Gen integration

OWL Magus
#1

How easy is it to control the screen and the new features on Magus in the Owl-package at is current state.
Thinking about pulling the tricker on a Magus.

Cheers.

Mikkel

#2

Gen integration is lagging behind Pure data and FAUST at the moment, primarily for these reasons:

  1. Gen doesn’t let us define a readable parameter name within the patch. It means that when you declare a parameter with name A it will be associated with Parameter A on the Magus, which is as it should be. But it will also display as ‘A’ on the Magus screen, which is not so useful. The plan to solve this is to use the meta-data provided in the web interface to supply readable names.
  2. No output parameters. There’s no send in Gen as there is in Pure data. We can overcome this by assigning ‘unused’ DAC outputs to parameters, but naming again becomes an issue.
  3. No print, which with Pure data lets you write strings and floats on the Magus screen.
  4. No MIDI in Gen - but you can still make fantastic MIDI-enabled monosynths using special parameters ‘pitch’, ‘gain’ and ‘gate’. In Pure data you have full access to receiving and sending MIDI.

With this in mind I’d currently recommend using Pure data if you want to make the most of the ins/outs, screen and dual MIDI on the Magus. But for making effects and synths, Gen is still great. Medium term we have plans to develop our web interface to fill in some of the gaps, and we will also be following new developments at Cycling.

1 Like
#3

Hi, joining in. I’m an OWL owner, and recently I have also become a Magus (Eurorack) owner. I’m using Max GEN patching environment.
One thing that I would like to achieve is to use the Magus out ports from withing the GEN environment. The idea is to build some LFOs and other modulation patches that will control other Eurorack modules.
So I would like to ask if is this possible with GEN and how to do it. Any basic example would be much appreciated maybe just a GEN template with the outport example.
Thank YOU!

#4

Hi @andrejkobal, welcome to the forum!

Output parameters in Max Gen is an outstanding problem, one we haven’t decided yet know quite how to solve. Gen simply doesn’t have the concept of output parameters.

What we’ve been discussing doing, and this will probably be the way forward, is to assign any ‘extra’ audio outputs to unassigned parameters. So that if you create a Gen patch with say 5 input parameters, and 4 audio outputs, then the first two outputs will be routed to audio as usual, and the remaining ones will be assigned to unused parameters e.g. F and G.
This way there’s still no sensible way to name the parameters in Gen, so the patches can easily get confusing. To help put sensible labels on both input and output parameters we are planning to update the build system, so that parameter names that are assigned in the online patch editor will be set when you load it in the Magus.

1 Like
#5

This approach can have interesting bugs in user code, since data would be generated at audio rate, but one sample per buffer would be output. So something like a very short trigger can be just ignored if it happens between start and end of a single buffer.

1 Like
#6

Thanks for the response looking forward for any updates about this. Anyway I trying also to figure out how to use the Magus out form Pure Data but again with no luck. I have tried to transform the CVtrig2MIDI to send CV Audio out but it does not work, maybe I’m missing something. Any help or example would be much appreciated. Thank YOU!

#7

I know that @ykmm was making some improvements to PD patches on Magus. Not sure if this is usable from official web patcher already, maybe he can help with this.

1 Like
#8

Thanks for the help will definitely check that.