First Time User Feedback

[unexpectedmetaphor]

First, let me say amazing, I really look forward to diving in. Just some random thoughts while using Audulus for the first time before I’ve had time to get used to how things work…

• Took me a long time to find the button/trigger node. Was expecting it to be somewhere near the knob, toggle and other UI elements. Wasn’t until I read through the documentation that I found it in MIDI.

• Is there a true push-button control? Acts like a toggle, looks like a button? Maybe a styling of a slider?

• The documentation for Trigger says it’s MIDI mappable. Cool. But there’s no mention of MIDI mapping of knobs. Odd. I’m sure I’ll figure out how to get CCs in.

• Phasor. Check. Range? Let’s hook it up to a Waveform. Uh… where’d it go? How do I change the range of the waveform? Nope. Documentation, oh 2pi.

• Hz: Hmm, 0 to samplerate/2. Docs don’t mention how to represent these values. I correctly assume 0-1 but it might just be a float between 0 and 24000.

• Hz: Having the input scale to the current sample rate sounds dangerous. Doesn’t this mean that if I open a patch on a different device that it’ll sound different? Pitches will be different. Clocks will run at different speeds. Does every patch and module designer have to build their own samplerate-independent scaling? Is there a proposed standard that everyone should follow? How else are modules expected to easily be patched together?

• At least I assume that modules are supposed to be patched together. I’m surprised that there’s no obvious way to save a module to a module library or browse them in the right-click module browser. Oh wait… there’s + at the very top, way out of the way. The node browser and right-click node browser are so visible that there’s no reason to think there’s anything else. Why do there need to be two different UI’s for inserting objects into a patch? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a quick way to bring up the module browser and the cursor was focused into the search box. Then you could just type “waveform” or “toggle” to get to those nodes? Does there need to be a difference between modules and nodes?

• Ok, now that I’ve found the module browser how do I close it? Tried the close box but that just wants to close the entire patch. Then I saw + thinking that it would let me create a new module in the user library but hey, no, it switches back to the patch editor.

• Since there’s a keyboard accelerator to bring up the module browser not having any keyboard navigation is jarring. At least starting with focus in the search box? Then arrows + return once you’ve narrowed your selections to just a few? I was expecting to close the browser but it’s another . Huh.

• Looking at the UI of the module browser it appears that search is limited to either the library or user modules but not both?

• Waveform: I really really don’t like the orientation. Every other app I’ve used reads left-to-right. This orientation makes my head hurt.

• Waveform: I have a phasor → / 2*pi → waveform displaying a nice saw wave. Every time I cmd-tab back to Audulus there’s a glitch in the display. The line jumps vertically by about a pixel. Hopefully it’s just a display bug and not the underlying phasor.

• Double-clicking on an input node creating an expression is nice. If the input is already connected it would be great if the expression’s input was pre-wired to whatever was feeding into the input?

• Really miss option-drag to duplicate a node.

• It’d be nice if dragging a new node onto the input or output of an existing node would auto-wire it. I use that a lot in Bitwig’s grid and it’s really handy.

• I notice that there’s no way to auto-merge input signals. Again looking at Bitwig’s grid, you can some-modifier-drag a cable to an input and have it auto-create an or gate. But I guess there’s no or gate in Audulus. That made me wonder how I would create one with an expression. There don’t seem to be logical operators like &&, ||, and or or but at least there’s the ternary ?: So I guess just a nested set of ?:'s? This led me to an n-way switch. There doesn’t seem to be a way for a module to auto-create inputs as existing ones are connected so it needs to be a fixed 2-to-1, 4-to-1 or 8-to-1 module? In these cases I wonder if there’s a way to detect if an input is wired up to enable one to create a n-to-1 switch (rather than an n-way logical operator)? Or would such a module force the user to specify how many inputs are being used? I can just imagine how yucky the actual expression for an 8-way switch would look. Hopefully I’ll find the tricks that make it cleaner than I’m thinking.

• VST: Hopefully I’ll be able to use this inside Bitwig at some point. If not, at least I have Blackhole. I don’t get along with Logic and Live still doesn’t support midi coming out of AUs.

