Planet LinuxMusicians

Song #8 from FAWM 2010 is up — “To Journey Over Ice.”  You can listen to it on the FAWM site or on SoundClick.

Special to readers of this blog — I do have a bit more information to add, which I didn’t post on FAWM.  I’ll present it after this copy of the original liner notes:

My eighth song of FAWM 2010 was written in the dark.

Two days ago, during the big snow storm that has so dominated my FAWM experience this year, the power went out for about 4 hours. Of course, participating in FAWM, it helps to have things like a computer, an internet connection . . . not to mention the ability to record.

But when the power went out, I had more pressing concerns. First was heat. The night was expected to go down to 8°F.

So my wife and I were sitting on the 1st floor (we have ground floor, 1st floor, and 2nd floor, so the second one up). She was quilting, I was practicing guitar. I do this game sometimes — I have a deck of 12 cards, on which I’ve written the 12 possible chromatic notes. What I do is turn over a card, and play something from that starting point.

In this case, I turned over F# (or Gb). I improvised the rest of the song.

Well, no way to go record it. So I practiced it, played a few variations, then went on to something else.

That evening, when the power came back on, I was busy finishing my recording of song #6. And yesterday, I already had set up the room to play congas, so went ahead on song #7.

Then, today — I remembered the song fairly well! So I’ve finally recorded it, 48 hours after first writing it, pretty much pulling it right out of memory.

OK, the instruments:

Breedlove Classical (Nylon String) guitar.

ESP Ltd Bass.

Hammond Organ. (Subtle work with it this time, playing high for an atmospheric effect.)

Nord Rack 2X (the two synth voices).

This song was composed and performed using natural rhythm only — without a metronome, click track, or drum machine. “No Robots Allowed” is my theme, and here are the rules I’m following:

http://bmccosar.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/the-robot-rules/

Now the extras.  One of the first comments I got on the track was about the chord progression.  Although I started from F# as the root note, I developed the following chord progression according to some fairly simple rules I’ve put together (basically a mixture of classical and jazz theory):

• intro: one bar each of F#m11, B7.  This is just a jazz ii-V progression.
• verses: two bars each of F#m11, B7 until the change.
• first chorus: stays on Em7b13 (E Aeolian, or E natural minor), then changes to Am7, Asus7.  How this works: F#m7, B7 can be thought of as the ii-V leading into the tonic minor.  I know, most jazz folks prefer the Dorian mode.  However, the b13 can be a very tense tone color and add movement to a progression.  The Am7 that follows can be thought of as the iv chord of the key Em.  To return to the verse, F#m can be thought of as the relative minor of A major, and A major is the parallel key to A minor.  It also helps the final chord is suspended — they can move just about anywhere.
• second chorus: has a specific progression I’ve shown in the table below.

Gm7	Am7	Bbm7	Am7
Gm7	Am7	Bbm7	Am7
D7	%	C#7#9	%

The first eight bars are a “constant structure” progression.  The final chord, Am7, forms a ii-V pair with D7.  The natural chord to go after D7 would be G something; I’ve chosen G7, but performed a tritone substitution to make this C#7alt, which I’ve voiced here as C#7#9 (no 5).  And C#7alt, of course, leads naturally back into the key of F#m.

“Everyone needs a hobby,” they tell us. For the blogger mysteriously identified only as “R,” that hobby would be an almost fanatical nostalgia for the Commodore 64 computer.

At first we thought this was a fan community site, but apparently it’s all the work of a single person. [R] has tweaked, extended, repackaged and resurfaced this 1980’s icon in nearly every imaginable way. They tend to gloss over the technical aspects of these mods, but that’s okay – the C64 is such an exhaustively documented system now that the site dwells mainly on the aesthetics and meaning of these reborn devices.

The 64 has made an indelible impression on electronic music, and the machines are still sought after by collectors, composers and circuit-benders. [R] pays homage by housing these vintage systems in styles reminiscent of even vintage-er synthesizers. Any one of these would warrant a post here, yet there’s a whole collection to browse. Check it out!

[via Retro Thing]

My seventh song of FAWM 2010 is up — “To Dance in Nameless Places.”  You can listen to it on the FAWM site or on SoundClick.  Here are the liner notes:

Song #7 was a tough one. Because of the recent snow storm, I have a few days off. Problem is, spending your morning shoveling snow and breaking up ice is very exhausting.

This is a nice conga groove — in fact all the rhythm is hand percussion. Here are the instruments, in the order they were recorded:

One conga, tuned to Ab.

A pair of maracas.

Claves.

Roland digital piano sounds.

Ibanez S620, in ‘twangy’ mode (pickup switch in position IV, humbuckers split and blended). I needed a more ‘glassy’ sound over the more mellow tone of the piano.

This chord progression is interesting. Because of the conga tuning, I tried to keep ‘Ab’ (or G#) a constant in all of the chords. I also tried for smooth voice leading, where possible. However, the chords are not in their traditional diatonic groupings — Fm, E, and DbmMaj7 in the verse; Ab, Dbm, and B in the chorus.

This song was composed and performed using natural rhythm only — without a metronome, click track, or drum machine. “No Robots Allowed” is my theme, and here are the rules I’m following:

http://bmccosar.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/the-robot-rules/

No kidding, I’m exhausted.  Although I have a few more hours left in the day, I think I’m going to spend the rest of the evening relaxing.  I would say ‘chilling out’, but considering the weather, hopefully not

Firstly, lots happening on the Ubuntu 10.04 audio front:

* daily builds of stable alsa-driver snapshots (thanks, Brad!);
* massive alsa-lib and alsa-plugins debugging (thanks, David!);
* continued alsa-driver/linux quirking;
* uploads of latest stable alsa*, libsdl1.2 (including direct seeding of the pulse backend in the Ubuntu desktop seed), openal-soft, and pulseaudio source packages;
* re-addition of HDA power down for Sigmatel/IDT in pm-utils-powersave-policy 0.3.

Some very positive Canonical goings-on have occurred, too, but that's the purvey of others. Also importantly, fellow community members are stepping forward to help triage Ubuntu audio bugs. You gals/guys are too numerous to list individually, but rest assured that your efforts (even if you're new to bug triaging!) are much appreciated. Thanks for helping make Lucid rock!

Secondly, John Poelstra recently wrote a fantastic piece on chairing effective meetings. The points are so entirely lucid (bad pun I know) that I can't believe that I hadn't used them!

In fact, the revitalized DistrictOfColumbia LoCo team meetings have begun using them. Brian has been doing a bang-up job posting summaries in lieu of a configured mootbot to keep us accountable. Members of the LoCo team are working on a screencast/video to demonstrate archive-uploadable activities at jams using Bug Hugger, Lernid, and Ground Control. I'll be doing a portion on fixing alsa-driver/linux bugs.

