Bohan aka BJohan

Yo!this second interview is for another psycle’s coder:Bohan. He is the hero of free psycle project…you can read here his interview with very detailed answere ;)

http://psycle.free.fr/Photos/bohan.png

Bohan

1 )Q:hello bohan,introduce yourself for us,please.

A:I was born in the late 70's in britanny, and i still hide somewhere in france nowadays.Why do i end up here? Well, my life has always been emcombered with computers..during the day, I do some boring jobs whose goal is to try to turn computers into businness machines,and at night, I continue on with the same kind of things but with more noble goals. Although I don't feel being totally weird, people think i barely have a real life, so I'm afraid i qualify for being called a geek. Nothing so far was able to cure this disease, and actually i haven't really looked for a cure.I have poor musicial skills (i've never been able to masterize the black art of synth programming, only sample-based systems), but i enjoy the work of other people I don't embrace a particular genre of music, but i often enjoy non-orchestral classical, funk, acid, deep house, depressive rock..

2 )Q:hmm...what do you mean for " being a geek " ?

A:being a geek? i guess it's when you sometimes put your introverted dreams before social life,i do that, too often.

3 )Q:you are one of the main coders,when have you started this experience?

A:I've always tried to play with the sound chips of the computers i got, even without a dedicated musical program, although i didn't have sufficient knowledge of programming to make anything beyond jokes,In the 90's, i used to spend some unreasonable amount of time with friends doing musical experiments with old trackers. We didn't have internet, so we weren't aware of all the bleeding-edge softwares.Trackers were easy to handle and fun, but at some point i've becomed annoyed with their limits. i started being fascinated by virtual synthesizers like Virtual-Waves,and at the same time, as i gained more experience at programming, i started to think it should be possible to combine trackers with realtime virtual synthesis. I started some basic modular engine, but once i eventually got wired to the web, it didn't took a long time before i bumped into psycle, around 2001.It already implemented most of the ideas i was dreaming of, and moreover, as opposed to most musical softwares at that time, it had the big advantage of being opensource,so i felt my own little project was a bit redundant, and started to look at psycle more deeply. I didn't know C++ at that time (the programming language psycle is coded with), so it took me some time before i could help with anything.Although i've been following psycle's development for some years now, i don't consider i'm one of its main coder, because psycle was already a full-featured application at the time i joined the project.

4 )Q:so..you are one of the older psyclers ,have you some news that you would to implement on psycle or something you are working on?

A:That's a good question, Since Arguru's release of psycle's source code, many people have contributed to the maintenance of psycle.Not just maintenance actually, compared to the early versions, psycle is more stable, more beautiful, and got many cool new features added to it. But its core concepts never really changed.Meanwhile, several new opensource projects flourished, especially on linux, and some of them became production-stable.Looking at them, i feel everything is slowly converging to the same set of concepts, and we should consider these concepts for Psycle too.I've been wanting to add multi-I/O to psycle for a long time, actually since i know psycle, i've always thought it lacks it.But it's not as easy as adding a new feature, it could break the source code for some time,and so isn't some modification i could decide to do without consent from other devers.Either we'll have to stop working on other features until the transition is done, or we'll have to do a temporary fork.Currently, many people contribute code to psycle, and if we have a fork, we might have a hard time managing all those nice contributions.Another big work on psycle's code that many of us would like to see accomplished is the split of its source code into.several distinct parts: mainly, separating the audio engine from the GUI.For example, it would be nice to be able to embeed a psycle host/player-engine into other apps, or to be able to reuse the engine on another operating-system, and plug it with a different GUI.During the past year, i've been mostly working on another audio engine, which i have unfortunately no way to integrate with psycle because all the aspects of psycle are entangled in the same monolithic codebase.There used to be a Winamp input plugin for psycle, based on the same source code as the whole Psycle tracker,but unfortunately, the separation between the " full psycle " and the "winamp plugin " was done in way that was rather tedious to maintain, and it's even abandonned now.The rework on the source code is something i know JosepMa also wants to do ; we just need to find enough courage to do it.If we ever do this psycle audio-engine library, i think it would be possible to rework it so it includes supports for other plugin formats like LADSPA and DSSI,but that's really not going to happen anytime soon.It's not even clear to me whether multi-I/O should be implemented before or after the audio-engine separation.

5 )Q:talk about your new project called freepsycle,please.

