Trance Album made with Linux Software. Listen to the album in all its entirety.
Trance Album made with Linux Software. Listen to the album in all its entirety.
Properly configured, a Linux system can breathe life into old hardware or finely-tune performance on new gear. The problem has often been not the OS, but having a comfortable tool for production when you load it. And so that means Linux fans – or would-be fans – will likely be pleased to see the image above.
It’s Tracktion, the lovely but oft-overlooked, bargain-priced DAW, running on Linux. (I highly recommend the just-released Ubuntu Studio. The update includes loads of fixes that solve the kinds of audio configuration problems that have kept many people from Linux, and the compatibility of that release is unparalleled. Ubuntu 12 is in fact directly supported here.)
First off, Tracktion has escaped its past. As some readers note, while developed by Mackie, the software fell behind, causing compatibility woes. Since then, Tracktion has again become independent – and is moving faster than ever, with a major reboot that makes it compatible with the latest and greatest stuff.
And Tracktion could have a future, too. Footholds in this business are largely to do with distribution, so a recent Behringer bundling deal, combined with a major upgrade earlier this year (and existing Mackie bundling), could give Tracktion a shot in a marketplace that remains pretty well dominated by a few players. You know, some trac– augh. Sorry. Never mind.
Of course, Linux isn’t likely to cause any explosion in users, but it’s nice to see 64-bit Linux alongside 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and Mac releases – and for enthusiasts, it’s nice to see attention given to a dedicated community regardless of its relative size.
There’s reason to root for Tracktion. It has a really nice, one-screen, drag-and-drop interface that eschews the mold other tools (even the mighty Ableton Live, in some regards) fit. Upgrades are $29.99; full licenses $59.99.
The beta test is free, so Linux users, please do test this and let us know what you think:
www.tracktion.com/linux
Tested on, say the developers:
• OSX 10.7.x & 10.8.x
• Windows 7 & 8 (64 and 32-bit versions)
• Linux (Ubuntu 12)
Ever heard "Digital audio is just an approximation of the real analog signal"? Forget that, it is a lie. Here are my sources:
Todays Share&Care are two videos from the Xiph.Org Foundation.
Xiph is a idea and development hub that gave us all such great codecs like FLAC, ogg and vorbis and recently Opus. Naturally they know a lot about video and audio internals. And they decided two share this knowledge with us all by creating videos.
Xiph open source communities description:
Xiph.Org has undertaken a series of self-produced videos to spread techie-level knowledge about digital media as well as our own work involving new media research.
Or in my words: Fantastic. A must-see not only for "Geeks", as xiph.org claims, but for anyone. If you ever recorded a video with your mobile phone and copied and converted it to your PC you will already benefit from the first video: A Digital Media Primer for Geeks
In 30 minutes you will learn in a compressed form what you need to know about image, video and audio ... Read More
A lot of awesome stuff happened up in [Bruce Land]‘s lab at Cornell this last semester. Three students – [Pat], [Ed], and [Hanna] put in hours of work to come up with a few algorithms that are able to simulate stereo audio with monophonic sound. It’s enough work for three semesters of [Dr. Land]‘s ECE 5030 class, and while it’s impossible to truly appreciate this project with a YouTube video, we’re assuming it’s an awesome piece of work.
The first part of the team’s project was to gather data about how the human ear hears in 3D space. To do this, they mounted microphones in a team member’s ear, sat them down on a rotating stool, and played a series of clicks. Tons of MATLAB later, the team had an average of how their team member’s heads heard sound. Basically, they created an algorithm of how binarual recording works.
To prove their algorithm worked, the team took a piece of music, squashed it down to mono, and played it through an MSP430 microcontroller. With a good pair of headphones, they’re able to virtually place the music in a stereo space.
The video below covers the basics of their build but because of the limitations of [Bruce]‘s camera and YouTube you won’t be able to experience the team’s virtual stereo for yourself. You can, however, put on a pair of headphones and listen to this, a good example of what can be done with this sort of setup.
For the Linux Audio Conference 2013 I had the opportunity to show Laborejo in a 15 Minutes "Lightning Talk" format.
The videos of the LAC 2013 are now online including mine:
http://lac.linuxaudio.org/2013/video.php?id=22
You can watch and download them directly on the linked site. With a HTML5 browser you should be able to see the 720p version as webm and mp4 embedded here:
Your browser does not support the video tag.
About the GStreamer Conference
The GStreamer Conference 2013 will take place from 22-23 October 2013 in Edinburgh (UK), and will be co-hosted with the Embedded Linux Conference Europe and the Automotive Linux Summit.
It is a conference for developers, decision-makers, and anyone else interested in the GStreamer multimedia framework and open source multimedia.
Registration now open
You can now register for the GStreamer Conference 2013 on the conference website.
Call for Papers
The initial submission needs to be only a couple of paragraphs describing the talk you want to give and the desired length of your talk (please allow for 5-10 minutes of questions at the end as well).
Talks can be on almost anything multimedia related, ranging from talks about applications to challenges in the lower levels in the stack or hardware.
Please send all proposals to gstreamer-conference@lists.freedesktop.org.
by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at May 20, 2013 07:25 AM
If you know anything about Linux Audio Development. This might be the most frustrating video you will ever watch.
by herrsteiner (noreply@blogger.com) at May 19, 2013 06:20 AM
I am not a electro or dubstep musician. While I enjoy listening to a piece here or there I leave it to others to create such music.
But if you want the LV2 dubstep I recommend having a look at the Sorcer LV2 plugin by Open AV Productions, software production label by none other than Harry van Haaren
I quote from the Sorcer page:
Sorcer is a polyphonic wavetable synth LV2 plugin. Its sonic fingerprint is one of harsh modulated sub-bass driven walls of sound [...] Easily creating a variety of dubstep basslines and harsh pad sounds.
Have a look at the demo video:
And here is a short demo of mine where I used Sorcer as bass.
License: CC0 - needs HTML5
But there is more, ... Read More
Not sure if I'll be back anytime soon, as life is short and shorter by the minute as there's so many things to get done, let alone seeing again. I believe no matter one sees it, Graz is a lovely town, singular on its own. And it just got brilliant after this latest LAC iteration. As they say 'round here, it's like Porto (the wine), it just gets better with age :).
As it's been the norm, this self-indicted über-procrastinator only gets the chance to put some babbling about the experience a lot after. So it is this now, it's all gone and wrapped and is with tears in the eyes that these lines are now happily written.
Now seriously ;) the Linux Audio Conference 2013, held at the IEM Graz just went great and smooth, although it seemed faster paced and formally shorter than usual, informally it ended with a great and awesome finale: a whole Sunday escapade in the countryside, a cherry on top of the cake.
Regarding my presence, making it was my official consecutive 9th attendance already, the usual record applies: infamous as a die-hard, lone wolf developer goes (read hobbyist), piling up some orders of magnitude high in the coding stash and none to the documentation still, I must say and praise that users are actually in charge of the asylum, sorry, institution. ;) Just to put merit where it is deserved, the current released documentation dedicated to my own software critters (eg. Qtractor) are products of extraordinary and excellence dedication from unsung heroes, written by users to users, as remarkable evidence that miracles can also breed from bare reason.
All that to say I tried to fill the lot of (huge) little gaps with one first workshop iteration--Qstuff*: past, present and future--which just went fine as great in value but, well, a lot has been left to be desired. One's only is to blame and that's me, this old lazy and sloppy über-procrastinator, no other. And then it happened, an additional aka. addenda workshop was promptly requested and kindly granted thereafter--Qstuff*: part II-- thankfully. And yet again no stretching of time was really enough to spill a decade old full of garage mold ridden stuff... whatever. I admit I've abused the conference venue and facilities somehow, after all I was given a lot of 160 (80+80) minutes allowance and burned it all with babbling making it to a total excess of 4 hours plus and, quite frankly, just skimming the poster subject(s). But, don't take me wrong, though time was very well spent only that it was not fully (how could it be?) enough to help covering all the issues the praying audience surely deserved. So, I failed just miserably, in the good sense at least. Or so I like to think :)
Next time I shall ask (in fact, I already did) for some all-day-long, non-stop, open, free-style workshop type for the next LAC (2014 obviously). No kidding here. Just think about this: when one of the attendees churned out quite on-the-fly, not one but three tunes in a row and when you know that some of the Qstuff* was piece and central in that workflow, then you know that you've been doing something right. Flattered to the bone and there's no evidence of sinfulness nor any close. Simply happiness.
