I am pretty excited for this new update to Reaktor and will hopefully get time later today to sit down and spend some time with it. I’m particularly excited by how easier it should make sharing the ‘racks’ and for saving within your DAW. Despite having used Reaktor for about 15 years there are some parts I’ve just never got my head around - working with samples and making sure that I save Ens properly within the DAW (laziness on my part I admit) so I’ve just tended to record audio.
Been a big fan of Euroreakt also so will definitely be throwing a bit of cash Unfiltered’s way for the new version. I hope this encourages other developers to create commercial blocks - it would be great to see Noise Engineering port their *.Vereor stuff from Reason.
Huge fan of BYOME and SpecOps so looking forward to these. Especially your synth… don’t feel shy about sharing some more details if you want!!!
It’s called LION, there are something like 25 synthesis engines for each of the two oscillators (each with optional stereo synthesis algos), 15 filter types, and the focus is actually on the mixing section. It has a BYOME row built-in, per-voice modulation of the synthesis section, MPE and MIDI modulators, full microtuning support, and more. We’ve designed it so there are no pages (except for the voice/tuning options page), so everything is visible at once.
Before I get too off track from the Reaktor thread Euro Reakt will officially be released tomorrow along with some other incredible third-party libraries that I’ve tested. Seriously, one of them is a bundle of Sampling Blocks by Toybox Audio that I spent the afternoon yesterday recording (https://www.toyboxaudio.com/). One of his Blocks is a Granular Sampler that does simultaneous live recording and playback. It has an effect mode that is similar to the Morphagene, but I’ve also been using it for sounds that are more like an Octatrack with an updated granulator.
Since all of this is tightly integrated with Maschine, I plan on spending a lot of time this week building myself some p-lockable granular boxes.
Thanks for the info, I’m a big fan of wasting countless hours playing about with various types of synthesis with no real end goal in mind so hearing that LION will have as many engines (and indeed filter types) has me pretty excited.
Thanks also for the insight on what’s coming tomorrow in the world of Reaktor. Even more excited to hear about the 3rd party libraries.
I had a good old play with the new R6.3 and I have to report back that it’s a pretty excellent experience (except for an authorisation I had with Blocks Base which I’ve logged with NI) and the use of the cables feels really smooth and intuitive. Being able to switch cables off and on with a keyboard shortcut is just much nicer than swapping back and forth to structure view.
I’d also advise people not to sleep on the example racks that are included, even the tutorial ones, as there are some pretty interesting ideas to steal/be inspired by. I particularly liked the rack which creates a crude wavetable by clocking a mod sequencer at audio rates.
Thanks for your work. I will be spending the next few days with your blocks and the Toybox stuff to build variations on the Replicant and Tandra rythmic effects.
Regarding Toybox, a word of warning to my fellow Elektronauts: the Sampler blocks currently do not work on my Laptop due to a problem with Reaktor 6.3 and the Designer pack does not unpack all modules on a PC. The developer has contacted me and promised to fix this problems soon, so maybe just wait a few days. The modules that run btw are great.
The Reaktor 6.3. updates removes one of my pet peeves, Ensembles really where eating up my HD really fast and prevented updates from Blocks.
Been playing about with R6.3 some more and in particular the free packs from Unfiltered and Toybox and both are excellent. I really can’t stress enough how useful having the example racks is for getting your head around blocks which are a little less obvious. I really enjoyed the free version of Euroreakt but in this iteration and with those examples it really does help the learning process. I’m almost certainly picking up both Unfiltered’s and Toybox’s packs as time and finances allow.
A couple of blocks that stood out for me from the free stuff:
1-op Chaos - Fantastic sounding (and weirdly flexible) noise/sound generator. This, a VCA and some choice modulation and you can easily live out those being signed to Raster-Noton circa 2002 fantasies… is the Ikeda mode a coincidence?
Wavetable Distortion - I wrote off the free version as it just destroys audio but seeing how it combines really well with simple sine waves to create a whole shed load of interesting wave shapes was quite the revelation.
And from Toybox:
Drum Module - Pretty run of the mill drum sample playback but when you start modulating the FM and Select controls at high rates with some pitch modulation too… again, really interesting textures.
Hopefully this ramble has inspired a few more people to check it out… I’m really impressed!
Surprisingly, yes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikeda_map (The original paper is by “K. Ikeda”). The full version comes with a whole lot more chaos. My masters project was built around audification of chaotic maps.
This is one of my favorites. The various “FM” types can provide very surprising results.
Definitely. I have a Block called “Rotator” that rotates up to 8 inputs across 8 outputs. There’s not an all-in-one Block like Trigger Riot, but you can combine Blocks to create complex and generative gate behavior. Ideal Blocks for this are Rotator, Boolean Logic, Flip Flop, Burst Generator, Gate Delay, 8-way Switch, Probability, and Gate Combiner.
General question whilst the thread is active : do you need to acquire these blocks from a range of third party sites now with the issues that come with that or will these ever be sourceable from NI given that there seems to be some tie-in to N.Access
[can’t try or explore as my Mac drive died and i am spending all my time on the forensic recovery]
Plus excuse my ignorance - why is it more disk efficient to the end user to work with racks aot ensembles - i think i read that somewhere ?
