intermorphic.com Blog

Yes folks, we are making good progress. I am working on some news skins, and have found that Fireworks is getting me some pretty good results (and webslices help with scaling and exporting). It is hard to say much, as we are still in the thick of it, but I can admit to being excited by Mixtikl .

It promises to be a lot of fun on a mobile device, and I know that ‘cos of miniMIXA 3 that never made it out.

Anyhow, we still have a ways to go before we can start saying more….

Yes, we getting back into developing mobile applications. We really can’t say too much at present, but we will be getting generative music onto mobile (that means noatikl!), as well as some other music apps we hope people find interesting. Although we are excited about what we are working on deep under cover at im labs, we know most people wont have a clue what we are on about. We can but apologise for that, but in our defence we hope you will enjoy playing with what we are cooking up . It might take a while yet to see the light of day, but that is just because what we are working on represents a lot of work.

Yes, on the weekend I finally figured out how to transition the forum from phpBB2 to phpBB3 - and the forum is “fixed”. phpBB3 seems a lot more powerful and phpBB2, but that also means lots more features and settings to get to grips with…

We added a new section “practikl”, which is related to a self-help community for mobile music making products (e.g. hardware). The idea to do this came about from the success of the MicroBR forum. Whether it is something people will want to see developed - or not - only time will tell! See: http://forum.intermorphic.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=393

We are trying to update the intermorphic forum to phpBB3, but are having some problems. Something we have done has somehow caused the existing phpBB2.0.0.22 forum to stop working - and we don’t yet know what has caused this.

The message that you are likely to see when you try to access the forum is “message_die() was called multiple times. This isn’t supposed to happen. Was message_die() used in page_tail.php?”. Well, we don’t know what this means or what has caused it.

We took a backup before trying to get moving with the update, but even if we reload the backup we get this problem (sound of head scratching going on). We have put a mail into Yahoo in case it is something on their side, and we will keep thinking.

Sorry for the “outage”! We hope to get the forum back to normal soon!

Tim

Well, that was hard work, but we’ve now got noatikl 1.5 out of the door.

This is a major new development for us, as it completes an arc of development that has been going on for many months now, and has increased the power of noaitkl greatly. The plan was threefold:
- give noatikl pieces the ability to incorporate internally generated structure
- give noatikl the ability to respond to MIDI input events
- introduce a fast, flexible, easy-to-use scripting system to bind it all together!

So: on one hand, we’ve added the ability to control noatikl from within, with (optional!) Lua trigger scripts that fire while the piece is playing. The effect on noatikl is quite incredible. It is especially gratifying to see users who are self-confessed ’scriptaholics’ test-driving the new features, and finding that it totally transforms their ability to control noatikl in the way they want.

On the other hand, noatikl can now be controlled in real-time in response to incoming MIDI controller events. Not only that, but noatikl automatically harmonises with incoming MIDI note events; and those note events can be used to trigger various responses within noatikl using the scripting engine. noatikl can now fairly be described as a hyperinstrument!

What next? Well, for starters we have plans to greatly improve the pattern handling within noatikl. That should keep us busy.

Pete

In case you’re interested, in addition to adding Lua-based scripting to noatikl, I’ve been using the same scripting engine in prototyping optikl, the generative visual art program we hope to release some time.

To help optikl and our other products go wherever we want, including maybe to mobile, I’ve written a common graphics library adaptor layer that sits on top of SDL, Juce and what have you. So this will let us, in future, write our apps once and simply recompiling them for whatever the target platform might be, without the need for any major rewrites.

Pete

As a follow-up to Tim’s post on his fun with Asio4All, I’ve found the easiest solution on my MacBook and Mac Mini was to get a really cheap Firewire low-latency audio box, that works with both Windows XP and Mac OS X. This was the Behringer FCA202. There are lots of really cheap offers for this in the webstores right now, and it is a tremendous piece of kit!

I’ve been using this to work on ideas for the noatikl hyperinstrument and MIDI-control features.

For that matter, I wonder if we should use the term “hyperinstrument” or “hyper instrument”. I’ll stick with the first spelling, unless anybody can tell me otherwise!

Pete

For those of you who are keeping up with developments at intermorphic Towers, we sure had a lot of fun getting our new web store live - believe it or not, we finally got it running late on Christmas Eve. It was nice to be able to enjoy Christmas with that out of the way…!

Since then, we’ve been working hard to continue to improve and extend noatikl.

We’ve been trying to keep updates for noatikl coming every couple of weeks, and keep on adding new and interesting stuff. The next update will feature support for build-in trigger scripts and MIDI control of noatikl, which is very exciting as it takes noatikl into the realms of being a customisable hyperinstrument!

It has also been great to be able to work again with Tim Didymus, who authored two new Generative Drum template packs for noatikl. These are tremendous fun to use, and are proving a big hit.

We’ve also been working on behind-the-scenes ideas for optikl and liptikl (some of which have fed-in to noatikl, including the scripting engine).

It is lovely to find that past users of our previous software creations (such as Koan Pro and miniMIXA) keep on discovering the intermorphic site, and start playing with our new software. Welcome back to you all!

Looking forward to another innovative and exciting year,

Pete

Well, we are still working on it, and it will be hosted by Plimus. We guess they are pretty busy at this time of year as we are getting slow responses to our questions. Suffice to say, we are ready on our side, so as soon as they can get the relevent hook up implemented, we should be ready to roll!

We hope people are now satisfied with our pricing model, which is similar to that of Reaper in that we have gone for both commercial use and non-commercial use licences.

We thank everyone for their feedback that has helped guide us to this point!

We are making excellent progress with noatikl and liptikl, as can be seen from the way the information on the website is taking shape. However, we are not going to make our self-imposed launch date of 30th Nov due to a couple of last minute things we need to iron out.

That said, we are working to sort them out as fast as we can and our best estimates are that we will launch early next week. Thanks to everyone for their support and patience!

Pete and Tim