A:The freepsycle project is about some aspects of software most users of psycle probably don't really care about.Currently, you can download Psycle freely and it runs fine on your windows system. You can then use its native plugins,and fetch some free VST plugins from the net to complement the possibilities. All this for free, you think.With a deeper look at it, you're far from using totally free softwares, in the sense given by the Free Software Foundation.Appart from the windows operating system, there are many compounds that aren't free: - psycle itself depends on libraries by microsoft which aren't free. - psycle itself has to be compiled with a software by microsoft that's not free. - The VST host and all those "free VST plugins" aren't free either. I started the freepsycle project with the evaluation of available free-softwares,that work across platform boundaries (i.e. on both unices and windows)and that could be used for reimplementing psycle. Although free-softwares aren't very matured on the windows platform (the gcc compiler has always been more mature than microsoft's tho, even on windows), it seems feasible to support both unices and windows with the same codebase. The major obstacle is only the huge existing codebase of psycle, which would need a major rewrite. All the GUI code would need to be rewritten.Currently, i continue the freepsycle project to experiment new concepts for audio engines, and also techniques for making applications modular and pluggable,I don't have any clear plan yet to merge anything with the original psycle codebase, because before than can happen, as i mentionned earlier,there's first the need to rework the original code to make it more modular: i'd like to be able to write a GUI using GTK instead of MFC, while preserving the original audio-engine intact, but it's unfeasible right now.You might feel disappointed hearing i have no intention to merge the two projects, but i think what's important is to be able to have common interfaces, which we can implement in various ways.The GUI of the original psycle represents so many manhours of work.. Can we think about throwing all this away? Nope, but yet, this existing GUI shouldn't prevent someone from trying to write a replacement GUI.PS: Satoshi Fujiwara is doing some psycle-from-scratch experiment too, i wish i was able to work with him on that, but we've got a language barrier.

6 )Q:I know you since 2003,but I never listened to your songs..have you ever made one?

A:hahahea,Ahem. I have many .psy files hidden on my HDD. But:

1) They are all crap.

2) I still want to be able to shamelessly critic someone else's tunes.

3) I'm not modest.

Therefore i want to keep them burried.I'm really not good at programming synthesizers.. all i'm content with so far is sample-base tunes which you can find on the net.I promise when sampulse is ready, and we've got a compo for it, i'll participate.

7 )Q:being an old psyclers you surely know a lot of musicians and songs,do you remember some special track that you liked and it’s still in your mind?

A:don't have a clear memory of most tunes, just a few of them..Dunno who wrote that: http://retropaganda.info/archives/psycle-tunes/unsorted/Sunshine_On_Mars.psy

http://retropaganda.info/archives/psycle-tunes/unsorted/Sunshine_On_Mars_remix.psy

http://retropaganda.info/archives/psycle-tunes/unsorted/Way%20To%20Psycland.psy

(i'm afraid the tuning isn't preserved correctly with these old tracks)

Some minimalist tune from tao,

http://retropaganda.info/archives/psycle-tunes/tao/The%20Shell/shell.psy

and basic trance from taika kim,

http://retropaganda.info/archives/psycle-tunes/taika-kim/NSKY.PSY

A tune demo-style tune from heatseeker,

http://retropaganda.info/archives/psycle-tunes/heatseeker/ht-psycle_demo.psy

Also i enjoyed receiving alk's unfinished "pattern loops".. i got a bunch of them, so it's a mess,but among them i like these very much (the "finished" tracks):

http://retropaganda.info/archives/psycle-tunes/alk/you-know.psy

http://retropaganda.info/archives/psycle-tunes/alk/metropolis.psy

http://retropaganda.info/archives/psycle-tunes/alk/alk-badworld.psy

http://retropaganda.info/archives/psycle-tunes/alk/[bee].psy

some other really random stuff:

http://retropaganda.info/archives/psycle-tunes/alk/ruff2.psy

http://retropaganda.info/archives/psycle-tunes/alk/chipster.psy

http://retropaganda.info/archives/psycle-tunes/alk/snchip.psy

Also, I love this early psycle song by arguru:

http://psycle.free.fr/arguru/arguru-ufoid.ogg

8 )Q:is there another musical program that you like ? if yes would you steal some features from it?

A:I'm impressed by the capabilities of low-level modular engines, but they are so complex to use that i'd say i don't like them as much as psycle.About code ripping, i'm thinking about ripping some of Om Synth's code.

9 )Q:what is OM synth?

A:Om synth is a front-end to a modular engine, like audiomulch, OSW, PD, etc..i like the way it's coded tho, which is not the case of other opensource projects

10 )Q:now talking about you a little bit,what do you like to do when you are not busy coding psycle?

A:hmm, I like to conspire about revolution, being beaten by the guards in front of night clubs.I like to refuse propositions to go to the cinema or anything boring like that I gladly accept someone who offers me drug.no, really, i can't say all that this way.oh, and i like boats, sailing boats, wind surfing, and everything humid like that unfortunately, i live in limoges nowadays, which is rather far from the sea I read anything from romance to books about physics.

11 )Q:France is one of the best place for food ,isn’t?so..what is your favourite food?

A:I don't have the greatest taste, so Mom's food is the best.

12 )Q:have you something to say to psycledelics community ?

A:Please join us on IRC, please write more on the boards!I want to know more people who use Psycle :)

eheh,I agree with you and I can add (more comments for tracks)..:P,thanks a lot mate..see ya!!

made by MfM on 29/01/2006