Louigi Verona is his (nick)name and to him goes my greatest gratitude. The aforementioned tunes are readily available on soundcloud.com: LAC2013 tune #1, LAC2013 tune #2 and LAC2013 tune #3 (nb. the first one actually includes some on-site recording samples of my babbling from Qstuff* part I workshop :))
Jeremy Jongepier (left photo) is also on the short list by all means. All my video footage are incidentally focused on him: Using your electric guitar with Linux (workshop excerpt), Slow Down, Leave It All Behind and Nervous Walking (2nd. club-night excerpts) are there made available unedited (CC BY 3.0 applies).
One honorable mention I should not forget from evading this wall of records, one that must be given to Superdirt² (photo on the right) . This project's performance just coined a massive dance-floor hit during the Linux Sound Night (aka. 2nd club-night). One memorable, so to speak. Only who was there may know what I'm talking about. ;)
And to all others whose names aren't here mentioned, and they are a lot, please don't get me wrong. A great, an immense thank you all for your interest, the slightest it can be, on my Qstuff*. Most of you expressed that very clearly and sure I know who you are personally. Although some I might not remember so easily, as this rusty brain is just getting older and rusty by the year, after year :)
Last but not least, I am deep and profoundly thankful to the core staff and team organizers: IOhannes m zmölnig, Peter Plessas, Florian Hollerweger and as usual, Robin Gareus and Frank Neumann et al. ;)
LAC2013 is now gone. Long live the LAC2014. Speaking of which as been firmly announced, the next years LAC will get back to its home place or, in other words, it will be LAC2014@ZKM-Karlsruhe. Nuff said.
As usual, as final candy,
Cheers, and see you all next year.
ps. Qstuff* is one lousy acronym I've made up in a hurry to collect all the things I've been polluting the Linux Audio world during the last decade. Yep, ten years o.O
Linux Binary:
Source:
ttp://denemo.org/downloads/denemo-1.0.2.tar.gz">http://denemo.org/downloads=
/denemo-1.0.2.tar.gz
Ever heard someone say Bach in general is better than anything today or that only Country is music truly from the heart and is able to write real melodies? Well here is my answer.
You need education and intelligence for most music. This is genre independent. If you do not have at least one of these aptitudes you will behave ignorant and will discard whole genres and styles as bad or inferior. For me this is nothing else than musical racism.
That does not mean that there aren't indeed good and bad pieces of music and that maybe one genre has the tendency to produce more sophisticated music than another. But that is not a principle and needs to be decided newly each time.
CDM and yours truly team up with Berlin arts collective Mindpirates next week for a learning event we hope will be a little different than most. The idea behind the gathering is to combine learning in some new ways. The evenings begin with more traditional instruction, as I cover, step-by-step, how you’d assemble beat machines, instruments, effects, and video mixers using free software (Pure Data and Processing).
But, we’ll go a little further, opening up sessions to hacking and jamming, finally using the event space at Mindpirates to try out ideas on the PA and projectors. By the last night, we’ll all get to play together for the public before opening things up to a party at night. I know when I’ve personally gotten to do this, I’ve gotten more out of a learning experience. Getting to do it with the aim of creating useful instruments and beats and visuals here, then, I think makes perfect sense.
Working with free software in this case means that anyone can participate, without the need for special software or even the latest computers. (What we’re doing will work on Raspberry Pi, for instance, or old netbooks, perfect for turning small and inexpensive hardware into a drum machine.) No previous experience is required: everyone will get to brush up on the basics, with beginning users getting the essentials and more advanced users able to try out other possibilities in the hack sessions.
If you’re in easyJet distance of Berlin, of course, we’d love to see you and jam with you. In trying to keep this affordable for Berliners, we’ve made this 40 € total for three nights including a meal each evening and a guest list spot on the Saturday night party.
But I hope this is the sort of format we can try out elsewhere, too. If you have ideas of what you’d like to see in this kind of instruction – in-person events being ideal, but also perhaps in online tutorials – let us know.
Create Digital Music + Mindpirates present: Laptops on Acid
Facebook event
Pre-registration required; spots limited – Eventbrite
Register while spots are still available!
(fellow European residents, I’m as annoyed at the absence of bank transfer/EC payment at Eventbrite as you are – we’re working on an alternative, so you should email elisabeth (at) mindpirates [dot] org to register if you don’t want to use that credit card system!)
| part | start | end |
| Intro | 0 | 1'20" |
| Part 1 | 1'20" | 2'17" |
| Part 2 | 2'17" | 2'46" |
| Part 3 | 2'46" | 3'15" |
| Break | 3'15" | 3'43" |
| Part 4 | 3'43" | 4'39" |
| Outro | 4'39" | 5'31" |
by noreply@blogger.com (Thijs Van Severen) at May 14, 2013 11:18 AM
Todays Share&Care is about hours over hours drone music files:
Project Droning is only one of the many projects by Louigi Verona but one that is worth mentioning on its own.
Authors description:
"droning" is an ongoing project to produce a great number of drone recordings of praiseworthy duration and extreme static nature.
Or in my words: Right now over 200 tracks between ten minutes and two hours as a source for concentrated listening, chilling out, using it as resource for your own music or just being in awe over the sheer amount of work and time spent here. As I know from the author directly all these are recordings of live performances (that does not mean with audience). No auto-generation took place.
The files are distributed in an .ogg format, but if I remember correctly you could ask for a wav ... Read More
The LAC 2013 in Graz is over and I am back home in Cologne.
I took exactly two pictures and these were of the tram-line schedule. If you want to see something watch out for blog posts by other people which will surely follow in the next days and also the LAC site for recordings of the videos.
Instead here is a picture of my own room with its newest addition. The LAC2013 poster I "stole" (no, I had the permission. But some people watched me grabbing the poster after the conference and thought I was plundering the place :))
It was my first linux audio conference and it was pretty good! I felt comfortable from the start since my hostel had good public transportation to the conference site and getting around in Austria as a German is a no-brainer since we share the same currency and language.
Obviously the talks and workshops were quite important, even though I did not understand much of the talks that deal with Digital Signal Processing (DSP).
My personal highlights were (in no particular order)
... Read More
The popular linux distribution Arch Linux has Laborejo in its AUR repository. This is a good situation, but currently you shouldn't use it directly. This package introduces a .sh script which points to the wrong file and prevents --help and all other command line options.
It should have used just a symlink to laborejo-qt instead.
Install the dependencies as packages. e.g.
yaourt -S lilypond python-pysmf python-pyliblo calfbox-git jack
then clone the git repository
git clone git://github.com/nilsgey/Laborejo.git
cd into the directory and run it locally.
./laborejo-qt --help
Just install the laborejo-git AUR package but don't try to start it with "laborejo", which is the shellscript in /usr/bin.
Instead create a symlink and ignore the shellscript, so you can update the program ... Read More
Cover of Gotye’s Famous song produced at T.Rex Studio using open source audio software.
OpenAV Productions new synth app. With a heavy dose of Dubstep from Harry Van Haaren.
Did you know that left over rice is a godsend for those lazy cooking evenings or hurried hectic days when time is scarce and bellies need filling? It can be already flavoured or plain, steamed or fried, made this morning or three days ago: it's there for you, regardless!
With a bit of oil, seasoning and imagination, you can turn your cold rice into something brand new, exciting and, best of all, hunger-blunting. Here is an example:
Little. Knobby. Different. Better.
8 knobs. No, 64 knobs! No, giant knobs, hundreds of buttons, dozens of faders…
Okay. One button, one knob. Put (one of your) opposable thumbs to good use and just do something simple. And, with something this small and inexpensive, never go anywhere without a real knob again. (Friends don’t let friends operate fake simulations of knobs using mice. Augh. Painful. (Which way is a “circle,” again?)
