Community release

[iamdey]

[TL;DR] I publish community contributions to LMN-3_DAW on my fork: https://github.com/iamdey/LMN-3-DAW/releases

---

Hello here, I'm pretty excited to share with you the changes I've made on LMN-3_DAW.
This means I'm able to add some improvements to the DAW even if the main repository get some technical debts (outdated versions of dependencies and transitives).

Well, I worked on this (as a side project as of my regular job) for months but got stuck on several problems due to my lack of experience on the technologies used on the LMN-3.

Nevertheless, I had pretty good insights on what I was able to do on my own (even if it's very small compared to what Stone did with the whole project).

Compiler

I've been able to recreate a full cross-compiler from scratch and make it reproducible. It's docker based in order to reuse it in the release process directly on the CI or in a local environment without altering the host.

Here are the images : https://hub.docker.com/r/iamdey/lmn-3-daw-docker-compiler

Modifications

The most interesting part.

First of all, I've introduced a changelog file in the repository to see clearly what changed.

One big change is the ability to edit, load and save song which @vidalsasun made the previous summer.

I've made some small changes too like fixing the interval of the rate selector that was annoying me on the LFO modifiers.

More fun, I've improved the Step Sequencer to allow live editing the sequence and also change the behavior when selecting a step division (4/8/16) to keep the same number of measures so the grid can now holds 64 notes. Previously you were able to have 4 measures of 4 notes or only one measure with 16 notes and now you'll have up to 4 measures of 16 divisions.

Troubleshooting

When using the step sequencer, the note are not played directly played when pressing it (you have to wait the next loop to hear it). You may have already encounter an other issue that is actually related with the current official version while playing and selecting a track.
The problem comes with the current version of tracktion engine which has some audio glitches while live editing.
Fortunately, there is a solution for that, see the next section.

Next steps

Short term vision

Migrating to tracktion_engine v3

This will completely fix the issues described above. The good news is, I've already made the job and it works fine on x86_64 platforms. It was tough since I'm a beginner in C++ and because it requires to migrate from C++17 to C++20 that's why I needed to rebuild a compiler from scratch.

But I still have issues with it, the tracktion_engine doesn't seem to compile correctly on armv7 which bothering me a lot (I spent months on this and I'm not proud of it).

Note velocity

(I hope I understand this correctly)

Add the possibility to change the velocity of a note in the step sequencer to allow more variations in a sequence. It's part of the midi protocol and completely handled by tracktion_engine so it should not be very hard to do.

Apply effects on the Master track

There is a “hidden” track in the daw thanks to tracktion_engine (which you can see in the level view actually). I think it would be very useful to allow to apply effects on this Master track.

Long term vision

Edit midiclip

Edit a midiclip instead of creating a new one when entering in the Step Sequencer.

Live Looper

I want this for real. In my mind, I want to be able to switch from the current track view to a looper view and be able to play “live”.

Reduce boot time on raspberry PI

I think this is one of the biggest issue on LMN-3_DAW, raspbian is super slow to start.
I've made several tries to reduce that for example using an image of raspbian lite and installing only X server without all the desktop packages but it didn't change anything, the system is always very long to start.
Also the song edit/load might introduce some load time, so I want to monitor this too.
Well, I still have a lead and I want to give a chance to buildroot which was made especially that kind of product.

Other (crazy) ideas

• Save song as sample
• Record a sample
• Select an other midi device than the LMN-3 hardware (or at least allow to play with a real keyboard)
• Run on android. I know there is already a fork that prove that is possible, I hope that we can sync those projects
• Semi-automatic update of the DAW on the rpi.
• …

The community

Last but not least, I know that LMN-3 is a very “niche audience” project, the activity is very low and @stonepreston, the main author has probably other plans or things to do which I totally respect.

The question now is, what should I do with the repository I forked and modified: https://github.com/iamdey/LMN-3-DAW ?

Here are the options I see:

• Nothing for now. Keep things as it is, because obviously I'm the only one interested in this 🤪
• Prepare pull requests for the official repository with each changes correctly separated and ready for review in the eventuality where Stone is ready to take a look
• Move to a new “Community Edition” group where I'm not the only administrator so it an continue to live on its own.

Any other options?

---

If you reach the end of this post, thank you so much 🙏 I hope you'll give a look the changes I've made and enjoy.

Cheers,
dey

[panki27]

Hello dey, thank you for all the effort you put into this!

I just discovered this project and was a bit surprised to see the repos being last updated 3 years ago
So glad someone is still working on this!

Once I managed to built my own LMN-3, I will gladly look into contirbuting to your fork 👍

[panki27]

@iamdey How do you think the project should continue - is there a list of to-do's I can get my hands on?

I have now finished my LMN-3 and fiddled around a little.
I've also managed to get a hold of the original creator of the project on the project Disord (see attached screenshot).

What he mentions regarding a web based user interface sounds rather interesting.

[HotPTgz]

@panki27 Man I built mine a month ago and having tons of fun with it. If you're looking for ideas, why not try to implement an arpeggiator?

[HotPTgz]

Ah, I see you got in touch with the creator of the project, tell him I've been running my LMN-3 on a raspberry pi 5 with no issues :-)

[iamdey]

Good news everyone; I've released the new version 0.5.0 including @panki27 's contributions:

• Range selector & copy in step sequencer
• sort drumkits and samples by name

It's available on my fork: https://github.com/iamdey/LMN-3-DAW/releases/tag/v0.5.0

[parallacks]

It's probably going to be a minute before I get around to building one of these but thank you so much for picking things up and sharing with everyone! ❤️

[iamdey]

New release v0.6.0 with the introduction of note velocity in the Step Sequencer.

https://github.com/iamdey/LMN-3-DAW/releases/tag/v0.6.0

LMN-3_0.6.0_demo_velocity.webm

(This demo also includes the copy/paste feature added in v0.5.0)

[vidalsasun]

Hi @iamdey

i´ve made two changes y a new branch:

1. I´ve added a Arpegiator to the osc plugins (Page 7)

Instructions:

• Activate: Control (Lemmon) key
• Encoder 1 (Mode) : Cycle through arpeggio modes
• Encoder 2 (Rate): 1.0 - 16.0 Hz | 8.0 Hz | Arpeggio speed
• Encoder 3 (Octaves): 1 - 4 | 1 | Octave range
• Encoder 4 (Gate): 0.05 - 1.0 | 0.8 | Note duration (80% default)

2. When an audio output is selected, it is saved for future runs, so we don’t have to change it every time we start the LMN-3

3. more detailed Logging (Minor)
use log folder in /home/pi/.config/LMN-3
there are 2 log files: error.log (crashes) and resources_spikes (high use of CPU/RAM)

I have the changes in the 'Arpeggiator' branch if you want to review and/or merge

P.S.: I used the Claude code AI to assist with the development.

There is the artifact:
LMN-3-aarch64-linux-gnu_0.7.0.zip