Can We Get Lists of Songs, Artists, Performances

Hi,

Could we get from Scaler Central some lists of the choices the program presents?

It would be quite handy to be able to start from a given list and subsequently make our own notes of likes, dislikes, applications, etc.

Text, or spreadsheet, or whatever would be fine. Whatever saves a user the effort of having to type-from-scratch information that obviously already exists.

Descriptions, better categorisations, favouriting, snapshots that combine many settings. All coming and we are working hard on. I am sure you can appreciate the teams efforts best focussed on implementing the above.

4 Likes

Thanks for the preview Davide. :slightly_smiling_face:

FWIW, I hope Favorites is not just a binary yes/no, but something more like 1-5 stars. as in Xfer Serum (observe at 5:30 here: - YouTube )

Iā€™ve used both kinds, and the extra flexibility really means alot!

Abletonā€™s approach is pretty good too:

Ableton - Favorites and Colors

I use Cthulhu but have not found a favorites/rating system. :thinking:

My mistake (now corrected). I was thinking Xfer and wrote Cthulu when I should have written Serum. Thanks!

OK! :grinning:
Anyway, I absolutely agree with the need for a good rating system.

Because of the complexity inherent in Scaler, a ā€˜fullā€™ rating system is probably very complex, IMHO. In Scaler 2.3, there were 528 songs/ artists / community progressions. Quite few to audition and apply ratings to.

But any of these progressions can have over 1000 expressions applied to them, so thatā€™s over half a million combinations of musical snippets. However, as Davide pointed out, you have still only just started at that point (!)

So letā€™s say you give ā€˜Timelessā€™ by one D Carbone a good score (I happen to be working on it now :grinning: ) will that sound good with every one of those 1000 expressions ?? Answer it might, but with more complex chords, probably not.

You might be able to rate expression separately, say against a harmonised Ionian. But does that mean a 9 rated expression will sound good with a 9 rated progression ? It might do, but I have no way of telling.

The fact is that options in Scaler are mind-blowingly large, and the concept of how to rate them seems to me to require a lot of thought.

The encouraging element is that we know that this application is in day to day use in commercial activities by those driving Scaler development, so if anybody can figure that out, it will be them. Over to Davide and co !

In my daydream moments in the garden with a glass of wine I thought that since everything is digital, there might be a way to run through all the permutations (by computer of course) comparing the notes in the chord with the expression notes and flagging potential dissonances, for example, as maybe a first pass that Scaler could offer.

Anyway, a numerical rating against progressions would be a good start.

For near orgasmic joy however, (not sure what Google Translate will make of that ***) it would be for the system to prompt for a rating and some text notes to get dumped into the state file.

*** Per una gioia quasi orgasmica, apparently .@claudioporcellana does that sound ritght ?

yes perfect
:grinning:

BTW, I was in the past one of those who asked/desired for ranking presets, but after finding that e.g. a metal preset can be perfectly fine to compose a Raoul Casadei tune, my interest is almost zeroed now
:rofl:

I have been arguing that there are challenges around any rating system because of scope of the variations, and itā€™s hard to see what shape it might take. However, something is often better than nothing.

I think we are in agreement in one sense, in that the point I believe that you are making is that any of the 600,000 plus and counting combinations might fit whatever it is that one was trying to compose. There is no obvious way to deduce that a priori, other than by ear. Our point of departure might be that for me the issue is how you find those good combinations ? And how do you remember which ones you have listened to ?

So I have been harping on that the process would be helped by a means to rapidly audition combinations, have a way to efficiently save the state file (potentially with the ability to annotate that file) and then query on the saved information at some later point.

I realise itā€™s a very personal thing and will depend on each individuals workflow.

2 Likes

the answer to the 1st query is: randomly
the answer to the 2nd query is: noā€¦ at the point I have sometimes to re-open an Ableton project to start toying from that forgotten point
:joy:

so, each time the treasure hunt is the same, and identical the chances to find a gem

Iā€™m not a music professional, so I can hunt forever just to have fun
and when there is no fun, I close Ableton and switch with no worries/regrets to reading or other hobbies

Iā€™ve just learnt how to have a more stress free life ā€¦

hahahahaha
this is the cool side of not being a professional

We were talking about this dilemma today in the Sequencer.de forum, and one of the ideas was to ā€œfind similarā€. Kinda like the picture search, you provide one chord progression and then let the search engine show you in order of relevance other chord progressions that are similar/related, kinda Riemanian Theory on steroidsā€¦