Devlog 3: Vital LFO Randomizer

Read the previous entry here: https://www.databroth.com/blog/devlog-two-building-an-mseg

Alright, I actually have something to share with you this time. I made an LFO randomizer for Vital using JavaScript. Why JavaScript? So I could embed it into a page on my website. You can find it here: https://www.databroth.com/lfo-randomizer.

I had a few other reasons to learn JS, for one, Logic’s midi scripter uses JS, secondly there’s a UI system for plugins called “WebView” that uses JS, third I want to add stuff to this site, and finally there’s a couple other reasons I can’t quite mention atm.

Learning JavaScript was not too difficult, what I’ve learned in Lua has definitely helped so far. That said, I really had to get used to this syntax, as it was my first time switching languages. I do feel like I gained a deeper understanding of Lua as well, as I was using some operations w/o exactly knowing how they worked.

There was one very large hurdle for me with this project. Creating and downloading the file just did not make any sense to me, I’ve learned about “blobs” but so far I’m using a library function that I think might be overkill and I don’t quite understand it as well as I’d like.

After getting this down, the rest was really a breeze, just had to refresh myself on how arrays/functions/tables worked in JS while figuring out the details for generating different LFO shapes. I made a simple point connection, a random ramps, and random steps. Next I predefined some array sizes, and set up a randomizer to swap between those.

It’s still a very rudimentary randomizer. Between the 3 shapes and 4 sizes, there’s really only 12 different flavors of random LFO it produces.
As you can see from the graphic, the steps mode is also kinda messed up, but that should be a pretty easy fix.

There’s a lot more I want to do with this one, but this is a good enough proof of concept to share for now
I’ve wanted to make this project for a few years now, so it feels good to get to this point.