Tutorial issues and Antescofo prospects

hugigu · April 19, 2021, 1:03pm

Hello
I’m new to antescofo but after just a couple of days working with it I managed to take a piece for cello and electronics that was previously operated by the cellist with a bluetooth pedal and make it fully automatic. And it even works better than the original version! I’m in complete awe over this and in slight shock that this isn’t something everything is using in their live electronic music.

I found the tutorials very helpful and easy to follow but they seem to be in need of an update (unless I somehow got an old version or something). The link to this forum is dead and the tutorial repeatedly mentions the use of Ascograph to convert files and follow the score which is a bit confusing when you are new to this and havn’t found out that Ascograph is actually dead and buried since several years ago. I then found in a different forum that the conversion should now be done online. Again, that lead to a few dead links before finding a new link that finally allowed me to convert scores. All a bit tedious and unnecessary, I must admit.

This led my thoughts to the bigger picture and the future prospects of Antescofo~. With the technology behind it now being made into a commercial product (Metronaut), can we be sure that the Antescofo~ will still be maintained and kept up to date 5 or 10 years from now? What is the “ownership” of the actual code? Is it Ircam or Metronaut? With no real alternative to the ascograph so many years after it was discontinued one can’t help but to feel that this project as a Max/MSP code isn’t on the top of anyones list to maintain.

This is a seriously powerful tool that I can see myself investing a lot of time and effort into but that of course requires that one can feel certain that this is not just going to fade into the abyss Is there any chance you will make this into an open source project?

A simple thing like having to go online to convert scores worries me also. Why isn’t that done natively in Max? I have lost count of the dead ircam links I’ve come across alone in this short quest and if this one goes down, Antescofo will be virtually impossible to use.

Anyway, thank you for an amazing piece of software and I look forward to hearing about the future prospects of Antescofo.

Best regards,
Hugi

arshiacont · April 19, 2021, 2:19pm

Thank you @hugigu for your enthusiasm and encouragement!

Yes the tutorials need an update… pinging professionals at Ircam to help out here: @goepfer @lemouton @muller I can do that but I am not the most valuable Max expert in this regard.

Regarding the future prospects: The Antescofo Company (behind the commercial Metronaut App for iOS) acquired the technology from Ircam in 2016. As part of the acquisition, we bound ourselves to maintaining the technology for artistic use (meaning Max and Puredata objects). The company, with agreement from Ircam, also decided that the technology for artistic use should be available for free on Ircam Forum (to show you our good will).
Besides all administration obligations: the Max/Pd objects are maintained partly by the company and Ircam. I should also mention our strong commitment to our roots which is contemporary music creativity (hence our insistance upon the creation of the Antescofo company that Max/Pd objects should be free).

As for the convertor of MusicXML to Antescofo format: the fact that the convertor exists on Ircam websites should actually lower down all worries! We are thinking about open-sourcing the convertor but in all cases, the convertor code is accessible to Ircam developers and fully maintained by us (it was not close to anything useful just a few years ago).

Rest assured,

Arshia

c-harl-ie · February 17, 2022, 8:47am

Thanks Arshia for this— I’m in a similar position where I am dedicating a really huge amount of time to building things with Antescofo. It’s an amazing piece of software (as I’ve said before, but it bears repeating). I agree that having a downloadable converter script would be useful.

One other thing that might make @hugigu and I sleep slightly better would be, for instance, a commitment that if someday in the future the Antescofo Company winds down, that the Max code would be open-sourced, so that some of us could continue building it for new hardware?

I of course understand that you don’t want to open-source this while you’re developing a commercial product. But to me it seems worth considering both cases!

All the best,
Charlie