Despite a number of hardships, song #6 of FAWM 2010 is up — “Walking Through Daydreams.”  You can listen to it either on the FAWM site or on SoundClick.  Here are my liner notes:

This, the sixth song of FAWM 2010, did not come easy. We’re in the middle of a severe winter storm here in northern Virginia. At my house, we got 33 inches of snow. Plus, today, right in the middle of recording this song, I had a four hour delay because the power went out.

The only rhythm instruments on this song are a trio of guitars. I’m using a folk technique here:

The first guitar, in the center of the stereo field, is played open. No complicated chords here — simple are required for the proper effect.

The second guitar, panned slightly to the left, is played with a capo on fret #2 — same chords, but now a different spelling.

The third guitar, panned slightly to the right, has the capo on fret #7. Here are the chords that can be embellished slightly.

Other instruments? The deep resonant thrumm of my Breedlove acoustic bass. The eerie wail of a Waldorf Blofeld on the chorus (when, notice, only one guitar is playing). Finally, a bit of glassy electric piano on top.

This song was composed and performed using natural rhythm only — without a metronome, click track, or drum machine. “No Robots Allowed” is my theme, and here are the rules I’m following:

http://bmccosar.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/the-robot-rules/

Edit: I got so wound up getting this article written and posted this morning that I forgot to mention one of my main points.  I have used this ‘chorus of guitars’ effect before — except in 5/4 time!  This was on “150 Years Later (The Mermaid Wife II)” (from La vie sous la mer, my third Jamendo album).

Since it’s part of the song’s story, I’m actually posting some pictures from the big storm (taken yesterday, 6-Feb-2010).

Saturday Morning

Saturday Afternoon

Saturday Evening

As a mostly autodidactic musician the concepts off scales, intervals, chords or rhythms can be quite mixed up, so when you work together with others it can get a bit complicated sometimes. Reading one’s way through encyclopaedias is lengthy, so I find it nice to find a book about all that, where knowledgeable people explain the whole picture. One place for such is certainly wikibooks. Users are working on a book on Music Theory since something like 2004 and it has gained quite a size. I was happy to see chapters on

• Scales and Intervals,
• Chords and
• Music Notation Systems.

Some other chapters are still quite short and need our efforts to be as good as the two mentioned ones.

Happy reading and extending!

This is the second song of two in a row — two in one day!  As I write this, there’s a winter storm outside.  We’re expected to get 18 to 24 inches of snow.  On the bright side, school was out for a snow day, and I spent my day making music.  However, I’m hurrying up and posting all of this in case the power goes out!

“Beware the Age of the Machine” is quite a contrast to the other songs I’ve done so far on this album.  You can hear it either on the FAWM site or on SoundClick.  The liner notes for the song:

Warning: starts quiet, gets real loud!

Songs #4 and #5 are connected — both were recorded in the same session. My goal for these two songs was to play a difficult rhythm on the congas. Here, I played the funkiest, syncopated conga rhythm I could sustain, with the goal of making this song super heavy later on.

The instruments on this track:

One conga drum, tuned to ‘A’.

ESP Ltd Bass (w/ active EMG Humbuckers).

Nord Rack 2X (Best synth ever. I know. I already said that on a previous song. But it’s true.)

Wailing, mad Ibanez S620! In contrast to a previous track where I played a guitar with very heavy strings, this one is basically strung with spider webs and hair (well, .009s, but you get the idea).

OK, the meaning of the title. Since the title of this album is “No Robots Allowed”, I thought I needed at least one theme song. This is it. I’m rocking out, free of the machines

This song was composed and performed using natural rhythm only — without a metronome, click track, or drum machine. “No Robots Allowed” is my theme, and here are the rules I’m following:

http://bmccosar.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/the-robot-rules/

More than a year ago, I released my fifth Jamendo album, Martian Winter.  Most of the songs on that album tied in to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.  Probably my favorite song on that album was “The Morning the Stars Began to Fall.”  Like “Beware the Age of the Machine”, it was also a hard rock type tune, with a wailing guitar balanced against heavy bass and synth sounds.

For some reason, though, that album wasn’t as successful as my others — at least not in terms of plays and downloads.  Why?  No idea.  I think it’s one of my best.  I think Jamendo was going through some hard times last year about this time — site outages, maybe?  Who knows.

Maybe someday it will find its audience.

What can you do with a button? What circuits can you bend? What software and hardware can you construct? Want to meet up with myself and fellow makers from the DIY music and visualist communities? I’m touring and looking for new works, we have one call for one-button objects that (if you can ship it) can come from anywhere in the world, plus upcoming events in New York, San Francisco, and — this month, Amsterdam at the planetary music tech hub that is STEIM.

STEIM + Handmade Music Amsterdam (Netherlands, February)

Handmade Music is beginning in Amsterdam. To kick things off, I’ll be visiting the legendary STEIM research center. The event will be open to anyone with inventions and self-built hardware and software you’d like to share. We’ll plug in and make a raucous noise. I’m really quite looking forward to meeting folks from this area.

When: Wednesday, February 17, 8p – ?
Where: Utrechtsedwarsstraat 134, Amsterdam
Cost: FREE
STEIM Hotspot Lab Event Page

I’ll also do a short presentation of some work TBD; more on this next week.

If you’re attending and want to share what you’re bringing in advance or make sure you see me, use the CDM contact form.

One-Button Objects Call (SF + World, March)

What can you do with one button? In an age of ever-more-complex touch interfaces, we’d like to imagine what a single, tangible, hardware button can mean for a design. To celebrate the arrival of their Gamma game event in San Francisco, art game collective Kokoromi is teaming up with Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion to launch a call for ONE-BUTTON OBJECTS.

So, sorry monome — too many buttons (unless you want to make a one-button monome, that is). The one-button game objects will incorporate a single-button-centered design and inspiration from the world of gaming into unique creations. Read up more on our sister site:

Call for Works: One-Button Game Objects
Then send your submissions for the gallery show in San Francisco to onebuttonobject@kokoromi.org
(see also Kokoromi
Receipt deadline: March 1

If you’re in the NYC or San Francisco, we’re looking to do some informal hackdays to play with buttons, HID interfaces, Arduino and microcontroller platforms, and the like — we just need a hackerspace to host us. And if you’d like to do that elsewhere in the world, let us know and we’ll promote it.

And of course, be sure to attend Friday, March 12 at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts if you’re in the Bay Area or attending the Game Developer Conference.

Handmade Music Brooklyn Returns; Your Inventions, Live Artists Wanted (NYC, March)

Handmade Music in its hometown of New York is being rebooted. We’re launching new workshops, new hacking, and a new quarterly performance series at a proper performance venue, Galapagos.

That means we need you.

For the quarterly party, we’re continuing to look for people to bring in your own creations. If it runs on a netbook, if you have headphones you can bring, if it’s made out of wood and you can play it, if you can plug into a portable amp and make some noise, if it’s a circuit-bent toy with built-in speakers, it’s a welcome guest.

