* iteration.2 now released! (with a big new website update!)
at last, i bring a much needed update to this dang website, and with it i bring an exciting new release! finally another entry into the iteration series of albums, this time with recordings of vcv rack patches, or remixed from vcv rack patches made in 2021.
** release
*** bandcamp
*** youtube
*** about the release
this release contains patches i wrote in 2021, which is a bit delayed than i had intended since i released iteration.1 with 2020 patches in 2021. sometimes things don't exactly go to plan and there were a few things that delayed this release. first of all, there really wasn't enough complete patches i wrote in 2021 to make a whole album, and the patches i started making later didn't really fit in with the style of the other ones. this halted progress for a while until i decided to remix a few unfinished patches i had started back then, a few months ago this year. i had also remixed the patch "epsilon acid" as i was unhappy with it's place in the album as well as the patch not lining up well as i didn't reset all the sequencers when i was making it at the time. that meant that the recording i had produced for that patch before was using sequencers that weren't aligned with each other properly. it is likely possible that i could have been able to fix this with logic delays or something but i thought it would be a nice opportunity to turn it into something different.
you can find a recording of the original "epsilon acid" on battle of the bits.
the other reasons for the delay mainly stem from the usual stuff, life stuff and priorities, some anxiety about getting all this released, that kind of thing. releases are a bit inconvenient because not only do i have to release the music itself onto bandcamp, but also write a visualiser, record the visualiser for youtube, compile the patches, and write an article on the site and posts on forums and so on. it can be a lot of work to do by yourself and i tend to like to put it off because it's not my favourite kind of work. however i think that since i'm heading towards my next semester i want to get many things out of the way so that i have more head space to do other things that will be important then.
more music is of course on the horizon but in what form, i don't know yet. iteration.3 is going to be made at some point, but other than that maybe a few smaller releases. i have a lot of unreleased music that hasn't been compiled into anything so i may find it worthwhile to go about and throw more compilation albums out. a lot of music i made in the past i don't like anymore but there is some good stuff there and then, the tricky thing is finding enough good musics in common to make a compilation. there will likely be more work in terms of finishing tracks and remixing or making new ones to fit in with the style.
*** visualiser
i have made yet another visualiser for this album, similarly to the iteration.1 album. i had almost given up making one since i had already delayed this release for a while and i was hesitant to do the work but here we are. you can try out the new visualiser in web stuff, it's written in javascript as usual.
the major difference with this visualiser is that it uses SVG as the base, and uses the actual SVG i used to make the album cover. i used a similar method to the iteration.1 visualiser except that it animates the outline of the SVG paths which is achieved using the property stroke-dashoffset.
*** vcv rack patches
you can find the patches i used on patchstorage with more some instructions on how to run the patch and load in the correct samples. the zip file contains one patch that only works correctly in Rack v1, with the rest working and tested in Rack v2. the compilation also includes some extra patches so give it a look if you're interested.
** new website update!
along with the new album comes the new website update! i've been working on this one for probably a year or two now, it's been quite some time since the website got updated, and i've just been sitting on the changes for a long time.
one of the main problems i've had with the site was the absolute mess it was then. all the generated content and the data to generate the content was all in the root directory, and all the javascript code to generate the site was in one big file. last year i finally sat down and refactored the code and improved the directory structure, to keep the generated content under a sub-directory and separate out the code into modules. it wasn't trivial but i think i have a better base to work from now.
home and about pages remain mostly the same, but musics and web had a big overhaul. background animations got removed (i just don't like them as much anymore, but eventually i plan on porting them so that you can find them again under web stuff). the site font got changed to a bitmap font from the oldschool font resource and overall it's got a bit of a different retro aesthetic with the hard drop shadows. xhbplayer now uses a custom audio player element with forward and back buttons. new stuff in web stuff!
there's just too many changes to document and as you can see in the old bulletins system, i haven't kept good track of them either, not even in the git commit messages. so that's not exactly ideal. i don't know what i want to do with the bulletins page, whether i should remove it or change it up. but currently it's going to stay for now because i don't want to work on it at the moment. this website is just infinite work, there's always stuff to change and improve on, and i've got other things to do so website updates will have to change from now onwards.
i think i need to target smaller updates now, instead of overhauling a whole load of stuff and reinventing the wheel for the 50th time. i like this site and i don't really want my changes to wait months or years until they go live.
when will the github repository be public? i honestly don't know yet. that's more work that i haven't done yet and i'm not sure if i want everything to be up there. maybe just the code? i'm not sure, but uh eventually it may be done. so look out for that? anyway i think that's enough ramble, hope you enjoy the new update!
