1. | What is Composite? |
| Composite is a software application/system for real-time,
in-performance sequencing, sampling, and looping. It has a
strong emphasis on the needs of live performance
improvisation. It's audio back-end is exposed as LV2 plugins
and developer libraries. |
2. | Why is it called Composite? |
| First, a composite is something that is made up of
dissimilar objects to make something new. The software
intends to do this with various audio sources to create a
composite composition. Second, in the English language,
“composite” is both a pun and an anagram for
“compose it”. |
3. | What is Tritium? |
| Tritium is the sound engine around which
Composite is created. For all intents and
purposes, Composite is a GUI front end for
Tritium, a library/API for building audio
sequencing applications.. However, Tritium does not exist, yet!
Composite and Tritium are the same project, but
at some point in the future Tritium will be spun
off into its own project. This will not happen
before the 1.0 release. |
4. | Why is it called Tritium? |
| Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen.
So, it's a nod to Hydrogen and also an
acknowledgement that the Tritium audio engine will
probably be refactoring and extension of the
Hydrogen audio engine (plans are not yet
final). |
5. | Is Composite a fork of Hydrogen? |
| No. However, we plan to reuse several audio
internal components from Hydrogen. The scope and
goals of this project are very different from those
of Hydrogen (a virtual drum machine). More appropriately, think of Hydrogen as
being a scaffolding for a totally new
project. Out of respect to Hydrogen, which is often
referred to as H2, please do not refer to Tritium as
“H3” or even
“3H”. |
6. | Why are you optimizing for
netbooks? If I have a large
screen, shouldn't I be able to take advantage of
that? |
| The emphasis is live performance. Whenever I
see indie bands performing live, I rarely see a
large, 27" flat-panel display. It's usually some
small laptop, on a small table, next to a drummer
who is very busy. Composite is targeting
that guy. The intention is to
provide optimum functionality for this use case,
even if it limits the 27" flat-panel in-the-studio
display. |
7. | What's with the emphasis on Tritium being a
stand-alone library? Dude... just write the program
and quit worrying about idealism! |
| Fair enough. Now, how many free
sequencers are out there? How much code can I reuse
from them in order to make
Composite? Very little. It's all embedded in
their code-bases, and typically with a track-centric
object model. In order to utilize this code you
have to fork their code-base. And how many fully-free sampler
libraries are out there that I could reuse for this
vision? One. FluidSynth. (Can't use LinuxSampler
because of its license.) But this (AFAIK) forces
you to package all the samples in a SoundFont. By making Tritium a stand-alone
library it's possible for others to write innovative
(or accessible) interfaces to the library without
having to re-invent the sampler, sequencer, plugins,
etc.... And this is in step with the overall vision
of Composite as a way to reuse and rearrange your
music resources freely. |