Update, 5th June 2014 - Sample precise sample playing, multi-touch keyboard and muliti-touch theremin, easier to use tempo and rhythm changes, polyrhythmic subdivisons, other minor features and bug fixes.

This upload brings you the new sample precise percussion sample player, multi-touch playing for the one screen keyboard, multi-touch "theremin", improvements in the simpler version of the automatic tempo and rhythm changes - and an easy way to do polyrhythmic subdivisions amongst other things. Also some bug fixes.

New Sample Playing feature

You can take a sample you recorded yourself - or one you downloaded, for instance from freesound.org - or many other online sources for free, and for commercial samples and sample packs - and in an easy process, just browse to find it to  import it into Bounce Metronome and you can immediately play it as a new percussive instrument.

The advantage of this is that you can have extremely high precision if everything is done in Bounce Metronome itself at the sample level instead of going via midi - well sub millisecond precision of timing. Also lets you use any sounds you like for the clicks.

Here it is in action

That video also shows the polyrhythmic subdivisions in action - it's just a minor feature - but you can now make these rhythms more easily by selecting polyrhythmic subdivisions from a drop list of default subdivisions - or enter them into the subdivisions field as e.g. 2:3:5 or whatever it is you want.

Details - how to add a sample:

You are recommended to trim it first, as any silence or quiet section at the start of the track will be played as well exactly as recorded - and so delay onset of the note.  Sample should be in .wav format  - so you might need to convert it from mp3 to wav, plenty of ways to do that.

Then go to Instr >> Percussion Samples... to bring up the menu - which comes with five example instruments to get you started. If you are using the melodic features in Bounce Metronome you'll find this under More Instr >> Wave Shape Player.

Then you'll see an option "Add Sample..." Click there and browse to find your sample, and you are done. Look in the "Samples as percussion" drop menu to find your new instrument.

SYNCHRONIZATION WITH BOUNCES AND WITH MIDI NOTES

By default the sample player uses Direct Sound and a buffer size of 50 ms, so fixed latency of 50 ms.

The Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth by default on most computers has a fixed latency which can be quite large, as much as 200 ms sometimes.

This will be noticeable if you mix percussion samples with midi instruments in the same rhythm. Here on the Surface Pro I can get synchronized playing between the sample player and the GS wavetable synth if I set the buffer for the sample player  to about 85 ms.

In the other direction, if playing with instruments with low latency then the 50 ms may be too much. You can reduce the latency using Asio typically to 1 ms or less.

The other solution is to either stick to samples for everything, or stick to midi instruments for everything.

Whatever the latency - you can then  set a bounce synchronization delay in the Bounce Options window as usual (Bounce >> Bounce Options (Ctrl + 220) ) to synchronize the visuals with the sound.

Idea for future upload of the sample player - count beats

The idea is to set it to count out the beats. This shouldn't be that much work, maybe a day or two of coding. Plus need to record or find samples for the numbers to get you started on the feature.

If you want to try it already - you can do it by using the option to set a different instrument for each beat in the rhythm. There are some sounds available on freesound for instance of someone counting, trim the leading space and import into Bounce - and you can set it counting e.g. 1 to 4 for a 4/4 rhythm. I've just done that myself and it worked fine. So it's a case of automating that - since Bounce has programming to count the beats already through the visual options - it's probably not a major job to get it able to count out loud as well.

How I'd do it is make it so you have a single instrument "Count Beats" select that into any part and it will count for you. But then there's an easy but rather fun addition if we can do that - would be great to have at least two of those "Count Beat" voices at different pitches say man's and woman's voice, so you can have a different voice for each rhythm in a two part polyrhythm counting simultaneously, if you want to. That would be a trivial addition if I can get the feature working in Bounce.

New "All in One" display for the simpler automatic tempo and rhythm changes

You can find this if you go to Tempo >> Simpler automatic tempo and rhythm changes (Ctrl + 245). When you switch on the feature - then as well as the separate fields to set a sequence of tempi, rhythms, numbers of measures and so on, you'll see a new text area that shows all of them together.

So then you have a single line for each rhythm or tempo, like this:

1: Rhythm 2 measures 4 Tempo 60
2: Rhythm 4s2 measures 8 Tempo 20
3: Rhythm 3s4 measures 2 Tempo 60
4: Rhythm 6/8 measures 5 Tempo 70
5: Rhythm 3:5 measures 6 Tempo 10
6: Rhythm 3:5s3:2 measures 3 Tempo 50
7: Rhythm 3+2+3s2 measures 7 Tempo 40
8: Rhythm 4/4+7/8 measures 12 Tempo 30
Or whatever.

It's useful as a visual display so you can see which rhythm, which tempo and which number of measures belong together.

