Mela 5.3 Update — 3 New Experimental Modules

eross

how is the mela labs audio module? what are you guys using it for ? this looks interesting for modulating with audio

Samu

This is what can be done with Mela 5 and a few custom presets, enjoy!

Nikolozi

@Luxthor said:

@Pxlhg said:
@Nikolozi I like to work with a pen and for some reason it stops working if I hold a key (note) down. I can move knobs and sliders with another finger but not with the pen.
If I switch and hold a key with the pen instead - I can't control anything with the fingers (I wouldn't work like that, I was just testing)

I can confirm this. Even setting “Settings->Apple Pencil->Only Draw with Apple Pencil” to off doesn’t do anything.

Hey guys, just got back from my holiday over the weekend and I'm slowly catching up on questions/feedback.

Thanks, @Pxlhg and @Luxtho for letting me know about this, my guess would be this is another limitation of SwiftUI (Apple's modern framework for building UI). I've reported a few issues to Apple similar to this and I will add this also. Maybe I can get one on one at WWDC with Apple engineers about some of these issues. A long story short is that SwiftUI has some limitations with gestures and scroll views, and has many annoying bugs. Not to mention Gestures aren't very customisable unlike SwiftUI.

Some examples:
1. When scrolling a lane in Mela with one hand dials will not respond to a drag gesture.
2. Or when playing with a virtual musical keyboard you won't be able to scroll.
3. You can even notice this around iOS/iPadOS UI (e.g. Files app), when there's a pop-up menu or combo box if you tap on it while another item is already being touched the pop-up menu / drop-down list won't appear.

Something about these gestures being mutual exclusively, only one succeeds. Anyway, I'll keep track of this.

Nikolozi

@Gagapokerface said:
Got Mela a week or two ago and I’m really enjoying it. Just took advantage of the sale to grab Collection 3. This Mela Labs idea is a really good one!

🙏🧡

Nikolozi

@eross said:
how is the mela labs audio module? what are you guys using it for ? this looks interesting for modulating with audio

You can modulate anything and it will probably end up sounding like some combination of phase distortion (or FM) and ring modulation. Just make sure that the source and target frequencies are harmonically related. For example, I just tried, for fun, modulating a Triangle waveform's Sync parameter with a sinusoid (octave lower). Then processed the Triangle oscillator with Flanger. Then I modulated the Delay parameter of the Flanger with the sinusoid oscillator.

Nikolozi

@Samu said:
This is what can be done with Mela 5 and a few custom presets, enjoy!

Love this!

Grandbear

@Nikolozi is Mela capable of routing audio in a feedback loop? If not, is it something you're considering for the future?

Nikolozi

@Grandbear said:
@Nikolozi is Mela capable of routing audio in a feedback loop? If not, is it something you're considering for the future?

100%, some feedback loop both for audio (and MIDI) would allow the creation of very interesting things. Probably it would be some sort of a delay module able to feed audio into audio buses. Delays could be as low as 1 sample.

Grandbear

@Nikolozi said:

@Grandbear said:
@Nikolozi is Mela capable of routing audio in a feedback loop? If not, is it something you're considering for the future?

100%, some feedback loop both for audio (and MIDI) would allow the creation of very interesting things. Probably it would be some sort of a delay module able to feed audio into audio buses. Delays could be as low as 1 sample.

Great, thanks for letting me know of your plans!

Nikolozi

@Luxthor said:

@Pxlhg said:
@Nikolozi I like to work with a pen and for some reason it stops working if I hold a key (note) down. I can move knobs and sliders with another finger but not with the pen.
If I switch and hold a key with the pen instead - I can't control anything with the fingers (I wouldn't work like that, I was just testing)

I can confirm this. Even setting “Settings->Apple Pencil->Only Draw with Apple Pencil” to off doesn’t do anything.

Just wanted to respond to this. I'm going through some of my bug reports checking on iOS 18 to see if Apple has resolved any of them. Looks like this is fixed in iPadOS 18, i.e. I'm able to use one hand to play notes and move dials with Apple Pencil.
They also fixed another annoying bug (probably related) where if you were performing a drag gesture (e.g. adjusting a dial) and at the same time you tried to scroll something, the scrolling would fail. The opposite was true as well, when scrolling drag gestures wouldn't work. This was bothering me a lot, so glad to see it fixed. But we'll have to wait till iOS 18.

Edit: You may not see this issue in some apps and it might be surprising that it happens in Mela and not in others. This issue only occurs in apps that use SwiftUI.

