Category: News

   

The Bol Processor BP3 is cur­rent­ly com­prised of a con­sole (writ­ten in C lan­guage) and a set of PHP/HTML/CSS/Javascript files that act as its inter­face. A con­sole ver­sion of Csound can also be attached. For detailed instal­la­tion instruc­tions, please refer to the Bol Processor ‘BP3’ and its PHP inter­face page.

It all works beau­ti­ful­ly in a design that is com­pat­i­ble with mul­ti­ple 64-bit sys­tems: MacOS, Linux and Windows. However it does require the instal­la­tion of an Apache+PHP pack­age to run the inter­face. (We are cur­rent­ly using the free ver­sion of MAMP on Mac com­put­ers to devel­op the BP3 interface.)

The next phase of the project will involve the cre­ation of a stand­alone appli­ca­tion that will replace the web brows­er and its asso­ci­at­ed PHP/HTML/CSS files. The appli­ca­tion will also be avail­able in three ver­sions, for Linux, MacOS and Windows.

This step is with­in our reach using the PHP Desktop plat­form. Versions in MacOS and Windows are already up and run­ning, but there are still a few issues that need to be resolved to reach the state of a distribution.

Bol Processor 2.9.8 (Mac ver­sion) had been around for eight years and required very few bug fix­es. However, it had to be com­plete­ly rebuilt to work with MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) and future ver­sions: only 64-bit appli­ca­tions are allowed. The high­est sys­tem ver­sion sup­port­ing BP 2.9.8 was MacOS 10.14 (Mojave).

The graph­i­cal inter­face was com­plete­ly redesigned for this pur­pose. We decid­ed to devel­op a con­sole serv­er appli­ca­tion that receives instruc­tions via com­mand lines. At the time of writ­ing, the new appli­ca­tion is work­ing, although some fea­tures such as real-time MIDI have not yet been imple­ment­ed. We are pleased to report that it suc­cess­ful­ly com­piled on many sys­tems includ­ing MacOS, Linux and Windows with both 32-bit and 64-bit Intel proces­sors! This was a big step towards a multi-platform version.

This new appli­ca­tion (BP3) is being test­ed with a graph­ic user inter­face pro­grammed in PHP. This requires a web serv­er on which to run, but it allows any­one with a web brows­er to try out BP3 with­out installing any­thing (fol­low this link).

We are now plan­ning to cre­ate a stand­alone ver­sion of BP3 that will run in MacOS, Windows and Linux envi­ron­ments. This step is with­in our reach using the PHP Desktop plat­form. Versions in MacOS and Windows are already up and run­ning, but there are still a few issues that need to be resolved to reach the state of a distribution.

➡ We invite soft­ware design­ers to join the team and con­tribute to the devel­op­ment of the core appli­ca­tion and its client appli­ca­tions. Please join the BP users help forum , BP open dis­cus­sion forum and/or the BP devel­op­ers list to stay in touch with the progress of the work and to dis­cuss relat­ed musi­cal or theoretical/technical issues.