That was the creed of none other than Brendan Ratliff, aka Echolevel, aka chip music “superhero” Syphus, a composer/musician/hacker who works scoring games and film/TV soundtracks and general musical mayhem. He wanted something simple that just didn’t exist. So he built it himself, all using an Arduino-like dev board (by way of the ultra-small Teensy USB hardware).
It works without drivers, so any OS will function, and so will the iPad via Camera Connection Kit. In fact, that makes this a great project if you’re learning how to make this sort of hardware – and it’ll keep you from biting off more than you can chew on your first go.
Of course, there are lots of build details and instructions should you want to attempt your own. And open USB MIDI implementations are just making so many things better. (I wonder if we’ll ever get around to doing something with that?)
Knobber – USB MIDI single knob/button controller by Echolevel
What a teeny little super guy this is. Did I ever tell you about the time …
Brendan makes music. Let’s hear it. (Sorry, I’m late to giving a talk, so that’s all the intelligent analysis I have … no, Brendan deserves more — here’s a giant cornucopia of awesome. You can quote me on that.)
Disclaimer/apology: I grew up in the 80s, and … sorry about the two references above.
Episode 65 - Tunestorm 10 Reveal Show!
-Tunestorm was to remix our theme song
-Next tunestorm annouced: Tunestorm 11 - mrotsenuT
-Reverse a sample in your next tunestorm entry
-Due June 5
Thanks for the hard work of danboid and wolftune (plus some corrections by falkTX and others), the KXStudio "Mini" Manual is now online,
directly accessible through the KXStudio website:
http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net/Documentation
There are still minor things that need correction, but overall it looks great.
The manual should be updated regularly from now on.
the third release of the csound floss manual is out at
www.flossmanuals.net/csound
there is a lot of new stuff in it. see below the "what's new" in detail. thanks goes to all contributors, and in particular to alexandre abrioux for his diligent proof reading.
all the csd example files (nearly 250 now) and audio samples can be downloaded here:
http://csound-tutorial.net/filebrowser/download/576
they will also be included in the next release of csoundqt.
alex hofmann will push a printed version at lulu.com in a short time.
please let us know any bugs, errata and suggestions.
enjoy -
joachim and iain
WHAT'S NEW IN THIS RELEASE
New chapters:
03E ARRAYS (Tarmo Johannes, Joachim Heintz)
04H SCANNED SYNTHESIS (Christopher Saunders)
08B CSOUND AND ARDUINO (Iain McCurdy)
12B PYTHON INSIDE CSOUND (Andrés Cabrera, Joachim Heintz)
12C PYTHON IN CSOUNDQT (Tarmo Johannes, Joachim Heintz)
Revised chapters:
02A MAKE CSOUND RUN: Updated section about Windows install (Jim Aikin) and new sections about Csound on Android and iOS (Jacques Laplat)
03A INITIALIZATION AND PERFORMANCE PASS has completely been rewritten (Joachim Heintz)
04A ADDITIVE SYNTHESIS has been expanded (Iain McCurdy, Bjørn Houdorf)
05B PANNING AND SPATIALIZATION now contains descriptions about multi-channel audio in Csound in general, and VBAP and Ambisonics in particular (Iain McCurdy, Joachim Heintz)
10A CSOUNDQT now contains a description of the options and choices in CsoundQt's Configure Panel (Peiman Khosravi, Joachim Heintz)
10D CABBAGE has been updated and covers now some of the exciting new developments (Rory Walsh)
12A THE CSOUND API has been revised and extended (Francois Pinot)
The OPCODE GUIDE has been updated (Iain McCurdy)
The METHODS OF WRITING CSOUND SCORES now contain a description of Pysco (Jacob Joaquin)
General additions and changes:
The code examples now also carry some (hopefully) meaningful names in addition to the numbers.
Many improvements to existing examples have been made by Iain McCurdy.
Fully open source platform and hardware controller for LV2 plugins.
This AM radio looks a bit like it did coming out of the factory. But there are a lot of changes under the hood and that faceplate is a completely new addition. The project really is a restoration with some augmentation and [Michael Ross] did a great job of documenting the project.
The Kenyon radio was built in 1946 and uses vacuum tubes for the amplifier. Considering its age this was in relatively good shape and the first thing that [Michael] set out to do was to get the electronics working again. It involved replacing the messy collection of capacitors inside. He then cleaned up the tubes, checking for any problems, and put the electronics back together to find they work great!
He cleaned up the chassis and gave it a new coat of finish. The original dial plate was missing so he built a wood frame to match a dial scale he ordered. The bell-shaped brass cover hides the light that illuminates the dial.
He could have stopped there but how much do people really listen to AM radio these days? To make sure he would actually use the thing he added an Arduino with an MP3 shield. It patches into the antenna port via a relay, injecting modern tunes into the old amplifier circuit. Catch a glimpse of the final project in the video after the break.
My favorite posts don’t easily fit on either Create Digital Music or Create Digital Motion. This one mixes, literally, the meaning of the two. And it results, in the video at top, in some eerily-lovely music. (Album below.)
PixiVisor is software for desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux) and mobile (iOS, Android) that transforms images to sound and back again. Producing sound from images is an idea in a variety of tools. But PixiVisor is unique in that it goes the other way, too: sound can be turned back into the originally imagery as a video. In the demo video here from developer Alexander Zolotov, a simple audio mixer can mix together multiple video sources (in beautiful low fidelity), and add effects. A DIY 4-pole plug connects the signal to the mobile gadget – iOS, in this case.
The video source (and recording format) is animated GIF files.
Alexander Zolotov is also the creator of SunVox, the powerful music making app.
For more, here’s a filter on a Korg monotron used to modify the appearance of the animated GIF:
Alexander Zolotov makes music as well as software. His eclectic ambient music I think is summed up in its Bandcamp tags: “electronic ambient chiptune easy listening experimental idm Екатеринбург”
Екатеринбург, aka Ekaterinburg, is the central Russian town from which Alexander hails. (Full disclosure: I know this because I Googled it. Did you know Russia is big? Really, really big?)
http://nightradio.bandcamp.com/
Here’s one selection, the latest – quirky, abruptly-percussive music produced entirely on his PixiTracker mobile music-making app, on an Android phone, no less. (LG E510)
Music of Little Canning People by NightRadio
Grab PixiVisor free on desktop, or for two bucks on mobile.
http://warmplace.ru/soft/pixivisor/
Thanks, LeCollagiste Vj!
Minneapolis-based artist Patrick Flanagan is no ordinary drummer or electronic musician. His rig does everything the hard way – and the results are fantastic. With robotic drum kit mechanically playing acoustic drums, his fingers command complex feats of rhythm and melody from an oversized, custom grid controller.
There are idiomatic musical possibilities unlocked by software he’s built in Max/MSP and Java. Repeat increments, of the sort found in drum machines, produce complex rhythmic figuration on multiple drums – partly because, unlike the dumber implementation on drum machines, it’s possible to play multiple repeat increments at the same time. (In other words, you can have one drum playing eights while another plays sixteenths.) In melodies, his layout make big octave jumps easier – think Giant Steps.
Mega, indeed. Apart from using the Arduino mega, Patrick Flanagan’s controller has a big scale and big ambitions. Image courtesy the artist.
Patrick writes with more details:
I just uploaded a demo video for my custom grid-based controller, the Meganome. The design is obviously inspired by the monome, but it departs in a couple ways from the monome and its cousins. I wanted larger buttons with light but solid action for triggering drum hits and synth notes–buttons that are hard to miss and give you a nice “clack” sound when struck. The rectangular arrangement with 14 buttons per row lets me display the entire
chromatic scale plus two notes of overlap when the Meganome is in synth control mode. Like the Push controller in its chromatic mode, the notes of the scale I’m in light up, but unlike the Push, the Meganome lays octaves along its columns, which makes for easy traversal of octave space and wide chord voicings. Triads, on the other hand, are tricky.I did a blog post on difficulties I encountered while building it and posted my Arduino code on my blog:
http://jazarimusic.com/finally-a-diy-midi-controller-with-purpleheart/Finally, you can see the Meganome in action as a robot drum controller in this in-studio performance video [below].
