HEELP

HEELP stands for: Hub for Expressive Electronic Live Performance

GOALS

It has two main goals:

• Provide a streamlined environment for live performance of computerized music
• Provide a hub for model electronic instruments that need a translation layer

PLANS

• Support for Eigenharp, Soundplane, LinnStrument, Leap Motion, MPE, standard MIDI and standard audio input
• Full 64-bit support
• Runs with a GUI as well as headless
• Scalable UI with sleak and bare-bones vector-graphics
• Small enough to run on restricted devices like the BeagleBone Black
• Channel-based mixer with fixed number of sends and busses for clarity
• Channels can host any number of instrument and effect plugins in series
• Busses can host any number of effect plugins in series
• Per-channel input selection with multiple possible sources (ie. each channel has its set of MIDI, controller and audio ports)
• Plugins and channels can't be changed in real-time, you set up your environment and parametrize it
• Channels and busses can have custom colors for the background and foreground for easy identification
• Each channel runs as separate process and has the possibility to run on a different CPU core
• Centralized clock and tempo handling
• State capturing of the entire mixer as scenes
• Program change support for scene and tempo switching
• Automatic capturing of all plugin parameter and environment changes in a history with rollback support
• Multi-track recording of all input and output data of all channels and busses (no individual record enable)
• Detection of audio activity for automatic splitting of recordings, files can use the name of active scene for easy identification

TECHNICAL NOTES

Having a rigid structure of a list of channels and busses with sends has a series of advantages:

• It's very easy to understand what is going on during a performance or rehearsal
• The graph is stable, allowing for completely predictible application behavior
• Channels can input and output both MIDI and audio
• There's no master bus in the main process, only aux busses, each channel outputs to the audio interface directly
• Busses can only receive and output audio
• Each channel runs as a seperate process:
  • Any channel process (and its plugins) can run on another CPU core, leveraging the parallel nature of modern computers
  • Unstable plugins crash the channel they're part of and don't impact anything else
  • This process uses same audio device callback as the main process
  • All channels and the main process inherently run on the same clock with a 100% predictible relationship
  • The channel audio callback writes the audio buffer to shared memory
  • The channel audio can optionally also directly be output through the audio callback buffer, sending it straight to hardware
  • The channel processes can directly use the system audio and MIDI input ports without having to exchange data with the main process
  • The channel processes can directly use the system audio and MIDI output ports
  • The main process audio callback monitors the finished state of the channel processes
  • The main process collectes the channel audio buffers from shared memory and processes them for the busses
• The busses are all handled by the main process
• Non-MIDI controllers are handled by the main process and convert their performance data into MIDI
• Channels can have non-MIDI controllers as input, receiving appropriate MIDI data from the main process
• The main process and the channel processes have a private communication channel, this is used for:
  • Propagating application events
  • Sending MIDI data of non-MIDI controllers
  • Sending and receiving channel and plugin state