L2Ork Tweeter

Bringing Communities Together Through Music

Welcome to Virginia Tech Linux Laptop Orchestra’s L2Ork Tweeter. L2Ork Tweeter is a free and open source program inspired by the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic that has required a vast majority of the human population to practice prolonged social distancing. It is designed to bring communities together by empowering users around the world to engage in collaborative music making even over slow internet connections. It also facilitates the exploration of audio synthesis and the rich variety of sounds one can generate using the frequency modulation algorithm. It supports up to ten concurrent performers and as many additional guests or audience members as the server bandwidth allows who can observe a performance live over the internet. Each user is given an instrument with a tracker that can be populated by up to 64 loop-enabled keystrokes or notes. This intentional constraint requires users to build complexity through interaction with other users. It is in part inspired by the popular social media platform Twitter that imposes a similar design constraint of allowing only up to 280 characters per Tweet. As a result, and as evidenced by its name, L2Ork Tweeter can be seen as a musical counterpart to Twitter.

Below we cover essential steps to get you started as quickly as possible. For a detailed overview of Tweeter’s features, we encourage you to watch the video above. For a 2-minute quick-start, fast-forward the video to the 1:25 mark.

Getting Started

First, you will need to download and install the Purr-Data (a.k.a. Pd-L2Ork) free and open-source digital sound manipulation visual programming language. During the development of L2Ork Tweeter, we have discovered a critical bug in the current 2.10.1 version of Purr-Data, a bug that was fixed and merged into its code shortly thereafter. However, considering that Purr-Data has not yet had a new official release since the said bug fix was added, until there is an version newer than 2.10.1, you will need to either download new test builds linked below, or build your from the latest git snapshot found here.

Download latest Purr-Data test release for:

IMPORTANT! Due to its reliance on the unique features found in Pd-L2Ork and Purr-Data, L2Ork Tweeter will not work with the vanilla Pure-Data, on which the Pd-L2Ork and Purr-Data are based.

Once you have installed the Purr-Data. Download the latest version of the L2Ork Tweeter using the following link:

Download Latest Version of the L2Ork Tweeter (v.0.36)

Now, simply unzip the downloaded L2Ork Tweeter zip file and open the L2Ork-Tweeter.pd file found inside it by double-clicking on it and you should be all ready to go.

Please note, with each new release, we will also update the server. So, if you are using an older version, in order to be able to connect, you will need to download the latest version using the link above. Once you have unzipped the newly downloaded version, you can simply copy over your loops, presets, and sessions folders from the older version folder and merge their content with the ones found inside the unzipped folder. New clients are backwards compatible, so you should not lose any work by upgrading. As we add more content (loops, presets, and sessions), to prevent having the newly included content overwritten by your content from the older version), when creating your own content, please make sure to primarily save loops and presets using numbers 1-10, or use some really high number (e.g. 1000). Please don’t forget to share your content with us and we will gladly consider including it in the future releases. For additional details what has been added, changed, and/or fixed, please see the CHANGELOG.txt file that is included with each release, starting with the version 0.33.
Mastering Tweeter

For information on where to go from here, consider watching the video linked above. Should you have any questions or encounter any problems, you can find us on the l2ork-dev mailing list.

IMPORTANT! If you encounter any issues trying to get the sound output, check the Purr-Data’s audio preferences found in the Preferences menu. You can also ask for help on our l2ork-dev mailing list.

We very much look forward to the creations you may come up with while collaborating with other users from across the world. Please don’t forget to share your creations with us and we will gladly include them in the future releases of the L2Ork Tweeter. Until then, stay safe, stay creative!

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