Those of you attempting something similar, you’ve got loads of resources here. LED drivers? Check. Shift registers and encoders? Check. Which parts to use, code downloads, USB MIDI firmware? Roger that. Open source sharing really does accelerate advancements in this space, without question. (Believe me, as we’re using it directly on MeeBlip – both in what we get and what we give away. There are things that wouldn’t have been possible with proprietary tech, especially as you bring together lots of musical and engineering elements.)
He’s also inspired by Christopher Willits’ recent thoughts about the Push controller:
Enjoyed your post on Christopher Willits and Push. I’m going to think about ways I could modify the pitch layout to make performance of tertian harmonies easier. I love octave leaps, but sometimes you want to play a triad. And I believe it’s worth thinking about how these grid layouts does relate or could relate to Riemannian Tonnetz; the similarity is too striking to overlook. It’s interesting to see how these obscure academic theories of harmony get incorporated into mass market products decades or centuries after their appearance.
But whether it’s the geeky or – as he hints in the video, the emotional – that attract you, or a combination of both, you’ll find lots more on his site.
And in the meantime, imagine frenetic marching, dancing robots, and you start to get the feel for this via the music samples below – imagining a revolutionary game universe for this, somehow.
Or maybe it’s a future-punk jam band.
Or maybe it’s Afro-Baroque-Electro-Robot Erik Satie in a Djembe Drum. (His description.)
Want more? Grab the free EP on Bandcamp.
I've written a simple scheduler in the programming language python and I've created some midi event generators, and combined both of those to drive the software synthesizer Yoshimi and the sampler engine LinuxSampler using the jack-midi protocol. I've made the complete code available on github.
The midi events are generated based on a concept of randomness within constraints. The things you hear are randomly generated, but not in an "anything goes" manner.
Constraints are imposed to limit the disorder of the randomness. Just like harmony and counterpoint limit randomness in traditional composition, the constraints here limit randomness in the experimental composition. One could say that different constraints generate families of alternative music theories.
"Randomness within constraints" is a deep idea whose time has come. Nowadays it is extremely popular both in science (artificial intelligence) and art (abstract art) and indeed one of the basic mechanisms underlying the origin and evolution of life itself. I suspect that "randomness within constraints" is the barren wasteland where creativity and innovation hides. In this piece, I try to explore a number of different constraints. In some cases the constraints slowly evolve, in other cases they abruptly change.
Ton De Leeuw in a speech once distinguished between two kinds of music: "music that becomes" versus "music that is". "Music that becomes" is music that starts from a begin point and gradually evolves. "Music that is" is music that doesn't show any progression or evolution. Because the constraints I used are quite static (with some exceptions they don't gradually evolve as time progresses), I think this composition is closer to "music that is". Nevertheless, I hope that by combining different timbres and different constraints I have managed to keep the composition reasonably interesting to listen to.Note: I do not consider "traditional music theory" (or rather: the different traditional music theory families) inferior or unnecessary (quite the contrary!), but in this piece I don't mind looking beyond its borders.
For this composition I programmed my own algorithmic composition system using Python, Rtmidi, Yoshimi and LinuxSampler with Sonatina Sound Fonts, but for a next algorithmic composition (if any ;) ) I would probably try to use the excellent supercollider environment instead.
The visualization was made with Sonic Visualiser.
Enjoy!
by Stefaan Himpe (noreply@blogger.com) at April 28, 2013 02:11 PM
I’m a huge advocate for doing rural broadband right. Mainly because I live out in the sticks, but also because I believe in building infrastructure properly and doing things right. When it comes to digital infrastructure, rural communities have a problem – they’re not economically viable to maintain. So, first, an overview of the situation for small communities like mine.
BT put in basic service years ago to the entire country and are only now starting to look at upgrading areas outside of cities and larger towns, thanks to a large (£530 million£830 milion, after £300 million from the BBC license fee from 2015-17 got reallocated, grumble) handout from the government – under the auspices of Broadband Development UK. This pot of money is for connecting “90%” of the country at at least 2Mbps.
There’s (obviously) some issues here. One, that 90% of the country doesn’t actually require BT to sort out the people on smaller exchanges – exactly the people the government should be funding. There’s a competitiveness issue, too – all the BDUK contracts are open competitive tenders but BT are the only people applying any more (after over-specification ruled out other vendors). Apparently the National Audit Office are looking into this now.
But hope is not lost – there’s an EU sourced pot of money available through Defra, the Rural Community Broadband Fund. This is for “superfast” broadband – 24Mbps or better advertised headline rate – and allows for about £300 per property. The total pot is around £26 million. This is aimed at the last 10%. As you’d expect, it’s hideously complex to apply for – it can only be awarded on completion of spending (meaning you only get compensated once you’ve spent it, so you need cashflow to cover it), it can’t go direct to a supplier, the suppliers must be tendered, etc. Plus the organization that managed the funds must exist for at least 7 years after completion to allow for auditing. This means that as of right now I am not aware of any money from this pot being allocated, at all, anywhere in the UK. As a member of a team trying to get some money allocated to our project in our village, it’s a nightmare, and after months of trying we’re getting close – but as you’d expect in a village of 120 properties there’s not many people willing to get their hands dirty and deal with EU paperwork in their spare time!
So where does this leave the 10%? Mostly screwed, basically. Even larger communities are having serious issues with any of these pots of money, and mostly these are turning to companies who do demand-based rollout of networks but very few exist, and getting 30% or more of a community to commit to a new non-BT service is hard. Groups like B4RN are an exception and a great model if you can make it work, but it’s incredibly hard to do so. My hats off to them for managing it.
Recently I’ve seen a couple of communities paying BT directly to upgrade their communities to FTTC. This makes absolutely no sense.
The cost of deploying a real, next-generation, high-quality, fully-active point to point Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) network to a community like ours is around £1.2k a house, in round terms.
BT charge as much as £40,000 per cabinet to upgrade a cabinet to FTTC (VDSL2). This means they put fibre in alongside their old copper to the cabinet, replace the innards with a VDSL2 DSLAM, and there you go – up to 50Mbps or so on current technology, maybe up to 80Mbps in future with line bonding and so on. Very nice.
So for us, we’d need to upgrade three cabinets. We’re a fairly standard linear community – we have a cabinet at one end of the village, a cabinet for a large group of properties on one of the turnings to the village along a main road, and another cabinet that serves some properties at another turning into the village. If we assume a conservative £30,000 a cabinet, we’re talking £90,000 to upgrade all three. That’s assuming BT don’t charge for excess construction if things are broken in their network, such as crushed conduits/ducts, survey fees, and so on. And even then we reckon only a handful of properties would get over 40Mbps, mostly people getting 10-20Mbps in the main village and outlying houses being lucky to get up to 10Mbps. This can’t be an uncommon situation for villages that aren’t so bunched up – as it pretty typical for most outlying villages that need new networks.
If we’ve now paid BT £90,000 out of our own pockets – assuming we raise that locally within the village (not much more than that raised by the residents of Binfield Heath, who paid £59,325 to BT for their upgrade of two cabinets) – realistically we’re not going to get residents subsidizing any upgrade works for a long time, and BT won’t be doing any more upgrades off their own bat (not that they ever do in rural areas) for an even longer period of time.
Meanwhile, our shiny future-proof 1/10/40/100/?Gbps capable FTTP network is sat on a shelf, now utterly unfundable. But if we’d gotten another £60,000 together we could’ve paid for it outright, practically.
Offering this kind of community subsidy to a network operator like Gigaclear should surely be sufficient incentive for them to come in and do a proper FTTP network installation. Active FTTP installations can be easily upgraded piece by piece, as demand requires; a welcome change from the typical BT model of passive networks terminated on large, aggregate and expensive pieces of kit. They also don’t rely on the ageing copper and aluminium cables that have been buried for decades now – which in some areas, including parts of my home village, mean you can’t get any internet.