But we’re also looking for live artists in the greater New York area who incorporate DIY instruments, hardware, software (and even wearable interactive costumes, if you’ve got them) into your act. We’d like to hear who’s out there. We can’t invite everyone to play, but that’s all the more reason to hear about what people are doing.

If you have a project or act to consider, send them here:
Official 2010 Handmade Music NYC Call for Works

The first event is Monday, March 8. Doors open 7p, live acts start 8p.

Here come two in a row.  It’s snowing here, a huge winter storm.  I was out of school today, and finished two songs for FAWM 2010.  This is #4, “My Secret Word for Dragonfly.”  You can listen either on the FAWM site or on SoundClick.

Here are the liner notes for this song:

Songs #4 and #5 are connected — both were recorded in the same session. My goal for these two songs was to play a difficult rhythm on the congas. Here, the basic rhythm is 5/4.

“My Secret Word for Dragonfly” is a variant of the blues, believe it or not — at least that’s what the basic chord progression resembles. The instruments on this track are:

A single conga drum, tuned to ‘A’.

Fender P-Bass.

Hammond organ.

Fender Telecaster.

Now, about the title. That is indeed a long story. When I was little, I had my own language. My word for dragonfly was ‘hohexexegosper’.

This song seems to dart around like a dragonfly, and so the name fits . . . on the other hand, if I actually named the song ‘Hohexexegosper’, mass confusion would result

I did tell a bit more about the origin of the name on my blog, back in the day:

http://bmccosar.wordpress.com/2007/11/18/strange-lady-part-4/

This song was composed and performed using natural rhythm only — without a metronome, click track, or drum machine. “No Robots Allowed” is my theme, and here are the rules I’m following:

http://bmccosar.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/the-robot-rules/

These songs were recorded back to back so that I could use the same microphone setup for each.  To record the conga part, I used two Behringer B-2 microphones, set up to the left and right of the drum.  I had to hurry and do the recording of these parts last night — today, the main sound I hear is snow plows cruising by outside!

The last time I brought up the subject of the word ‘Hohexexegosper’ was in an article I wrote on this blog about “The Strange Lady I Met on the Shore“, the first track from La vie sous la mer (my third Jamendo album).

“Okay,” you say to the Web geeks, “I’ve had enough. I don’t want another little app that looks at my iTunes collection and tells me that if I like Lady Gaga, I probably also like Madonna. I want to listen in new ways and, most importantly, make music. What have you got, Web 2.0… 3.0… whatever we’re on now, that I can actually use. I want some of the deliciousness of the future, now.”

“Oh, and another thing – can I patch this Android phone of mine in absurd ways?”

Wish granted.

The latest Music Hackday in Stockholm was filled with the usual simple, first-draft hacks – as it should be; the whole idea is to do something quickly and start something real. But among them were some really strong ideas about how connecting music makers to the Web could do intelligent, new things.

Here are some of the best. Themes emerging:

There is a “there” there. Use proximity, and make location start to help people share musical tastes (and, by the same token, music making).

Put music creation in the browser – without Flash. New JavaScript-based tools can do live synthesis. There’s even a Nanoloop-style sequencer, built entirely with JavaScript and HTML. While these won’t be replacing dedicated music software any time soon, they can have the inverse effect, which is bringing musical creativity to more online apps. (Trust me, it’s more fun than most of what’s on Facebook.)

Make musicians’ online lives easier. Thanks to open APIs, all your gig info, tour info, and music uploads can finally come together.

Get physical. Hacks involving everything from big robotic visualizers to physical radio controls connect open hardware platforms like Arduino and Android.

(And yes, there were a lot of new Android apps, early proof that open mobile development could make a splash.)

Here’s a look at some of the coolest individual projects:

AlbexOne
Data as connected, kinetic sculpture

It’s one thing to talk to a Web API and put the results on the screen. It’s quite another to turn that feedback into a massive, mechanical sculpture.

Ingredients:
One Web API (Echo Nest Java API, for song analysis)
One Google NexusOne phone, running Android, receiving data on wifi and sending on bluetooth
One microcontroller, receiving signals from the Android and rotating a giant, mechanical arm to make a drawing

Here’s hoping co-creators Albin Karlsson and Alex Olwal can send us video of the project working in action.

ProximRadio + Blobble
Making software and hardware proximity-aware

The work by Michael Coffey (github | @eartle) and Jonty Wareing (github | @jonty) may seem at first like more of the usual social song-playing stuff. But it’s really a clever use of Bluetooth and proximity that could have significant implications for listening to and making music with other people in the same room.

Using new clients and servers, Michael and Jonty change the experience of listening to music. As people enter and leave a room, radio feeds respond accordingly. And the experience of “scrobbling” — writing a piece of music played on your computer to the Web — changes from solo to ensemble experience. If you and a few friends listen to Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz, now all of your Last.fm accounts respond accordingly.

Note, too, that by using the open-source GUI framework Qt4, what looks like a native Mac UI is actually portable across (cough) platforms.

Let’s say you’d rather make music than play it. Well, good news: developed could use these same tricks to build Bluetooth-enabled musical instruments that respond to proximity, not only for social interactions but better-integrated
hardware.

Radio Free Hackday
Virtual radio meets the physical radio object

Simon Hohberg and Robert Böhnke (aka @ceterum_censeo) had a brilliant, simple hardware hack: put the soul of an Arduino mini into a friendly-looking Panasonic FM radio. Result: physical controls for virtual radio, and an actual, local FM stream transmitted back from the computer into the stream.

With some minor upgrades (like a beefier, non-Arduino minicomputer), this could be a self-contained Internet radio. But it’s a reminder that making physical controls for software can be fun, frivolous, and novel. After all, it’s really the way we interact with real-world objects that makes them meaningful.

Webloop
Game Boy mainstay Nanoloop, reimagined as JavaScript

Start with Nanoloop, the unique, elegantly-designed music creation software for the Game Boy. Now imagine it as a browser application – no Flash, no standalone app, but all JavaScript, even down to the audio output.

That’s what Jan Krutisch did with his Webloop, now in its second iteration. It’s a testament to the universality of Oliver Wittchow’s design for Nanoloop, and the growing power of the browser and JavaScript as an open platform on which to make music software.

Synthism
Patching synthesis in online browser modules

This is a bit hard to see in action, so we’ll have to take their word for it. But the idea is compelling – and is another example of the action that could take place in the browser (in this case, with the actual sound work done elsewhere in a more traditional fashion):

Synthism.com our frontend to the powerful BrainBeat compiler, which is also built by the synthism.com team. This gives you the possibility to export synthesizers from synthism.com to different platforms, e.g. as a VST instrument. The flexibility of the BrainBeat compiler allows us to add support for exotic hardware such as FPGAs or special purpose built DSPs found in different hardware synthesizers, making export to such platforms available.

