Mixtikl now released!

Wow - at long last! Mixtikl is finally out of the door. And before Christmas, too!

With the software finally released, it was a real treat to sit-back and relax by simply playing with Mixtikl for a while, mixing-up the paks and generative music elements. Frankly, it sounds amazing and is a blast to use.

Do try out some of the Noatikl generative music items in the Tiklpak Cinematic 120d, which is one of two Tiklpaks that comes embedded with Mixtikl. The generative items show up as red in the content list. They make for amazing backing sounds! :

So, onwards and upwards from here. We already have lots of things we want to improve, and lots of things we want to add (including many more Tiklpaks!), and we also want to take a look at Noatikl and Liptikl. 2009 should be very busy, but hopefully not as frenetic as 2008!

Pete

Mixtikl - launch in a few days

Hi Folks,

We're aiming to launch Mixtikl any day now; we'll do our best to get it out of the door before the weekend starts. :)

Pete

Mixtikl now in Beta

Well, we're almost at the finishing line ... Mixtikl is now in Beta, and we can't be more than a week from the full release. Thank goodness!

Mixtikl is easily the most complicated piece of software I have ever created! The last time I checked, there was more than half-a-million lines of code in there ... and then there are all Tim's skins and the Tiklpaks and the documentation we've had to create... this has certainly been a labour of love!

Keep an eye on the Mixtikl site for the draft user guide and lots more information! The user guide is ever expanding, and hopefully makes for an interesting read...
http://www.intermorphic.com/tools/mixtikl/index.html

I'm looking forward to porting to Symbian Series 60 during my Christmas holidays (yeah, I really know how to enjoy myself!). I've already completed most of the iPhone port, in case we ever decide to release on that platform...

Mixtikl Beta (and Alpha!) - and some background

It is always something of a relief to hit major project milestones. We have already passed a major one: Mixtikl is midway through its Alpha testing phase and now has people other than Tim and me using it! The Beta release is now only weeks away.

What is Mixtikl, and why are we so excited by it?

Mixtikl is the first mobile music creativity app that does not ignore the importance of the 'full-on' desktop music sequencer. Mixtikl embraces it: with both plug-in and standalone versions. Mixtikl is for both PC (Windows and Mac) & Mobile!

• Mixtikl is open: Use your own content, or from in add-on Tiklpaks.


• Capture / mix / work on content on the move on your mobile.


• Finesse your mixes on PC using the Mixtikl plugin.


• Move your mixes between mobile and PC and back again.


• 'Performer' app - Perform music on your mobile.


• 'Remixer' app - Create quick mixes, and mix and match sounds.


• 'Partikl' app - Sound and FX design, exporting mix files


• 'Player' app - Play lists of Ogg, MIDI and generative music.


• Use audio loops, MIDI, generative music & modular synthesis.


• Integrated Noatikl generative music engine for generative music.


• Pitch shift your loops and apply realtime FX.


• Act as VST or AU plugin in your VST/AU enabled sequencer.

There is also a whole lot of other stuff in there that we'll let you all know about when we release it!

What is Noatikl, and why is it in Mixtikl ?

For those who don't know, Noatikl is a Generative Music tool. This is an easy-to-use program (with great depth!) which helps you make music; by composing the music for you, in real time, while you give it direction in what to do!

Mixtikl contains a run-time version of Noatikl . That is to say, it Mixtikl lets you play your Noatikl compositions on whatever device you happen to have Mixtikl . You can use Mixtikl 's built-in synth designer (called Partikl) to attach sounds to your Noatikl compositions, to really bring them to life in a cross-platform way.

This lets you, for example, create playlists of Noatikl Generative Music pieces that you or your friends can listen to on the train, where the music changes every time you hear it; as a change from listening to the exact same notes in your MP3 collection time-after-time!

Releasing software is hard work!

It never ceases to amaze me exactly how much work is required to get software out of the door. We've been creating products since the early 1990s, so we've got a feel for how long things will take now and what order things need to be done in.

Our prediction "way back" when we started creating Mixtikl out of the ashes of miniMIXA has actually been pretty good; we figured it'd be out sometime this month (October) but it now looks like it'll be November. As always, the delays are due mainly to discovering new things along the way, and adding them in to make the product more interesting! :)

The software is now pretty much in a Beta state, give or take a few items. We'll let it out of the door when it feels ready!

Looking back, to look forward

It is interesting to reflect that we actually created the first version of miniMIXA back in 2004; and that we won a BAFTA award for miniMIXA back in 2005 - more than three years ago! If our then employers (Tao) had had the vision and resources to back miniMIXA, I wonder where we'd have got the product by now... Still, we're making up for lost time and are having a blast bringing Mixtikl to life.

