Forums

Note from Admin: this is a repost from the previous MachineHead wiki forum. This was posted when 0.6b was current: some of Johnny's feature requests made it into 0.7b. Others will be included by 1.0.

-----

Johnny Retard, 2007/05/15 14:48:

To the Developers of MachineHead

As a musician, producer, live PA artist, I just want to congratulate you on a really great idea, and I want to offer my suggestions for what they are worth.

I doubt very much that I represent the “bulk” of users who might want Machine Head. My needs as a performing musician are different. Your inclusion of Audio Unit capabilities demonstrates that you are aiming this product towards musicians as well, so I want to gear my comments with the idea of using Machine Head as a performance tool.

Question: Why would we need Machine Head at all when iTunes exists?

Answer: A lot of Macintosh users are naturally suspicious of software made by Apple. Using products that are not related to Apple has a certain appeal to paranoid people! Not all of my MP3‘s came from my personal CD collection, and I really don’t know whether Apple has a copy of my playlists or not, but I get really nervous when iTunes attempts to connect to the internet, or even worse, when Little Snitch tells me that iTunes is trying to call home when iTunes is not even running. iTunes is potentially spyware, and my conspiracy theory doesn’t wreak so much like a theory any more.

Q: What seperates MachineHead from all the other half-baked audio programs?

A: Machine head allows me to change the “TIME” and “PITCH” of my MP3‘s in REAL TIME, while they are playing. (Wow!)

As a person who uses Ableton Live, and Reason, amoungst other pro audio apps, I have always relied on either iTunes or Bias Peak to be my backup when Ableton crashes. Because my performances are highly improvisational, I make choices sometimes that cause my computer to cough and hack. As a safeguard, I always have itunes running in the background so if any of my pro apps DO crash, I can switch quickly, and the audience is not left with dead air. The problem with this of course, is that whatever tempo I was at in Ableton is almost guaranteed not to match whatever song happens to be playing in iTunes. MachineHead allows me to change the tempo on the fly, and even Tap Tempo so that I can roughly match the Ableton sequence. This is a function that I have not seen addressed in competing players.

Suggestions: I am not a MachineHead pro, so I apologize if some of these suggestions have already been addressed unbeknownst to me.

The TONE EQ

Although musical enough, the faders do not update the audio quick enough. I move a fader, and as soon as I let go of it the tone changes. This is not okay, especially if one happens to be playing through a large PA system. Adjusting tiny little “faders” with a mouse through really large speakers means there is a large room for error. I cannot have Machine Head responsible for blowing up my subs, which makes these “front” controls not only useless, but dangerous. The Graphic Eq included is much better, and updates the audio as I am making those changes on the fly, so why do we need this “TONE” faders on the front in the first place?

Key Commands/ MIDI

Some of us musicians have Midi Motorized fader boxes like the Behringer BCF-2000 which allows us to control any onscreen control (program permitting) with the use of an actual knob or fader. The BCF “floats” over top of apps, so if Reason is the frontmost app, BCF controls it. Having a rotary knob attached to the “TIME” and “PITCH” in MachineHead is absolutely necessary for me to take Machine Head seriously. If I cannot have a MIDI knob, than I need to be able to assign random key commands to it. “+” for Pitch up, “-” for Pitch down as an example. Having a “COARSE” and “FINE” adjustment on all knobs (PITCH/TIME/VOLUME specifically) would be a very nice feature, because MIDI only has 128 steps. 128 steps is useful for most situations, but for anyone who has every tried to control subtle pitch nuances with 128 steps, one can quickly come to the conclusion that 128 steps is nowhere near enough.

Live Mix CUEing

This is a burning issue that must be addressed!

In Ableton, I can cue my mixes thorugh the headphones before I allow anyone else to hear them. It is easy enough for me to set up CUIing with MachineHead, but heres the nagging issue: Everytime I press stop on an MP3 in the playlist, the PITCH and TIME adjustments that I just finished setting up are no longer relevant! I “CUE” a song in the headphones, match the tempo, match the pitch, tap the tempo in, ready to be CUE’ed, and when I hit play on MachineHead, all of my adjustments are lost. There is no “PAUSE” in machinehead, only PLAY/STOP. I really don’t want the ability to Save and retrieve settings for the Pitch and SPEED knobs for every song in my playlist, I just want them to stay in position where I last left them.

