2021-06-19

MAIN GOAL: Get back into the groove of web-synth development and come up with a plan to actually produce some demo music.

After reflecting a bit on what actually has been built so far for this application, I realized that there's really not much standing between what exists now and producing crude, primitive music. I remember that the last thing I was working on before stopping development to spend a month or so working on the spotify graph thing was the sample editor. For some reason, that whole thing felt convoluted and out of place; it reminded me of the first attempt at building the MIDI editor where things were badly designed at a very low level.

Despite that, the [midi-editor] itself feels very well made and functional. The synth designer, especially the FM synth, is well-developed and capable of producing a good variety of good sounds. The sequencer will suffice for now for sample-related stuff; remember that the goal was "primitive" music, nothing fancy here.

The goal that I want to achieve is this: Build a demo of a modular synth-style tecno-esque loop using these components. It doesn't have to be original, it doesn't have unique components only made possible by the web synth. I do want to use the MIDI controller functionality of the FM synth to do mappings and modulate it dynamically, again very closely modelling the modular synth experience. One sequencer for the whole drum loop, two or three synth instances with maybe a few effects each with its own MIDI editor looping, and... that's pretty much it I think.

Technically... I don't think there's anything missing from making this possible. If I encounter problems along the way to making that possible, I think those are the exact issues that should be fixed first as I start development back up here. Even if there are just some pain points or annoyances, those will also be great targets for improvement.

I don't think there's really that much more to do... Let's do it?

OK wow interesting, so a lot works and there are more bugs and rough edges than I expected:

• Soul-powered freeverb effect only comes out of the left headphone
• Paste didn't work for the MIDI editor when clicking on the UI
• It would be very useful to have more metadata available for samples in the [sample-library]. Just adding columns for modification date and sort options would be a big help to start.
• Adjusting frequency on the [synth-designer]'s filter while things are playing causes audio to cut out very horrifically. Need to optimize that.
• Need to be able to adjust the size of note that the squares correspond to in the sequencer
• [sequencer] standalone playback is broken, I remember that it never got ported over to global playback when I made that change for the MIDI editor
• MIDI editor loop scheduling breaks after a few iterations when a loop length of less than 4 beats is set.

That being said, the core of it did work. Dynamically controlling things while it was playing worked. I didn't get all the way to the level I wanted to get, only one synth and two tracks on the drums sequencer.