devblog / friday 011021 (Patreon)

Hi friends. Well, we’ve all made it to October 2021. Lucky, lucky us. From here on it is surely going to be plain sailing throughout the rest of the year. Nothing but a completely normal winter ahead of us.

Things were thrown into disarray at 65LABS this week as a significant portion of our technicians called in sick to ‘rehearse for important live shows’. They’ve returned to the lab having seemingly aged by a decade or more, haunted looks in their eyes, mumbling incessantly about how they didn’t realise that their live show relied on so many old 32-bit synth plugins that no longer worked on their laptops. We don’t usually tolerate that lack of technological organisation at 65LABS, but we do value haunted looks fairly highly, so for now they’re all on probation.

THIS WEEK

- Despite be absent under false pretences, our motley bunch of musical technicians did manage to flesh out the Wreckage Systems masterplan a little, thanks to all being in the same room together for the first time in about 18 months. You'll be pleased to know that we are all in good stead for the rest of the year in terms of Cool Stuff Planned.

- The team from the Archival branch really stole the show this week with the announcement of the forthcoming V1 Archive (release date TBA). If you missed the announcement video, you can see it in all its pixellated glory HERE. The V1 Archive is a faithful recreation of the V1 Stream, but one that you can run on your personal home computer. It will be available for Windows and macOS and, as a couple of people have offered to help with a Linux port, when we get a chance we will try to look into that too (although that might have to come a little later, need to do some research first).

- Dan Smith in a comment here on Patreon asked about an iOS version. While this is technically possible, it would be a much bigger job than a desktop PC release. It would require re-doing all the graphics and U.I to properly fit, plus it would be much more difficult to distribute and maybe (?) impossible to make it available free for Patreons if we otherwise wanted to charge for it. But most importantly of all, we don’t really want to sink too much time into V1, because as you have probably all seen and heard, the V2 stream is a much more advanced and hopefully more enjoyable generative music system overall, and we would rather focus our efforts there. So iOS/Android… unlikely at this point. Let’s see how the first release eventually goes and take it from there,.

- 65LABS releasing software is a bold/foolish move. It seems to be a very different mode of expression to music, because when you release music, people either like it or don’t like it, but they rarely demand you improve it or change it to fit their own ideas of how it should be. In contrast, our peripheral experience of the software world is that this is often what happens, endlessly. So please keep in mind that we are not actually software developers! And that this is first and foremost intended to be an archival document of the V1 Stream as it actually exists, rather than a purpose-built piece of music software. If we were to ever attempt anything like that, it would be expressly designed for that role and built from the ground up, rather than be a reworking of something made for another context entirely.

- CREDITS. We would like to include a list of credits in the software, which means all of you, without whom this would not have been possible. We are aware that embedding all of your names into a piece of software and then putting that software onto the internet forever is perhaps not the most privacy-friendly move, so we think that it is probably safer to make this opt-in. In due course we will set up a Google Forms webpage or something similar and invite you all to add whatever credit you like there. Suggestions/thoughts welcome on any better ways to do this that don’t mean us doxxing all of you.

THINGS TO COME

- We are still in a rehearsal period so some tasks - specifically building and adding new systems to the V2 stream and bugfixing it - are needing to take a backseat at the moment. But there’s some other content in the works that we are pretty excited about, and you should be seeing/hearing that relatively soon.

- We’ll be re-announcing the V1 Archive through our main social channels in the next week or two, trying to reach all the people who aren’t privvy to this backchannel, at which point you can smugly turn to the closest person you can see and be like ‘I was into 65LABS before they were cool’.

Which, to be honest, is a line you can probably get away with saying for quite a while to come.

That’s the news from the labs. Take care out there, everyone.