As communities we have a responsibility not to squander our investment power in short-term fixes, and we have a duty to ensure that the networks we pay for are going to be good enough for the next 50 years, and upgradeable to cope with the rapid pace of change in the world of telecommunications. Last week I sat in a room with the people who are building these networks at the UK Network Operator’s Forum, and BT talked about their ‘solution’ for rural broadband (‘whitespace’ networks, up to 16Mbps with ~5 subscribers in their pilot if memory serves). Later, Brocade talked about their expectations for upgrade paths to 400Gbps optics and even 1Tbps optics modules for core switching. As ever, BT appear to be living in a different era.
Bodge-jobs over congested and changeable radio spectrum or bolting on improvements to a slowly rotting copper/aluminium network is not future-proof. Good single-mode fibre in the ground is. Communities must make sure that they invest wisely in technology that will last, because small rural communities cannot afford to invest often at this scale, and there is no sign of the government stepping in to help.
The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug-fix release for the new API and ABI-stable 1.x series of the GStreamer multimedia framework.
Check out the release notes for GStreamer core, gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-ugly, gst-plugins-bad, or gst-libav, or download tarballs for gstreamer, gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-ugly, gst-plugins-bad, or gst-libav,
Improvements include:
These strange glyphs represent the dictionary of hand gestures Geco and LEAP can turn into music control.
Here we go again. Touchless hand gestures have been part of electronic musical performance ever since the Theremin first hummed to life almost 100 years ago. And those gestures embody the same challenges and promise. We have the ability as humans to think spatially, in three dimensions, and to have a tight sense of control via our muscles of gestures in space. We use gestures to communicate and to manipulate our world. Those same expectations can be disappointed in electronic systems, however, as they lack tangible physical feedback and may misinterpret our intentions.
It’s easier to play with these ideas and experiment with them than talk about them, though. And for everyone who’s turned off by the idea, someone else is enthused.
What the US$79.99 Leap Motion may do for gestures in music is to lower the bar for entry – and up the bar for performance. Leap is affordable hardware, there are already lots of developer units out in the world, and there’s an easy-to-program SDK. We’ve already seen Microsoft’s Kinect open up gestural control to lots of new music projects. Leap may do more: it’s cheaper, it’s faster and operates with vastly lower latency, and it’s more precise for individual hand gestures. It also offers a platform for developers to share their work, in an app store full of stuff you can use, so that the hardware theoretically won’t become a paperweight in the cubicles of the digerati.
Latency alone could make a big difference for musical applications. It’s not the only challenge in motion control, but it has been the showstopper, particularly with the hefty lag you get using something like Kinect. Leap is different, offering latencies low enough to satisfyingly control music applications.
The unobtrusive Leap Motion hardware. Courtesy the manufacturer.
That doesn’t mean you should run out and buy one. Healthy skepticism is always good practice. So, I actually agree with some of Chris Randall’s complaints about Leap, as discussed on Twitter. I think anyone experimenting with novel control schemes, though, may learn something from successes and failures alike.
If you’re ready for the adventure, though, Leap will make it immediately easy to start mucking about with music. Leading the charge is Geert Bevin and his Geco (originally Gesture Control) app. I’m testing it now, but here’s a quick look at what it does.
By making a virtual MIDI port, and using a library of gestures and mappings, Geco allows a wave of your hand to control any music tool that works with MIDI.
The intro price will be US$9.99. It should launch with the Leap Motion app store – dubbed Airspace – when the controller launches on May 13.
MIDI is useful, but it’s too bad there’s no higher-precision control implementation here. (OSC would be one option; it seems apps that do that are a likely addition.) There is a whole lot of detail and thought that has gone into how the UI works, and Geert promises that the whole engine is low on system resources and approaches “zero latency” (at least, it’s very, very fast).
Updated: Geert fills us in on that high-resolution data question and OSC. From comments:
Yes, there will be OSC in a next version and I plan to add direct hosting of AU/VST also. I’m also thinking of making an AU/VST version of Geco itself so that it can perfectly be integrated into any DAW and process the audio that’s flowing through.
It’s worth taking a look at the draft documentation for more detail:
Here’s another experiment showing VST and AU control:
Nor is Leap Motion the only game in town. On Create Digital Motion yesterday, I wrote about another project that is using crowd funding to launch an open source rival. I can imagine developer APIs that let you work across each. The advantage of open hardware would be that people can understand how the device works, and modify it for specific applications (both code and hardware form factor.)
DUO is a DIY 3D Sensor – Like Leap, But Open Source, From Gesture and Vision Veterans
I’m clarifying the details of their licensing plan. At least one of this team has come under criticism in the past for the approach to open source releases and Kinect hacking – you can read the discussion in both directions, though I’m encouraged that developer AlexP was ultimately responsive to some of those concerns. We’ll see how this project is structured.
It does seem that people will continue to develop this thread in motion control. We’ll be watching.
As I do have a Leap, let me know if there’s anything you’d like tested or developed (summer project!), or questions you may have.
https://www.leapmotion.com
[Craig] did a great job of restoring the case of his antique console radio. But he wanted to bring the guts up to modern standards. The fix ended up being rather easy when it comes to hardware. He based his internet radio retrofit around a wireless router.
We laughed when we heard that he removed about eighty pounds of original electronics from this beast. He then cut a piece of MDF to serve as a mounting platform for the replacement hardware. The WiFi router takes care of audio playback from several sources and offers him the ability to control the stereo from a smart phone or a computer. It has a USB port to which he connected a hub to make room for the USB sound card and a thumb drive which holds his music library. The black box in the upper right is an amp which feeds the NHT stereo speakers housed in the lower half of the cabinet.
It doesn’t make use of the original knobs like the recent tube-amp conversion we looked at. But [Craig] did add some LEDs which illuminate the dial to help keep that stock look.
A Minimal Techno mix from DJ Manu Kebab
I'm happy to announce the release of LiSP (Linux Show Player)!
font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style:
normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing:
normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px;
text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto;
word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;
-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">
font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style:
normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing:
normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px;
text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto;
word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;
-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">"LiSP (Linux Show Player)" is a sound player specifically
designed for stage productions.
The goal of the project is to provide a stable and complete
playback software for musical plays, theatre shows and similar.
font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style:
normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing:
normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px;
text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto;
word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;
-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">
font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style:
normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing:
normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px;
text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto;
word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;
-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">Features:
-Zth's tutorial on using a reversed piano sound
Together with a new website design comes a new release of the Music Notation Workshop.
Besides the usual fixes and small enhancements please focus your attention on the following new features:
Latest Screenshot: http://www.laborejo.org/latestscreenshot.p ... Read More
Welcome to the new new website.
After some experiments I decided to settle with the current version and tech of this website.
There is some new info, documentation and most important: a new forum.
I have never liked that you need an account for every small site just to ask a question. The Laborejo forum will now be hosted on LinuxMusicians.com. Chances are, that you already have an account there.
There is no laborejo.org website account for users anymore.
If you are not the forum type please subscribe to our mailing list.
Todays Share&Care is a website dedicated to various native linux software synthesizers: amSynth.com
First a a note about the good colleagueship of this site: amSynth is a softsynth itself. But it was also decided to show its competitors on the same site. A very nice gesture!
On this site you can find audio demos of various instruments and patches of synths like ZynAddSubFx, Whysynth, Hexter or Phasex.
Also included are screenshots of their GUIs.
So if you want to know how the different programs sound before installing them yourself: Visit this site!
"Share&Care" is the category for projects and links related to music, programming and cats. Useful, insightful or funny. No already famous or viral material here. Only relatively unknown or unfinished projects. Subscribe to my RSS feed to never miss one:Read More
It's that time of year, once again.
Qsynth 0.3.7 spring cleaning sale!
Well, not a sale per se, but I'm sure you get the point ;)
Description:
Qsynth is a FluidSynth GUI front-end application written in C++ around the Qt4 toolkit using Qt Designer. FluidSynth is an excellent command line software synthesizer based on the Soundfont specification.
License:
Qsynth is free, open-source software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later.
Website:
Project page:
Downloads:
Change-log:
Weblog (upstream support, yours truly):
Cheers && Enjoy.
