Captain's Log: Stardate 79584.2

Some NAMM Ramifications, or NAMMifications

I've been quite busy (in a good way!) the last couple of weeks, with some of the connections that I made at NAMM bearing fruit in various ways.

One thing I've been working on is some setup for collaborating on a demo video with a popular MPE controller that I won't yet name. This is super exciting since the video will have broad reach, so I am working hard to iron out any remaining wrinkles in Anukari's MPE implementation. And I'm really stoked that a sound designer whom I met at NAMM, Jake Siders is cooking up some amazing MPE presets for the demo.

Also I have engaged the help of a marketing expert, Chris Hayzel. We met at NAMM and immediately hit it off. Anukari is a kind of weird product, and I have some extremely strong opinions on how I want the marketing to look. A huge thing for me is doing marketing in a way that I feel good about, so no used car salesman stuff, no misleading hype, no lies, basically. But also, hey, I think Anukari is pretty cool and I'd like to tell more people about it, and explain it in a way that's fun to learn about and not a bunch of dry technical talk (my forte). So it was important to me to find someone who I felt I could trust with this vision. This is in the early stages, but it's likely that this website is going to undergo a significant metamorphosis in the coming months. I'm excited.

Polishing, polishing, polishing

A lot of people at NAMM were surprised that Anukari is still in Beta, given that it seems like a completely functional product. I think it's almost ready to be called 1.0, but there remain a few small things I want to polish first.

First, there were still a couple of crashes/hangs that I was aware of from user reports.

One hang only happened in Apple's AU validation, only sometimes. This turned out to be a weird issue where if you pass too long of a work cycle time to Apple's Core Audio workgroup feature, the thread won't be created. JUCE has some comments to this effect, and has a supposed workaround, but it didn't work for me. I implemented my own workaround and it fixed the hang. This issue appeared when the AU validation set the plugin up with a huge block size (4096 samples), so the estimated time to process the block went above 50ms, which appears to be the limit where Core Audio loses its mind.

For the crash report, I only really knew that it happened on AMD hardware. So of course I prayed that I could find a way to reproduce it on my AMD test machines, and thankfully I was able to. The biggest hint was that my user said that originally Anukari worked perfectly, but later it crashed on startup. I guessed that they had changed a graphics setting, which was persisted to the preferences file before causing a crash. So then it crashed forever. I had the user delete their preferences file and things worked again! So I went through all the graphics settings and toggled everything until I found that the Reflections feature crashed. I tried to find the root cause, but the Vulkan code involved is so complex that I gave up and filed a bug with the Google Filament folks. Here's hoping they can help.

One improvement I made based on this crash report is that Anukari now waits a couple seconds before persisting preferences changes to disk. This way, if a change crashes Anukari, hopefully it won't be persisted, and Anukari will work when it's restarted.

Some of the other polish work includes audio quality improvements, such as adding a bit of smoothing for LFO retriggers to avoid pops.

MTS-ESP Support

As of the 0.9.25 testing release, Anukari is fully compatible with the MTS-ESP protocol for microtuning using an MTS-ESP control plugin such as (MTS-ESP Mini](https://oddsound.com/mtsespmini.php). This protocol lets users tune all their MTS-ESP-compatible plugins to whatever scale they want, in sync, so they all play in tune. The control plugin can import .scl files, so there are thousands of tunings to play with. People have been asking me for this support for a long time.

Given that I've been busy with NAMM follow-ups and polishing Anukari into a 1.0-ready product one might wonder how I fit in the work for MTS-ESP. I am also surprised! Basically what happened is I ended up with a few hours free where I didn't have enough time to really start a new big task, and was finished with my last big task. And right at that moment I got another email asking for MTS-ESP support. So I just said screw it, let's just see if I can bang that out this afternoon and that way I can say "yes" to the email.

The MTS-ESP site says you can integrate the library in an hour. I was skeptical, but it's mostly true. I had things working at a basic level in less than an hour. I did spend several more hours after that making it work really well, ensuring some of the optional features worked, and writing tests and GUI stuff to make it all professional.

So far users are reporting back that it works great. I tested it myself, and despite not being a big microtuning geek, it was surprisingly fun to try out different scales. I'm glad to have been able to sneak in this feature!