My synth vision and some questions about the Axoloti project

#1

First, a short personal introduction: Professionally, I am a web developer with a preference or open source. Privately, I am an amateur keyboard player and play in a band.

Though I own two rather good keyboards, I still sometimes feel that I'm missing 'something'. To be more specific, what I'm missing is something that – at least to some degree – can sound like a 70's-style analog synth, but without the huge price tag of a modern Moog or the like. And, since I regard myself as a live musician, it's absolutely got to have presets that can be chosen quickly and easily without having a computer attached to the device. Furthermore, it's got to be packed in a solid casing that is suitable for live use - preferably steel and definately not acrylic. What I have in mind is a box that does not have physical controls as there are a number of good and relatively cheap MIDI-controllers in the market, and there's no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Lately I have invested some time in investigating Axoloti, and I must say that the time I have spent with it has been very entertaining and fun. I have made a number of Axoloti synth prototypes, and the sound of these has slowly but steadily improved. Now I have come to a point where I think it would be legitimate to ask a couple of questions about the Axoloti project itself:

  • What is the project organisation? I looks like, at least for now, it's more or less a one-man project - or am I missing some important information here?

  • What is the business model for the project?

  • Is there a roadmap for future development?

  • The documentation is close to non-existent. Are there any plans to improve on this?

Before I invest a lot of time (let alone money) in trying to realize my vision as described above based on Axoloti, I feel that I need to be more certain about the answers to these questions. Hope that noone feel insulted by the questions. I see a lot of potential in this project, I'm just trying to point out what I see as areas that need improvement.

#2

The documentation has improved over the last month or so, there are a couple of web pages with an object list generated by @cpwitz which is a very useful reference community objects and factory objects

There is also a book by @janvantomme called Getting Started with Axoloti I've found it very useful to get familiar with using the axoloti patcher software, along with techniques for building synths/noise makers.

There have also been efforts to get doxygen added to automatically pull documentation but I'm not sure on the progress.

#3

Hi @groovy,

I'm a contributor (other than the founder Johannes) and plan to be involved with the platform for the foreseeable future. Lately I've been working on improvements to the patcher, specifically patch rendering. Generally, I try not to make specific promises about features until I'm confident they're going to be merged and released. What is merged is ultimately Johannes' call. If there's something specific you'd like to see, let me know, and I'll try to work it into my schedule.

Best,
Nicolas

#4

Hi @Reggie,

These pages are definately helpful - I didn't see them until now. They don't see to be linked on the official website?

Anyway, I think that the documentation of each object type tend to be very short. For some object types the usage is obviuous, but for other object types it would be helpful with an example and/or a deeper explanation of the concept. Of course, one can always ask in the forum, but normally that shouldn't be necessary.

#5

Hi Nicolas,

Good to know that there's more than one person who can work with the platform. What I would like to see first and foremost is improvements to the preset system. There are several threads about this in the forum, including one that I started myself. If it would be helpful, I could contribute with some testing in this area.

#6

I'd like to see the preset system become more intuitive as well. If I recall correctly, there's a bit of controversy about how it should work. I haven't used the current implementation enough lately to have a strong opinion about the way forward (possibly because it seems a bit tough to use). I feel like I would prefer something more like the way that Ableton Live's preset system works: unlimited named presets stored with a patch, no parameter in/out selection just a complete snapshot, etc. I seem to recall there being some technical limitations that supported Johannes' decision to go with the current parameter selection style.

I'd really like to see a random patch feature and some kind of "random evolution" functionality as well.

#7

I think Johannes' concern is that he does not want to fill up a lot of memory with preset parameters. I don't know how to see the status of Axolotis' memory, but my guess is that in my case memory comsumption is not a problem. Anyway, if you can select for each control whether it should be 'presetable' or 'not presetable' it would be up to the patch programmer how much memory should be used for presets.

#8

There are helper patches (.axh?) that show examples for a lot of the objects, you can get to them via the help menu under the library option.

In an ideal world we would have full documentation but it's not an ideal world so there are compromises, the compromise here is that if you can't find it in the help files, then you should ask on the forum, it's exactly what the forum is for!!