Forum

Workbench, living history already before it's birth :)

Reading John's thread about Geert's Little Phatty setup he built with Workbench, I started to become nostalgic and had some fun digging up the "history of Workbench" in the forums, starting from the first posting were it was mentioned up to the historical "is probably getting a bit of a rewrite before we subject you all to it" posting in 2009 :)

---- The first thread I found that mentions the Workbench:

John: "We will be making some setups (our musician team make these using our Workbench software) that make all 18 keys into performance keys."

steveelbows: "Is there a plan to release the workbench software at some point?"

John: "Well, you sound like the perfect candidate for the Workbench software. It was originally the main GUI for EigenD, so its quite complete, if rather lacking in cosmetics.
We changed tack very rapidly (we're trying hard to listen to our customers here) after Robin Bigwood, who reviewed it for Sound On Sound, reviewed the Alpha. Robin is a really nice chap,
and very technically able as well as being a seriously good musician (one of the UK's best harpsichord players). When he first encountered the Workbench he was, to put it mildly, astonished.
His first reaction, in week one, was unprintable (well, not really, he's very polite, but you know what I mean). Then, after a lesson from Dave and some struggle he got it.
He told us he completely understood its power and what we meant by it, but that we would really struggle to communicate that to the wider world.
If you imagine all the issues people are having with the new browser right now, but mulitplied by 100, you get close.
It is very radical, an environment driven by a pseudo natural language command language spoken by playing note sequences that define words. Its hard to learn, and awesome when mastered,
and enables one to do things in seconds, live, that just could never be done by a GUI. Sharp sharp learning curve though. And we have precisely zero tutorial information ready for it,
hence keeping it out of the way until next year. It really is the heart of the Eigenharp though.
If you're interested, we're getting together a hardcore group of Eigenharp users to start using it help us evolve the tuition materials early next year,
and try to make the learning curve rather gentler. Let me know if you fancy having a go. "

Geert: "I'm very interested in the Workbench. I've been a software developer and a musician for more than 20 years and like complex software.
I've been very active in open-source over the years in various languages, environments and projects (I'm one of the core team that created Gentoo Linux for instance)
and love figuring stuff out myself.
Anyway, if you do send it out to a select group, please take me into consideration. "
http://www.eigenlabs.com/forum/archive/threads/id/112/#snap_post207

--- Just had to copy this, Geert hoping for a Worbench release and ranting about QA of Eigenlabs back when he was not employed yet :P
--- Given that he is actually evangelizing now EigenD must have become extremely stable ;)

Catoro: "I will love to test any alternative to the EigenD software, even if is a beta.
I strongly believe that this instrument is a revolution, but the weak point is too noticeable ... "

Geert: "I totally agree, it's starting to be increasingly frustrating. I can sort of live with the reduced function set that
EigenD imposes on the instrument (compared to what I hear about the Workbench), but I'm getting very annoyed at the lack of stability
and clear lack of QA and testing. [...] Me too I would love to test an alternative, but I doubt the stability issues will be gone
in the Workbench as that seems to be in the underlying engine and not in the EigenD packaging of the functionalities."
[...]
Geert: "I second catoro that as soon as you get rock solid software out there that's suitable for live performance, I'll be out there evangelizing the Eigenharps"
http://www.eigenlabs.com/forum/archive/threads/id/166/#snap_post554

--- a first estimate on the release date ;)

Sam: "This and the other configurability you mentioned will be available when the full Belcanto/Workbench environment is released in 2010."
http://www.eigenlabs.com/forum/archive/threads/id/111/#snap_post263

--- the usual John-way of cautiousness. Some plans work out, some don't..

John: "We are not planning to charge for the Workbench, and in fact you will find elements of it's functionality creeping into the system slowly over the next couple of months
(starting with the Belcanto scripting support in the exisiting browser). It is now likely (we been doing a lot of brainstorming here in the last couple of weeks, largely driven by all
your feedback here) that what was originally intended as one monster application will in fact become several smaller ones that can be turned on and off from EigenD, as the need for some
of the functionality is likely to be sporadic and they will use up system resources. This particularly applies to the graphical plumber now in development, as it will be a fairly heavyweight
application that many will not use that often. And experienced Belcanto users can do pretty much everything it will do without launching it, albeit at the price of having to maintain a complex
mental model of the system - easy after a year or so, much harder for beginners. "
http://www.eigenlabs.com/forum/archive/threads/id/195/#snap_post736