[Dominic Buchstaller] found this German Greatz tube radio at a flea market. It only cost him about €35 and was in a bit more rough condition than the finished product you see above. He also found that a portion of the original circuitry was missing, making it completely non-function. He cleaned up the case to improve the wife-acceptance-factor, and outfitted it with hardware to make it a web radio.
Adding modern speakers was pretty easy as he was already replacing the original cloth bezel which has several holes and tears in it. A set of elements from some Logitech computer speakers served as the organ donors for this step in the process. As he was trying to keep a stock look he came up with a really neat hack to use the original knobs. The station select happens to have a large metal wheel on the inside which is about a centimeter wide. [Dominic] used the optical sensor from a mouse to monitor the turning of the dial by aiming the sensor at this wheel. Internet connectivity was provided by a wireless router he had on hand. This way he can stream music or play from an SD card he also used in the retrofit.
More from Jeremy Jongepier as he discusses and demos the capabilities of his Raspeberry Pi FX box running Linux.
by Dan Chen (noreply@blogger.com) at April 15, 2013 01:46 AM
Months ago I picked up some radio modules – specifically the XRF radio modules from Ciseco. They’re about £10 a pop and are in theory very simple to use. This is… almost true. In the end my modules sat dormant in my component store, and the OpenKontrol gateway I got from them at the same time was never assembled, owing to some missing parts for the ethernet module and abysmal documentation for the entire project – it’s still sat on my desk and will probably migrate to the bin eventually. This theme of abysmal documentation is unfortunately consistent across all of the Cisceo product lines, which is a real shame since they make great bits and pieces in theory. I really do hope they’ll pull their finger out and fix their documentation.
All that aside, last week at work, we had a two-day event for physical prototyping and I decided that I’d try and get the things working – and after a day or so, succeeded. This post is a brief introduction to how to get the modules working as advertised.
Ciseco ship a series of sensor boards designed to have an XRF module plugged into them, with a coin cell battery on the reverse. Most of my woes stemmed from this – I still haven’t gotten them working and suspect you need to do some setup on the board before you can use them in this lower-power environment. Being unable to solder anything and lacking a Slice of Pi or other breakout board I eventually clipped my logic analyser probes onto the XRF module directly and stuffed M-M jumpers in to expose the required pins on a breadboard, then powered it from a 3xAA battery pack.
There are a few ways you can use the XRF modules – by default they ship with a transparent serial bridge firmware, but you can program them with a range of firmware (downloadable here) from Linux or Windows. The uploader for Linux (found here, with usage instructions) works great once you apply the slight hack required to work around their packaging format on Linux – you have to run, for instance:
awk 'BEGIN {RS="\n";ORS="\r\n"} {print $0}' llapThermistor-V0.56-24MHz.bin > llapThermistor-V0.56-24MHz-ok.bin to convert the line endings to the right format for the uploader. Bit of a faff but not that much work.
My basic “Hello world!” idea was to have a button I could press on this XRF and have it register on another XRF connected via an FTDI bridge to a Raspberry Pi. To achieve this I would upload the LLAP Button firmware to the XRF on the breadboard (which then had a button attached to the appropriate pins with pull-up resistors) and upload the latest XRF serial gateway firmware to the XRF in the FTDI bridge. LLAP is a lightweight protocol for talking to devices, and we’ll talk more about that in a second.
Programming is simple – just drop the XRF into the FTDI converter (and it’ll show up as /dev/ttyUSB0 or whatnot in your OS) then run the uploader with the (line-converted) firmware file passed to -f and the path to /dev/ttyUSB0 passed to -d. It should upload the firmware, check it was a success, and finish.
Once you’ve done this it’s good to talk to your XRF and check it is okay. The easiest way I’ve found is to use miniterm.py, shipped with python-serial/pySerial. Install with pip install pyserial or apt-get install python-serial and then run the following: miniterm.py -p /dev/ttyUSB0 -e. You should get dropped into a terminal – enter +++ and no carriage return, and after a second you should get an OK back. You’re now in command mode, and after doing nothing for 5 seconds you’ll be (silently) dropped out of command mode again. Quickly enter ATVR followed by a carriage return, and you should get a version string back. If so, all is well!
Now we’ve programmed both we can do a test to see if they can talk to each other. Insert the XRF into your FTDI bridge and power it up, then open a miniterm.py session to it. Then power on the other XRF; you should see a bunch of messages along the lines of this:
a--STARTED--a--STARTED--a--STARTED--a--STARTED--a--STARTED--
Congratulations, you’ve got your first LLAP device talking to you! Let’s just talk about LLAP for a moment. LLAP messages (some docs here) always start with a lowercase a, followed by two letters – the device identifier. After that is a message, with padding in the form of – characters to a fixed length of 12 characters.
The STARTED message is intended to announce the arrival of the device on the network to a hub controller. We need to make our other XRF act like a hub, which is happily all software. Note the — device ID in those messages; this is a default ID and should be changed. We can do that over the air, though.
The first thing the LLAP device expects back on sending STARTED is an ACK back, otherwise it repeats itself a maximum of 5 times. Our ACK message, with padding, will look like a--ACK------. After that we can change the device identifier with a--CHDEVIDAA (to change the ID to AA) and ask the device to reboot once we get an identical message back to confirm the device ID change by sending it a a--REBOOT--- message – note the ID hasn’t changed yet – and we should get a new STARTED message that contains our new ID – our device coming back with our new setting. Congratulations, you’re talking over the air! If I now pull the button pin to ground on my LLAP device, it sends a message: aAABUTTONA–. I can tweak this button behaviour to record on/off, or act as a toggle, on the module by using over-the-air configuration options documented here.
The trick with all this is that you want to be responding rapidly and automatically. This is something where you want to be programming your interactions rather than doing initial setup by typing things into a terminal. There’s no easy fix for this; my solution was to hack together some Python with some if statements (this was an 11th hour moment in the hack day) to automate the responses, which did work okay, but a more OO approach is certainly the best approach. I’m going to start putting something slightly more sorted together in Ruby.
Obviously an even simpler approach is to simply use a transparent serial bridge and something to drive the bridge on each end, but this requires you to have constant power on each end. This isn’t always what you have – while base stations probably are powered from utility power sources, constantly powering a device for a few hundred mA (for a RPi and a radio) isn’t easy – possible, but fiddly, with a combination of solar charging and sealed lead acid batteries being the only real approach for external sensors. The advantage of the LLAP devices are that you can get them to go to sleep and wake up on an interrupt, making them very low power devices suitable for battery power. Once I figure out how to set the boards up for use with the Ciseco battery boards, I’ll do a follow-up post.
I really like the hardware Ciseco put out – the XRF is a great board at a great price point – but they really need someone to sit down for a week, set up a new site, and fill it with error-checked, up to date (and maintained) information, organized in a manner that lets you actually find things. And it really needs to be complete, with worked examples for their products and how to use them together. This would absolutely seal the deal in terms of using their kit for prototyping – as it is, it’s damn fiddly to get anything working ‘out of the box’!
We like the look which [Emmanuel] achieved with his Raspberry Pi based Squeezebox client. It’s got that minimalist slant that makes it seem like a commercial product at first glance. But one more look at the speakers without grates, the character LCD, and the utilitarian buttons, knobs, and switches tips us off that it’s filled with the hardware we know and love.
Since Logitech announced that it was terminating the Squeezebox line we’ve seen several projects which take up the torch. We’ve seen the RPi used as a Squeezebox server and several embedded Linux systems used as clients. This follows in the footsteps of the latter. The RPi is running Raspbian with the squeezelite package handling the bits necessary to talk to his server. The controls on the front include a power switch, rotary encoder and button for navigating the menus, and a potentiometer to adjust the HD44780 LCD screen’s contrast. The speakers are a set of amplified PC speakers that were liberated from their cases and mounted inside of the wooden box that makes up the enclosure. The in-progress shots of that case look pretty rough, but some sanding and painting really pulled everything together. As you would expect, we’ve embedded the demo video after the jump.
One highlight of Musikmesse for me was getting to catch up with Jay Smith of Livid Instruments. Base, their touch controller (grid plus touch strips), is even more appealing in person than online. And it seems like it could really sit in a niche in controllers, even with lots of grids out there these days.
