STICKY
written by: john
Hi Steve
Nice to hear from you again. Since you were last playing with the Pico and EigenD there have been a lot of changes. There is considerable documentation about the Belcanto environment on the Wiki now and all of the significant Agents are now fully documented. Quite a few players have been experimenting with Belcanto, both in interactive and scripted form. The original delay in documenting it (which now dates back a year or so) was largely because we wanted to make a substantial change to the syntax. After we had accomplished this, we ploughed into documentation, but there wasn't much point beforehand. What has become apparent is that Belcanto is fantastic for some things but very difficult for others, mainly connection management and control. This is precisely what the new Workbench is designed to do and several of your desired features need this.
I don't know which version of EigenD you are using right now, but the current Testing release (which is due to become the new Stable, if we don't get any show stopper bug reports against 1.1.19 it this will be promoted next week) is a very improved animal over the 1.0 branch. It doesn't yet have Workbench or Stage, but it's UI is a nicer and it does have a significant one of your feature requests, a GUI routing matrix for AU/VST MIDI as part of the AU host. It is available from download from the website in the software section, it was released last week.
We had hoped to have Workbench out quite a while ago, but Windows proved be a much tougher port than we had anticipated and really took us out for most of early 2010. We didn't have a lot of choice about this as it is such a commercial driver. Workbench is looking good in development though and we think it will be the foundation of the 2.X series of software. The principal reason that you haven't seen a lot of additional setups released (which as you rightly pointed out we originally intended to do) is partly down to this - for some unavoidable technical reasons the 2.X setups will not be backwards compatible with 1.X setups and we have been trying to avoid too much proliferation before we get Workbench out for this reason. The other reason is that Sam has been able to use the scripting feature to provide quite a few players with ways to customise their setups and this has often proved enough, not needing alternative setups at all. If you are getting back into your Pico and have a need that can't wait until Workbench (and isn't addressed by improvements in 1.1) then please get in touch and I'll see what we can do.
The new upcoming Unstable branch (1.3.X) will not yet feature Workbench (which as I have said is now slated for the 2.X series) but will have a couple of very nice features, among which is Stage. This is a very significant development for us, uses OSC natively and is the beginning of a very different player experience, particularly in live situations. I think you'll enjoy it a lot and we hope to have an early Unstable release with this in for 1.3.X in the next few weeks. The other thing that 1.3.X does is unify the Mac and Windows code, so that the features will largely track each other from that point on, which is not the case at present.
In terms of future plans we are obviously very focused on getting the 2.X release ready in the next quarter. Part of this process may well involve a broad 'OSCification' (if that can possibly be a word) of EigenD internally, which I think you will find interesting. We've had a lot of good discussions with a number of AU and AU host vendors about OSC and MIDI extensions or idioms to enable discovery, zero configuration and bi-directional communication, all of which are needed to really make things work well. It turns out that our current proprietary network protocol (which all EigenD Agents use to to talk to each other) can probably be turned into OSC without a big rewrite if we choose our idiom well. This is good news, and I'll try to keep people posted as to progress. The upcoming release of Stage is a big step towards this as its our first native OSC application.
With regards to the absence of our open source release, I have to confess that this is my fault. I just haven't finished all the work we need to do to get it done. Quite a bit of the work has been accomplished (most of the legals for example) but the website, bug tracking etc etc is not there yet. We have just completed a major step towards the goal by moving our version control from Subversion to GIT - we decided this had to be done prior to release and it's only really settled down in the last few weeks. So all I can tell you is that its probably Real Soon Now. Unfortunately I am critical in that path, and the manufacturing side of Eigenlabs is still using up a huge amount of my time and probably will continue to do so for most of 2010, I will probably need to be in China for most of November for this reason. I'll try to keep you posted.
Oh, and the other thing I should probably mention is that we will be launching 1:1 lessons online shortly. You'll be able to book a series with Sam, Dave, Mark Finlay or Geert. If you are interested in playing with Belcanto then some lessons with Sam would be a great start. A couple of those and you could probably sort out the setups that you'd like to build, even without Workbench...
Best regards
John
UK
