intermorphic.com Blog

Just to keep you all up-to-date : the Mixtikl software is now just about ready for Beta. We’re still working on the starter Tiklpaks though, and will wait until those are ready until starting the Beta programme! That shouldn’t be too long though; just a few weeks. I can’t wait.

Pete

It is always something of a relief to hit major project milestones. We have already passed a major one: Mixtikl is midway through its Alpha testing phase and now has people other than Tim and me using it! The Beta release is now only weeks away.

What is Mixtikl, and why are we so excited by it?

Mixtikl is the first mobile music creativity app that does not ignore the importance of the ‘full-on’ desktop music sequencer. Mixtikl embraces it: with both plug-in and standalone versions. Mixtikl is for both PC (Windows and Mac) & Mobile!

• Mixtikl is open: Use your own content, or from in add-on Tiklpaks.
• Capture / mix / work on content on the move on your mobile.
• Finesse your mixes on PC using the Mixtikl plugin.
• Move your mixes between mobile and PC and back again.
• ‘Performer’ app – Perform music on your mobile.
• ‘Remixer’ app – Create quick mixes, and mix and match sounds.
• ‘Partikl’ app – Sound and FX design, exporting mix files
• ‘Player’ app – Play lists of Ogg, MIDI and generative music.
• Use audio loops, MIDI, generative music & modular synthesis.
• Integrated Noatikl generative music engine for generative music.
• Pitch shift your loops and apply realtime FX.
• Act as VST or AU plugin in your VST/AU enabled sequencer.

There is also a whole lot of other stuff in there that we’ll let you all know about when we release it!

What is Noatikl, and why is it in Mixtikl ?

For those who don’t know, Noatikl is a Generative Music tool. This is an easy-to-use program (with great depth!) which helps you make music; by composing the music for you, in real time, while you give it direction in what to do!

Mixtikl contains a run-time version of Noatikl . That is to say, it Mixtikl lets you play your Noatikl compositions on whatever device you happen to have Mixtikl . You can use Mixtikl ’s built-in synth designer (called Partikl) to attach sounds to your Noatikl compositions, to really bring them to life in a cross-platform way.

This lets you, for example, create playlists of Noatikl Generative Music pieces that you or your friends can listen to on the train, where the music changes every time you hear it; as a change from listening to the exact same notes in your MP3 collection time-after-time!

Releasing software is hard work!

It never ceases to amaze me exactly how much work is required to get software out of the door. We’ve been creating products since the early 1990s, so we’ve got a feel for how long things will take now and what order things need to be done in.

Our prediction “way back” when we started creating Mixtikl out of the ashes of miniMIXA has actually been pretty good; we figured it’d be out sometime this month (October) but it now looks like it’ll be November. As always, the delays are due mainly to discovering new things along the way, and adding them in to make the product more interesting!

The software is now pretty much in a Beta state, give or take a few items. We’ll let it out of the door when it feels ready!

Looking back, to look forward

It is interesting to reflect that we actually created the first version of miniMIXA back in 2004; and that we won a BAFTA award for miniMIXA back in 2005 – more than three years ago! If our then employers (Tao) had had the vision and resources to back miniMIXA, I wonder where we’d have got the product by now… Still, we’re making up for lost time and are having a blast bringing Mixtikl to life.

It feels amazing to sit on a train and sculpt music in real-time on my mobile. And, when I want, just kick-back and listen to a generative music playlist courtesy of the built-in Noatikl Generative Music engine. And I still can’t quite believe it when I use the exact same software as an Audio Unit under Logic, a VSTi under Kore 2 or Sonar … or even standalone on my Mac/Desktop.

This is been such a long road; we started writing the code that is within the Intermorphic Sound System, which underpins Mixtikl , more than 6 years ago. We started writing the 2d engine that the Mixtikl UI sits on, well over a year ago. minMIXA itself took around 3 years to write, including three major releases. The port from miniMIXA to Mixtikl has been a long, hard slog through 2008, but it is great to be so close now to releasing the product that reaches our vision from nearly a decade ago!