By comparison, Novation’s new Launchpad S, while much cheaper, lacks pressure sensitivity. And Ableton’s Push also leaves plenty of room for Base. Push I still think is a terrific controller, even as it has some growing pains with its initial launch – I’ve had some readers complaining about hardware variations like off-color RGB LEDs, and you just can’t buy the thing for some time. But more importantly, while Push is a beautiful piece of hardware and has the deepest integration with Live, you might want something simpler and more generic. Others must agree: even with Push announced, Base sold out its initial handmade run. There just seems to be an insatiable appetite for all these controllers, and of course no one size fits everyone.
Livid’s Base has dedicated vertical faders, which Push and Launchpad lack. The grid is pressure sensitive, of course. And you get the ability to send note on and note off values (with velocity) from the sliders, too, so you could devise new instrumental applications for them. And it’s tough to overstate just how portable this is. With nice metal sides, crafted in Livid’s facility in Austin, Texas, and no moving parts, it’s a no-brainer to drop this into a backpack or messenger bag – even ones too small for Push.
The simplified layout – grid, bank buttons, faders – lends itself nicely to mappings. Jay showed me the Base’s Ableton Live mappings, and I think they’re brilliant. Bank buttons switch you between clip triggering, drums, and instruments, and the faders easily access mix, sends, and Device parameters. And you still get step sequencing. I think Push is a lot deeper in the studio, but while it works live, it can be a bit complex to navigate in that scenario. And that’s before we get into the possibility of using Base with other software. First, a look as Jay walks us through the Ableton mappings:
Other software, you say? One example: Bitwig was also at Musikmesse, so as I stopped back by the booth, Jay had just installed a new Bitwig Studio control script they’d given him. One of the nice things about Bitwig Studio is its JavaScript controller support. Of course, Bitwig still isn’t publicly available, but insert your own favorite software here.
Here’s a terrible video proving that the script works, and not much else. (Apologies – Jay and I hadn’t really had time to look at the controller, so just figure this is visual evidence that … there is a script. I expect there’s a Base sitting here in Berlin at Bitwig. We really need to all get together and have a massive grid hackday with monome and Push and Launchpad and Base and as much music and visual software as we can organize.)
I’m disappointed that there’s nothing other than MIDI control on Base, though. I won’t get into the ups and downs of OSC, but if not OSC, some control protocol would sure be nice, especially given Livid’s focus on the DIYer.
But that’s about the only complaint I can think of. Like Push, Base is sold out at the moment, but a new run is in the works and should be available soon. We’ll be watching.
http://lividinstruments.com/hardware_base.php
Update: Peter Nyboer explains how the touch faders send messages. You can send variable velocity, but using position, not touch sensitivity (which makes more sense, anyway, I think)!
There’s two modes for the note that is sent when you touch the fader: “fixed” and “position.” If fixed, when you touch the fader, a note (of your choice) is sent with velocity 127, then a 0 when released. In position mode, the velocity will be based on the position where you touch the fader, so if you touch it at the bottom, it sends a velocity of 1, if you touch it in the middle, it sends a velocity of 63, and so on. You could say there’s a third mode: “don’t send any note, I just care about the CC!”
What if you could do more than just consume music as a passive listener?
It’s a question that has fascinated musicians ever since the dawn of digital technology. Now, a very big label is releasing an app that provides an answer to that question. Ninja Tune – and, crucially, founder Matt Black of Coldcut – are going to mobile platforms with an app that does far more than simple remixing. It can let you radically transform some of Ninja’s artists, even going in a direction that might be considered instrumentalism. CDM contributor Matt Earp has been quiet in these parts in the last months partly because he was contributing to the project. He and the developers give us an exclusive look inside the process of making this app and what it means.
And don’t miss the making-of video; the final app as it ships is built in OpenFrameworks and libpd.
Venerable independent UK electronic music label Ninja Tune have launched Ninja Jamm, their first music remix app, in collaboration with London-based arts and technology firm Seeper. It’s been created (for now) for iOS and it’s filled with tunes and loops from Ninja artists. Seeper have produced the “making of” video above that tells the app’s story, and both organizations answered some of CDMs questions below. It’s live in the app store as you read this and free to download, so grab it while you finish the article!
Ninja Jamm is basically a smart but simple remix sequencer that users can load up with “tunepacks” from Ninja’s catalog – all purchasable through the app. These tunepacks are tracks broken apart into a 4×8 matrix of clips, 8 each for drums, bass, and two more (melody, keys, vox, FX) depending on the tune. Most clips come from the original tunes, but some extras have been added to round out the bill. Users can turn instruments on and off, swap between clips, glitch them out, add effects like reverb and crush in a number of different ways, trigger the “Coldcutter” for beat-repeat action, trigger and pitch-bend stabs and one-off samples, and even change the tempo of the track. “Jammers” can record what they’re doing as they mix and instantly upload the whole thing to SoundCloud when they’re done. It packs a fairly dizzying array of sonic options into a small screen, but you’d expect nothing less from creative director Matt Black, one half of Coldcut – Coldcut did give the world “Beats and Pieces” and are synonymous with the cut and paste aesthetic of large swaths of electronic music spanning their 25+ year career.
Matt Black and Romin Aliabadi‘s video takes us through the various functions of the app
It’s an ambitious project for a record label to make something this complex, and while Black is familiar with writing a line or two of code, he’s far from a iOS developer, and Ninja Tune is far from a software development house. Enter Evan Grant and Seeper – he and his team have done multi-touch interface, projection mapping, and interactive design for some of the biggest names in the world – BBC, MTV, Ted, Xbox – It seemed like a natural fit, but there were challenges. Grant: “We’ve worked with major music labels before and put sound design and music at the core of all our installation and event projects. We develop hardware and software all the time, but this is the first time we’ve released a public mobile app.” Apple’s design specs are rigorous even for the most experienced team. A video of a prototype of the app in the hands of Amon Tobin surfaced last summer, but concerns about stability and a desire to keep making it even better kept it from launching then. Still, hard work and a relentless desire to fix a bug list a mile long prevailed, and the team received approval from Apple a few weeks ago.
Matt Black on the app’s inception and what’s under the hood:
“The concept’s genesis is in software created for [Coldcut's] 90s projects such as Tonetrakker, DJamm and the Let Us Play software. For the 1997 ‘Let Us Play’ album, Coldcut and Hex released a free CD-ROM including our first mixing software ideas like My Little Funkit and Playtime. These let the user swap between loops, fire samples, and randomly cut them up. In 1998 we made a more controllable 4 channel loop glitching engine for our live shows, called DJamm. We got a deal with Steinberg to release it, but we never finished it – though we did release the glitching shuffle algorithm as the Coldcutter VST plugin.
When we met Seeper I was just getting into creating software again, and the App Store/iPhone were changing the whole software business, opening it up to independent operators. Evan already knew the space well and Seeper seemed like great partners to collaborate with to do something. So I knocked up a demo using Ableton and a Launchpad for a mixer app, and at the same time long time Seeper collaborator Christian Curtis had created a MaxMSP patch which cut up loops and also had a brilliant waveform interaction mode. So we mixed those two together as the prototype. However, Max wasn’t the right choice for the final implementation, and eventually we found Ed Kelly, who heroically converted it to a Pd patch, itself a work of art.”
“There were other contributors in there as well – Ariel Elkin of Arivibes lent a hand building out the store, which was surprisingly tricky. The lion’s share of the non-audio code was written Chris Bradley and Andy Wallen, the main hackers at Seeper, and they deserve special commendation for their unflagging efforts.”
Black and Grant gave CDM a run down on some of the app’s essential details:
When’s the launch?
Today! April 11th, 2013
How much is the app?
It’s free to download and comes with 1 free tunepack (Beats and Pieces 3). You can purchase single tunepacks for a launch price of £0.69/$0.99, or “EPs” of 4 tunepacks for £1.99.
What tunes and artists will be included at launch?
Will there be new music released for the app after launch?
