Captain's Log: Stardate 77439.9

A friend of mine came by last night and we made some music with Anukari. It was great fun -- we created an elaborately weird contraption using all kinds of modulation and chaos, and came up with some really fun sounds to jam with. But especially with someone new using it, it became unbearably obvious that without compression / limiting, it's too hard to avoid distortion and ducking, especially during a live session where you're experimenting a lot.

So today I went off on a wild tangent and finally got around to implementing a basic compressor for the microphones. I got the GPU implementation working and tested it a bunch with the preset that my friend and I made last night. It's night and day -- if you give the compressor an aggressive ratio, you can get away with a LOT more experimenting and screwing around without getting distortion. And then later you can always go back and tune the compressor better.

Right now it's just the backend code that works -- the GUI hasn't been wired up to let the user alter the compression parameters. That'll be the next task.

This still puts off the video that I've been putting off forever, BUT the nice thing is that this will make the video easier to make. I will be able to live demo a lot more easily with the compressors keeping me safe. It's great, actually, for demos -- I won't have to do any postprocessing to get them compressed/limited for release, I can just go straight from OBS to the web.