You can also edit it directly to change any of the numbers. This is something I've been asked for. Might be especially useful for blind users - but also useful if you have a lot of rhythms and tempi and numbers of measures and not sure which goes with which - this should make it totally clear.

New Multitouch Features

Firs - all the on-screen keyboards are now playable with multi-touch. They are tested up to ten finger multi-touch, and also with sustain and sostenuto also tested.

You can also set it to respond to the touch contact area, in Config >> Pen and Touch Sensitivity.

This doesn't give many levels of volume sensitivity - but enough to play with several levels of accents by tapping a little harder. So may be useful if you don't expect too much of it.

It doesn't sense the velocity of your tap - instead it senses how squashed your finger is at the moment of impact with the screen  - for instance if your finger is put sideways to the screen it may sense it as a louder tap. But if you do tap a little harder - that tends to squash out the finger and so you get some volume sensitivity that way - so that's how it works.

It also works pretty well for "after touch" type volume sensitiivty becuase as you press harder your finger squashes out more and gives a larger contact area - again only a few volume levels - but still can be useful. Also again - things like tilting the angle of your finger can vary the contact area - but typically pressing harder is the best way to squash it out to get a larger contact area.

The after touch sensitivity here is used for the mouse theremin, and also for the on screen keyboards - you can assign any midi controller to be controlled by it, in both cases.

Multitouch Theremin

Here it is in action:

To find it, go to Bounce Metronome Professional or any of the others, say the Theremin's rhythmicon.

It's a minor feature in Bounce, rarely used in normal operation, so you may need to do some navigating to find it.

Depending on your settings, you may need to go to Opts >> Advanced mode in the menu, then again, to Instr >> Add Melodic instruments...- and finally to Instr >> More Windows and Options and you'll find it in the Instr. drop menu.

It's fun to play around with. And as you see here you can assign a different instrument to each finger, an unintended but welcome feature of it. You can also use it with a joystick instead of fingers.

But - if you want to do e.g. microtonal work trying to find just intonation chords - you need to set the pitch range to be quite small.

The problem is not so much the midi pitch bend resolution as the screen resolution. Set it to a one octave pitch bend range for instance, for screen width of 1920 pixels, and the minimum pitch step is a little under 1 cent. That might sound pretty good - but you get noticeable beating if a just intonation chord is out by 1 cent. So it's not too good if you want to try using the multi-touch to experiment with seeing if you can tune just intonation chords like a 5/4 or a 3/2 by hand precisely - don't be surprised if however hard you try there is always a bit of residual beating. Set it to a four octave range and you'll get 2.5 cent steps. In the video shown here - then the larger steps are even larger as I did it with pitch ripples, which makes it more sensitive around particular steps of the tuning and less sensitive otherwise - but didn't really do it to demo that feature - this video is just something I uploaded while release testing, need to do a better one to show its features better.

You can use the pitch ripples feature to get more pitch sensitivity. You can find that in the Theremin Options window, which you can also get to with a click on the icon at top left of the Theremin window. Then go to Theremin Centre Pitch, Pitch Ripples, and Device Max Bend (Ctrl + 130) and you'll find the pitch bend ripples option there.

Idea for future upload of the mouse theremin - multiple strips, one for each note of the tuning

In a future version then I plan to split the display into horizontal strips so you'd have, maybe a dozen strips for each note of the tuningn - and each one with a range left to right of say two semitones or whatever you want - and then as you move the finger up and down it goes up and down through your tuning (e.g. pentatonic or diatonic or harmonic series or whatever) with the volume dropping to zero between each note - and then from left to right  decreases and ncreases pitch.

So like lots of "mouse theremins" stacked on top of each other. That should deal with these issues, because our ears don't have nearly so much sensitivity to volume as we do to pitch. You can make do with a 100 volume levels without too much trouble, at least, 127 volume levels is considered fine for midi for volume, but far more than that for pitch.

So, I think that will work well - did give it a quick go but was too much involved to do it in just a few hours of coding, so maybe a day or two of work some day - for a later upload.

Minor feature - golden ratio swing.

You can now use Control + click on the light swing button to get a golden ratio swing - that's a swing with the subdivisions in the ratio 161.8... to 100. You could of course set up any desired amount of swing, by typing in the numbers by hand - this is a minor update which just gives a short cut easy way to set it up if you happen to want a golden ratio swing.

Bug fix and rename to Bounce Metronome Lite

Bug fixes include a fix for an access violation connected with display of the music notation.

I've also renamed Bounce Metronome Lite to Bounce Metronome Lite - and will now need to edit this website to match. So if you wonder what happened to Bounce Metronome Lite - it's still there, nothing changed except the name.

Details see Change Log and Bug Fixes.

Any questions about all this be sure to say - either comment here, or ask me via email to support@bouncemetronome.com - or you can talk to me about it on facebook, google+ etc.

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