Textual update

Just wanted to say thank you to everyone, all the people who have stuck with me for the past 4 years, those who have come and gone, and to all the new subscribers recently. There has been quite a large influx of new people joining over the past few weeks which I think is due to a combination of the Youtube video by soundlearn and also an article on the Sonicstate website.

When I get a sudden increase in subscribers like this I always seem to get overwhelmed and have to sort of mentally recalibrate. I don't know if that makes any sense but the general coping mechanism at play here is to block people out more than usual and just concentrate on coding so apologies if I am slow to respond to messages.

I am not focusing at all on bug reports at the moment but I will try to go through everything that people have been reporting on Discord before the next build I release. I think the current build is relatively stable and it is probably just the same few crashes that people are reporting.

Unfortunately since Blockhead is not a finished product it is not going to be suitable yet for real-world usage but those of you who have been here for a while know that occasionally I will put a hold on working on new features to focus on bug fixing and stability, just so that those who are trying to make stuff are not getting too frustrated with it.

From experience I know that trying to keep things 100% bug-free and stable during heavy feature development always ends up to be a massive waste of time but I will maybe try to have another week or so of concentrating on bug fixes after I finish implementing the CLAP effect rack.

For those who haven't been following, what I am currently working on is the first iteration of CLAP plugin support. This will be an real-time effect rack which goes on the end of any top-level workspace track, onto which you can place free-running (not baked) audio effects. So then we will finally have access to some proper mixing and mastering facilities within Blockhead, via CLAP plugins.

This is all going fine so far and I haven't hit any major problems. It is just a case of getting on with the coding. Plugin support is quite complex and there is a lot of work to do, and so the first iteration of the effect rack will be very barebones but will be fleshed out more and more in later updates. There will likely be no parameter control (outside of the plugin's custom editor), and no automation or preset management to start with.

After the effect rack is implemented, there will be more CLAP support added:

• Parameter automation. There is a lot of avenues to explore here but I will probably go for something very basic to start with. Extending the manipulator block to allow us to offset or override CLAP parameters for workspace regions should be possible but that will probably come much later.

• Initial CLAP instrument implementation with plugins being triggered by some kind basic MIDI-note block. That stuff is likely to evolve a lot as I figure out how I want things to work.

• The "baked" CLAP blocks that I discussed in this video. I do not yet see any reason why that idea will not work technically but I am mentally prepared to discover that it doesn't. (Repeatedly resetting and re-using a CLAP device with different parameter settings is quite a weird thing to do.)

So there is a little roadmap just for the CLAP related stuff. Usually when I write up these kind of bullet point lists they just get interrupted by other plans or the ideas end up evolving into other things but I am happy as long as things are moving forwards.