Note: I didn't ask Asphinx's permission to post these, and he made no great pronouncement about them, so please do not judge them past his excellent use of the tool to make a multi-track recording.
But next time I see him, I am giving him another Bravo! (right click on player name to give a Bravo... you can only give Bravos if you have earned enough performance points)
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10641 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
| IP: Logged
* update your bravos on all player's screens when they change
* option to auto fetch songs if you don't have them (at all) (on options dialog, replaces 'loop')
* make fetch option non-volatile (other options still come up default every time you play)
* scroll wheel on options combo boxes no longer sends lots of packets (instrumment selection)
* instrument spam filter (scroll wheel on combo) (no more than one instrumet choice every 2 seconds)
* delay spam filter (no scroll wheel selection of delay seconds)
* absent band members will now be booted if their slot is needed by a new player
* text chat continues to work, no matter what window you click in - EXCEPT when dialog box has active focus.
* and aby wants scroll wheel to work in top area while keystrokes go to bottom). works now (though backspace still beeps when you click in scrolling chat area and press backspace)
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10641 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
| IP: Logged
quote:and aby wants scroll wheel to work in top area while keystrokes go to bottom). works now (though backspace still beeps when you click in scrolling chat area and press backspace)
I am anticipating the moment when the next arc vers will be pushed with this update in three months or so ^^
[I think this is actually a per game change, so only synJam has the fix at the moment. You will have to make specific complaint about other games with the problem :-) -s]
-------------------- "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." Posts: 152 | From: yesterday | Registered: Nov 2003
| IP: Logged
posted
..but it is still acting the same in SynJam. The scroll wheel doesnt affect the chat box unless the text cursor is inside it.
[well YEAH, but you can type while the cursor is in the chat box and your letter will show up on the SEND line, whereas before they would just beep. -s]
-------------------- "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." Posts: 152 | From: yesterday | Registered: Nov 2003
| IP: Logged
posted
I guess now's as good a time as any. Here's the number 1 thing I want to see... Some sort of way to use the keyboard to play. Here's what I'm thinking: 8 keys (say F1-F8, wouldn't interfere with the chat focus and such) one for each note of an octive, and 2 octive modifier keys. These would allow you to quickly shift up or down an octive. Also, I guess there'ld have to be a way to sharpen or flaten notes, so that's two more keys... Still, I want to be able to play chords!!!
You can tell I got my new keyboard (Emu Xboard61) and it's very nice
* support for more than one keyboard (Toy Options has new drop down combo to pick your MIDI input controller)
* support for velocity sensitive keyboards
* option to turn off velocity sensing (velocity rubs your face in what a bad player you are!)
* more options are non-volatile
* new instrument option "127 - Percussion" (yeah, I took away gunshot!) which maps you to midi channel 10 so your notes are the standard midi drum kit.
* Miscellaneous bugfixes
* processes standard 'patch' messages, so if your keyboard has patch selection buttons (that send MIDI events, like MINE does!), they will change the instrument selection.
----
And no crappy Ascii Keyboard support.
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10641 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
| IP: Logged
posted
I have a Casio CTK-518 keyboard, a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop, and no midi cable or midi port on my laptop. Could I have the imfamous "Dan's Advise to Live By" on what is required to hook up a keyboard to a computer?
-------------------- SoV: Exalted Devout Oracle | World Developer | The Black Guard Outside is just a prank older kids tell younger kids at Internet Camp Posts: 9482 | From: NY | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged
posted
First, your casio has to have a MIDI OUT plug of some sort. This will either be a round connector called MIDI OUT, or a usb connecter (see your Casio intructions for details)
If your Casio has USB, then a USB cable to your laptop (and the installation of the drivers which came with your casio, if any) is what you need.
If your casio has MIDI OUT, then you need a midi-to-usb cable (and a usb port on your laptop)
M-Audio makes a nice MIDI-to-usb cable.
But if your casio doesn't have MIDI out, then well.. you're stuck.
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10641 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
| IP: Logged
posted
Did a little work on synJam this weekend, inspired mainly by my MIDI keyboard falling off the wall on me when my bookshelf collapsed.
Since then we had an earthquake which would have knocked it off anyway, so just as well it fell of on its own without the extra panic.
Anyway, turns out this was the first time I had used synJam since upgrading my primary PC, and I found I had an irritating delay between the moment I pressed a key and the moment I heard the note start to play.
At first I assumed it was my fault, so I went through what turned out to be unnecessary optimization of the key distribution logic, to no avail.
Then I did some experiment that proved to me it was the MIDI 'driver' (I use the term loosely) which was imposing the delay.
And that's when I realized I was using this Vista machine for synJam for the first time, and realized (I think I knew this before) that Vista removed easy access to MIDI setup.
After failing to find where MIDI was now to be configured in some Vista Control Panel (it appears there really is no such beast -- Vista, like their abasement/improvement of the Volume Control just decided MIDI was not worth mentioning)
And the idea apppears to be that it is up to the music application to offer this sort of UI to the user.
