A new version of Konkreet Performer appeared over the weekend with a couple of great improvements. Number one, there’s now a way to resize the touch areas – a larger touch area around each node makes aiming easier, which is great especially in the frenzied spurts of creativity this control surface inspires.
Secondly, there’s now a setting to make the angle parameter “discontinuous”. Previously, the angle of a node from the center increased from left to right whether the node was above or below the center node. That way, the value would never jump from one to zero but always smoothly increase to one and back to zero as you orbited the node around the center.
That’s great in one way, if you don’t want that jump, but it doesn’t allow the angle from centre parameter to distinguish between values above and values below the centre node. With discontinuity activated, every angle in the 360 degree circle is unique; the values above range from zero to 0.5 and the values below, as you continue clockwise, go from 0.5 to 1 and right at the end they jump from 1 back to zero.
This is going to be terrific for my Chroma and Mirage instruments, which send their values back to Konkreet Performer on snap change, to place the Performer nodes according to the settings of the current snapshot; now, I can guarantee that the placement on snap change will be the same every time.
Discontinuity will also allow for much higher resolution control of the angle parameter, as you wind around it to change a value in your Reaktor ensembles or other destinations. I’ll post some examples for you later this week.
(incidentally, there will be free updates of Chroma and Mirage this fall!)
Update: looks like there’s a bug with node angle when Konkreet receives OSC. This won’t be a problem for most users, who are only sending from Konkreet to their musical devices and not receiving values in Konkreet to update the node positions. The Konkreet devs are aware of the problem and a fix is coming.
@peterdines Your article just triggered the dawning realisation that we forgot to test OSC In with node angle discontinuous! Damn!
ā KonkreetLabs (@konkreetlabs) August 12, 2013
@peterdines guess there’ll be a v2.1.1 fix for OSC In soon… š #KnewIForgotSomething
ā KonkreetLabs (@konkreetlabs) August 12, 2013
UPDATE: and now, the update is updated with a fix for OSC receive in discontinuous angle mode! I was testing this and experimenting with it last night. The cool thing is, now you can calculate polar to rectangular coordinates using discontinuous mode, because every node position is unique – which not only makes it better for recalling node position from Reaktor snaps, but for visualizing node position on the screen. I’m in the process of updating the Konkreet translator / visualizer accordingly.
