31 December 17:26 - One last diary entry in 2000 : Merry Christmas and happy new year to all !

21 December 22:09 - Christmas is coming closer, and with it also a bit of time of from work (woohee). But first I have to finish the VSTi wrapper plugin for FruityLoops, which will hopefully be done tomorrow. In unrelated news, the new memory for my Duron computer has finally arrived. For the past 3 weeks I've had a cpu and motherboard, but no memory. I ordered it in a shop where they said it was sent out 2 days after I had ordered it, but it never arrived. Since I hadn't paid anything yet I just ordered it elsewhere, and it has arrived today (pretty fast, and very cheap). Hey, I'll even be able to try out overclocking the Duron before christmas !

14 December 10:06 - I'm working on a VSTi host for FruityLoops. It's coming along nicely, although there are a few problems with some plugins. The cool thing is that the host will be a FruityLoops plugin, so I can alter it when bugs appear without the entire FruityLoops having to be updated. This also makes testing a lot easier.

5 December 10:41 - OK, so it's been 2 weeks since I last added anything to the diary. Guess I got a bit lazy. I upgraded my K6-2 400MHz computer to a Duron 600 last weekend. Everything went great, until I took a good look at the boot screen : 256MB of ram. Great, no ? Problem is, I only have 128MB installed. I thought I had killed either the motherboard or the memory, but it turns out to be neither. For some reason, the memory module only works right on the old motherboard. Go figure. So now I have to buy new memory (not so nice). There's one good thing about this : now I have memory for my old motherboard and cpu (now all I need is a case, a harddisk, cdrom, videocard, ...)

17 November 13:54 - I'm going to do some VST instrument development, and to prove it, I've translated the VSTXSynth example from the VST 2 sdk. Hey, I might even get to the offline interface one day :-)

13 November 15:12 - Well, FruityTracks 2 is finished and will be put up for download one of these days. So I've started preparations for the next project, FruityDJ. No details at the moment, as most features have still got to be decided. Some other (smaller) projects are also waiting for me, so I guess I have my work cut out for me at the moment.

8 November 22:48 - Anderlecht have now also beaten PSV in Eindhoven and are through to the second round of the Champions League. More than that : they're group winners ! (Note that while I might seem calm right know, I'm actually a lot more nervous than after the match against Manchester)

6 November 21:27 - I've made a decision : I'm going to program in C# (Microsofts new programming language). Ok, and now serious. Another day's work, another bug in the mixing engine fixed. I'm feeling good, like I accomplished something. It's of course nice to finish a program, giving it the last little improvements, without having to worry about the core of the thing.

3 November 9:26 - I've made a little change to the Delphi VST sdk and for the first time in a long time I've added a bit to the tutorial. This was prompted by Tom Barnes, who asked me some questions that should have (but weren't) answered by the tutorial. Still, it's all a matter of available time.

31 October 14:07 - Well, FruityTracks 2 and the variants are ready, apart from the translations to French and German. So it looks like next week I can take it real easy.

26 October 19:50 - I hope there aren't too many Manchester fans among you. To make up a little I've made the victory message a bit smaller :-) FruityTracks is starting to look complete, after more (and better) graphics. I still have a lot to learn when it comes to graphics, but there's improvement.

ANDERLECHT HAVE BEATEN Man Utd 2-1 !!! (24 October 22:35)

24 October 7:15 - The program is nearing completion. I'm working on the graphics now, which I've postponed for as long as possible ("Damned, I'm a programmer, Jim, not a graphical artist"). Anyway, making the graphics is a lot easier with Photoshop 5 (layers, effects on layers, great history tool, and did I mention layers ?), so it's not that bad after all.

18 October 10:56 - It's starting to be long between updates :-) I've been working on several things this past week. Most notably, the visual plugins are not going to happen yet (OpenGL doesn't want to co-operate). Now it's more of a cleanup job, making sure all the different version compile and work. Also ironing out the last bugs of course. Because the deadline has been moved, I hope I'm going to have enough time to try to change the trackgrid in this release anyway.

