Wren

I’ve put up all older Wren versions - all the ones that did not use an installer - at a history place.

The first Wren I could find was from 2013-11-18, the first public one seems to have been released on 2014–03-18.

Before that, at the time processors were real things and one could easily code whatever .. and write synth like code as interrupt routines .. I had done some audio effects. Some of that code still is in Wren, althought the driver mechanism is totally different these days (and the efficiency is way lower and execution speed is way higher .. ). The oldest code I’ve found was from around 1990 or so.

Saturday June 25 there will be another electro-music.com >> live << concert.

See the electro-music.com event site for more info, and also see the schedule (still under construction as when I wrote this but not likely to be changed).

Deo volente … I’ll be doing one hour of pure Wren stuff on that occasion, titled “I Read It All Wrong” - and my thanks go out to Thomas for the title.

The poster has some of the patch names to be used, I’m planning to make some more this week.

“Anno Un Cement” might have been a nice title :’)

And yes - 🔥 - is a title too!

Published as pre-release version 2022.6.19.0

This can be installed from a recent Wren version - or alternatively download the installer (see the wiki for more info on updating or installing Wren).

• New SimpleRange module - it may save some cycles to use simple modules.
• Made an analog-ish position output for the Divider module, it presents the internal count value..
• Font for popup editors was too small for one unit modules, made the font smaller for those low modules.
• Removed Sine and Cosine lookup tables, calculation was faster.
• More lines of code removed.
• Changed controls for polyphony and wire thickness to be knobs, those support keyboard control to change the value.
• Changed format for knob hints a bit - to make things a bit less confusing.
• Made main VU meter peak and valey indicators a lot slower, a factor of 20.
• Wire addition or removal no longer needs a patch recompile - it will just keep playing. This works for cable undo and redo operations too.
• Removed the F12 (patch manual recompile) action. F7 (reset) still works, and patch recompile can still be done programmatically
• Extra mode for the Pluck module, fixed tuning for KS, Pluck, PluckControl and TunedDelay modules. Lowest possible (internal) frequency now is about 1Hz (it was about 8Hz).
• Linear controls now additionally display a fraction of the total range in their popups.

Updated the example patches to have all my patches up to the date of this posting.

I’ll have the wiki to have the official link .. so eh .. there’d be just one place to change when the location changes - if not forgotten :’)

The latest patches require Wren version 2022.6.4.0 - see previous two or three posts.

Finally came to automate source releases a bit, and made a new Wren source release available (2022.6.4.0).

This can be installed from a recent Wren version - or alternatively download the installer (see the wiki for more info on updating or installing Wren).

There are some changes in the source release, the zip files no longer have a version number. The main Wren is wren_source.zip and included in that one is wren_components.zip.

You’ll first need to install the components into Delphi (version 10.2 here) before you try to open the Wren sources in Delphi.

Delphi messed up again on version numbers .. the actual values are :

prog_version      = 2022.6.4.0
prog_build        = 183
src_version       = 2022.6.4.0
src_build         = 183
comp_version      = 2022.6.4.0
comp_build        = 78
pre_rel_version   = 2022.6.4.0
installer_version = 2022.5.22.0
patch_version     = 13
pa_version        = 19.0.2
lpc_version       = 2015.1.18
forth_version     = 2017.11.19
looks_version     = 2020.7.18
formants_version  = 2021.4.6
modal_version     = 2018.5.18
markov_version    = 2016.9.9
mazes_version     = 2020.1.23
wrengine_version  = 2018.5.25

Published as pre-release and release version 2022.6.4.0

This can be installed from a recent Wren version - or alternatively download the installer (see the wiki for more info on updating or installing Wren).

As mentioned in the previous post, there was a bug in the compressor gain setting. The fix for that bug caused older patches to to be left with a way too low gain setting.

This release fixes old patches on load, so that approximately the same gain as was intended will be set. When patches were already manually fixed it will leave them alone.

The module version was changed from 2 to 3, and when a patch with module version 1 or 2 is loaded it will see if a fix is needed.

And as a compressor gain setting of -6dB or lower does not seem to make much sense (at least not for my own patches) it will only then apply a fix to set the gain to approximately what it was intended to be in the old situation. When the patch is being saved it’s module version for the compressor will always be set to 3.

This heuristic will fail when the gain was lower than -6dB intentionally - and a manual fix will still be needed then.

It will also not repair the gain setting for the spectrum module (the only other module using a 64dB gain control), but that is a thing needing constant manual tweaking anyway.

Also the help for the PluckControl module was updated.

Oh - and removed some monsense from the Pluck module and gave it al-pass feedback filtering - it still needs some work on the brightness and on tuning.

Published as pre-release and release version 2022.6.2.0

This can be installed from a recent Wren version - or alternatively download the installer (see the wiki for more info on updating or installing Wren).

• Redid the Pluck module, got out the inversion stuff but gave it an extra string with detuning and cross coupling - I think it to sound more interesting.
• Made a PluckControl module - I see that the help for it is nonsense still - but it is meant to create a pluck signal for the Pluck and KS modules..
• Fixed the tuned delay module - it’s delay times were wrong.
• Fixed the PhaseDetector module - it never worked since Wren got polyphonic.
• Another 2000 lines or so of code were removed.
• Totally redid signal propagation, the way how signals are transferred over wires. It made Wren faster by another five to ten percent.
• Fixed a bug in the compressor module - unfortunately old patches will have wrong compressor gain now and need to be reviewed (they'’l be pretty soft now).
• Sped up the handling of the lights a bit more, there was some unneeded searching still for screen elements.

There were a lot of changes made to the code and I tested a lot but not everything - there may be surprises .. and when I notice I’ll fix things.

A recording of the pluck stuff - and some more sounds.

It starts with some Karplus-Strong sounds only; a drum like sound and a more typical KS one. At about one minute percussive noise is added, at about two minutes some grain processing is turned on and at around three the PADSynth module is activated.

It is a three voice self playing patch running at 48kHz with a control decimation of 32 needing about 30% of ome core here.

Some details (including a short help for the pluck controller and also about the patch) are behind the read more link.

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