Reviving Machina

drobilla.net

In the past few years of hammering on my repository while moulding Ingen into the modular of my dreams, my poor little generative sequencer Machina was often left to rot. That's a shame, because it's a fun tool to play with if you're into generative gadgets and pretty graphs.

So, I spent the weekend working on turning Machina back into a usable app. It's come a very long way in two days, from a mess that doesn't even compile to most functionality working pretty well:

A small Machina machine created by step recording

Aside from rewriting a lot of the code, testing, and fixing things that were broken, I've changed the conceptual model a bit. There is now always just one start node for a machine. This tends to create more manageable structures, especially when recording several takes into the same machine.

Step recording has also been significantly improved. You can build machines entirely in the UI, but this is pretty tedious. It's much more effective to record, or step record if you want regular timing and no delays in-between notes. The above pictured machine was created by step recording MIDI, though I have tweaked the edge probabilities with the mouse. You can also import a MIDI file, which is an easy way to get a big machine to work with.

Hopefully I can find the time to turn this into an LV2 plugin and release it, but for now it is an unreleased Jack application. Give it a try if you're feeling adventurous, I would appreciate any feedback.