Hey James, Lots of idea's going around there anyways.. Thats great. Its been a while since I've been appealed by the "custom widget" craze, but you got me intrested enough to relpy... I quite like the way one can write custom widgets in GTK. It involves some small steps, but once you've got your head around them (maybe you already have) its quite fun.. :-) I've set up one folder in my programming dir call gtkmmWidgets, lots of small / medium sized widgets in there. Can throw it into a tarball and mail it to you if you like. Small Demos: Random Widgets<http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_8g0da9Fi3pA/TBfSivPpmlI/AAAAAAAAADI/6E… (You may notice the "screenshot tear" in the "midi-editor"... to humans its not like that! Anyway, where can we find out more about your project? I'd have some MIDI / JACK MIDI gtk example code aswell if your intrested.. (cant garantee its all correct, but it works at least..) Cheers, -Harry

Hey, I decided to throw up a github repo of my JACK MIDI stuff, (only one simple (bad) app so far), but I intend to improve it as I learn PThreads properly and things like jack_ringbuffer. http://github.com/harryhaaren/JACK-MIDI-Examples My Gtkmm Widgets are zipped and on the way to you. -Harry WRT:

On 18 June 2010 11:06, James Morris &lt;james(a)jwm-art.net&gt; wrote: you may notice the display is a bit naughty, it reads directly from the freespace_state array - it should not do this, it won't, but it does just for some visual satisfaction that it's actually doing something.

On Tuesday 15 June 2010 17:55:56 Paul Davis wrote: Unless you make your lights "slowly" go on an off with transitions, there isn't even a need to be faster then 25 or 30 updates per second. The slowest part here is the human eye. And the requirement for >60Hz refresh rate for pictures comes from the good old days of CRT screens. Arnold

Ralf Mardorf wrote: PS: Why not programming for savant syndrome musical gifted and 'fast' watching people too?

Paul Davis wrote: I'm not a 'fast watching savant' ;) and even if the GUI is too slow, I won't care. I'm listening to music with my very good ears, but my bad eyes. No doubt, Linux is a good choice, but MIDI real-time could be better. For me the GUI is unimportant. BUT I prefer to do audio recordings using Linux, but MIDI recordings. It's a real pity, because MIDI would add some very cool features. 2 cents, Ralf

Patrick Shirkey wrote: No! Yesno! I guess it's OT here what I experienced. I just wonder that computers >= 1 GHz could have issues, while hardware from the 80ies < 1 MHz is completely in sync. No doubt, my computer is a low-cost computer, even my 80ies 4-track recording equipment is much more expensive, but I noticed the same when doing jobs for audio and video studios with very good MacOs and Windows PCs, MIDI isn't capable on most modern computers. What would you call reasonable jitter for MIDI? 5 ms are inaudible regarding to some audio stuff, but for syncopation less than 1 ms is a no-go. You might record the Pet Shop Boys using Linux MIDI, but also try to interpret Weather Report. It's similar to the refresh rate. We aren't able to count how often a light would flash, but we are able to recognize the difference between a screen that refresh vertically at 60 Hz or above 75 Hz. Everybody is able to do that, not only highly gifted autistic savants.

Ralf Mardorf wrote: PPS: Regarding to the groove at the beginning of the video, not to the sampling ;). Btw. a nice wristwatch Herbie did wear :D. :) Ralf

On Thu, 2010-06-17 at 00:08 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote: Do it with Windows, or Mac OSX for that matter. PC hardware (and Macs really are just PCs, now) cannot - for some odd reason - keep time. The 2MHz 6809 in my ESQ-1 is rock solid - absolutely dead even. Same with the 8MHz 68000 in an Atari ST; Cubase 3 is still my favourite sequencer. No "slop" at all. Why can't a 3.4GHz Athlon get even close to that? Gordon MM0YEQ