Yes, new tunepacks coming every 1-2 weeks. An exclusive track from Luke Vibert is in the works as well as the mighty “Witness” from Roots Manuva, and tunes from Emika, Mixmaster Morris, Slugabed, Raffertie, Lapalux, Shuttle, Toddla T and many more Ninjas. Possibilities for themed packs and artists from beyond the Ninja fold are also on the horizon.
Do artists receive any royalty from the downloads?
Yes, artist receive a cut when jammers buy the tunepacks.
What’s the audio format?
44k 16 bit for ultra high quality sound.
Can users export or share the jamms they create?
Yes, they can upload to SoundCloud at the touch of a button, then share on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or wherever else they can think of!
How did the Seeper/Ninja Tune partnership come about?
Evan Grant: We’re all Ninja fans at Seeper so when Matt and I started talking about a collaboration it was really exciting. It was clear we shared a passion for innovating with interactive sound and vision, and we agreed there was a need for a next generation jamming app.
Why launch on iOS, and are their plans to release on the Android platform?
Matt Black: You have to hand it to Apple, their introduction of touchscreen mobile computers has been a real game changer. iOS is the most mature development environment and Apples App Store system helps get us and the artists paid. We do love multiculturalism and will support Android as soon as we can earn a few bucks to pay for the conversion.
What were some of the major technical hurdles you faced, and how did you overcome them?
EG: The audio engine is built in ‘PureData’ and run’s on mobile courtesy of ‘libpd’. The user interface is built in C++ using Openframeworks with the store developed in device native Objective-C”. The downside of this approach initially was performance. Using open source libraries results in a overhead, a lot of time went into resource and speed optimization throughout the app.
MB: Yes, the choice to use Pd was at least partially inspired by the enthusiasm the CDM community has shown for it. Using open software like OpenFrameworks is inline with everything we stand for. Unfortunately, whilst Pd is a fine and useful construction kit, it’s not that efficient as code, so Ed had to work very hard to get the Pd core audio engine to handle the playing and processing of 4 stereo channels with fx. Pd uses 32-bit audio so it takes double the memory of 16-bit samples, again not very efficient.
Ed.: I have to strongly disagree with Seeper’s assertion that libpd is inefficient; there is always room for improvement and in particular the way in which patches are deployed, but that’s not the feedback we’ve gotten from other users, and versions of Pd have even been made to operate on first-generation iPods. Hopefully this is something we can take up on the libpd site soon, including the specific concerns raised here. -PK
Did working with Lossless / high quality audio present any problems?
MB: Yes, many apps use mp3s or 22k audio. Being DJs and music heads, we knew we didn’t want to compromise with the sound quality, so we held out for 44k 16 bit uncompressed. This means content takes longer to download than an mp3, but the end result is far higher quality, and you can actually play Ninja Jamm in a club on a big sound system and hear your work properly.
What are the plans for the project after launch? Forthcoming features you hope to see in future releases?
EG: We’re working with Ninja Tune to align with new releases, so lots of cool new content will be available. We see this as the start of a genre of ‘jammboard’ apps using the ‘tunepack’ format.
MB: Yeah, we have a feature list a coupla metres long already. The no .1 feature for us and everyone else is the ability to load your own samples, but this could conflict with the business model which is centered on saleable Tunepacks, so right now we’re thinking about it. Sync between different copies of the app would be fun. Vol controls for each channel should be possible. If we can get a decent community of jammers who get what we are doing and buy enough packs to support future dev, we vow to keep on with maximum effort and never surrender.
Where can users go for info on updates?
ninjajamm.com will be our main hub – It will feature charts of mixes created by Ninja Jammers that have been uploaded to SoundCloud, as we expect the community and competitive aspects of NJ to be important. Also the Facebook page and Twitter feed should keep you up-to-date on all the news.
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My fellow Berliners! There's another Berlin Open Source Meetup scheduled for this Sunday! You are invited!
See you on Sunday!
Todays Share&Care is a free book, "Fundamentals of Piano Practice". Not only fundamentals but really advanced topics as well. Ever wondered how to play really fast sequences? Start from infinite speed and get slower over time!
I got piano lessons since I was four years old. I had multiple teachers, from self-taught over concert-pianists and, as I entered the music-university myself, top pianists and teacher-instructors.
While in university I discovered the book "Fundamentals of Piano Practice" by Chuan C. Chang.. It gave me a huge boost. First in technique, closing gaps and removing misconceptions But more important: it gave me a huge motivational boost. You realize that you maybe don't need a teacher, but you need something that teaches you.
Teachers can use this book as a textbook for teaching practice methods. It can save you a lot of time, allowing you to concentrate on teaching music. If you don't have a teacher, pick any piece of music you want to learn (that is within your technical skill level) and start practicin ... Read More
Novation’s Launchpad may have begun its life focused mainly on controlling Ableton Live. But a new update, while not radically different from the original, is more flexible, working with more software and more operating systems – including the iPad. It’s also brighter and refreshes faster than the original.
The Launchpad S is, generally speaking, still a Novation Launchpad. It has the same complement of controls, and unlike some recent hardware, it lacks features like velocity sensitivity and full-color RGB LEDs. This is still just a basic, tri-color 8×8 array grid controller with some extra controls. But like the original, that also means it’s about the cheapest grid controller you can buy, and it’s unusually light and portable.
What that “S” adds in terms of hardware is mainly brighter LEDs – much brighter and more saturated, from the looks of the video – and a “significantly-faster refresh rate” that might appeal to specific programming applications.
The other big change is, while there’s still an Ableton logo (the old one, even) and prominent mention of controlling Live, the Launchpad is no longer tied to specific drivers and software. Class-compliant operation means you can plug it into any Mac, Windows, or Linux machine (hello, Raspberry Pi), as well as, via the USB Camera Connection Kit, an iPad.
I think it’s most interesting what hackers will do that, but Novation is also bundling some extras to get you started. There are new custom software control overlays in the box, including FL Studio. (No word yet on what others may be included.) And there’s a gigabyte of Loopmasters samples, as well.
It seems to me there’s a window of opportunity for Novation here, both in timing and cost. On timing, any mention of Ableton’s much-fancier Push controller has to come with a big caveat: Ableton can’t ship you one, with a backlog stretching into the summer. Novation says the new Launchpad S will be available this month. Add to that the dealer price / suggested retail of US$169.99. We’ve seen some street prices much lower than that.
So, sure, the Launchpad S does less than most of the competition. Significantly, Keith McMillen’s QuNeo controller offers more touch controls and continuous control, plus RGB color, for US$199.
But, if you really just want a grid controller bargain, the Launchpad S is a contender. And it’s worth observing that, for not much more than a Push, you could pick up an inexpensive PC laptop or netbook, install Linux and Renoise, and plug in a Launchpad S for an all-in-one setup (among other solutions). I’m also interested to see what an iPad-plus-Launchpad S rig might look like.
What do you think? Is the Launchpad S – or original Launchpad, which may now be even more impossibly-inexpensive – something you’d consider? Let us know in comments.
With the new ‘S’, here’s KillTheRobot. There’s an Ableton session to download, too:
http://bit.ly/KillTheRobotSamples
And behind the scenes of how he produced this:
[Ivan] made something special with this car stereo hack. He altered the head unit to play MP3 files from USB and added an auxiliary line-in. But looking at it you’d never know. That’s thanks to the work he did to create a false button hiding the audio jack, and a false cassette hiding the USB port and MP3 player display. Possibly the best part is that the radio itself still works like it always did.
There are several components that went into making the system work. It starts with the cassette/radio head unit. To that he added an MP3 player with remote which he picked up on Deal Extreme. He wasn’t a huge fan of the IR remote that came with it so he rolled in a remote that mounts on the steering wheel. To pull everything together he used a PIC 16F877a. The microcontroller controls the lines which tell the head unit if a tape has been inserted. When [Ivan] selects either the Aux input or wants to play MP3s from a thumb drive the uC forces the head unit into cassette mode and the audio from the player is injected into the cassette player connections.
To help deter theft [Ivan] created two false fronts. The end of a cassette tape plugs into the USB port. The rewind button plugs into the Aux jack. You can get a good look at both in the demo after the break.
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May 23, 2013 11:03 PM
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