And yes, all of this is meant to be “collaborative,” which could add more dimension to it.

Songkick On Tour from Matt Biddulph on Vimeo.

Songkick on Tour
A Web service that adds information to your trip

It may be technologically less impressive, but part of what I think will make the Web more useful is the use of open Web APIs to reduce the amount of work you have to do to get information. Songkick on Tour is a great example of that: it figures out your travel itinerary from the awesome Dopplr and lets you know what gigs are happening when you’re traveling. I’m a big fan of Dopplr and feel it’s underused; this demonstrates the sort of thing that could be done.

Of course, this quick hack is only the start – it could make it easier for touring musicians to stay on top of information when they’re on the road.

Along the same lines, and on a grander scale…

Holodeck
One place on the Web, all your artist stuff – automatically

“A tool for artists to create their own website with music from SoundCloud, gigs from Songkick or Last.fm, news/posts from Tumblr.”

That says it all, doesn’t it? Instead of adding yet another Web service to keep track of, another dimension of complexity in your life, this mashes together information you’ve already put elsewhere.

Imagine if every time you made a note of something, you scattered it in a different part of the house. Imagine how complex your life would be.

Oh, wait. I don’t have to imagine that. I do that. Anyway, yeah, let’s have the Web not work that way so it pays for the time, electricity, and money it consumes, ‘kay?

Echonest Midi Player

A Web-to-MIDI converter

Internet comes in, music goes out. Connect an Ethernet cable to one side of this gadget (via the Arduino Ethernet Shield), connect the other to a MIDI instrument, and Bertrand Gondouin’s creation plays MIDI music automatically.

Of course, this has other creative implications, like the ability to pipe your own music or musical events to installations, remote players, to rig up an Ethernet- (or wifi-) powered MIDI band, or whatever you might imagine.

And bless the presence of simple, free Web servers, like the one on which this site runs. (Actually, CDM is LXMP – Linux nginx MySQL PHP – not LAMP with Apache, but I digress.)

More cool projects

Tired of embedding a whole Flash-powered player? the hackable SoundCloud JS player is customizable and lightweight. (It’s not Flash-free – you still need Flash as the back-end to decode the audio, as sadly HTML5 still doesn’t mean consistent MP3 and OGG codec support across browsers, at least so far.)

HacKey asks a fascinating question, which is whether people’s musical tastes are related to key.

BuddyJ for iPhone adds a dead-simple, cueable music output. Now, true, this may not look like an all-powerful DJ app, but that’s not the point: it makes the iPhone or iPod touch into a cueable “deck” you could connect to a mixer, etc.

SleepApp is a simple Android demo app, but it also demonstrates – with all the code on Google Code – how to do basic UIs and stream Internet radio, meaning it could be a good starting point if you’re dabbling in Android music development.

More coverage

Five music hacks from the future [Pocket-lint]

New Echo Nest APIs demoed at the Stockholm Music Hackday [Music Machinery, where you can also follow the Echo Nest APIs]

Hacking in Stockholm [A report from Last.fm's LAST.HQ]

48 Hours, 31 Hacks – Stockholm Music Hack Day [Programmable Web]

And here is some rough mobile video of the presentations:

New York?

NYCers, I’d really love to help host a Music Hackday here (I missed the nearby Boston event, but we have some specific folks in NY who would be great to involve.) The only remaining challenge: a venue that can host 100 or 200 people, free. Suggestions?

http://musichackday.org/

All the Stockholm hacks

Reader [Jimmy] sent us some info about his recently completed antique radio to audio streamer conversion. The electronics from the original radio were too far gone to repair, but he took the time to pull apart modern components to provide a polished looking finished project without losing the antique feel. We like it, but we are just suckers for that old time look. Check out his blog for more photos.

This article is an idea of live streaming with instant feedback from listeners. There are quiet a few source clients that can generate direct streaming from OSS, ALSA audio devices. When using more advanced musical softwares in Linux, especially when running them in sync the sound engine and routing is handled by Jack. Therefore you need a source client capable of dealing with Jack to forward the sound to the streaming server. Internet DJ Console fulfills the requirement. Furthermore it delivers an ogg output stream, which enables you to easily embed it on a website with the audio tag implemented in the html5 standard.

To enhance the user interaction you could implement a chat/shoutbox on the station website. Bumpin is an alternative but I’m not fully satisfied with it’s loading time. If you know of any service similar to Bumpin, please direct me to it. Optimal would be something that can be installed on LAMP.

This isn’t a scan of an early 1980’s punk ‘zine, it’s a picture from last night’s gig (thanks Daniella Altamirano for the photo).

I think Thom was looking at my hands to see what I was playing, and probably saying “let’s go to E flat, then G, then intro to Groovy Lady”, or something like that.

Tons of fun as usual.

Pictured you can see the Boom Boom Room’s real B3, my Novation on top of that, and my linux EEE.

I used Tapeutape live for the first time, to bust out some sound samples to punctuate one particular song. Tapeutape is awesome: fast, simple, solid, and no damned GUI to get in the way.

No French pop-stars this night, but a really cool dude on vacanze from Venezia stayed for the whole show, and said he’d love it if we played Italy. We’d love it too. He said he’d ask around when he gets home. Who knows, anything could happen.

[Robert] wrote a program using Max/MSP that lets him make music with his guitar hero controller. There’s another video after the break where he walks through the various features but here’s the gist of it. This works on Mac and Windows and allows a sort of ‘live play’ or midi mapping mode. In the midi mode each key can be configured to do your bidding. His example uses the pick bar to scroll through different samples and the green button the play them or the red button to stop.

The live mode us much more involved. In the software you choose the type of scale and the key you’d like to play in. This makes up for the controller’s lack of enough frets to make it a chromatic instrument and these settings can be adjust from the controller. There is an up-pick offset that makes the upward movement of the pick bar a different note than the downward movement. The motion control can also be used as an input. He demonstrates pitch bending and cutoff using that method.

This looks like a lot of fun. He needs to team up with [Joran] to add drums to the mix, forming a much more creative rock band than you can buy in the store.

Wherever you live, you can enjoy the DIY and open hardware inventions coming out of Texas. Or, as the famous song goes: “That’s right, you’re not from Texas / Texas wants you anyway.”

Austin, Texas may be associated with the strum of guitars. But it’s also populated by some of our favorite electronic music hardware inventors on the planet, led by the likes of Bleep Labs, 4ms, Eric Archer, and more. They’ve taken the idea of a “Handmade Music” and come up with the best formula for building a community around DIY hardware I’ve seen yet:

1. Get beginners – even if they’ve never soldered before – making noises with a beginning kit workshop.
2. Do an advanced workshop that pushes the envelope with new hardware.
3. Turn that noise into a performance/party: i.e., “After all the kits were built, we plugged in to the PA and partied until the amp overheated.”
4. Provide your specs and software freely.
5. Make a kit available for people to buy.

