Ethan, great program, thanks a ton. You've made my commuting time
bearable!
All in all, aside from the slightly frustrating interface (I blame the
PSP layout more than you or your app; so far I find the solutions
you've programmed pretty ingenious), PSPSeq could easily be my primary
computer music environment. Since I'm primarily into live
instruments, there's no real reason for me to be stuck behind a
computer monitor when I'm at home -- if I've got PSPSeq on the road.
Anyway, there are of course just a few niggles that prevent me from
relying on PSPSeq for just about everything. I'm a pretty new user,
and my apologies if I've missed something in the tutorials that can
already be done.
-- More flexibility in loop lengths. This is the primary issue for
me. I realize we can use different length patterns but that still
doesn't allow us to get more complex rhythms and melodies without
relying on extremely good memories or planning (i.e. if I want to work
on a long, but somewhat complicated, 168-beat loop, I can create a
temporary song sequence around 8 21-beat loops, but not only is this a
PITA but it's also afaik not really practical to edit while you're
listening to your loop in song mode). Although I realize the
programming might be a PITA for you, I'd love to see a PSPSeq where we
can set any number of what are currently called loops as a loop.
Ideally, the transport of the song would optionally be independent of
the display, allowing us to set up fast-paced, super-long loops that
we could edit freely while listening to what we're creating.
-- I know this one might be weird, and something I'm not as worried
about but think would make a huge difference to most people's editing
speed -- preview of notes as you change the params, or perhaps better,
whenever you feel like triggering the note manually. So if I'm
tweaking beat #30 of a track in a fairly slow loop, I don't have to
wait for the loop to come back, I can preview that note whenever I
want -- this is a really a speedier way to write when you lack
graphical representations of your settings, IMO. For example, in
editors with more horsepower or screen real estate, it's easy enough
to edit because you have a visual cue as to what 2184.48 Hz sounds
like, relatively speaking, or what "5.09858229 offset" is doing to the
spectrograph. But real-time preview in those environs is still a
great boon. Here we can't do it really real-time, that seems
impractical, but I can't see why we couldn't trigger the note we're
editing more or less at will...
-- I reserve the right to think of something else ^^;
Of course I'll take what I can get. Having some limitations is still
fun, but I hope you can continue to make PSPseq more flexible. It
would be a shame, I think, to let such a cool and expressive little
synthesizer fail to shake off all escapable limitations!
-chris