This all started out as my own personal frustration with clumsy knobs and sliders in current use by most audio software.  I wanted to have an intuitive interface with variable resolution control built-in.  The entire interface is rendered in 3D, so you can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel.  Zooming in on a node will give you more precise control over its position, zooming out does the opposite.

Really I wanted an environment where there is no different between MIDI or audio signals, so an audio effect will work the same with a MIDI signal.  Also I wanted an integrated way to handle envelopes, something that has a direct and visual connection with a node, this ended up meaning the removal of the GUI all together, there is only one interface for everything :)  PCs are fast enough now to make this happen.

I'd like M271 to end up as a total modular environment where you can easily make performances just as easy as a synthesizer or effect

The current release that you will find in the downloads section is very very pre-alpha so please be kind and report any bugs in the appropriate section in the forum, the entire project has been written on my laptop and only tested with several ASIO devices so there are going to be some issues there.  Most of the optimizations have been at the structural level which is pretty optimal currently but there are plenty of things that can take advantage of some SIMD.  The sound quality isn't really optimized either, there isn't any over-sampling yet and no anti-aliasing.  This will all be taken care of in the future along with the addition of alias free BLIT oscillators.

I'm very interested in hearing all feedback on this project, it's still in a rather amorphous state right now so it would be nice to get as much feedback and possible new feature requests before I set too much in stone on the next round of refactoring.

Some cool features include:

• ASIO/MIDI support
• built with portability in mind, a mac/linux version shouldn't be terribly difficult.
• everything is a full audio-rate signal which means you can do DSP type stuff to say a MIDI stream.
• there is a VSTi version in the works but it is still pretty unusable in a general case.
• every node can be automated with unlimited control points and automation takes place right in the 3D environment.
• nodes can influence any amount of other nodes or switched into a singular state.
• all signals are drawn at audio rate and with full hardware acceleration, although this can be disabled.
• the entire environment is rendered in 3D.
   
• radial and linear influence modes are supported for every node.
• all envelopes and motion are completely sample accurate, meaning you can make an oscillator out of an envelope.
   
• over 25 node types, of course this is going to grow.
• Python node type that will allow easy extensions.
• and most importantly it's fun!