Pxlhg

@Nikolozi said:

@Luxthor said:

@Pxlhg said:
@Nikolozi I like to work with a pen and for some reason it stops working if I hold a key (note) down. I can move knobs and sliders with another finger but not with the pen.
If I switch and hold a key with the pen instead - I can't control anything with the fingers (I wouldn't work like that, I was just testing)

I can confirm this. Even setting “Settings->Apple Pencil->Only Draw with Apple Pencil” to off doesn’t do anything.

Just wanted to respond to this. I'm going through some of my bug reports checking on iOS 18 to see if Apple has resolved any of them. Looks like this is fixed in iPadOS 18, i.e. I'm able to use one hand to play notes and move dials with Apple Pencil.
They also fixed another annoying bug (probably related) where if you were performing a drag gesture (e.g. adjusting a dial) and at the same time you tried to scroll something, the scrolling would fail. The opposite was true as well, when scrolling drag gestures wouldn't work. This was bothering me a lot, so glad to see it fixed. But we'll have to wait till iOS 18.

Edit: You may not see this issue in some apps and it might be surprising that it happens in Mela and not in others. This issue only occurs in apps that use SwiftUI.

Sounds good. Thanks for the info update.

Luxthor

@Nikolozi said:

@Luxthor said:

@Pxlhg said:
@Nikolozi I like to work with a pen and for some reason it stops working if I hold a key (note) down. I can move knobs and sliders with another finger but not with the pen.
If I switch and hold a key with the pen instead - I can't control anything with the fingers (I wouldn't work like that, I was just testing)

I can confirm this. Even setting “Settings->Apple Pencil->Only Draw with Apple Pencil” to off doesn’t do anything.

Just wanted to respond to this. I'm going through some of my bug reports checking on iOS 18 to see if Apple has resolved any of them. Looks like this is fixed in iPadOS 18, i.e. I'm able to use one hand to play notes and move dials with Apple Pencil.
They also fixed another annoying bug (probably related) where if you were performing a drag gesture (e.g. adjusting a dial) and at the same time you tried to scroll something, the scrolling would fail. The opposite was true as well, when scrolling drag gestures wouldn't work. This was bothering me a lot, so glad to see it fixed. But we'll have to wait till iOS 18.

Edit: You may not see this issue in some apps and it might be surprising that it happens in Mela and not in others. This issue only occurs in apps that use SwiftUI.

Hey Nikolozi, great news for those upgrading to iOS 18. I didn’t have any clue it was the SwiftUI bug all along. I've also noticed some other developers struggling to tame SwiftUI, this framework ended up being a double-edged sword after all.

Nikolozi

@Luxthor said:

@Nikolozi said:

@Luxthor said:

@Pxlhg said:
@Nikolozi I like to work with a pen and for some reason it stops working if I hold a key (note) down. I can move knobs and sliders with another finger but not with the pen.
If I switch and hold a key with the pen instead - I can't control anything with the fingers (I wouldn't work like that, I was just testing)

I can confirm this. Even setting “Settings->Apple Pencil->Only Draw with Apple Pencil” to off doesn’t do anything.

Just wanted to respond to this. I'm going through some of my bug reports checking on iOS 18 to see if Apple has resolved any of them. Looks like this is fixed in iPadOS 18, i.e. I'm able to use one hand to play notes and move dials with Apple Pencil.
They also fixed another annoying bug (probably related) where if you were performing a drag gesture (e.g. adjusting a dial) and at the same time you tried to scroll something, the scrolling would fail. The opposite was true as well, when scrolling drag gestures wouldn't work. This was bothering me a lot, so glad to see it fixed. But we'll have to wait till iOS 18.

Edit: You may not see this issue in some apps and it might be surprising that it happens in Mela and not in others. This issue only occurs in apps that use SwiftUI.

Hey Nikolozi, great news for those upgrading to iOS 18. I didn’t have any clue it was the SwiftUI bug all along. I've also noticed some other developers struggling to tame SwiftUI, this framework ended up being a double-edged sword after all.

SwiftUI is pretty great in many ways, but when you start customising things sometimes it's not as flexible as UIKit or has bugs. One great omission in SwiftUI has been super limited support for custom gestures. Can't do anything reasonably complex. Looks like in iOS 18 they are trying to improve gesture support by allowing UIKit gestures to work with SwiftUI. And along the way, they must have fixed the bugs we were talking about earlier.

Also, some issues are specific to AUv3. I imagine UI frameworks' teams don't think about or test their APIs in AUv3. The same goes for Mac Catalyst.

I have WWDC Labs reserved with Core Audio and SwiftUI teams, let's see if I can bring their attention to some of the bugs.