I hope this is not my legacy

I have finally released a version of BeatButcherMPC! Hooray! Click here for a download link

It is vastly cut down on functionality compared to the original prototype, but hopefully will provide a feature which is conspicuously absent on the Akai MPC500 device. I will explain the reasoning behind this feature-cull in this post.

Shout out to all the guys from mpc-forums hopefully you don’t hate me too much for taking so long to get this out there. I have had a lot of great support from you guys and I really feel like I let you down. I promised and promised that it would eventually get finished, but I found it very hard to keep them! If any of you were banking on features which I have removed then I apologize heartily. Hopefully you will find patched phrase editing useful though.

This is a screen shot of the new release:

Compared with the old version:

So as you can see it is MUCH MUCH simpler. Program editing is the main casualty, and this requires quite a complex interface for a relatively simple problem. I am thinking about releasing a second tool “BeatButcherMPC Program View” to address the problem of program editing some time in the future (hopefully not three years). I personally never found editing programs on the PC to be especially useful, since you can’t hear the changes that you are making. There is no point in being able to adjust the filter or envelope on a sound unless you can hear the output- to do anything else is creating music by sight rather than ear which is ridiculous.

The tool which I just mentioned would look something like a spreadsheet- allowing you to see an entire program on one page. You can sort of see this in the following screenshot. I’m not sure if this would be helpful to people or not. It would provide at-a-glance viewing and editing of programs without any of the cumbersome slider or spinner controls on programs such as “mpc maid“. N.B I like, respect, use and recommend mpc maid, all I am saying here is that it’s program view models the MPC500, albeit with a (much) bigger display, no disrespect intended.

A part of the problem I have had in releasing the software is that I initially wrote BeatButcherMPC when I was in my second year at university. I have since graduated and now work as a software engineer, and looking back at the code I see a lot of things which I want to change. However this is generally a lot of work for not a lot of visible gain, so it is hard to be motivated to do it!

All in all, I hope this is useful to someone!

It has been a while since my last post (five months). I would love to say that is because I have been busy, but in reality it is just because the longer you leave it, the harder it gets. What has happened to me since the end of January? Umm.. in february I spent a fortune on my car, in march I did nothing of note, I was in Thailand for the whole of April, in May I recovered from Thailand, and I moved house in June and bought a pair of deck shoes and fell in love with Eminem’s new album, Recovery. So this is really a filler post to say, I will be back soon.

I finally finished BeatButcherMPC. I ended up stripping out the program editing functionality, which I decided wa not overly useful, and there are other programs such as MPC Maid which can do the job. Instead I decided to simplify the interface and focus on the wave editing functionality, making it very easy to create patched phrases (not possible on the MPC500 itself) and sequences of chops. I will be putting it up here for download shortly.