[playinmyblues]

You have a lot of good points. I think that this is an app produced by no more than a few people. And they are pretty good to get back to you in the forum with some form of assistance.

I tried to find my way around Audulus a little bit on my own and then started to look for documentation. Go to the home page (https://audulus.com/) for Audulus and see the link to the Docs section at the top: http://docs.audulus.com/

Have a look at the bottom of the left hand menu to see Node Reference. In that, you will find the mathematical expressions that can be used.

I will not try to answer all of your questions but a lot of them can be answered by watching the YouTube tutorials from the Audulus channel - see the “Wired up with Mark” and “SoundforMore channel’s Audulus 4” tutorials. Those will get you started and answer some of your questions about what some of the nodes and modules actually are.

Music in general is something that has a flexible vocabulary. I suppose that is why they call the generally accepted system of Western music “music theory.” My own experience with this was when looking at repairing an old Yamaha Electone organ with a friend. The documentation referred to tremolo as vibrato. My first guitar pedal, a Digitech RP100, called tremolo the effect that affects volume. I know a retired piano teacher and organist about vibrato and tremolo and they knew tremolo as vibrato. And, apparently, I just saw a YT video that said an old Fender guitar amp called tremolo vibrato.

One thing that tripped me up with trying to recreate submodules (as they call them - more than nodes, less than modules?) is that once you place the module node, enter it, and then exit it, you need to click or select the “Lock” icon. That will place a rectangle around each of the controls that is currently in exposure mode. Click or select, and drag the controls to make your module easier to look at and use.

Or you can just place your nodes and modules on the patch space and group them to create a module. Either way, select the “Lock” icon in the top right row to get to the edit location mode. Separate the controls to where you want. Deselect the “Lock” icon to get back to normal. Deselect is actually reselecting it.

This brings me to the next part. To get out of some menus, you have to reselect the one you just select to exit that mode. By watching some of the videos, you can see how it all works.

If I get the time, I think I will go back and watch some tutorials from earlier versions of Audulus to see if I can create some of the things they did back then. But there is also Patchstorage.com. On that site, they have a number of patches created from earlier versions. You can still download them and use them. To update them, you will probably have to pull them all apart and recreate them. It might even have to be done at the most basic level as I have seen that it recommends you update your patches to the latest version.

The Audulus 4 MIDI Implementation is not fully developed at this point. If you want to sync it to an external source, such as a DAW, you have to use a workaround which uses a repeating sequence of notes which can be seen by a module in Audulus 4. I made one on my own and posted a patch and a short video. One of the developers posted their version to help out. Here is the link to that: External MIDI Clock Sync Hack/Workaround

If you take a screenshot of the Audulus 4 patch and zoom in on the area, you can figure out how to build your own.

[playinmyblues]

And there are some other questions in the forum where the developers have provided submodules and short in-Audulus 4 tutorials explaining how things get used. There is probably more information that you have time for at this point which is, in a way, documentation.

[biminiroad]

Thanks for the detailed feedback! I’ve gone through and addressed them point-by-point.

@unexpectedmetaphor

First, let me say amazing, I really look forward to diving in. Just some random thoughts while using Audulus for the first time before I’ve had time to get used to how things work…

• Took me a long time to find the button/trigger node. Was expecting it to be somewhere near the knob, toggle and other UI elements. Wasn’t until I read through the documentation that I found it in MIDI.

I actually always have the same problem myself even after using Audulus for like 8 years. Perhaps I can bring up to Taylor moving its category, but no promises.

• Is there a true push-button control? Acts like a toggle, looks like a button? Maybe a styling of a slider?

The button had this functionality in Audulus 3, it was an option you could select. Taylor just needs to add it back in, it’s already an issue filed in our tracker. For now you can use a flip-flop - look inside the Clock module for one like this.

• The documentation for Trigger says it’s MIDI mappable. Cool. But there’s no mention of MIDI mapping of knobs. Odd. I’m sure I’ll figure out how to get CCs in.

You go into MIDI mapping mode and click on the knobs and then twist the corresponding hardware knob just like Live or other DAWs.