Sometimes when I go over to Machine head, I am in a panic, because Ableton is frozen. If Machine Head is still playing my playlist at the last Tap Tempo setting that I entered, I should be okay in a pinch. Now in the worst case scenario of Ableton being frozen, I can “secretly” run MachineHead in the background to cover my ass while I wait for Ableton to reboot. As long as the tempo is close enough, I’m saved. my reputation is saved, my mistake now looks like I intended it that way to the audience.

Visualizers:

I couldn’t get them to work. Fullscreen, half size, NOTHING. They don’t exist. Why not? Honestly, I could care a less about that feature, this is one of those things that people use as a screen saver.

BUT:

If you want to be truly revolutionary, and appeal to live Video artists as well, allow that visualizer to send Output to the Firewire bus, so it can be translated through a MINIDV camera, where the signal can get translated and output to the projectors. That would be a great feature to have just as a backup for my visuals in case a tape gets chewed or a DVD is skipping, I can switch over to MachineHead visualizer while I fix the problem without all of my projection screens going dim. Forget going into the “Displays” System Preferences to set it up, just have an On/Off switch built into the GUI.

Looping

The looping feature is great. Certainly cannot do that with iTunes!

AU

Being able to insert an Audio Unit into the chain is a great idea, that needs more development. Because I can only use one AU, the most logical plug in to reach for would be a compressor, so that I can “brickwall” limit the mix. This eliminates the need to worry about what kind of levels MachineHead is putting out, or the level inconsistencies of my itunes playlists. If you have seen BIAS Peak, then you know of their success with AU effects blocks. How many users would actually use this function? For normal music playback and enjoyment, probably very few would use it to the extent of its capability.

BUT: From a DJing perspective, if I could load in an AU Compressor, my favorite Parametric EQ, and a tempo-based delay, all of the sudden Machine Head now serves a much more musical purpose, and now instead of using it as an emergency backup, I can actually have fun with it, and improvise with it, once again making my “train-wreck-screw-up” look like it was intentional.

Missing AudioUnit GUI

Not having the GUI for those AU sucks, and here’s why:

In every other pro audio app be it Cubase, Logic, DP,Reason, Ableton or whatever, my AU looks the same. Looking at the GUI for the plug in, I know what knobs do what. When I load up my favourite AU in MachineHead, there is no GUI. I have to logically think, and dig, and ponder where the hell that Dry/Mix slider has disappeared to, and once again, there is no time for that. I need to click on the plugin, and tweak it NOW, not after I’ve identified the correct slider.

MIX Meter

Congratulations! Another feature that iTunes doesn’t have. That being said, I need to have the bricks. All of us audio engineer types are used to staring at multiple LED’s that make up the Level meter. Machine Heads meters are snappy enough to make them useful, but thats it. They are fast enough, and knowing when I am overloading is obvious, but what isn’t obvious, is how close I can push the envelope before I start to overload? Having Green bricks that turn into Yellow bricks, that turn into red bricks gives me much better graphical representation as to how close I am to distortion. Why can’t the Clip meters be reset, by a simple button?(Or by clicking on them?) Once clipped, they remain clipped forever,so that after I have clipped them once, I never know from that point on if I am clipping or not. Unfortunately, that small missing detail makes them pretty much useless.

Mini Floating Window Emphasize on “MINI”. Screen real-estate for me is prime, and MachineHead insists on floating above everything else, even when its not the currently selected app. That would be useful as long as the actual floating window was a tiny remote control for the program, similar to the iTunes floating window.

