26 Jun
2006
26 Jun
'06
6:04 a.m.
On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 04:21:20 -0400, Dave Robillard wrote:
That's why I said you have a centre frequency control, that's set in Hz.
It's all
about modulation, if I connect a [-1.0, 1.0] sine LFO to a cutoff
modulation input then I want it to modulate up and down by N octaves, not
N Hz, frequency-linearly symmetric modulations sound wrong. My favourite
(digital) modular filters have a centre frequnecy (shown in Hz, expoentialy
scaled control) and a modulation input that modulates in octaves.
You want the modulation to be musically relevent, and the most musically
useful unit for pitch is octaves :) Humans aren't SI sadly.
I agree that describing it as volts is a bit odd, but it instantly makes
people like me feel at home. There's not reason why a digital modular neds
units for its modulation sources. It's just real numbers.
This is true, but there are other cases when you want a real, meaningful
frequency to do something with (using the same plugin). Eg lowpass all
frequencies above 800Hz. Someone working on a DAW definitely doesn't
want to deal with this meaningless V/Oct unit. Of course, in a modular you can convert Hz frequencies
to VOct
frequencies, and in a DAW you can convert VOct frequencies to Hz, but in
both cases it's a user nuisance, so it needs to be automatic. My gripe
isn't with the unit itself, so much as in the current situation with
LADSPA it's a really, really huge PITA to have a mess of twisty little
units, all alike.
Yes, but neccesary, unless your hosts all understand the semantics of
pitch/frequency and are willing to do lots of pow() based conversions.
Of course LV2 will let us solve this, and the
frequency unit can in both
cases be kept entirely transparent by the host (if you want), making the
actual unit used by a plugin just an optimization as it should be
(skipping the conversion step).
s/will/could/, I'm not yet convinced that it's appropriate. My preference
would still be for a Hz centre control and a (high rate) modulation input.
If there's a sane representation in RDF for a single port to do both
things well, then I'm all for it, but I'm scpetical.
- Steve