For many years, Velpro was sold through Avangate, our original e-commerce provider, also known as merchant of records. A merchant of records deals with the payment system on an e-commerce website, and all the legal things around it (sending the…
Some context Velpro is a Mac and Windows application that lets you adjust the velocity curve of each MIDI note, which is a changeable setting that controls how hard a note will play. Think of it as a measure of…
How it works A MIDI Velocity Curve Changer is an application, plugin or physical device that changes the MIDI signal between a source and a destination. More specifically, it transforms the note velocity value to comply with what you program…
The latest version of VelPro has been released a couple of weeks ago. It’s now even easier to edit your MIDI Velocity curve. We’re now at version 1.2 thanks to all your feedback and feature requests! Let’s walk through the new features of this release: “Apply curve to notes…” dialog Copy/paste a curve to any number of notes at once with this new dialog that lets you select all the notes on the keyboard that you want the current curve to be applied to. The option is shown in the “three lines” (aka “Hamburger”) menu, along with “Apply to all black/white keys” options. Display numeric scale on vertical axis if desired If the musical terms like “piano” or “forte” don’t really mean much to you, you can now switch to a numerical scale showing the actual velocity values with a switch shown in the View menu. Precise coordinates display and snap to grid when hovering and dragging a point No need to guess the values anymore. You can now see the precise x and y velocity values of a point when hovering the mouse. Also, the points now snap to a grid so that you don’t end up in between two velocities, not knowing which one will be applied. Compatibility with Apple Silicon If you own a recent Mac, chances are that it’s not an Intel processor anymore, but an ARM-based Apple Silicon chip. This release makes it possible to run VelPro on this new family of computers. Learn more There is now a Youtube video explaining new users how to use the basic features of VelPro. Also, of course, owners of previous 1.x versions get the update at no additional cost. Learn more about how VelPro can help you make your own MIDI velocity curve and buy it here!
The latest version of VelPro has been released today. Please welcome version 1.1! This version includes fixes to the bug that prevented users to hear some changes they made to the velocity curve until they reloaded the device. But most importantly, it introduces a handful of new features: The most requested feature of all: Presets for your devices You can now create as many setups as you want for a given device, simply by clicking the “+” button on the top-right corner. Give the new preset any name you want, and start modifying the curves. If you were using version 1.0, your settings will automatically be migrated to a default “Init” preset in the new version. Speaking of Curve edition: Here is undo/redo There are no reasons to fear editing your curves anymore, since you can now easily get back to the previous state by pressing Ctrl+Z (Command+Z on Macs). Multi-client for Windows And finally, for the Windows users who felt like Mac users where privileged, you can now connect several applications to VelPro through additional Virtual MIDI ports. When a device is disabled, a new “Instances” section will appear on the top-right corner, allowing you to define how many ports should be created when the device is enabled again. All those ports will received the MIDI transformed by VelPro at the same time. A very big thanks to all the users that have kindly tested the 1.1.0 version and reported their findings so that everyone can have the smoothest experience with version 1.1.1. Of course, owners of the 1.0 version get the update at no additional cost. Learn more about VelPro and buy it here!
I know it’s cold news, since it’s been a while already, but it’s still important to mention: Earlier this year, another project we did a lot of contracting work for saw the day of light. Orb Composer has been released by our friends at Hexachords after years of developing their artificial intelligence engine. If you’re a composer or simply a music lover, you can very quickly put a song together with Orb Composer : It will generate many things for you, based on all the AI packed in its engine. It doesn’t render sound by itself, but creates all the chords, instruments and notes, if you tell it to. Of course it doesn’t have to be all automatic, as you can customize any parameter that you don’t want the AI to change. Once the notes are created, you can use the template projects for your DAW to do the routing between the application and your favorite tool. With good instrument synthesizers, it really is a music powerhouse! I strongly recommand using the given templates, as doing all the routing by yourself could quickly get boring. Interface The base interface in itself is pretty simple: And the first video tutorial is a perfect way to get an idea of what it can do. As you can see in this video, the user interface allows you to drag and drop building blocks into your piece, like sections, chord progressions, chords : or instruments : Simple yet powerful It looks pretty basic, but once you master the foundation and want to go more in depth into the tweaking, you can too. Like creating a special parenting relationship between clips : Or changing all the properties of a clip : This is just scratching the surface of what it can do. And the team […]
Here it is. The latest version of Autotheory has been released after long months of hard work and a 3 months beta period. This version, while still maintaining all the features of the previous one, lets you be even more creative than before, with new included tools. Check out this quick overview: Video doesn’t exist anymore. The first thing you’ll notice after watching the video is the new user interface. It looks cleaner and lets you access the new features without compromising on simplicity. You will then probably notice the sequencer at the bottom. Autotheory now lets you record up to 8 scenes of different lengths. It synchronizes with your DAW using Midi Clock. The chords and melody part of each scene can be exported by simply drag-and-dropping the “export” button onto your DAW: Speaking of melody… the black keys of your right hand are now assigned to fully customizable arpeggiators: There are plenty of other features for you to discover. Check their website and youtube channel for more!.
For a couple of months now, Soundtoolz.com has been selling TranscriberTrack, a Windows and Mac app developed by Springbeats that facilitates the work of musicians wishing to learn and transcribe their favorite songs. It lets you load any song you like by simply dragging the file onto the app: You can then use the integrated 8-band EQ to emphasize the instrument you want to listen to specifically: Record yourself while looping on a specific section: Tapping the tempo lets you align the loop on the song’s bars. Slow it down while keeping the correct pitch and record yourself at lower speed: Speeding the playback back up also adapts the speed of your recorded performance. Apply VSTs to your recorded track to match the original performance: You can try and purchase it online from the official website, have a look!
Building a BitCrusher app with JUCE is easy. You just need to know C++. Even if you have never used JUCE before, you can follow along. I explain the full process step by step. You can find the article in the January 2017 issue of Linux Magazine France. There is one catch: the article is in French. And yes, you need to buy the magazine. 😉 French version Construire une application BitCrusher avec JUCE est simple. Un développeur C++ peut y arriver facilement. Même sans expérience préalable de JUCE. Je détaille chaque étape dans un article du Linux Magazine France de Janvier 2017 (numéro 200). A la fin de l’article, vous aurez une petite application graphique. Elle vous permettra de modifier le son des fichiers audio que vous y déposerez. Bonne lecture !
Last November, we attended the Audio Developer Conference at Goldsmiths University in London. The event is run by the company behind the JUCE library. At Springbeats, we use JUCE to build audio apps for clients and for ourselves. The conference lasted two days. It covered many topics in audio programming. And yes, central London is a cold place to stay in November 😉 Clear trends If you check the program, you will notice the main trends of the year: Machine Learning Embedded systems New technologies, practices, and standards Machine learning is everywhere. Even in audio. Some demos looked very convincing. I expect many companies to add these technologies to their products soon. Embedded and mobile systems are also maturing. Latency and power limits are less of an issue now. That opens more possibilities for mobile audio. Controllers keep getting better too. Roger Linn mentioned this in his talk. The ROLI products are a clear example of more expressive control. Overall impression The organization was excellent. Attendance doubled compared to last year. Big industry names came, but also many small developers like us. Most talks lacked technical depth for my taste. Time limits may have been the reason. I also heard from other small developers that there was little content for plugin developers. Still, I’m curious to see how the event evolves. I definitely want to go back next year 🙂 You can now watch part of the talks on YouTube.