DSP Robotics Support

I've been developing what can loosely be called a 'music generating' programme, based on some work I did in Synfactory about 3 years ago. This has been my main exercise in learning Flowstone (& Ruby), and because I'd reached the limits of Synfactory and want to improve and extend the system. The schematic (or patch to use the Synfactory term) is all based on timers, logic gates and so on. I've developed a whole album of 10 pieces of music, which you can hear on

http://tranzmachine.bandcamp.com/album/ ... anzmachine

if you want.

This morning, using F 3.0, I'd got the system working well, producing the expected results. But Flowstone had become a bit unstable (crashing a lot), so I decided to re-install it. During the process, I was notified of the new version F 3.0.1, so I decided to upgrade. Installation was swift and successful. I loaded my programme - AND THE NOTES ARE PLAYING IN A DIFFERENT ORDER!!! I was obviously pretty baffled at this, tried a few things to correct the problem but nothing has worked.

I decided to reinstall F 3.0 . The very same schematic works (once again) as it should! I don't know what you guys have done, but there is something different in the internal timings or something. I'm sticking with F 3.0 until there is an answer.

Having said that, I think Flowstone is an excellent piece of software, I've had/ am still having an informative and enjoyable time - not to say addictive!! - getting to grips with it. Keep up the good works guys. I have a few minor suggestions for improvements to the interface, which I may post some time.

Tim C

Hi Tim,
Intriguing - both the bug, and your music!
Whatever it is you're doing with those "timers and logic gates", the end result is very good - the tonal variations and rhythm are very musical and much less 'random' sounding than many of the 'music-generators' that I've heard before.

Is there any particular small(ish) area of the schematic where you can isolate the problem - a particular array of values reading out in the wrong order, for example?
I'd strongly recommend posting a schematic - or preferably just the part which is showing the problem. The 3.01 changelog shows a couple of small changes to the way that triggers are handled by Ruby, so possibly one of these changes has inadvertently had an effect elsewhere that your particular design has exposed.
Of course, if you are using your design commercially, you may not want to make your source code public - in which case, you could e-mail it to the developers directly (support@dsprobotics.com). I have always found them to be very helpful with problems like this, and I am sure that they would respect any wish to keep the schematic 'confidential'.

Bummer, I hope you 2 get it sorted soon! Tim, Trog is very helpful, & I guess you live close enough to buy him a beer

I've learned never to use an x.0 release for production, esp when dealing with a small programming company (read: 1-2 programmers & no dedicated testers like Outsim) or a huge platform (like Ableton Live). There will simply be too many bugs.