder code and is consistent with the other audio mixers.
    Revised the "Instructions" menu to put Half wave and Absa (full wave) next to each other.
    Hooked up controls to ga_demo_wah to make it actually work with SpinCAD (for internal testing).
    Cleaned up some unused imports and removed deprecated Java code for Triple-Tap delay.

[mark2]

Glad to see you're getting back into this! It's such a great tool and I think people are going to continue to benefit from it for years to come.

[Digital Larry]

I still crack up about the well known pedal maker who, back in the day (when I was first working on it and had my own forum) sent me $100 (the biggest single donation I ever got) and then publicly stated on a guitar forum that he didn't use it.  That their code was "hand crafted by a team of highly skilled engineers". 

I didn't get into it with him, but IMO "hand crafted" would imply that you wrote it fresh for every unit that was shipped.  Inevitably little foibles would creep in, some of which made those units better than the rest and subsequently highly sought after.  People would be scouring the used shops, taking them home, extracting and disassembling the code looking for those special nuggets.

I'm all for having a team of highly trained engineers available to do your bidding.  I know I've always wanted a setup like that but I just have my wife and kids and two aging cats who are more interested in snuggles.

DL

[pruttelherrie]

their code was "hand crafted by a team of highly skilled engineers". 

I didn't get into it with him, but IMO "hand crafted" would imply that you wrote it fresh for every unit that was shipped.

I agree "handcrafted" sounds weird in this context, although here I would understand it as meaning "written in bare SpinASM".

[Digital Larry]

Yeah, I knew what he meant too.  Anyway to each his own, some people want to write Spin ASM. 

For many bread and butter things that is akin to trying to do the Mona Lisa in MS Paint, but don't let me stop you.   

DL

[PRR]

> do the Mona Lisa in MS Paint
This is actually good: https://youtu.be/hb3A1TdqXug

[Digital Larry]

> do the Mona Lisa in MS Paint
This is actually good: https://youtu.be/hb3A1TdqXug

LOL I stand corrected!  It's much easier than I had imagined.

[pruttelherrie]

That video has some kind of Bob Ross quality to it! Nice.

Anyway to each his own, some people want to write Spin ASM.

Masochists?

[Digital Larry]

I wouldn't go that far.  Certainly even to optimize SpinCAD generated Spin ASM you're going to need to understand something about it.

I'd say that Spin ASM is great for the following:
- doing reverbs - since SpinCAD doesn't really have the building blocks for this
- pot skip routines - I couldn't think of a way to do it generically, as the many different ways you can use POT skips didn't lend themselves to my mental reduction approach
- tricky stuff where you're able to take advantage of a certain RAM alignment to make pointer arithmetic easier
- probably other things like tap tempo or stuff where the code is implementing "logic" in addition to DSP

DL