It feels amazing to sit on a train and sculpt music in real-time on my mobile. And, when I want, just kick-back and listen to a generative music playlist courtesy of the built-in Noatikl Generative Music engine. And I still can't quite believe it when I use the exact same software as an Audio Unit under Logic, a VSTi under Kore 2 or Sonar ... or even standalone on my Mac/Desktop.

This is been such a long road; we started writing the code that is within the Intermorphic Sound System, which underpins Mixtikl , more than 6 years ago. We started writing the 2d engine that the Mixtikl UI sits on, well over a year ago. minMIXA itself took around 3 years to write, including three major releases. The port from miniMIXA to Mixtikl has been a long, hard slog through 2008, but it is great to be so close now to releasing the product that reaches our vision from nearly a decade ago!

And that product is an extendable, trans-platform music/media mixer and "box of tricks". And it includes a runtime of the Noatikl Generative Music engine. The first Mixtikl versions are for Windows (Standalone, VSTi), Mac (Standalone, Audio Unit, VSTi), Windows Mobile Pocket PC/Smartphone (Standalone). Once those are finally released, Symbian Series 60 looks to be our next target. And hopefully iPhone after that, if Apple ever solve the problems with their SDK.

We have lots and lots of ideas of ways to extend Mixtikl - and the prices are going to be amazing. I can't wait for the first full release ... not long now!

Pete

Mixtikl now in Alpha

Phew!

It is always something of a relief to hit major project milestones. And we have just passed a major one: Mixtikl has entered its Alpha testing phase and now has people other than Tim and me using it!

Pete

Porting Mixtikl to Mobile - Windows Mobile, Symbian, iPhone, Antix Game Player

While evolving miniMIXA into Mixtikl at my company Intermorphic, I've encountered quite a few issues porting Mixtikl to the various mobile platforms, and I thought it'd be useful to be able to share some of this with those of you interested in writing trans-platform applications. I hope you find this of use! If you have any comments, please let me know!

A bit of background

Before I start, the first thing to note is that for implementing any trans-platform application of this complexity (750K++ lines of code!), you'll need to start with a common UTF8 library. I wrote that when I first started Liptikl, so didn't have to worry about that this time round!

I started by implementing Mixtikl to sit on top of the trans-platform graphics layer that I'd already written. The first implementations of this layer were for Juce, Direct X, Windows Mobile GDI, and SDL. Symbian will come soon; iPhone is ongoing, and hopefully Android at some point. The Juce version of the graphics layer for Mixtikl were really easy - Juce is a really great platform for desktop apps. Hence, Mixtikl for Windows and Mac desktops were relatively straight-forward (considering the complexity of Mixtikl!) And, of course, it made the plug-in variants of Mixtikl relatively easy to sort-out.

What do I like about writing for Windows Mobile?

- Great tools: Visual Studio is simply superb.
- Fabulous documentation - mostly. I love MSDN, but the API documentation is light on in-situ example code, and I have had to spend a lot of time surfing for solutions to problems. I still rely on my old Windows API Bible (by Jamle L Conger) - certainly the best API guide I have ever seen, packed with examples of every API call; no longer in print, but amazingly still relevant to graphics coding for Windows Mobile!
- Windows Mobile supports full-duplex audio, which is more than can be said for Symbian...!
- Windows Mobile devices are very consistent
- Windows Mobile devices have good user input: joy pads for control, and keypad/touchable screens where appropriate.
- Windows Mobile allows users to copy data freely to-and-from their desktop computer (via Internet Explorer), which is more than can be said for iPhone...!
- End-of line Windows Mobile 2005 devices are really, really good value.

What don't I like about writing for Windows Mobile?

- Graphics APIs: it took a while to get our Windows Mobile graphics layer sorted-out.

I wasn't able to use Direct X out-of-hand for a couple of reasons. The biggest consideration is that we think that it is useful from a usability perspective for an application like Mixtikl to be able to use the mobile device's soft menus, and to display the status bar. However, Direct X apps on Windows Mobile only run full screen, which made it a non-starter. On another point, there is no PNG import support, the blit routines are not flexible, and I'd have had to do a lot of blitting through my own generic blit functions anyways.

So, we used the standard win32 GDI API for Windows Mobile. The biggest problems I faced here were twofold: I had to implement my own png importer (it is a huge oversight for this not to be built-in to Windows Mobile 2005!), and I didn't realise that when constructing an in-memory bitmap on Windows, I had to WORD-align all lines in the bitmap. That latter problem actually had me stumped for a few days! Also, you need to know to create your bitmaps where possible as 565 BGR bitmaps, as this is the most memory format for Windows Mobile; transparent bitmaps must be stored as 32-bit ABGR bitmaps.