--- "a bit of a rewrite"... :P

John: "On the use interface front, we're having a big design session on the Workbench (which is probably getting a bit of a rewrite before we subject
you all to it) on Tuesday. Steve's point that he might be jumping the gun a bit on the configuration front has some value - the Belcanto language
really does make a load of things possible that would be very unlikely to be supported in any kind of GUI. And its not actually that hard to learn
(all our current musicians, all non technical, have learned it without difficulty) - the reason I talk about a steep learning curve is that there
are currently no tutorial materials
at all, not even a basic guide. This is the main reason we have not released it."
http://www.eigenlabs.com/forum/archive/threads/id/166/#snap_post554

---
--- Two years later, anticipations for the "rewritten" version are pretty high - would be interesting what Robin Bigwood says about it this time :)
--- Really looking forward to Workbench now!
---


Greetings,
NothanUmber

Are there any tips for working with the old browser/workbench in the EigenD distributions? It looks to be useful even in its somewhat broken current state, and potentially quite helpful to those of us still struggling to form that "complex mental model" of the system that would illuminate and inform our use of Belcanto.

The biggest problem seems to be a lack of scrolling functionality when the graph overflows the screen. What techniques for zooming in and out to focus on objects of interest?

Interesting to see the long route to where we are today written down. The first few months after we released EigenD 1.0 were a big learning experience for us and it took a while before a clear route forward became obvious.

Geert is right, what we talked about as 'Workbench' in those times ended up as a number of separate components. You can see that strategy emerging as we realised the different usage patterns that were emerging in our players, some of which we hadn't anticipated.

So we released scripting support first in the script browser, followed by Stage (which became a lot more advanced than originally intended, with the ability to create your own GUI layouts for performance and full network/.OSC support) and then the MIDI routing matrix, which also involved a lot of improvements to the MIDI data translation system.

The last part is the 'graphical plumber' that I talk about early on, which is the component that inherited the 'Workbench' name. This turned out to be a lot harder than we anticipated, both in the GUI sense (those things are always harder than you think, so no surprise there) but more importantly in the underlying system, which has required a lot of hairy changes to accommodate making the overall system more comprehensible and consistent in a graphical picture rather than a linguistic one. Some of these changes involved very low level concepts, changes that have required a lot of testing and have slowed everything up as a result. They're largely done now though (and quite few of them are well proved in 1.4 as well), so we're in good shape moving forward.

@jaself, the old thing from two years ago we called Workbench could probably be got working with a big effort (there have been a lot of changes to the underlying system that are not compatible with it recently, so there would be quite a lot to do) and you've very welcome to give it a go. I wouldn't bother though, the end result is vaguely useful but it is telling that our experienced players at the time (Sam Massey and Dave Kemp) very rarely used it, particularly in the more advanced setups, as its graphical view of the connection graph was automatically generated and deeply confusing as a result, as well as it being very slow (written in Python, which turns out not to be so good for that kind of thing). It was the realisation that we had to make the connection graph layout manual and created as part of the setup build that led us to where we are today.

The other reason not to bother is that we really aren't very far away from the first Experimental 2.0 release, with a functioning version of Workbench in the Pro version, the very version that Geert is using in anger on that Youtube vid. The difference between the old thing we called Workbench and the modern world of Stage + MIDI Routing + new Workbench is so large I don't think you'd want to go back.

John

I'm quite interested in v2 and Workbench. My new Tau has given me a better understanding of how the Eigenharp can fit into my overall musical life.

I still need to find a resource/reference for Belcanto and the MIDI Routing Matrix that connects with how I absorb information. Has anyone put together or come across something other than the wiki pages here for those?

Randy

@keyman Sure, no problem at all, it's rather difficult to make me upset for a longer period of time ;)
If it was your birthday, hope it was a happy celebration! Otherwise: Good you're enjoying your here and now :)
I also hope that Eigenlabs is on a viable track - at least I couldn't imagine a more promising direction in the current situation. I just don't like it if everything (even from the core user's side) is virtually indistinguishable from marketing, building hype, pink sunglasses visions and feel the urge to put things into perspective from time to time: It will be very interesting with what Eigenlabs will come up with Workbench but given the preceding situation (where even Eigenlabs told us that they couldn't imagine how a GUI should ever expose the full power of the system) I simply first want to see it first before I fullheartedly buy into all the praise. But I definitely hope it will meet the built up expectations - of course :)

Musicians are most complex life forms even when coming from a rather small planet :P