10 October 19:02 - The new and improved envelope is finished, now multi-point instead of just an attack and release. I also did a lot of little things (they take a long time to do and nobody really notices them). Now for the final big feature I'm finally moving on to the visual plugins (basically some OpenGL things, and then the current video and scope visual effects).

6 October 7:50 - The envelope has been completed, it appears to work as intended. There was a problem at first that the mixing engine would get stuck (under win2k) or crashed the program (under win98). So I completely rewrote the envelope mixing function and now that doesn't happen anymore. More exciting news : the opengl plugins will be included in this release. By chance I stumbled onto a website that provides Delphi examples for opengl, that use regular forms instead of the ugly mess of Windows API functions for windows. So finally I've succeeded in making a dll export a window which actually draws the opengl stuff.

5 October 8:23 - It turns out to be a little bit more difficult than I thought to implement the individual envelopes, due to the way the mixing engine is designed. I've done some little bugfixes and all new song settings are now saved to the .FTR files. The project is nearing completion.

3 October 13:24 - I've been sick for over a week so I haven't been able to do anything for a while. Now I'm back at work, trying to implement the individual envelope for each wave item. I also still have to change the way the grid works.

19 September 23:01 - Anderlecht just won the Champions League game against PSV with 1-0, so obviously I'm in a good mood. The plugins are added now and appear to be working as you might expect them to. Now in order to add the envelope and solve some bugs, I have to rework the track grid completely. This will probably take up the rest of the week, which is a pity.

18 September 23:11 - I've been trying to add the plugin functionality for a few days now and finally it kinda works. Kinda, because there's a major problem when there are plugins loaded and the song loops back to the start position. But as such, the plugins (VST only) work. DirectX plugins have a bunch of other problems and probably won't be included in this release. I thought for a long time that I wouldn't be able to finish anything today, but in the end I go quite far. So that's hopeful for tomorrow, as I'm a bit behind on schedule.

14 September 10:45 - Yesterday was spent entirely on changing the mixing engine from 16bit int to 32bit float, only to find out afterwards that DirectSound only supports 32bit float output in Windows 2000 (possibly WinME too). So today I've switched it back to 16bit int, but the mixing engine itself remains 32bit float (necessary for plugins). So now I'm finally ready to really add plugin support.

12 September 12:15 - I've started on changing the internal mixer. Basically, the tracks will now be mixed to 32bit floating point buffers instead of 32bit integers, and the final output will also be 32bit floating point instead of 16bit integer. Also, tracks that have plugins assigned will first be mixed to a seperate buffer, after which the plugins are processed, before being added to the main mix.

11 September 10:16 - The next step now is the most exciting new feature : plugins. It does mean changing a lot of things internally, so it will take a while.

8 September 9:09 - The track properties have been added, so I'm moving slowly but certainly towards adding plugin support. This will probably take a few days, not counting the problems that will undoubtedly pop up. It's kind of exciting to be making progress more easily now that I've explored the source code more.

7 September 11:46 - Yesterday wasn't all too productive, with all the little problems that kept popping up. Just getting it to work as it used to took almost all my time. It's going a bit better now, I'm getting to know the source code better. Still lots of problems though. I'm still working on the tracks and I'm going to add the new track properties window, which will hopefully pave the way for the plugins.

6 September 7:23 - Today, I'm going to work on the way tracks are handled, with more properties, a nicer look and who knows what else. This is necessary to start adding plugin support later, but also for the awe-inspiring envelopes. In the meantime I'm not really sure what to do with this site yet. I'll keep it as it is for now (a lot of work still to integrate the Audio Plugin Developers Page), but I could add guestbooks and all that sort of stuff. I'm just not sure if it would really be an addition.

5 September 2000, 21:56 - Working on Radio538. There are some little annoying things that pop up sometimes for apparently no reason. In general it's going allright though. I can't wait to start adding plugins, but there's so many things to be done first. Maybe I can put up some screenshots sometime. I'm going to stop working now so I can start fresh again tomorrow.

2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001