Notice that it’s possible to make “free hardware” (open sourcing part or all of the code, publishing specs and circuits) and still sell a product. And it’s possible to act locally (workshops in Austin), and sell globally (sharing documentation online, and shipping kits everywhere else).

And notice that it’s possible to make events beginner-friendly. In fact, this isn’t just to teach experienced musicians how to solder. I find that many people who are too shy to make music via traditional means find there’s a freedom to a glitchy, blippy electronic thing that makes noise. After all, through the ages music was never intended to be exclusively the domain of professional specialists.

Here’s the latest on their activities – and a chance to meet the hardware that has come out of their series.

For more, stay glued to handmademusic@noisepages.

First, let’s meet the devices:

Meet the Beasties

Thingamagoop 2

Bleep Labs’ Thingamagoop seems as much electronic creature as electronic instrument; its sounds seem like the vocalizations of an alien and, yes, it’s darned cute. The new Thingamagoop 2 is more usable (easier-to-access battery), sounds better, and has more features. But it’s also more open in every way. CV in and out lets it interface with analog gear. A programmer jack lets you reprogram it with your Arduino, if you so choose (the Arduino isn’t required, but it does let you reprogram the sounds on your Thingamagoop). And now the sonic effects — sample and hold, arpeggios, noise, and bit crush — all use open-sourced code. That makes what was already an ingenious soundmaker more open to hacking by advanced users.

The Thingamagoop 2 debuted to the world at Austin’s Handmade Music. Now, perhaps we need some hack sessions to get people working on reprogramming this and other sonic oddities.

Full info on the Thingamagoop 2
Arduino code
Circuit diagram

I expect to get one of these soon, so expect a hands-on.

Nebulophone

Nebulophone is a coming kit that builds on the Arduino platform to create a playable, DIY Stylophone-style instrument. Having debuted at Handmade Music Austin #4, the instrument features “adjustable waveforms, a light controlled analog filter, LFO, and arpeggiator that can be clocked over IR.” Yes, you read that last bit right: it’s all part of the new wireless, infrared sync revolution these guys are leading.

Official site has code, schematics, instructions – so you can actually make your own – plus sound and advance info on the coming kit. I expect a video and more on the kit soon.

SimSam

The SimSam is a noisy, glitchtastic product.

It’s also the subject of a beginners’ workshop, a chance to get people working with electronics for the very first time.

And its cost – a tiny $8 in parts.

It’s also a brilliant use of the ATTINY85, an ultra-compact, 8-pin AVR chip. (AVR chips also live at the heart of the Arduino platform.)

And the SimSam debuted at – you guessed it – a workshop at Handmade Music Austin #4.

Tons of info and everything you need to build your own:
SimSam

There are actually some details that could use improving, so have a look and see if you can do an updated version.

Autonomous Bassline Generator + Andromeda Space Rocker + MIDI-IR Sync

The Autonomous Bassline Generator…

…can sync up with drum modules like this Andromeda Mk-4 by Eric Archer:

…and sync together via infrared, wirelessly, connecting to each other or slaving to a MIDI clock signal generated by Wooster Audio’s MIDI-IR.

Together, you get the Andromeda Space Rockers: a whole little galaxy of wirelessly-synced sonic gadgets. And all of the above are available as kits, so you can sooth your soul by assembling them yourself.

The creators have debuted and jammed with these gadgets through Handmade Music, and presented workshops on the technologies and concepts that underly their creation.

Arduino, Sound Libraries, and Resources

I asked Dr. Bleep himself (John-Mike) about what resources might be useful for working with the Arduino platform (and similar architectures) and sound. The main secret is, use Pulse Width Modulation to accomplish sounds with a minimum of code:

Here are a few of the pages I used when designing the code for it:
http://www.cs.mun.ca/~rod/Winter2007/4723/notes/timer0/timer0.html
http://arcfn.com/2009/07/secrets-of-arduino-pwm.html
http://blog.wingedvictorydesign.com/2009/05/29/generate-real-time-audio-on-the-arduino-using-pulse-code-modulation/2/

http://little-scale.blogspot.com/ is a fantastic source for “Oh man why didn’t i do that/ this guy is incredible!” projects.

I’m also not the first to mate the stylophone with arduino
http://hackaday.com/2009/08/25/arduino-based-synthesizer/

The two biggest/ earliest arduino synths were :

">
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">http://code.google.com/p/tinkerit/wiki/Auduinohttp://www.critterandguitari.com/home/store/arduino-piano.php

One difference with the Nebulophone is that it is very low part count. No multipexers or DACs. Just PWM out to an two opamp analog filter. This does limit the number of keys and controls but makes for a tiny, simple pcb.

Handmade Music Austin, in Videos

How do these events go down? Here’s a look at some of the sonic mayhem.

Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Episode 3:

Handmade #4 lacks a video, but we’ll watch for #5 when it happens.

The next Handmade Music Austin is on February 28. Details aren’t up yet, but I’m told you can expect an advanced workshop on building a digital delay by Nathan/Wooster Audio, plus a simple, light-controlled noisemaker for beginners. Stay tuned to:

http://handmademusic.noisepages.com

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What if a competition didn’t just encourage entrants to try to make a better product? What if it encouraged friendly rivalry between makers to produce entries that were also shared across the community?

That’s the idea behind Digitópia’s upcoming series of competitions, now entering its third year. Digitópia itself is based in Porto, Portugal, at the Casa da Musica. But even if Portugal isn’t exactly in your neighborhood, entrants and onlookers alike can benefit from shared, open sourced contributions.

In fact, even the prizes itself are open projects. The simple, anthropomorphic-looking controller above is a free project. It’s dead-simple, a combination of an IKEA salad bowl, a potentiometer, and ultrasonic distance sensors. But as a result, it’s also inexpensive, simple to use (particularly with the addition of Digitópia’s custom-developed software), and a flexible starting point for further work. (Actually, handling multiple ultrasonics is a bit tricky, too, relative to things like infrared, so that’s a particularly nice addition.)

First up: Max and Pd patchers, your pride is on the line.

Think your Max/MSP or Pure Data multimedia patch is the most original around? Prove it. An international competition will find the best patches, and all of them (whether made in Max or Pd) will be released under a free software license. A panel will judge the results, led by Pedro Rebelo, composer, digital artist and Director of Education at the School of Music and Sonic Arts, Queen’s University Belfast. New deadline: February 14. (That’s right, polish off your best patch, send it into battle, and then take your pumped-up sense of masculinity / femininity out for a fantastic Valentine’s Day dinner.)