- Problems with the Visual Studio 2005 C++ compiler

Even though the port to Windows Mobile wasn't so hard, I faced some serious problems with Visual Studio 2005. The first problem is that the emulator is so *slow*; I ended-up having to get a top-of-the range Mac Book Pro to get the emulator running fast enough for real-time debugging of my audio engine under the emulator. And far more seriously, there is at least one horrible bug in the compiler ... you can read more about the bug here:
http://vividos.wordpress.com/2007/12/06/the-infamous-arm-by-value-compiler-bug/
http://vividos.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/in-depth-analysis-of-the-arm-by-value-compiler-bug/
The bug is fixed in Visual Studio 2008...

- Visual Studio 2008 Pro is required for Windows Mobile 6 development

Due to the compiler problem in Visual Studio 2005, we upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 Pro; it fixed our compiler problems, and you need at least the Pro version of Visual Studio 2008 to develop for Windows Mobile 6. It is a shame that Microsoft didn't include the Windows Mobile support in the Standard Edition; only the Pro edition (or even more expensive versions) contain Windows Mobile support; I'm sure this puts-off a great number of hobby developers from developing for the platform.

I've taken a close look some of the ARM code generated by the Visual C++ 9 compiler, and it looks really good; the code it makes for maths routines is as good as (or better!) than I can write by hand, so I'm happy to say that I'm keeping clear of assembler on this platform!

- The lack of build-in profiler; you don't get a profiler without paying for an even more expensive version of Visual Studio. This seems a shame for hobby developers.

What do I like about writing for Symbian?

- Symbian allows users to copy data to-and-from their desktop computer (via Internet Explorer), which is more than can be said for iPhone...!
- Symbian devices have good user input: joy pads for control, and keypad/touchable screens where appropriate.
- Based on the Gnu tool chain, so the compiler is good!

What don't I like about writing for Symbian?

- the lack of full-duplex audio support. This is a crazy omission in the Symbian APIs. If anybody out there is listening, you should commission Intermorphic to provide you with a decent audio library. :)
- the need for multiple SDKs. Series 60, UIQ, and variant sub-variants of each... that is a lot of stuff to keep track of.
- if you put your software code a little too deep in your file/folder structure, the Symbian build system falls over!
- documentation nowhere near as good as what is available on MSDN or Apple's site.
- the user interfaces. Why is so much screen real-estate wasted on the title-bar and soft menus, for example?
- the really weird idiosyncracies in their use of C++...
- Symbian doesn't allow full browsing of the local file system from the device; if you want to see what is on a storage card, you have to pop-out the card and look at it with Windows Explorer using a card-reader!

What do I like about writing for iPhone?

- XCode is free for all Mac users!
- It uses a good development environment. XCode is quite nice, though the debugger drives me potty compared to Visual Studio when browsing variables in the application code.
- XCode has a really, really good build-in code profiler. Well done Apple!
- No need to write graphics importers; image loading is pretty easy.
- Based on the Gnu tool chain, so the compiler is good!

What don't I like about writing for iPhone?

- The real killer, show-stopper, "I don't believe it" problem is that the user can't copy data to-and-from the desktop and any data area that can be seen by an iPhone application. This is a *massive* problem with writing software for iPhone. Why even bother attempting to write creativity software for iPhone, if you can't transfer data between your desktop computer and your mobile? Why didn't Apple provide for a common area to which all apps can read/write, and where Windows Explorer and Finder can also read/write. That seems a complete no-brainer to me.
- You're not allowed to use interpreted languages or scripting engines in your applications (other than those in Apple's own APIs - which aren't adequate). Which is not good news for games that rely on scripting engines to get their behaviours, or the user Lua scripts in Noatikl pieces, to give just two simple examples! I am really puzzled by why there would be such a restriction...
- No support for storage cards. No doubt to force all content to come via the Apple Store...
- No clipboard support. Presumably this is part of a cunning plan by Apple to prevent applications sharing data with each other. :-)
- Objective C. It is a great language that seems very well suited to development in a wide range of contexts. It is a whole lot cleaner than C++ (IMO!). It is great that you can mix objective C and C++ in your code (if you first remember to rename your files to have .mm extensions, rather than the default of .m!). However, it just wouldn't be cost-effective to write a new application purely in Objective C; so you have to write most of your code in C++, and implement a very thin adaptor code layer to the iPhone APIs. Fair enough!
- the touchable user interface can't be operated with a pointer stick; that makes high-precision user interfaces a no-no

And to close with a slightly off-target point: why doesn't my Mac Book Pro have a built-in 2-button mouse? Drives me potty.


