Zynth club. .. There's just one rule in Zynth club

Tuesday works for me. Given no other objections let’s aim for that.

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So tonight?

Or tomorrow morning if you live in Paul Island or further west.

We might be putting up Christmas Decorations.

good idea for developer is a Christmas theme or a Christmas icon in VLC style

During December Zynthian automatically adds a chain with sleigh bells, beatmatched to whatever is playing.

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Guess what I’ve been up to the last few days…

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This was a long one, starting earlier in the northern hemisphere than summer club (due to day light saving) and going beyond midnight here in Europe. Amongst other things there was chitter-chatter about:

  • A Roli Piano M looks cool but are Roli to be trusted to deliver any products bought by their customers?
  • An expressive-e osmose may be a better option… if one had the budget.
  • You can run Linux on a mobile phone, but should you?
  • The concept of convergence of phone, tablet, laptop, etc. was dropped by all the OS vendors (notably Ubuntu) - possibly because it reduces the quantity of devices that can be sold…
  • Two weeks in Hawii is too long but there is much to be done, island hopping, including headbutting a turtle.
  • We discussed LLMs and how they may be used for the better (mostly ignoring the harm they are doing to the planet). We even made a brief attempt at asking them to help document and code Zynthian, but our weary minds were no match for our hyper‑intelligent overlords, who patronised us into submission.
  • Treat LLM interfaces like a subordinate and give it parameters and context and it may provide some useful data from which you, the experienced human can use as a starting point or prompt for a solution to your problem.
  • BirdNET-Go is an automated identification of birds from their song which may be run on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a cheap microphone attached. Christmas project anyone?
  • You can still purchase a Black & White TV license here in the UK (£58.50)! What equipment exists to only receive B&W pictures???
  • Teletext was the marvel of the 1980’s which seemed to mostly miss north america. If your country had it, you would remember. It was so exciting waitng for a page of text to be rendered on your TV - like a hyper curated WWW more than a decade earlier.
  • What benefit does a dual nvme card provide a zynthian? We may find out from our “dual nvme correspondent”. A boot menu may be useful.
  • Did Charanjit Singh accidentally invent acid house?
  • Zynthian has quite acurate timing with its own metronome but is this what we all want? Maybe not Jimi. (This may be possible in a future zynthian.)
  • The new developments in zynthian were demonstrated including; sequence launching, audio clips / loops, effects sends / returns, stompbox style processor bypass, tempo and time signature changes, chaining sequences, etc. Some bugs were identified and suggested improvements recorded. It is good to share early…

Of course there were seasonal greetings exchanged. Zynth club will return in 2026 (or earlier).

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I mentioned Michael (dev of Loopy Pro iOS app) is using AI a lot in his coding. This Insta vid was the one I first saw from him where he produced a VST host in 10 minutes rather than 2 weeks by his estimates.

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New year, time for another moot. Tuesday 20th January 2026 at 19:00 UTC.

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Works for me. But any time is mostly okay.

Unless you’re going on again for hours and hours, I won’t be able to make. Back from tap training at around 23:00 UTC. Or next Thursday if the likes of you are inclined to change dates.

The anticipation is palpable…

No bus, in case you’re wondering. Just a dead battery

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We had fun last night, chatting about many things, a small subset of which are:

  • Tap dancing is tiring.
  • Raspberry Pi based laptops are a thing.
  • ASM have a new synth - a tad expensive.
  • Music made on old computers could be a challenge but the determined found solutions.
  • Should we use the crotchet (quarter note) symbol in the GUI?♩
  • We had demo of the Vangelis features with some oohs and some wows with the occasional OMG and falling off chairs. I think they liked it!
  • Of course nothing is perfect - we had some useful feedback like how to deal with timebase (tempo & time signature).
  • Monitoring pendulums with lasers and building simulated bell ringing.

Lots more but I didn’t listen.

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Very nice and brief. Next time I’ll be joining if it doens’t happen to fall on a tuesday.

Yes, we pretended not to notice the glass of beer that disappeared in the close proximity of our secretary, whilst we discussed important issues like lasers, clocks and pendula…