Application Icon

I keep all of my icons on the dock, I have a hard time finding MachineHead on the dock, because my dock has a lot of applications on it. The icon for Machinehead needs to stand out: contrasting colors, more simplification, so that it can stand out from the others. (Currently, it looks like a tiny cock and balls on my dock, and I always have to squint to find it)

There are a lot of people out there who are intensly frustrated with iTunes (especially Windows users). NOt sure about the legalities, but having an alternateve for loading songs onto my iPod would be a godsend. Thanks for reading, and thanks for inventing such a dope product with amazing potential.

Johnny Retard

Mark Hill, 2007/05/15 20:47:

Hi Johnny,

You raise a lot of good points in your message, hopefully I can address a few of them. First up, I’d ask f you are using the latest release (version 0.61b). The previous 0.6b release had some nasty bugs which 0.61b addresses, so please check using the ‘Check for updates’ menu item, or download a fresh copy if auto-updating isn’t your ‘bag’.

First let me start by saying that a lot of the features you mention are really ‘pro’ features, which as you point out, may not apply to the bulk of users. A big part of the design idea behind MachineHead is to provide access to these sort of pro-level features in a more streamlined GUI, so that you can do most of what you need to do in the one window, with the option to open detail inspectors for more control if you need it. As such we think carefully about how to present new functionality to the user before exposing it.

Some of the ideas you talk about are elements we aim to provide in a ‘pro’ version available at some point in the near future, which adds more of these sorts of features, perhaps even a dedicated ‘VJ/DJ’ version that adds more live performance-oriented features, but more on that at a later time.

Re Play / Pause... MachineHead is supposed to play/pause, when you either click the play button or tap the spacebar. The main window has to be active ( ie most recently clicked on) for the spacebar to work.

Re Time/Pitch settings, a tracks TimePitch & EQ settings are currently only applied if LoopMode is engaged. These settings are retained from session-to-session for tracks in any playlist in the ‘MachineHead’ source group, as are EQ settings & loop markers. For items in the iTunes or Watched Folders collections, settings are saved only for the current session. If you want to have persistent loop, timepitch & eq settings, add the track to a MachineHead playlist and play it in loop mode. I’ll be adding more preferences to control this aspect of the program’s behavior in the next release so that you have the option to always use song-specific settings in playlist (ie non-looping) mode.

The idea with LoopMode is that only items in the MachineHead playlists can be looped... if you have LoopMode turned on and then play a track from an iTunes or Watched folder playlist, a new Loop entry is automatically added to the MachineHead:Loops playlist. This approach means that the Head doesn’t have to perform time-consuming synching with iTunes & the Finder at each launch & shutdown, it only has to worry about stuff in the MachineHead source group. It also means that the same source-file can be used for as many different loop & effects combos as you choose.

Re the Tone sliders, they actually soft-link to the same AUGraphicEQ 10-band equalizer, although the code linking the two displays is admittedly still pretty bodgy. I do aim to get a much better degree of control from the three tone sliders, including immediate updating; the idea though is that if they don’t allow enough control, you use the 10-band display on the HUD. Ditto the other control dials; the AU’s they represent have slider-based inputs with more controls on the HUD.

Re Fx AU’s, at the moment, only AU’s that either conform to the Cocoa GenericAUView protocol, or that otherwise provide their own Cocoa view, can be loaded. I do want to be able to support custom Carbon GUI‘d effects, which are the type you are no doubt talking about, and am taking steps to support them... more on this topic soon. Plus the ability to add multiple effect AU’s will be available very shortly.

Re the mini window always floating, you can turn that behavior off in the Preferences. The main reason for that configuration, ( apart from allowing me to use the cool collapsing animation) is so you can float MachineHead over another app ( like GarageBand ). It’s the size it is because I didn’t want to sacrifice any of the audio controls in that mode. Re a mini-me controller, that’s something that will probably also be in the offing sometime soon.

Re Mix-meters, they can be ‘unclipped’ by clicking on them, but the target is so tiny that it’s hard to hit ( you have to click on the clip blocks themselves !). This may be remediable. And a more sophisticated display is something I’m working on

Re Visualizers, it’s wierd that they don’t show up at all; what sort of Mac & OSX version are we talking about? You need to be using Tiger (10.4) , indeed the app shouldn’t run if you don’t have Tiger. It could be a case of no video support on your machine, but I’ve had them working on something as old as a G3 600 Mhz iBook, and a G4 400 PowerMac. Is there anything unusual about the volume/folder you are running MachineHead from? Perhaps it can’t ‘find’ the bundled compositions.

