Wish list

Multi-touch playing for the virtual keyboards
I.e. the screen of your computer or laptop would be touch sensitive, and you'd be able to play the on-screen virtual keyboard using two or more fingers at once to play polyphonic music.

I should be able to make this available soon after the release of Windows 7 some time in 2009. It should be easy to program and unlikely to introduce new bugs. See: Multi-touch polyphony and Windows 7

Support for the Sagittal microtonal notation
This is a very versatile microtonal notation, suitable for just intonation, and scales with many notes to an octave etc. Support for it in FTS is already mostly coded for. But it needs to be tested and debugged and updated.

Because of the complexity of the coding, and the risk of adding new bugs to the program if I enable it, then I've postponed the release of it until the next beta / release cycle. I hoped to release it earlier, but have had too many things to do after the release of FTS 3.0, which still needs work adding extra help and fixing things and improving the user interface, and it no longer seems a good idea to introduce such a major new feature before the next beta / release.

Wishes
If wishes are particularly easy to program, I do it right away. Most will be left to the next beta / release cycle, especially if there seems to be any chance that they may introduce new bugs. I don't know when that will be as there is still lots of work to do finishing the help for FTS, the wiki, improving the user interface, fixing remaining bugs and so on. Maybe some time in 2009 or if the rest goes particularly slowly it may be later, 2010.

See also the Wish list forum

(Please edit below here and add any wishes you have for the future)

Get seeds for the fractal tunes from a midi file
What you can do already is to play the seed from your music keyboard. Also using a virtual cable you can play a midi file in another program e.g. a midi player or sequencer or composition software and route the notes to one of the windows in FTS. For more details see the tool tip help for the Edit radio button in.

The idea here is to add an option to FTS to open a midi file to get the seed from it directly. May be most useful for midi files with short monophonic melodies.

I'm not sure how useful it would be for polyphony. If the idea of recording polyphonic seeds as you play was explored one could do that. Also another idea to explore here is to take the notes from separate midi channels in the midi file and put them into successive layers in. Note that FTS wouldn't normally play the seeds synchronised as they were in the original. Generally not sure how useful it would turn out to be to get polyphonic seeds or multiple seeds from a midi file - but it could be explored at least.

Another related idea one could perhaps explore is to see if one can get the chord progressions automatically from a midi file to make a tune with the same chord progression - and perhaps get seed fragments from motivic phrases in the file. This is getting more like "hand waving" and I'm not sure how easy it is or how it would go. The idea would be to e.g. make something like e.g. the example La Folia and GreenSleeves fractal tunes more automatically by opening a midi file for the original tune, and then you get the chord progression from it and maybe some motivic material as well, and transform it into a fractal tune based on the same chord progression.

I'll probably look into all this for the next beta / release cycle. If there is a lot of demand or it is easy to do then I may investigate it before then.

Record polyphonic seeds for fractal tunes as you play
The motivation behind this is that you can already make seeds with chords in them. In fact in there's an option to convert the chord, sequence or broken chord into a seed for the fractal tune.

This works by setting the sustain in to the number of notes in the chord of most notes in the seed - and then whenever you want e.g. a two note chord, play it as a note with time duration 0, followed by one of normal duration. When the melody line plays a single note, you do the same, but set the volumes of the other notes in the chord to 0, so that they don't sound.

Since any polyphonic music can be broken up into two or more note chords with sustain, then this could play any polyphonic music as a seed - so long as you don't mind breaking up some of the longer notes into shorter notes. E.g. if a single note in one melody line is accompanied by two notes in the counterpoint, you have to break the single note into two identically pitched notes with different notes for the accompaniment.

So in principle with that restriction, you could record any polyphonic playing as a seed. It mightn't be that hard to program. Though how useful polyphonic seeds would be for the Tune Smithy sloth canons I don't know - maybe it would be most useful for simple phrases with a few chords.

I'll probably look into this for the next beta / release cycle.

Rewire Support
I plan to look into this for the next beta / release cycle. As a sole trader I'm legally permitted to add rewire support according to Propellerhead. But I haven't yet looked into the details of how it would need to be coded, or how easy it is to do.

Make the Tune as Score editable
This is one of those things that looks simple because it is easy to use. Unfortunately, the programming is very complex. I can't think of any easy way to attempt it myself - unlike e.g. text editing, then there's no standard windows component to just slot into your program. With a music score, you would have to write it yourself from scratch at a very low level.

The best approach is probably to use any existing notation software and hook it up to FTS for the retuning. See Compose Microtonally and Tutorials:How use FTS to compose microtonally.

It would be a great feature if it was easy to do. Unfortunately, unless some completely new approach is possible, e.g. someone releases a reusable music score component for anyone to use, it has to remain just a wish for now.

Play Direct Music Sound devices directly such as the Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth
Some time, if it is easy enough to do, I may add code to play DirectMusic devices directly in FTS, to avoid the fifth second latency - so that you can play it directly without the need to use DirectMusic producer. I've no idea yet about how easy or hard it will be to do.

See FAQ - Soft synths

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