I’m not that fussed about front panel patching - i’m well used to that from Nord Modular Patching and it’s no great hardship to ‘rear’ patch - you only really miss patch clarity and a bit more immediacy at the expense of clutter - but i don’t know if i want to create accounts all across town to pick up a few blocks to augment the factory set
At the moment, I haven’t heard of any plans for NI to do distribution for me, so my Blocks are only available through Unfiltered Audio’s website. The DRM isn’t machine specific, so I keep my Blocks on Dropbox and then activate them using Native Access on each computer.
Ensembles save full copies of every Block–including every knob–as a monolithic file. There’s no compression, so multiple instances of the same knob aren’t reduced in size. Because of this, an Ensemble with only a few Blocks can easily push 100 MB. The Rack format can currently only use Blocks designed for Racks and registered through Native Access. Racks use IDs to reference the Blocks, so the entire Block isn’t saved inside of the Ensemble. Racks end up only taking a few kilobytes of space.
Totally fair. Euro Reakt will remain free on the User Library. I don’t believe our website requires account creation, as you can do guest checkout. You need to fill out “Billing Info” when “buying” the Free Edition, but since it doesn’t actually use the payment info, you can fill it out with “–” or gibberish. I’ve had a few Free Edition purchases from people with names like “asdf asdf” and addresses like “1234 Farts Lane”, which is totally fine. I’m not planning on sending letters to billing addresses or anything like that.
Thanks for the enlightening reply - i am very late the the reaktor party, more a Max/NM guy - so i’m more drawn to the creative aspects - but it was the neat CV stuff which got me over the line whilst it was super cheap a while back
Had a quick Google but couldn’t find anything - is there a document or list somewhere of all the Euro Reakt modules and what they can do, or a manual of some kind?
There are 5-10 new Blocks that were released in an update after the dissertation was published, and some features were added to existing Blocks. The change log on the User Library page has the info not contained in the dissertation. I need to sit down and prepare some simplified materials, but life just sort of went crazy to say the least. I’m teaching a class on Ask.Video about building with Reaktor 6 on June 4th, so that should also be helpful.
Thanks for sharing the link to the document, it’s very appreciated. I’ll definitely check out the appendix to your dissertation a bit later when I have a moment.
Hah! Thank you. We’re at the grandparents’, so there’s a rare moment of downtime.
I was literally working on a Toybox Repeat Sequencer + ER Rotator patch on my other window. Every time I open Toybox, I find something new to obsess over. There’s always something fun lurking on an options page.
One question on Repeat Sequencer: Is there a quick way to combine Roll and Mute behavior? A design thought I had is that in Roll mode, double-clicking a “1” could throw a mute onto that step (alternatively, having the ability to select “0” on a step could work, but would make it potentially more frustrating to work with). Otherwise, I could make it work by combining the Repeat and Gate sequencers with AND logic.
Also, since this is the Elektron forum and all, I was going to send a Block request to NI but wanted to make sure that it didn’t already exist in Toybox. In Euro Reakt, I have a few Racks that I made for sequencing MD, Digitakt, AR, etc. They take eight gates and convert them to eight MIDI triggers. To accomplish this, I had to put together a bunch of offset generators with eight separate Util MIDI Out Blocks. It was a pretty hacky way to accomplish this. Anyway, does Toybox have a Gate-to-MIDI Block? The closest thing I’ve found is Poly MIDI Out, which reduces the number of MIDI Out Blocks required but still needs offset generators to pick the target note.
Hah! Thank you. We’re at the grandparents’, so there’s a rare moment of downtime.
Ha yeah it must be a big upheaval, I’m actually looking forward to that… (I’m getting kinda broody!!)
One question on Repeat Sequencer: Is there a quick way to combine Roll and Mute behavior?
You can actually use another sequencer, for example the ‘level sequencer’ to modulate the ‘MUTE/HOLD’ control, therefore selecting if a particular step is muted or rolling… (you might need to fiddle with the delay knob a bit to make sure the event timing works out between the 2 sequencers)
I’ve just made a modification to the block so that now the ‘roll’ function is applied only if the step isn’t in mute mode and not if it is… good call on that, I think it’s more flexible this way and will allow you to mute as well as roll steps without needing to modulate the knob… I’ll add this to the upcoming V1.1 update…
Anyway, does Toybox have a Gate-to-MIDI Block? The closest thing I’ve found is Poly MIDI Out, which reduces the number of MIDI Out Blocks required but still needs offset generators to pick the target note.
The only way I can think of to do this is, as you suggested, to use 3 ‘poly midi out’ blocks and 3 offset generators -->
I’ve added ‘Offset’ controls to each channel of the ‘poly midi out’ block now, so you can use that to specify a note for each output… I’ll add this to the V1.1 update also
Euro Reakt will officially be released tomorrow along with some other incredible third-party libraries that I’ve tested. Seriously, one of them is a bundle of Sampling Blocks by Toybox Audio that I spent the afternoon yesterday recording (