As for making visuals available for output to alternative devices via Firewire... watch this space I can say that we are in the process of adding a couple of ways of linking MachineHead more ‘deeply’ with other apps, and that there already exists some undocumented goodness to that end wrt to sound in the current version (0.61b)

Re Midi integration & keyboard commands, the F1 - F4 keys are currently assigned to control time & pitch up / down. I aim to provide an interface for users to assign their own key commands by the release version. Regarding Midi control, I do intend to implement some Midi aspects to the app in future releases. The only midi device I have on hand is a Roland FC-40 switchbox, & I don’t currently have the budget to test any midi-stuff around to develop more midi stuff, but

Re Application icon... my icon designer mate would be turning over in his grave (if he were dead... which he ain’t). But your point may have some validity & has been noted

Re iPods & MP3 player access, this too is coming, indeed it’s already sort of there... for now, if your iPod or other device shows a Finder icon you can always try dropping it into the MachineHead or Watched folders groups and see what comes up. You should be able to play anything on the device, and convert it (bar protected m4p’s) to a copy on your hard-drive.

In closing thanks heaps for taking the time to write such a detailed post, & if you contact us directly by email we may be able to provide a pre-release version for you to test... I am particularly curious about why Visualisations aren’t working on your rig.

Cheers,

Mark Hill MachineCodex Software

Mark Hill, 2007/05/16 19:19:

A bit more follow-up; when in LoopMode, the current version does NOT play-pause, it re-cues. Play/pause only works if LoopMode is off. These behaviors were chosen as default modes of operation for now, but there will be additional preference settings in the next release that will allow you to specify how you want the play button to respond when in loop mode... recue or pause/resume.

Prefs will also be available to determine how you want to deal with effects: either as globals that apply their current settings to each successive played track, or otherwise saved/restored per-track.

Cheers,

Mark Hill MachineCodex Software

ATTN Machine COdex Cats:

My apologies in advance for posting here, but besides calling you up on the telephone, I don't see any "tech support email address", so please feel free to remove or edit this post if it is inappropriate.
This is "Johnny Retard" the guy that gave you the hundred page essay on the present and future of MachineHead Beta, my copy which expired a few weeks back, but my "essay" apparently hasn't.

At least two of you hit me with a bunch of questions, and I miss not being able to pitch the songs to my voice, and just hate iTunes in general and don't trust it period.

We could certainly continue this relationship, and I will take your questions one on one with my machine and respond back with you as a so called tester, and your half of the deal is to keep me with an updated copy to show off to people.

I also have ideas for the visual element, which is off to a great start as well.
As the owner of a Matrox dualhead2go, I can test MachineHead out on that as well.

If you want to potentially appeal this product to the semi=pro and pro musicians, I am the type of guy who knows what that crowd requires and expects.

AS both a live PA artist and VJ, my hands are wet and sloppy with the waters from both live audio and live video pools.

If you can clearly see on YouTube what "Kid Beyond" does for Ableton's market, you may be able to imagine what Johnny Retard ™ can do with his Machine Head.

If you can apply to musicians like my peer group, you can raise the price tag, and people will pay it if it is proportionate to the power it offers, As far as I'm concerned, MachineHead is a better appliance right out of the box.

I don't have the fastest response times in the world, as my company has done business worldwide so internet access can be limitied at worst.

However, as you have made it past the attention span threshold at this point, you made it this far, and so you understand that I am a communicator, and by nature good at explainiung things as clearly as possible.

That's my offer--

Thanks in advance for responding.
Johnny Retard

Hey Johnny, this is the perfect place to post: we created this thread for you after all. Mark is working on a reply to your post and will be back to you in the next day or so. Thanks for your interest, I believe we should be able to work something out....