Supercollider front end

[Jay Vaughan]

> Here s the thing: suppose you build a ms 20 type synth
> from building blocks. You will take two filters with potentially quite a bit of parameters. Some of them will be hardwired (one low pass and one high pass for example), some of them will be hidden and others will be exposed.

I have had to solve this problem a few times myself some years ago .. for the prototype work I did in Germany, this was a significant problem domain.

> So you need to be able to easily forward an internal module parameter
> /filter1/frequency to something exposed to the outside by the synth "hipass frequency". As i said, it s not a huge deal but I need to tackle it in an elegant and flexible way.


.. so for example "hipass cutoff" and "lowpass cutoff" are two parameters from the same  'kind' or 'type' of module ('filter') .. and you want to set it up so that the value for hipass frequency makes sense if the user switches the module type to lopass filter .. So that they can easily switch back and forth between the filter types, but still have the knobs in the same position (just applied differently to the algorithm of the module).

So you've got three levels of detail:

A) General details - a list of *all possible* parameters for all possible modules
B) Specific detail - a list of parameters, explicitly described for the purposes of the module the user has *actively in front of them*
C) Common details - what modules have common, similar (but not necessarily identical) paramter types.  Filter EG and Amp EG both have ADSR parameters, Filter Module A and B both share "resonance and cutoff" as parameters, etc.

Essentially you have to be able to sort the list according to what parameters are identical (or equivalent), what are similar, and what are completely different.  The identical/equivalent/similar parameters ought to occupy roughly the same space (memory wise) so that they can "cross-polinate" for the user between patch changes, and so on.

So you could have a sub-list, for each parameter, which identifies which other parameters are similar, and which are identical; and obviously from these two data points you can infer: what parameters are utterly different.

;
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Jay Vaughan