What next?

The Antix Game Player looks interesting! Android is also on the near horizon; but, and here is a show-stopper: it looks like it only allows apps for it to be written in Java ... which seems crazy!

Hoping this is of interest!

Pete

Mixtikl - coming soon!

Mixtikl - what a huge challenge. Taking miniMIXA into the real world! What you'll see and hear will just be the tip of an iceberg of multimedia code, enabling what we think will be the first truly trans-platform multi-media creativity tool.

We've been working towards this for some time now, and it is really quite amazing to physically see/hear Mixtikl working as a native app for Windows and Mac, as an Audio Unit for Mac, and as a VSTi for Windows/Mac, and also on Windows Mobile! With interchangable files that work on all supported platforms! Oh, and an embedded Noatikl generative music engine. :)

We're currently very busy working on polishing-off the work we've done so far, and will then be looking to port to iPhone - where I hope there won't be too many issues with sand-boxing or integration with Objective C...

October 2008 release? Well, that's what we're aiming for. Wish us luck!

Pete

noatikl 1.5

Well, that was hard work, but we've now got noatikl 1.5 out of the door.

For those who don't know, Noatikl is a Generative Music tool. This is an easy-to-use program (with great depth!) which helps you make music; by composing the music for you, in real time, while you give it direction in what to do!

This is a major new development for us, as it completes an arc of development that has been going on for many months now, and has increased the power of noaitkl greatly. The plan was threefold:
- give noatikl pieces the ability to incorporate internally generated structure
- give noatikl the ability to respond to MIDI input events
- introduce a fast, flexible, easy-to-use scripting system to bind it all together!

So: on one hand, we've added the ability to control noatikl from within, with (optional!) Lua trigger scripts that fire while the piece is playing. The effect on noatikl is quite incredible. It is especially gratifying to see users who are self-confessed 'scriptaholics' test-driving the new features, and finding that it totally transforms their ability to control noatikl in the way they want.

On the other hand, noatikl can now be controlled in real-time in response to incoming MIDI controller events. Not only that, but noatikl automatically harmonises with incoming MIDI note events; and those note events can be used to trigger various responses within noatikl using the scripting engine. noatikl can now fairly be described as a hyperinstrument!

What next? Well, for starters we have plans to greatly improve the pattern handling within noatikl. That should keep us busy. :)

Pete

Graphics libraries and scripting

In case you're interested, in addition to adding Lua-based scripting to noatikl, I've been using the same scripting engine in prototyping optikl, the generative visual art program we hope to release some time.

To help optikl and our other products go wherever we want, including maybe to mobile, I've written a common graphics library adaptor layer that sits on top of SDL, Juce and what have you. So this will let us, in future, write our apps once and simply recompiling them for whatever the target platform might be, without the need for any major rewrites. :)

Pete

Low-latency audio IO on a MacBook!

My brother (Tim Cole) has tried using Asio4All to get low-latency audio on his Mac Book, but ended-up having various problems with it.

Well, I’ve found the easiest solution on my MacBook and Mac Mini was to get a really cheap Firewire low-latency audio box, that works with both Windows XP and Mac OS X. This was the Behringer FCA202. There are lots of really cheap offers for this in the webstores right now, and it is a tremendous piece of kit!

I’ve been using this to work on ideas for the noatikl hyperinstrument and MIDI-control features.

For that matter, I wonder if we should use the term “hyperinstrument” or “hyper instrument”. I’ll stick with the first spelling, unless anybody can tell me otherwise! :)

Pete

intermorphic - at the start of 2008

For those of you who are keeping up with developments at intermorphic Towers, we sure had a lot of fun getting our new web store live - believe it or not, we finally got it running late on Christmas Eve. :) It was nice to be able to enjoy Christmas with that out of the way…!

Since then, we’ve been working hard to continue to improve and extend noatikl.

We’ve been trying to keep updates for noatikl coming every couple of weeks, and keep on adding new and interesting stuff. The next update will feature support for build-in trigger scripts and MIDI control of noatikl, which is very exciting as it takes noatikl into the realms of being a customisable hyperinstrument!

It has also been great to be able to work again with Tim Didymus, who authored two new Generative Drum template packs for noatikl. These are tremendous fun to use, and are proving a big hit.

We’ve also been working on behind-the-scenes ideas for optikl and liptikl (some of which have fed-in to noatikl, including the scripting engine).

It is lovely to find that past users of our previous software creations (such as Koan Pro and miniMIXA) keep on discovering the intermorphic site, and start playing with our new software. Welcome back to you all!

Looking forward to another innovative and exciting year,

Pete