And that product is an extendable, trans-platform music/media mixer and “box of tricks”. And it includes a runtime of the Noatikl Generative Music engine. The first Mixtikl versions are for Windows (Standalone, VSTi), Mac (Standalone, Audio Unit, VSTi), Windows Mobile Pocket PC/Smartphone (Standalone). Once those are finally released, Symbian Series 60 looks to be our next target. And hopefully iPhone after that, if Apple ever solve the problems with their SDK.

We have lots and lots of ideas of ways to extend Mixtikl – and the prices are going to be amazing. I can’t wait for the first full release … not long now!

Pete

Yes, we getting back into developing mobile applications. We really can’t say too much at present, but we will be getting generative music onto mobile (that means noatikl!), as well as some other music apps we hope people find interesting. Although we are excited about what we are working on deep under cover at im labs, we know most people wont have a clue what we are on about. We can but apologise for that, but in our defence we hope you will enjoy playing with what we are cooking up . It might take a while yet to see the light of day, but that is just because what we are working on represents a lot of work.

Yes, on the weekend I finally figured out how to transition the forum from phpBB2 to phpBB3 – and the forum is “fixed”. phpBB3 seems a lot more powerful and phpBB2, but that also means lots more features and settings to get to grips with…

We added a new section “practikl”, which is related to a self-help community for mobile music making products (e.g. hardware). The idea to do this came about from the success of the MicroBR forum. Whether it is something people will want to see developed – or not – only time will tell! See: http://forum.intermorphic.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=393

Well, that was hard work, but we’ve now got noatikl 1.5 out of the door.

This is a major new development for us, as it completes an arc of development that has been going on for many months now, and has increased the power of noaitkl greatly. The plan was threefold:
- give noatikl pieces the ability to incorporate internally generated structure
- give noatikl the ability to respond to MIDI input events
- introduce a fast, flexible, easy-to-use scripting system to bind it all together!

So: on one hand, we’ve added the ability to control noatikl from within, with (optional!) Lua trigger scripts that fire while the piece is playing. The effect on noatikl is quite incredible. It is especially gratifying to see users who are self-confessed ’scriptaholics’ test-driving the new features, and finding that it totally transforms their ability to control noatikl in the way they want.

On the other hand, noatikl can now be controlled in real-time in response to incoming MIDI controller events. Not only that, but noatikl automatically harmonises with incoming MIDI note events; and those note events can be used to trigger various responses within noatikl using the scripting engine. noatikl can now fairly be described as a hyperinstrument!

What next? Well, for starters we have plans to greatly improve the pattern handling within noatikl. That should keep us busy.

Pete

In case you’re interested, in addition to adding Lua-based scripting to noatikl, I’ve been using the same scripting engine in prototyping optikl, the generative visual art program we hope to release some time.

To help optikl and our other products go wherever we want, including maybe to mobile, I’ve written a common graphics library adaptor layer that sits on top of SDL, Juce and what have you. So this will let us, in future, write our apps once and simply recompiling them for whatever the target platform might be, without the need for any major rewrites.

Pete

As a follow-up to Tim’s post on his fun with Asio4All, I’ve found the easiest solution on my MacBook and Mac Mini was to get a really cheap Firewire low-latency audio box, that works with both Windows XP and Mac OS X. This was the Behringer FCA202. There are lots of really cheap offers for this in the webstores right now, and it is a tremendous piece of kit!

I’ve been using this to work on ideas for the noatikl hyperinstrument and MIDI-control features.

For that matter, I wonder if we should use the term “hyperinstrument” or “hyper instrument”. I’ll stick with the first spelling, unless anybody can tell me otherwise!

Pete

For those of you who are keeping up with developments at intermorphic Towers, we sure had a lot of fun getting our new web store live – believe it or not, we finally got it running late on Christmas Eve. It was nice to be able to enjoy Christmas with that out of the way…!

Since then, we’ve been working hard to continue to improve and extend noatikl.

We’ve been trying to keep updates for noatikl coming every couple of weeks, and keep on adding new and interesting stuff. The next update will feature support for build-in trigger scripts and MIDI control of noatikl, which is very exciting as it takes noatikl into the realms of being a customisable hyperinstrument!

It has also been great to be able to work again with Tim Didymus, who authored two new Generative Drum template packs for noatikl. These are tremendous fun to use, and are proving a big hit.

