colb's snap breeder

A device for breeding snapshots in instruments.

 (10 Votes)
1.0 (Updated 10 years ago)
5.5MB
July 15, 2014
Reaktor 5 or lower

DESCRIPTION

Colb's snap breeder is a tool that you can drop into an existing instrument. You then choose two existing snaps in the instrument and 'breed' them together, creating a new bank populated with the children. This is generally more successful than pure randomization, although there is an option to introduce a random factor using the 'mutation' control (I usually keep this at 0).

The uploaded ensemble has snap breeder installed into photon, with some example banks that have been generated using it.
Bank 7 is results from breeding bank 1 snap 4 (Rostorot) with bank 1 snap 7 (sunbluster)
64 children created, all silent or boring sounds manually removed, leaving 27 patches maybe 10 of which are pretty nice and distinctive
Bank 6 is results from breeding bank4 snap 125 (PAD.) with bank2 snap 13(Shallow Pad), after manually removing silent and boring snaps, then tweaking the master volume on each of the others...
Bank 8 uses bank3 snap11 and bank4 snap56, this was less successful, after removing silent sounds, most of the remaining ones will need at least some tweaking either to pitch or to envelope settings to make them really useful

Installing snap breeder into other instruments is fairly easy - you just need to move the gui elements around a little after pasting the snap breeder module into the intrument's top level macro.
Normally, after creating banks, you should be able to use them in a version of the instrument without the snap breeder, but with photone, I was prompted to switch off legacy mode, and the generated snaps are not tested in the version with legacy mode switched on - can't see why they wouldn't work though.

Please post any questions or bug reports here on on the forum

NOTE - make backup copies before using this tool - if you get the settings wrong, it's easy to overwrite existing banks and or patches!!!

colb

COMMENTS  (12)

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Paule
10 years ago
It works in this way also with Pandora Colin.
Paule
10 years ago
Jim, here is the n-formular in a snapshot family tree for colb's Snap Breeder. Choice for mom and dad different snapshots maybe bank one no. 12 and 14. Create 12 children in bank eight. Pick up 4 ot them in bank two. Same with different sources and 12 other snapshot children. Add 4 snapshot in the same bank two and so on. Next generation, start mom and dad from bank two and create 12 children in bank 8 etcpp. Next generation … and so on. In this way you get n-snapshots with very different sources without changes in colb's Snap Breeder.
Colin Brown
10 years ago
I'm not sure Jim. Each time you breed two snaps together, maybe 10% of the resulting snaps are ok, and only a few are really good. If you were to breed two banks together and just create one child from each pair of snaps, the results would be really hit and miss. IMO for this to be useful, you would have to create a bank for each pair, and there aren't enough banks. Another thing to note is that - other than the name given to the resulting snaps - it doesn't matter which is the mom and which is the pop, it just takes each parameter in turn and decides randomly which parent to take it's value from. It's also still really important to build some snaps from scratch to broaden the gene pool, otherwise you'll end up with horrible in-breeding problems!
arachnaut
10 years ago
I've been using this a lot. It would be really helpful if there were a bank to bank breeder - set every snapshot in, say, bank 1 to breed with the same number snapshot in bank 2 to give a new bank 3.
Eric Curkendall
10 years ago
This is great! Works a charm on Massive Reaktor. Thanks, by far my favorite user library upload of 2014!
Fedor Mihailovich
10 years ago
Thanks a lot - very useful and flexible macro. Tried it already with several synths and created dozens new interesting presets "almost out of nothing" :) Certainly it needs some manual adjustments (e.g. pitch corrections and so on), but anyway it helps a lot!
Colin Brown
10 years ago
It simulates a gene swapping approach where each parameter is a gene and a child gets each one either from mom or pop. There is no 'merging'. It uses the merge function of the snapshot module, but with maximum setting so that the child parameter is exactly the same as mom's or dad's. It wouldn't be possible to use three or more parents because the snapshot module doesn't have this feature, and any 'work around' would be a massive cludge imo.
arachnaut
10 years ago
I can see having a probability map for several snapshots to control merging.
arachnaut
10 years ago
How about a 3-way merge? Or n-way?
arachnaut
10 years ago
This is wonderful. But it doesn't generate snapshot 128.
Paule
10 years ago
The test with pandora failt. I do it manually like before. With Auralis by Kristian Thom it´s becomes a very good result. I load up a snapshot bank here. Called Phukett-Dreams. The demo song 74:05 is too long for NI. I put it here: https://archive.org/details/VirtualFugitive-2014ToEternity
Paule
10 years ago
Yeah! Will test it with the pandora series. Thanks Colin.
now