Along the years, I've worked in a lot of different projects and had to create a lot of tools again and again. While those tools were functional, they weren't optimized nor easy to use and once the creation is done, I couldn't let those tools to the artists I worked with for them to continue working on the project as they were not quite user-friendly.
Few years ago, i decided to create once and for all a tool that would fit most of my purposes as both a technician and digital artist. After few years of private use and tests, i decided to rewrite it completely from scratch in C++/JUCE and give it to the community as a free, open-source software, now known as Chataigne.
Chataigne means "Chestnut" in french, the real story behind this name involves a love story and wanting to remember this time in my life. Also it's funny.
In most of artistic projects involving technology, creators are going to use multiple softwares and devices for different purposes : one to control audio, one to generate video, another to handle the video mapping and maybe one to control lights, or Arduino boards to control motors, who knows..
In these setups, the communication and synchronization between those softwares can be challenging and therefore rapidly escalate to an overly complex setup. Also, those softwares and devices may require technical experience to be able to understand how they work and what's their best practices.
Chataigne aims to be the "conductor" of this technologic orchestra : while it will barely do anything visible to the public on it's own, it will be the one seeing the big picture and make sure that everyone gets what it needs. I'm trying hard to make the interface understandable for both technician and artists, so hopefully Chataigne would be the common workplace for artists and technician to work together.
First of all, because Chataigne is a conductor and doesn't "play an instrument", you won't have much use of it unless you have an "orchestra", meaning you it will make sense if you actually have a project and want to control other softwares and devices.
If you have a project involving multiple softwares and / or devices, you may want to synchronize everything from a unique place dedicated to that and not have intricate relationship between all your tools.