Now, what does that mean exactly? In my case, the machine came with an X-FI card (presumably built into the motherboard as a single chip), so it is the X-FI driver which is actually providing the MIDI sound generation capability. In fact, it provided two separate MIDI generators. Three even, since it was also the support for the 'stock' microsoft MIDI.
So, I started researching X-FI to see where the midi output selection control panel might be hiding, and apparently there is no such beast.
But I did find a probable explanation for the delay I was looking for in the first place, which is apparently the mixer, which imposes a delay so as to allow it to do fancier mixing (special effects which need knowledge of future events). Lots of web pages implied I just needed to reduce that delay, but I couldn't find a knob for that anywhere either.
But I did finally notice that X-FI has this concept of 'mode' (entertainment vs music performace, for example) which I strongly suspect modifies a basket of variables all at once. Except that no mode setting made this delay go away.
Remember, when I started all I wanted was a way to set the MIDI_MAPPER such that synJam could continue to send MIDI to 'the midi mapper' who would then send it to the currently selected midi driver, for people with more than one.
Anyway, it finally seemed the writing was on the wall, and Vista just wasn't going to play that way any more.
So, I added one more combo box to the synJam options dialog. One which queries the OS for a list of midi OUT devices, gives you a list and lets you pick one. I also added 'midi mapper' to the list, for the people who still HAVE a midi mapper control somewhere (and that's still the default, and I know XP users will benefit from it)
Anyway, once I did that, suddenly I could see the three MIDI out devices I had. And to make my long story get short finally, the default one was the one with the 200ms mixing delay at start of note. The two pure X-FI MIDI outs sound identical to me and have no delay at all.
Anyway, so I think that was the right thing to do.
I haven't pushed it yet, since I also notice I get a 'crash' on exit related to midi on this machine. It's not all that inconvenient, being on exit and all, but MY code NEVER crashes, so I will fix that first.
I also had some ideas for a jamBot, but it's a bit like my chess AI in synChess... can I really make something that plays better than I do? (and if I *can't* then do I really have the right to force it upon you?)
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10641 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
| IP: Logged
posted
The empyrion bots came out interesting for team games. Synchess bots make the same mistakes every time making it more a puzzle game than a game of chess.
I think a jambot would be cool. If you made it like Pandora, it could really work well.
-------------------- SoV: Exalted Devout Oracle | World Developer | The Black Guard Outside is just a prank older kids tell younger kids at Internet Camp Posts: 9482 | From: NY | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged
quote:I have a Casio CTK-518 keyboard, a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop, and no midi cable or midi port on my laptop. Could I have the imfamous "Dan's Advise to Live By" on what is required to hook up a keyboard to a computer?
If you're really inclined to use your keyboard for synJam, you COULD use an audio cable with two male-ends and let synJam "use Microphone as controller". One end of the cable should be attached to yout keyboard's audio output port, and the other end to your speaker's mic port. Provided you have configured things correctly, your PC should recognize tunes played by your keyboard.
The drawback to this jerky method is that the actual playback on synJam lags a lot, and it only recognizes one keynote at a time (which is odd now that I'm reminded of it since a MIDI track is capable of holding more than one keynote playing at a time), so this probably isn't the best way to play synJam. But it still lets you play with your keyboard and should be used when you want to be proud of not playing synJam by clicking on the in-game keyboard
For the reference, I have a Casio CTK-120 keyboard I got as a Christmas present circa '99.
-------------------- This signature contains a lot of foul languages. Also racism. Posts: 2227 | From: Yokohama, Japan | Registered: Oct 2002
| IP: Logged
* new voice encoder algorithm. Not necessarily any better (I think it is a little better, but still not going to blow anyone's socks off)
* new options control lets you pick your MIDI *out* device, which is versy useful for Vista users since Vista removed the midi mapper (and the entire 'multimedia' control panel)
* fixed a crash on exit from not properly releasing the driver, oops!
--
And I did buy that $40 combo midi/ascii keyboard I mentioned above. It's about as good as you might expect a $40 combo thingamy to be. About 3 octaves of piano keys sticking out the front of a 'normal' (but thick) computer keyboard. USB cable. I am using it on 'the family room' computer.
WOW! Today the price is $49 and I have the funniest feeling I am the only one to buy one in the last umpteen whatever and that they raised the price specifically in response to having made one sale!
posted
Something I should point out about the Create Prodikeys $40/$49 combo PC and MIDI keyboard
1.) it came out in 2005 (the last version) 2.) Creative considers it end-of-life 3.) It does NOT come with Vista drivers (just XP) 4.) while a lot of googling implies some people have made it wotk with Vista, I have not.
For me, this makes it worth more like $20, so I am still looking for a truly inexpensive, but not too garbagey usb midi keyboard controller to recommend to casual synJam users.
-------------------- He knows when you are sleeping. Posts: 10641 | From: California | Registered: Dec 1998
| IP: Logged
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Mad]](mad.gif)
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
