I’m happy to announce the next device in Calf Studio Gear: (kind of a) bitcrusher named Crusher. It is able to reduce the resolution of the signal bitwise like every bitcrusher does. Additionally one can reduce the resolution seamless. It can handle asymetric resolution changes by adding/removing a DC offset to the signal which chruches signals of one halv-wave different from the other one, resulting in more distorted chrushing sounds. The real innovation is a logarithmic reduction which means that signals of lower values are reduced with a finer grain while signals at high levels are reduced more gruffly. This technique produces lo-fi sounds more pleasant to the ear even at lower resolutions without distorting the signal to an incomprehensible level.

Another thing I implemented lately is a new GtkWidget for tapping beats per minute which is exclusively used in Vintage Delay by now.

Here we are – lucky to meet each other @ 30C3 in Hamburg, coding on Calf Studio Gear. We’re fixing bugs, talking about new concepts and improvement of existing ones. Actually Krzysztof is raping Valgrind with calfjackhost, Chrischi is working on attack phase of Transient Designer and I’m implementing new stuff like Bitcrusher and sample rate conversion. It’s so damn cool here we never ever want to leave again .)

I once was like „Yay, nothing to do this weekend – so let’s rewrite the Calf UI“.

That was about 2 months ago.

I just pushed the latest changes on the user interface to the repository. To sum it up: There is a major speed-up in the user interface now together with lots of new features (like Analyzer or individual filter curves in EQ’s or visual tracking of the active multiband strips) and a more polished design (new graphics everywhere, reliable knobs and VU meters, …). Additionally I got rid of the pixmap engine which caused some problems with more restrictive hosts like the new Ardour. And I was able to clean up the whole thing and strip lots of GtkRC, Python code and PNG images – thousands of lines of code rendered redundant and so did lots of background images for the pixmap engine.

And now I’ll have a beer. Cheers.

Last night i raped the calfrc file which is responsible for the GTK styling of the application. Apart from the fact that I removed nearly 700 lines of code there was a massive speedup in opening/using a plug-in window because of some simplifications and the removal of most of the pixmap engine commands: Over the last days I added a couple of custom widgets which draw themselves via Cairo now making the use of pixmap engine unneccessary. The only widgets left are the buttons used in the rack. Widgets I already migrated to Cairo are GtkFrame, GtkHScale, GtkVScale, GtkNotebook and GtkComboBox. Since these changes all plug-in windows open in a blink and use less CPU while open.

I started the work on getting rid of the GTK pixmap engine dependency by starting to impelement all widgtes that rely on it as exclusive Calf widgets getting drawn by Cairo. By now GtkFrame and GtkComboBox are done – faders, buttons and much more to go.

Additionally I implemented the GtkNotebook as a parameter control which means that the plugin has access to the actually displayed notebook page. First impression can be achieved in the Multiband Compressor/Gate – the graphs follow the actually selected band.

After years of guessing what the VU meters are displaying we now have reliable meterings in all plug-ins.

\o/

There are two new modes available in the Analyzer, both show a stereo signal. The first one draws one channel on top of the other but both with different colors. This mode is best used with extreme stereo signals. The second mode shows both channels side by side.

More information FTW! The new line graph is an awesome kindergarden .)

Finally! I finished the Line Graph widget. The new performance and structure of it encouraged me to implement some new functionality in the Equalizers of the package: Now we additionally have individual graphs for all filters and a zoom fader.

As I mentioned before, I spent the last weeks with a major rewrite of the line grap widget – seems I’m almost done. The speedup of most of the user interfaces is awesome. The only things missing are some problems with some Analyzer grids and the spectralizer drawing mode of the Analyzer, everything else seems to function well. Some of the plug-ins got an update of their user interfaces and I slightly changed some widgets graphics.