Urban Meanderings | Long-form Meditative Ambient version | Ambient Generative Patch in VCV Rack 2

A reinterpretation of the Urban Meanderings patch that was previously released, this time as a long meditative ambient version.
While creating the background voice for the original patch of Urban Meanderings, it was clear from the start that this voice would be very suited for usage in a long-form version that could just keep playing in the background. So even while creating the first set of additional voices in that patch, I kept into account that I wanted to also use them in a more laid-back version.
The result is that, compared to the original recording, this version of the patch only has one voice disabled: the one with the Dark Energy oscillator into the FLAG Tap Dancer delay that had some more tonal movement. I did try to keep that voice in the mix by make it less present (reduce the volume, make it more reverb-only, etc.), but even with those changes it kept grabbing the attention. So in the end, I just ended up muting it, and did a little rebalancing of the volumes of the other voices to even out the overall sound. More details about the patch itself can be found in the description of the original version (at • Urban Meanderings | Ge... ).
For the animation accompanying the audio, I wanted to try and capture a version of the visual image that I had in mind while creating the original patch: a city at night in the rain. To create this, there was some tinkering done in Blender, starting from a tutorial by ‪@PizzadelRay‬ (this one: • Blender 3.0 Sci-Fi Cit... ). I added some of my own flavour to it, some light animations and a bit of raindrops in the foreground.
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__ Setup __
- VCV Rack (2.3.0) on Windows
- Audio captured directly by the Recorder module in VCV Rack
- Reaper (v5.99) for cutting down audio to 4 hours with fades
- Blender (3.4.1) for the artwork
- DaVinci Resolve (18.5) for merging of different animation layers, adding text and video fades
- Shutter Encoder (v16.0) for stitching together the video files and merging with the audio
__ Copyright __
All rights reserved

[@TinyMaths]

I'm almost one hour in, and this really is just too good; and I'm not just using empty compliments. I really didn't give VCV rack a chance before. Here's what I'm talking about:
I have a video saved to playlist, the video title is:
_"Meditating with Bruce Wayne in Batman while raining "_
I've spent hours listening to that in the background, and it's got more than 350k views, check it out if you don't believe me. I'm drawn to your 'meanderings' the same way I'm drawn the music in that video - I'm a drone addict. There is absolutely an audience for your craft out there.

[@not-things]

Thanks for the very kind words 😁 That Bruce Wayne video is indeed a good background drone. I wonder what sequencing method was used, it has a very nice balance between variation and consistency.

[@PCorNPC]

Enjoying this!
Out of curiosity, the description says you used Shutter Encoder. I've never used that. Whats the reason to use that instead of Davinci Resolve to put the audio and video together?

[@not-things]

Glad you enjoy it 😁
Shutter Encoder is a (free) UI frontend that runs on top of ffmpeg, and I was already using that in the past to merge synced audio and video together (I only started using Davinci Resolve about 2 weeks ago). So part of the reason for using it is out of habit.
The other reason is that the animation I created in Blender for this video is only 2 minutes long. So in Davinci Resolve, I'm currently also only doing the (cpu intensive) mpeg encoding process for those 2 minutes (and adding the text animation). I then tell Shutter Encoder to just repeat that 2 minute video file 120 times (without any re-encoding, just repeat the binary data that many times) to make a 4 hour video out of it, and then let Shutter Encoder put the audio on top of that. I'm sure there is a way to do the same in Davinci Resolve (without actually having to do the full 4 hours of mpeg encoding), but I already knew how to do that reliably in Shutter Encoder, so I didn't look into that any further in Davinci Resolve.

[@PCorNPC]

@@not-things Tbh that sounds like it might be quicker than using Davinci. Didn't know it could do that. Thanks!