On Wednesday 16 June 2010, Patrick Shirkey wrote: One of the test tools that might be enlightening for the MIDI folks here, is the machine control program called emc. Because jitter is very important when feeding a stepper motor controller a steady heartbeat at high audio and somewhat above frequencies, the coders have developed a 'latency-test' script, which you run on one screen, then abuse the heck out of the machine doing other things, (browsing the web, moving windows around, compiling a kernel, whatever warms up the cpu) then come back half an hour or more later and read the average and worst case latencies as displayed in nanoseconds. Those are generally big figures so do the math and make milliseconds out of them. Emc when running stepper motors is fussier that all get out, and that tool just might point the finger at truly bad motherboard, or video hardware. FWIW, an nvida video card, can only be used in a machine running emc if the vesa driver is selected, all the others including nv, tie up the interrupts, sometimes for many milliseconds. For emc, that would equal a stalled motor and a wrecked part you were cutting at the time it stalled. Similar things can be said about the APCI of some motherboards. If that can't be fixed via a bios setting, toss the board. Via chipsets seem to be the most popular in this latter category. If its a complex part that you've already got several hours worth of carving & cutting tool wear into, that will only happen once, because whatever the culprit is, gets both found and a free airmail trip into the bin. What? Oh, I'll go back to lurking now. ;-) -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The policy is not to have policy. It works as well in kernel design as politics. - Alan Cox on linux-kernel

On Wednesday 16 June 2010, Philipp Überbacher wrote: Go see <http://wiki.linuxcnc.net>, I am reasonable sure there are links to a downloadable live but installable .iso there. You can run this latency-test from the booted cd I believe. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together ... -- Carl Zwanzig

On Wednesday 16 June 2010, Harry Van Haaren wrote: Working from wet ram and its 75 years old, what can I plead except oldtimers. ;-) -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The FALAFEL SANDWICH lands on my HEAD and I become a VEGETARIAN ...

Gene Heskett wrote: Thank you :) I guess I'll have the time to test it on the weekend or within next week. Cool :)!

Philipp Überbacher wrote: Never ever! I bet the DOS machine 'controls' micro controllers used by the CNC machine. Imagine a conical object where you wish to engrave a word in a reasonable time. Have fun using my computer + a Linux kernel rt (or any windows rt) to do this ;).

On Thursday 17 June 2010, Ralf Mardorf wrote: Chuckle. We have SW that can take your name, wrap it around a beer can sized object, and once the code is correct, carve your name on that cylinder in maybe a minute. That would take a machine setup with 4 axis control, which mine is. And all 4 axis motors are controlled by step and direction controls over a single parport. Using xylotex motor drivers. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) *** Knghtbrd is now known as SirKewLDooD *** Mercury kicked SirKewlDooD from #quakeforge (*WHACK*)

All very fascinating I'm sure.

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 10:37:25AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: So, that leaves me wondering why no one seems to be trying RTAI for audio work? Or is someone doing that and I'm just not aware?

Regarding to the age, I should have read who is the sender of the email before I replied ;D.

On Thursday 17 June 2010, Ralf Mardorf wrote: There are several boards about that will let you treat a stepper equipt machine like they were servo's. But in either case, if the stepper misses a step, game over. So one stays within the limits of what the stepper can do. I would explain why steppers and high speeds are mutually exclusive, but then I'd really be off topic. I have one friend down in TX that is running his stepper mill with a TRS-80 Color Computer whose clock is .79mhz. He has been making steam engines with it. Slowly, very slowly, using a Dremel for a spindle. For that, Dremels area POS. Midi's timing is fairly critical, but steppers are even fussier at higher speeds where the torque falls off. A good question. I believe the wiki may have a list of hardware broken down that way, but its nowhere near complete or definitive. My machine is driven by an early athlon single core, running at 1.6Ghz. That is why the latency- test was written, because we needed to be able to define if it was usable before we carved up an expensive hunk of metal & wrecked the job. One should also bear in mind that MIDI, was standardized when a 600 baud circuit was _fast_, 30 years ago. And IMO, MIDI as a standard needs to be replaced by something with a 16 bit word, and 10 megabit or more data rates. We can do it, optically or electrically today and I see no real reason not to be developing a new standard that reflects what the hardware today can do. Some folks I hear are using ethernet in studio settings, but the cables aren't durable enough for the way touring musicians tend to treat them. So that isn't something the guy who has a gig once a week in a bar wants to put up with. Anyway, I don't see any real progress being made toward a new std way of doing midi, one that reflects what todays hardware can do. Till that day, we are stuck with playing a midi piano that sounds a wee bit like Floyd Cramer with an overdose of speed. With midi, you simply cannot bring all 10 fingers of both hands down on the keyboard truly simultaneously like a good human player can. With midi working perfectly, those 10 notes are going to have at least a .003 second lag from first to last. Me too. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) If 7-11 is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, why are there locks on the doors? -- Why Why Why n�6

Am Mittwoch, den 16.06.2010, 21:48 +0200 schrieb Ralf Mardorf: 25 times/second is good for me greats hermann