There are other competitions, too. The third-annual Musical Miniatures Competition is looking for musical works or “gestures” of 15 seconds or less. (If you’ve ignored other calls for works, this one should leave you no excuse.) The sounds will be licensed under a Creative Commons license for freesound.org, adding to that communal repository of sounds. Bram de Jong, legendary developer and freesound.org guru, will judge the results. Deadline: May 28.

Produce the best sound or the best patch, and you get the controller above and accompanying software. But the for third competition, you get the futuristic controller of your dreams. You submit the idea, and Digitópia builds the results. The entrants are judged on “innovation, originality, feasibility and inclusive potential.” (Yes, it needs to be feasible in order for them to build it — no electronic music equivalents of The Homer.)

Oh, yes, and the Dreams Competition has me as the judge. Deadline: April 3. Keep a dream journal.

The beauty of all of this is that these are contests that give back. We’ll have sounds, patches, inventions, and hardware documentation for the prize and the entrants; stay tuned as that documentation becomes available.

Speaking of getting something out of this for yourself… don’t have any dream ideas? No good at Max and Pd patching? For an absurdly-cheap €15 for three whole days of seminars, Digitópia will teach you patching skills in these two tools. Jeez, for that price, you could afford a flight to beautiful Portugal and still come out ahead. No details on the new seminars for spring up yet, but I’ll put up a notice when they are. (I’m also teaching a seminar at Digitópia the first week of June.)

Digitópia Competitions 2010

Digitópia – Platform for the Development of Digital Music Communities

Thanks to a snow storm, I was home today.  I used the time to finish a very complicated piece, “Dreams from the Shore.”  You can listen to it either on the FAWM site or on SoundClick.

This is my third song in as many days — FAWM 2010 is going pretty well, so far.  But of course if things follow tradition, they will fall apart right in the middle (about song #7 or ;-)

Here’s what I wrote for my “liner notes” on FAWM:

You have to listen closely to hear the special feature of this song. The percussion on this track was a jazz brush set. I’m using a wire brush on a snare, as well as on the ride cymbal.

The other instruments:

Fretless bass (Fender J-bass).

Nord Rack 2X (best synth ever ).

Ibanez Artcore hollow body guitar. Yes, this is the one strung with the .015 – .056 gauge strings:

http://www.juststrings.com/lab-20ph.html

A lot of guitarists hear that and think, ‘ouch’. But the action on this instrument is very low, and the fact that they are flatwound makes this a very easy instrument to play — there is next door to no string noise, and a big, big sound.

The meaning of the title: it looks like I’m on an ‘ocean’ theme, for now. In a way this is an answer to the previous song (Sailing Into Night Time), except seen from the shore.

This song was composed and performed using natural rhythm only — without a metronome, click track, or drum machine. “No Robots Allowed” is my theme, and here are the rules I’m following:

http://bmccosar.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/the-robot-rules/

Just as a bit of trivia, the last time I played brushes on a recording was for some of the songs on my third Jamendo album, La vie sous la mer.

As you may or may not be aware, the Arch Linux repositories have undergone a major rebuild.

Our repositories contain a good deal of packages of graphical software that may break due to this update, so we request that you hang tight and report such packages to the forums instead of the bugtracker (since we still do not have a proper list).

In the meantime, we will of course be hunting these packages down ourselves, but the rebuilds if necessary will take a little time.

Thank you for the patience!

Ardour 2.8.7 has been released and can be downloaded now. This is a bug fix release almost exclusively focused on OS X. These fixes enable correct operation and use of several "families" of AU plugins, including those from Stillwell/Schwa. If you've had issues with some AU's even after the 2.8.5 fixes, this is worth trying. Linux users who do not use the Czech translation have little reason to upgrade at this time.

Fixes

• Smarter decision making when deciding which in/out configuration to choose when handling an AU plugin that has several.
• When exporting/bouncing/consolidating, tell AU plugins the new processing blocksize so they will actually run during the process. Yes, that means what you think it means.
• Remove use of std::locale() which is utterly and completely broken on OS X, and causes a program to crash if used with any actual national locale.
• Don't reconfigure I/O of AU plugins when they already have the correct I/O configuration

Translation

Updated Czech translation from Pavel Fric

Contributors

Ben Loftis, Paul Davis, Pavel Fric

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Preparations

The tempo is something you should already have set before you came to the editing part of your recording. If you’re importing loops you can use BPMdetect to find it and with the metronome adjust the project tempo.

Grid

With the grid you can define the points for your editing and the resolution can be set with beats and bars for fast and accurate editing. You can see it represented by the vertical lines in the project window. With the signature 4/4 we get four editing points within one bar if the grid is set to beats. To get more accuracy, adjusting the grid to beats/4 gives us 4 editing points within a beat and 16 within a bar. The most accurate we can get is by choosing beat/32 witch gives us 32 predefined editing points within one beat.

If that just isn’t good enough for your needs then you can turn the grid off to find an absolute point.

Split

To split a track hover the mouse pointer over the area where you want the separation to occur. Then press the key “s”. When the track is split we get two parts, which in Ardour are called regions. You’ll see they individually get different names.

Trim

At the bottom of a region there is a coloured area. By hovering it you’ll discover a double arrow. Dragging it along the base line will let you adjust the size of the region.

Fades

There are fade boxes in the top corners of a region if you hover it. They enables you to handle fade in/outs.

If you have regions overlapping each other the default Ardour configuration will apply a crossfade between them to smoothen the transmission. However this functionality can be disabled in the options menu, crossfades → active.

Layers

If your regions are overlapping and the crossfade functionality is switched off, only the top layer will be played  throughout the overlapping section. To control the playback the regions can be brought to the top or background layer under the region menu.

Gain

The fast way of adjusting the volume of a region is by accessing the region menu where you find the function boost and cut gain. This will change the gain of the whole region.

If you want a more dynamic change there is the possibility to automate the volume change. If you right-click the region and look under it’s individual name, you can make the volume line visible by choosing “envelope visible”. Draw the desired gain curve with the drawing tool and make the automation active or inactive by turning it on and off with the function “envelope active”.

It’s pretty creative to use a 9v battery as an enclosure. That’s what [Osgeld] did when building this amplifier. There are several advantages; they’re easy to find, it keeps a bit of the dead battery out of the landfill, and this method provides a built-in connector for a 9v power source. In this case the circuit is built around a LM386 audio amplifier. It’s glued to the back of a potentiometer and wired up with the other components for a package smaller than a quarter. A stereo jack reside in the side of the battery case with a cable and alligator clips for connection with a speaker. Now the amp can be quickly connect to any 4-8 ohm speaker.

Whew.  Two songs in two days.  My second song of FAWM 2010 is “Sailing Into Night Time.”  (You can hear it on the FAWM site or on SoundClick.)

Here’s what I wrote for my “liner notes” on FAWM.  (Like I said before — I’m posting them here as well, because the FAWM site doesn’t stay up all year.  Plus, here I can actually add inline links.)