We’ve also been working on behind-the-scenes ideas for optikl and liptikl (some of which have fed-in to noatikl, including the scripting engine).

It is lovely to find that past users of our previous software creations (such as Koan Pro and miniMIXA) keep on discovering the intermorphic site, and start playing with our new software. Welcome back to you all!

Looking forward to another innovative and exciting year,

Pete

Well, it has been quite some year for Tim and me! The year of intermorphic.

Since our previous employer went down the pan, we’ve taken the opportunity to kick-off intermorphic, accepting the challenge we set ourselves to “do it all again, only better”. Its funny how life turns out, losing our jobs was the catalyst to “go for it” with intermorphic…

Looking back, we’ve taken on an almighty task. We’ve created two completely new products from scratch. They are cross-platform, Windows and Mac. We created them in double-quick time. They’re solid, good looking. Innovative. Different. And powerful! We’ve created a new site, with a fresh new style, written masses of documentation, and have even created a load of video tutorials. I think we’ve got a lot to be proud of.

Why did we create liptikl first? Well, this was partly because we thought it *could* be done and because I figured it’d be nice (ha!) to get started on something very new to us, and that we could cut our teeth on with the new development frameworks and design principles we’d adopted. I hope you can imagine how exciting it was for me when Tim sent me the first lyric he’d created with liptikl, I figured it was a verse from Shakespeare… and then he told me he’d created it in a few seconds with liptikl by mangling-together some words he’d found on the net . We knew we were really on to something, and once we’d got liptikl sorted we felt ready to start on noatikl…

noatikl was an unbelieveably challenging piece of software to create. We had the advantage of knowing exactly what we wanted to create, having learned our lessons in past lives (!) about exactly how users wanted a generative music tool to work and integrate with their own tools. But… that made it hugely daunting … how could a small company like us create such a thing totally from zilch, and include a standalone version, as well as a raft of plug-in variants, all focused on MIDI, and working wherever our users wanted within the vast range of Mac and Windows sequencers? Big challenge – the key was not to be daunted, but to start with the right tools (the exact same ones that we used for liptikl, we’d looked ahead very carefully!), and just plug-away without looking down off the tightrope. The past few months have been a blur, but here we are, we’ve done it and frankly it works beautifully, just like we wanted. Maybe even better! Our Beta users spotted very soon how solid the software was. Our decision to focus on pure MIDI was totally vindicated. The UI approach we’d adopted worked a treat. And with some massaging of the software, we suddenly integrated beautifully with Logic. Then with Cubase and Sonar. Bliss – it works!

Actually, getting noatikl working well with the various plug-in formats, and standalone mode, isn’t something I’d want to have to go through again but here we are, we’ve done it. The future now lets us focus on concentrating on the guts of noatikl and liptikl, making them as powerful and easy to use as possible, without our having to worrry any more about integration or cross-platform issues. And hopefully to bring-out new generative tools like optikl, where we can leverage yet more of the experience we’ve built-up.

A big “thank you” to our Beta testers to helping us find the way through the product development maze. An especially big thanks to Mark Harrop, who has been *immense*. Big ups too to Tim Didymus (generative music master!) and Ken Mistove for his top VSTi tips.

I can’t wait ’til you all start using the software, and hope you’re as excited as Tim and me to be at the start of what will be hopefully a huge generative tools success.

Have fun!

Pete

Hi Folks,

Thought it was about time that I posted a blog update, to let you all know how noatikl and liptikl are both coming on.

Firstly liptikl: this is now pretty much complete, and now ready to go into a Beta testing phase. We’re looking forward to finding-out what people think of it!

Secondly noatikl: well, this is a far more complex product than liptikl, but we’ve been making great progress. In fact, we have all the plugin variants and the standalone version working fine, in both Mac and Windows versions.

We’ve got a lot of parameters and properties implemented now into noatikl, and are getting some fabulous results playing through some of the wonderful synths that are available these days!

We have an active community of noatikl Beta testers who are doing their best to create great music with noatikl … and report back bugs as they find them!

We’re also doing some interesting stuff like building-in MIDI Sync support for the standalone version of noatikl, as we know this is something that many of you are really keen on.

Don’t forget to pop-by the intermorphic forums, and do please feel free to ask some questions!

With best wishes,

Pete