• Phasor. Check. Range? Let’s hook it up to a Waveform. Uh… where’d it go? How do I change the range of the waveform? Nope. Documentation, oh 2pi.

This is just a RTM moment on two accounts - 1) phasors are 0 to 2pi because of trigonometry, they’re a fundamental building block of DSP oscillators and 2) the range of the waveform node is -1 to 1.

• Hz: Hmm, 0 to samplerate/2. Docs don’t mention how to represent these values. I correctly assume 0-1 but it might just be a float between 0 and 24000.

It’s a float - 0 to 1 is 0 to 1Hz. Hz values are only useful at a maximum of half the sample rate. I can’t put a number there for samplerate/2 because you can vary the sample rate.

• Hz: Having the input scale to the current sample rate sounds dangerous. Doesn’t this mean that if I open a patch on a different device that it’ll sound different? Pitches will be different. Clocks will run at different speeds. Does every patch and module designer have to build their own samplerate-independent scaling? Is there a proposed standard that everyone should follow? How else are modules expected to easily be patched together?

You’re misunderstanding how it’s implemented. There are some things like a delay by x samples submodule that use the sample rate node to derive the current sample rate and do a calculation that ensures that it’s delayed by that precise number of samples, but clocks and pitches are independent of sample rate.

I think the samplerate/2 is throwing you off - you can put whatever 32 bit number you want at a Hz input, it will just not be useful in any sense past that range.

Audulus uses a linearized pitch scale called the octave signal (like 1 volt per octave, but scaled so that 0 = 440Hz), and that is translated into Hz sample rate independent. Clocks just have knobs that multiply the knob by the maximum number of Hz the clock uses without basing anything on the sample rate. Take a look inside the modules and questions like this will become clear.

At least I assume that modules are supposed to be patched together. I’m surprised that there’s no obvious way to save a module to a module library or browse them in the right-click module browser. Oh wait… there’s + at the very top, way out of the way. The node browser and right-click node browser are so visible that there’s no reason to think there’s anything else. Why do there need to be two different UI’s for inserting objects into a patch? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a quick way to bring up the module browser and the cursor was focused into the search box. Then you could just type “waveform” or “toggle” to get to those nodes? Does there need to be a difference between modules and nodes?

Again, another RTM moment. It would be great if we had more onboarding, and we will at some point, but Audulus is only programmed by one person and a few helpers. Go easy on us, please, we don’t have the resources of larger companies

And yes there are possible more ideal ways to bring up search, but this is the way it is at the moment. Keep in mind that Audulus is cross platform and we have to figure out ways for it to have similar workflow on both iPad and Mac.

Ok, now that I’ve found the module browser how do I close it? Tried the close box but that just wants to close the entire patch. Then I saw + thinking that it would let me create a new module in the user library but hey, no, it switches back to the patch editor.

RTM

Since there’s a keyboard accelerator to bring up the module browser not having any keyboard navigation is jarring. At least starting with focus in the search box? Then arrows + return once you’ve narrowed your selections to just a few? I was expecting to close the browser but it’s another . Huh.

This is something people have brought up and we’ve added to the pile of things to implement at some point

• Looking at the UI of the module browser it appears that search is limited to either the library or user modules but not both?

Correct - perhaps you should be able to search in both but browse separately with the tabs (that was the idea to have them on separate tabs).

• Waveform: I really really don’t like the orientation. Every other app I’ve used reads left-to-right. This orientation makes my head hurt.

It’s how it works and won’t change. You can visualize it like the signal is pouring out of the input into the window if that makes your head hurt less. You can use the scope node instead, also.

• Waveform: I have a phasor → / 2*pi → waveform displaying a nice saw wave. Every time I cmd-tab back to Audulus there’s a glitch in the display. The line jumps vertically by about a pixel. Hopefully it’s just a display bug and not the underlying phasor.

It’s not a bug - when Audulus is in the background, it stops rendering the GUI. The glitch you see is the rendering kicking back in.

• Double-clicking on an input node creating an expression is nice. If the input is already connected it would be great if the expression’s input was pre-wired to whatever was feeding into the input?

As someone who has spent hundreds of hours using Audulus, I can’t say I’ve ever run across a need for this, but I’m open to you explaining why this would help your workflow.

