From Buzztard

If you know 'Buzz' you all probably have a few wishes. Even though we still have quite a way to go, before we can do everything the original can do, we would like to start collecting these ideas.

Just add them below. We will look over this page from time to time, restructuring and commenting on the posts. Items that are accepted and where the idea is well enough developed, will be moved to the RFE tracker on sourcefore.net.

[edit] General

• just fix all of the poor programing present in some of the machines, the only thing keeping buzz from being as powerful/proffesionally popular as other programs is is faulty-ness. comb out the buzz so that all of the machines can work correctly with any other machines/at all! keep working on stability and buzz could crash the whole system of overpriced audio software!

I'd like to have a sub-module in our CVS with the buzz-machine sources (cleanly sorted by author and type). Then the issues could be fixed and we could have updates for the original buzz and native implemnetations for other apps. It would even be possible that to write decent docs for some machines. So BuzzMachine authors stand up and send in you code + the licence you wish to release it under. It would be a shame to let it bitrot anyway. --ensonic 23:57, 25 Jul 2005 (CEST)

[edit] User Interface

[edit] parameter groups in machine windows

• e.g. grouping all paramteres belonging to an envelope
• the groups could be made collapsable (folding)

[edit] n-dimensional machineview end edit

• Use of containermachines to be able to better organise a complex machinesetup.
• Alternatively this could be done by snapping machines together in machineview by reducing their height to the extent of the text giving their name and docking them together. This prolly would be the better option.
• Deleting whole machine-chains with one click
• align / arrange machines

[edit] different units in sequenceview for the time

• buzz only shows bar positions
• buzztard should add a context menu to let the user choose (bars,various time-formats)

[edit] split-panes in the GUI

• add possibillity to split the GUI into several views (each containing the same tabs)
• users with large screens (or multiple displays) could then e.g. split vertically to always see machine and sequence view

[edit] Impulse Tracker Scroll Lock

• The one thing I wish most that BUZZ had, So that live recording can be possible.
• being able to record in your favorite tracker live.

[edit] Traceplay

Play the current songtick (on all tracks), while being in the pattern editor.

Do this in loop-mode? Only the current pattern? More details please.

[edit] Machine Icons in menus

• Add icons to menus (and comboboxes), indicating machine types.
  • generator, effect, output: use colors
  • mono, stereo: ?
  • monophon, polyphon: ?

[edit] Piano roll

• Maybe some time at a later stage a piano roll, just like the ones in Reason or Cubase, with automation graphs, velocity/panning bars, notes length etc could be a nice addition as a very intuitive and helpful interface. This would also meet with the implementation of sub-tick triggers for notes.

[edit] Internals

[edit] Higher/variable tickresolution

• One of buzz' biggest problems is the fact that it lacks a variable beatresolution. Once you've decided to do a song at a certain BPM-value, you can't insert notes between two ticks anymore. (Except if the machine is supporting tickdelay.) Having this issue solved would be great. There *could* appear problems concerning compatibility to the old buzz-songformat tho.

• why not have an event based model and have no tick restriction? It is perfectly possible to also support buzz songs with an event model by snapping events to the simulated tpb rate. The tpb would simply be a filter for what's displayed in the tracker view, so you could make a song in 4 tpb and be none the wiser, but you could then set it to 8/16/65535 :) if you wanted to. I personally think note delay columns are a nasty hack solution. Aero uses an event model and it works great. -vectrex

• A subtickmodel for the trackerview would be great for this. Imagine "+"-Symbols beside each tick showing a variable count of subticks when clicked. This would work similar to how subfolders are shown when you click the "+" in windows explorer. -moon.god

Although the above sounds reaonable it is not so simple. Music applications have a couple of different loops:

• an outer loop that runns on low frequency, that pushes musical event data into the machines
• in inner loop that runns faster that drives the machines to process chunks of audio-data
• in innermost loop inside the machines that processes the audio-data

The problem is that subtick events are not fitting here. All that can be done is to raise the number of tick (e.g. use 32 ticks per beat instead of just four). This should come with some advance pattern display to allows to shrink the number of ticks shows. This could e.g. use something like a "+" to signal that the event is actually on a "sub-tick". ensonic 09:31, 4 Nov 2004 (CET)

• how about making automatic stretching already built in? remember buzzscript? double or half tick thing? how about implementing a similar automated function that doubles (or whatever you set it to) the tpb, and updates -all- the patterns, sequences and views, so that basically there is no difference. one problem i would see here is when a delay uses -that- tpb setting for its actualy delay. but thats something i could live with. or maybe, since we already know what machines are using that tpb setting for their delay/reverb/whatever, it should be possible to make the function update those settings to the new tpb too. -romanb

Exactly, whe plan to add such tools to the editor. Apart we have dicussed to add more metadata to buzz-machines, so that such a script could also adjust time-related machine properties. But many thanks to this comment, I have not yet thought about this case. ensonic 12:03, 3 Jan 2005 (CET)

[edit] A working internal C1

• Look what the Jeskola C1 in Buzz is supposed to do. This machine has sadly never been finished. Having this functionality within buzztard would be very nice.

[edit] Solid MIDI timing

• It would be a lot of fun if one could actually sync Buzztard with other software. Buzz really sucks at this..
• gstreamer might provide this with proper support for JACK

[edit] Buzz-machine to VST(i) wrapper

• I <3 blockfx ;)

We use GStreamer as the machine connection framework. There is also a VST wrapper for linux (libfst) and when buzzmachines work nicely, we can write a gstreamer connector for VST-plugins the same way. Of course anyone is welcome to do it ;-) ensonic 12:01, 3 Jan 2005 (CET)

[edit] Effects in wave editor

• Would be good effect machines (VSTs/LADSPA/...) could be used in wave editor in order to apply effects to current editing wave.

[edit] Smooth automation

• Having the option to automate parameters smoothly between vertices, either in a line or spline fashion. I understand that this sort of goes against tracking and would fall into the highest resolution of the aforementioned loops, but it is for this reason and this reason only that I still use Audiomulch (well, that and the DLGranulator). I also realise that you can "fake" this with most machines using inertia, but, really, it's just not the same, in terms of resolution, rhythmic possibilities, being able to compare multiple parameters of different machines at once, etc. There's a lot of possibilities this opens up...were this implemented, Buzz would really easily contend with many of the heavyweight DAWs.

[edit] very future ideas

[edit] song structure visualisations

See Shape of a song

[edit] realtime web database for presets etc.

• You can upload/download presets from central database. Web browseable too.
• Context menu from effect/generator to bring up preset chooser
• Sort by rank (users can rank the presets), by submitter, by name, by whatever categories there might be