Note: this song starts slow, but changes to a nice conga groove at about the 1:00 mark. So if you’re impatient, just run the clock forward

My second song of FAWM 2010 features hand percussion. Back in 2007, I got a set of three Meinl Woodcraft Congas — tumba, conga, and quinto. These appeared on my second Jamendo album, handmade, which featured all hand drums. They’ve moved with me all the way from Florida to Virginia.

The second thing I like about the song is the sound of the guitar I’m using — a Breedlove classical. For this sort of song, with the style of chords I’m using, nylon strings are ideal.

Here’s the image that goes with the song: twilight at sea, near enough to see the shoreline. The sun sets. Lights go on in the towns; the water reflects these lights, which shimmer on the waves. Overhead, the stars appear one by one.

This song was composed and performed using natural rhythm only — without a metronome, click track, or drum machine. “No Robots Allowed” is my theme, and here are the rules I’m following:

http://bmccosar.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/the-robot-rules/

Twelve songs remaining.  Twenty six days left.

People sometimes criticize a piece of software as being "unintuitive". In fact, its one of the most common complaints you'll hear whenever anyone starts using a new piece of software. Its often entirely justified too - its rare that a complex application manages to be obvious to every new user, or even most new users. Some software developers have a good track record here, Apple in particular, whose rules and guidelines for how to design user interfaces keeps on manage to churn out remarkably intuitive software. Well, it does as long the application is fairly simple and its scope is well defined. By the time you get to applications such as Final Cut Pro or Logic Pro, it would be hard to find anyone who found them "intuitive" in the same way that, say, iTunes or even Garageband is. Read more below ...

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I made it.  Song #1 of FAWM 2010 is “How Many Miles Beyond?” (You can hear it on the FAWM site or on SoundClick).

Here’s what I wrote for my “liner notes” on FAWM.  (I’m posting them here as well, because the FAWM site doesn’t stay up all year.)

The origin of the title:

One of my favorite books is the collected Amber stories of Roger Zelazny. There’s always a line I remember . . . “How many miles to Avalon? None, I say, and all.”

(This is of course related to the nursery rhyme “How many miles to Babylon”, source of the term “Babylon Candle” in Neil Gaiman’s “Stardust”.)

Anyway, the title . . . I guess you could say this is a song about how the familiar places in life grow strange, and in many ways more distant, with time. Certainly I feel that when I go to my home town (LaFayette, GA).

This song was composed and performed using natural rhythm only — without a metronome, click track, or drum machine. “No Robots Allowed” is my theme, and here are the rules I’m following:

http://bmccosar.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/the-robot-rules/

As of 4 pm today, I had nothing — “How Many Miles Beyond” was composed, recorded, and mixed in about 5 hours!  For me, that’s some sort of record.

And now I’ve built up a one day lead.

Remaining: 13 songs in 27 days.

I don't usually write book reviews, but this one is special. My friend and colleague Daniel James has written an introduction to the world of media production with Linux, or as the subtitle describes it, "A manual for creative media on a modest budget". I'll put the spoiler right up front: This book is wonderful and is an essential read for all artistically-inclined Linux users. Read on to find out why I think so.

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Oh Sunday, boring Sunday... :o) Well, swing-quantize has just sneaked in the SVN trunk (qtractor-0.4.5.1502+). You can bear this from MIDI clip editor's (aka piano-roll) Tools/Quantize... menu.

Basically, the way I've implemented it, is kind of a deformed grid quantization, which distorts even numbered (beat, quarter-note, seminima, whatever) divisions by a given percentage, something that can pictured as follows....

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A short look at our current state of the arts. This actually serves as a showcase to attract singers to join and share their lyrics.

Recorded directly to stereo with Audacity Mixed with Ardour Effects mainly by LinuxDSP

Tomorrow it begins . . . FAWM 2010.

FAWM

The goal is to write 14 songs in the 28 days of February.  I’ve already developed the composition rules I’ll be following, as well as my album cover / theme, No Robots Allowed.

Now all that remains is to write and record 14 songs

Music Hosting

In the past, I’ve relied on SoundClick to host the music I create during FAWM.  Last year, the site went down right in the middle of my run.  I had to make an emergency stop at Google Sites to continue.

This year, yes, I will be hosting my music at SoundClick.  However, I’ve also taken FAWM up on their offer of on-site file hosting.  My music should, therefore, appear in the jukebox on FAWM’s front page — along with everyone else’s!

Jamendo

Good news on the Jamendo front.  Two days ago, Sylvain Zimmer (from the Jamendo administrative team) posted this message to the forum:

Thanks all for your support

We’ve been working in our “war room” all week, and it has been quite a ride.

I will definitely have good news to announce in the next few days.

In the meantime, keep the questions/ideas coming, if possible about the future jamendo because that’s we’re talking about now

cheers

Just a month ago, when I got the news of Jamendo’s troubles, I really thought it was the end.  Over the past three years, I’ve dedicated a lot of time and energy into the site — I’ve made it my flagship.  The news that my flagship might be sinking was rather disheartening!

With all that going on, and the Save Jamendo campaign we launched, I wasn’t sure if I would have the energy or the enthusiasm to do FAWM this year.  In the end, I gambled — I said I’d do it anyway, regardless of whether I had a musical home or not.

It turned out to be one of those times where a leap of faith was justified.  For now, the future looks much better.  I can take on FAWM with, if not answers, at least solutions already in progress.

Uvumi

At the same time, this experience has taught me the wisdom of the phrase “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”  I think it’s time that I got my music further out there, and appeared on more sites.

I need to diversify.  Jamendo will remain my home; but I would like some additional options.

Therefore, I’ve actually started a user page at an up-and-coming music site called Uvumi.  Right now I’m still learning the system and experiencing the site as a listener.  But one day, in the future, it could become a sort of second home on the internet.

Sites may come and go.  We support the sites we love.  But if I’ve learned one thing in the last 41 years, it’s that all things are mortal, even places, even ideas.  My music is all I have to leave the world; I’d like it to have as many options for a long life as possible.

[Pat Metheny] has a robot armada backing him up when he performs on stage. They’re going on tour and he’s done an interview explaining his mechanical band. Like the auto-drummer, this setup uses multitudes of solenoids to play the percussion instruments, each getting commands from a computer. It’s pretty wicked to see him use his guitar as a marimba controller; it’s so responsive that he can tremolo and the solenoid follows in kind.

But there’s a lot more going on here. We love to see crazy facial hair from time-to-time, but this guy’s just got crazy hair! This easy listening isn’t exactly hair-band material but more like live-action Animusic. It’s also reminiscent of the automated orchestras at House on the Rock, an attraction you may remember reading about in American Gods. It’s fun to kid, but whether you like the music or not, he’s certainly talented when it comes to this genre.