• Really miss option-drag to duplicate a node.

CMD+C, CMD+V, it’s quick. Option drag is for panning.

• It’d be nice if dragging a new node onto the input or output of an existing node would auto-wire it. I use that a lot in Bitwig’s grid and it’s really handy.

Some nodes have many different inputs, how would it know which one to auto wire to? Also, the action of dragging a node to an input or output is the same action as you’d take to make a wire connection. Unless you can make a compelling case for this, I don’t see the point.

• I notice that there’s no way to auto-merge input signals.

Use an Add node. Imagine you have several signals connected to one input. If you wanted to remove just one of them, how would you do that? You can’t - you’d remove all of them at once. Not ideal. Using an add node is simple and easy and exapandable.

Again looking at Bitwig’s grid, you can some-modifier-drag a cable to an input and have it auto-create an or gate.

You can just create an OR gate submodule. and use that if you need to.

But I guess there’s no or gate in Audulus. That made me wonder how I would create one with an expression. There don’t seem to be logical operators like &&, ||, and or or but at least there’s the ternary ?: So I guess just a nested set of ?:'s?

Download this submodule toolkit and look into the logical operators to see how it’s done.

https://discourse.audulus.com/t/submodule-toolkit/3142

This led me to an n-way switch. There doesn’t seem to be a way for a module to auto-create inputs as existing ones are connected so it needs to be a fixed 2-to-1, 4-to-1 or 8-to-1 module? In these cases I wonder if there’s a way to detect if an input is wired up to enable one to create a n-to-1 switch (rather than an n-way logical operator)? Or would such a module force the user to specify how many inputs are being used? I can just imagine how yucky the actual expression for an 8-way switch would look. Hopefully I’ll find the tricks that make it cleaner than I’m thinking.

Perhaps you’re looking for the mux node? You can expand the number of inputs to however many you need.

• VST: Hopefully I’ll be able to use this inside Bitwig at some point. If not, at least I have Blackhole. I don’t get along with Logic and Live still doesn’t support midi coming out of AUs.

Perhaps, I don’t know if VST is planned before we come out with a Windows version, which is a little in the ether right now. Like I said before, it’s a small team, so go easy on us please

[biminiroad]

All in all I think you could benefit a lot from watching me build things on my Wired Up with Mark series. That way you could get used to the workflow - I explain everything I’m doing as I go as well.

https://discourse.audulus.com/t/wired-up-with-mark/3166

The Sound For More tutorial series is also really great for building with nodes and perhaps it’s worth it to look through it first to grasp some basics, then come over to mine to see how you can work quickly and efficiently.

https://discourse.audulus.com/t/soundformore-tutorials/3157/

I can tell from the level of detail of your feedback that you’ll be a great user of Audulus, so that’s why I’m taking so much time to answer your concerns. I hope you keep learning about Audulus and encourage you to come to our Discord as many of these questions I could have answered for you as they were occuring to you.

Someone’s usually on there 24/7 since I live in Croatia and most others in the US.

Discord - A New Way to Chat with Friends & Communities

[playinmyblues]

A suggestion for a tutorial on yt would be for the scope node. I remembered that you provided an in-patch tutorial with your submodules toolkit. I will have look at that first to see if ai can figure out how to get a simple use case working. Something like any wave form represented properly onscreen.

[biminiroad]

Good suggestion, perhaps I will do a build along making a more fully functional scope.

Look inside the VCO modules - they have a scope node in them. If you look at the documentation as well as the node tutorial patches, it will be clear how to use it:

https://discourse.audulus.com/t/node-tutorial-patches/3132

[playinmyblues]

I like using the scope-type modules in miRack and VCV Rack so I can see what kind of signals are being used and the results.

One thing that I have come to realize is that my advanced math is rusty and some terms I may have known years ago has been forgotten. And things like how your audio signals have been normalized (correct term?) and how to get everything to work within the Audulus environment would be good. I studied electronics a couple of times in my life so I have a good idea of how things work in general. Again, it is all a little rusty.

[jersmi]

Not on yt but here’s a little Scope demo patch.

Scope-demo.audulus4 (4.1 KB)