Forum Archive

Sam is adding a MIDI driven Talker into the Factory Setup 1 for you. You won't be able to switch instrument with it (oddly, and this is a bit of an oversight, that's not possible from Belcanto right now) but it will have all the tonics, a bunch of scale changers, metronome start/stop configured on MIDI notes for you.We'll try and get this into the current unstable release in the next few days, probably alongside Aaron's new MIDI clock in (to enable EigenD to slave to external MIDI clock) code as they both use the MIDI input. Please remember that the unstable release is what it says it is - it has a bunch of new stuff in and is not yet well tested so your milage may vary...

Sam will post a MIDI in chart here later. And you're quite correct, this is the kind of thing that will become available to users to set up themselves over the course of the year. In fact, if you had any useful documentation to tell you how to do it, you could do it now using the new Commander in the unstable release. We'll be starting on documentation for this kind of thing very shortly.

John

Thanks John for the info.

One thing I will say about docs is that so far there are these high production videos for the initial install, etc and very expensively printed documentation for getting started etc, which is well and good. It does give that very nice unboxing experience. After that though, I'd rather see unpolished beta docs, or even docs written by developers on belcanto etc than waiting for highly polished printed documentation.

In fact a lot of major software manufactures are going to a wiki format for all their docs for the reason that it is faster to keep updated, users can add comments etc.

Cheers,
Chris

We're already working on a wiki (and a text search for the forums), that'll be the home for all future docs I suspect. As of this week we now how a new, full time programmer working on our ERP and web systems so we should experience some steady improvements.

The Belcanto language is about to undergo a few syntax changes in the next few weeks - nothing that will affect users, but its a little early for full documentation, particularly of the parser. Interestingly, the syntax is actually pretty simple - most of the system is distributed so looking at the language interpreter isn't that useful, its documenting all the individual Agents, their verbs and nouns and providing example usage, that's the time consuming job.

John

Hi John,

I've already experimented with the commander and the available commands in there. It's indeed clear that the language is a dynamic DSL (domain specific language) that automatically adapts itself based on the current environment. You can clearly see that if you run the Commander at startup and see all the agents register itself.

What I'm missing to be able to write scripts is the general approach of the language and what the concepts are. It might for instance be interesting to not have a simply alphabetical list of commands, but to also categorize them into their function. A very high level description of the different language elements and a categorization like that, together with some more involved examples would be sufficient for the users that are programmers to get started with it. I'm certain the barnone and I could easily figure stuff out from there and write docs on the wiki. This would take some of the work off of your shoulders.

I know that documentation is one of the weak points for the Eigenharps now ... let the community help!

Take care,

Geert