[Thanks Grey]

iPad
1GHz Apple A4
No firewire or USB
Microphone
Few advanced music apps available but some simple.

indamixx
Intel 800 Mhz CPU (SSE 2)
USB no firewire
Microphone
More advanced music apps  available

Made with

LMMS Ardour Ladspa Jamin

MusixBr - Adriane 2.0 RC6

http://musix.codigolivre.org.br

For those who like to build Rakarrack from sources and stay up to date with current development, notice all recent activity is happening in the git master repository.

CVS is being held stable for 0.4.x releases, which will be bug fixes and efficiency improvements to the current 0.4.2 release.  No new features will appear in CVS.

Recently added to git:

Steve Harris LADSPA Valve emulator.

Dual Flanger w/ through-zero switch.  Width/Depth are expressed in frequency instead of delay time.  Sweep is interpreted as an exponential filter frequency sweep where the depth frequency indicates the lowest frequency notch, and width indicates filter frequency deviation.

Ring modulator:  Another LADSPA plugin adapted to Rakarrack program structure.

There were some major changes to the program structure for 0.5.0, most of which are invisible to the user, but necessary to continue development.  These “growing pain” changes for 0.5.0 are through the worst, so the git repository is now stable enough for every-day use.

Site updates

finally i fixed the apache config, and the redirects of the backend paster are properly reverse proxied again. So login should work again. I also added a set of tracs:

ttsoot is a nice c++0x experiment, to create dsp graphs with massive inlining. quite a fun project.

tschack tracs the jack1 smp version. its still quite young, but it seems to be quite stable already.

Lahar played the Boom Boom Room last night, the same night that French pop sensations Phoenix were playing a sold-out show across the street at the Fillmore. Their show let out fairly early, so we had a good crowd, thanks to the doorman doing a great job pulling in people leaving the show who wanted to hang out and party some more.

Including… the guys from Phoenix themselves, who came and hung out and caught most of our second set. We all said hi to them; they’re really chill dudes. They complimented us, and seem to have enjoyed what we were doing, which was very nice.

Good sense of humor too: I asked them if they could recommend any booking agents in France who might work with smaller bands such as us, and one of them suggested talking to Sarkozy, apparently intending to have a bit of fun at the expense of an ign’int American. No way, man, I replied, I don’t want to deal with no right wingers. But Mitterand seemed like he was an alright guy though. And the dude looked a bit surprised that an American musician would actually know not only the current and one of the past presidents of France, but also what their political inclinations were.

I also complimented them on their crowd, since a good number of our audience was overflow from their show, and the Phoenix dude said he was glad to have warmed up for us. That was pretty funny too. I replied that we were honored to have played their after-party, which was a lot more accurate.

Nice guys. I felt slightly embarassed that I knew nothing about their music, but that’s probably fine; they just wanted to hang out and have a drink or two anyway. Vive le France!

Sometimes it’s really hard to find just that piece of information one needs to get done with the work. Searching a program’s homepage, looking around in the uncountable forums or playing with the settings can be very time consuming. On one of that journeys I passed by a site which I have seen before but did not remember: http://en.flossmanuals.net/ – “Free manuals for free software”. Concerning music making I was happy to see the new Ardour manual and an Audacity manual.

There are many more documents about streaming, video editing and graphic design software, general Linux commands and other. The site is nicely made, very appealing to the eye and comes as well in other languages than English, however not all of the manuals are translated. Maybe YOU want to supply one?

Apple’s iPad is here. It starts at $499. It’s a gorgeous, brilliantly-designed device that has the benefits of Apple’s cleverly-engineered, best-in-class developer tools for mobile. A lot are likely to sell. And unfortunately, to me that means bad news for the kind of creative computing we talk about on this site.

To put it briefly, I think the new, mobile Apple is doing immense harm to the computing legacy the company has forged. We could have had a Mac tablet today. Instead, we have a giant iPhone – and that’s a decision that has some serious repercussions. It’s a blow to open source alternatives, but also to open development in general: the power of interchangeable hardware and software, on which everything we do with music and visuals on computers is based.

For years, the Mac community railed against the perceived closed nature of Microsoft. Now, many are rallying behind an Apple with a vision more closed than Redmond’s.

This is important to both CDMs, because it’s on both these sites that I, along with readers and contributors, have advocated open computing as a creative outlet, for creation, sharing, and distribution of music, visuals, and knowledge.

I’m entirely biased by my own perspective. There are certain things I care about, that I believe in. I can talk about the technical, measurable values of each of those, but I can only speak for myself. With that in mind, the iPad, in a single device, embodies the exact opposite of all the reasons I’ve invested so much time in computing for the last 25 years.

• It’s a closed platform. As with the iPhone, development for the iPad means reliance on Apple’s tools, on the use of proprietary Apple hardware and software just to build an app. Now, those could be worthy sacrifices for a great product. But it also means that Apple alone distributes applications, and decides which applications developers will be allowed to create – something that has never been true on a computing OS. Since the unveiling of the iPhone SDK, Apple apologists argued that somehow this was a decision made by phone carriers, that surely their beloved Apple was not to blame. Yet Apple has chosen that path for a device that, while it lacks a keyboard, otherwise looks for all the world like a computer – like something that could have been a Mac, with all the power and freedom of a Mac, instead of an iPhone.
• It has no standard ports. Like the iPhone, the iPad has only a proprietary dock connector, ensuring Apple has control over the hardware made for the device. You can throw away decades of the lessons of the value of standard connectors, of the freedom to connect a computer as – to use a phrase Apple popularized – a digital hub. There’s not even HDMI to connect to a display. Clarification: video out will be possible, albeit with a proprietary adapter. And *access* to that video port from software has been a huge problem on the iPhone. See additional notes on Create Digital Motion. Additionally, the possibilities of external hardware are not entirely known. Apple will offer a memory card reader adapter that uses USB. But there isn’t a native USB port on the machine, and this doesn’t necessarily suggest full support for USB; hopefully, additional details will emerge.
• It’s tied to iTunes. As with the iPhone, you can’t use the iPad’s drive as a drive. You can’t connect it to a computer and put on it what you like. You’re limited to using third-party apps as conduits or servers – and even then, you’re limited; critical files for media and reading are controlled by Apple’s market-dominating iTunes app. It’s a storage device you own, but that someone else controls. Maybe that’s acceptable for game consoles, but, again, the iPad has the appearance of a computer. (Except, of course, it’s actually not.)
• Apple alone controls the distribution of media. Apple already has a dangerously dominant position in the consumption of music and mobile software, and their iTunes-device link ensures that content goes through their store, their conduit, and ultimately their control. This means that developers are limited in what they can create for the device when it comes to media – a streaming Last.fm app is okay, but an independent music store (like Amazon MP3 on Android) is not. Now, you can add to that Apple dominating book distribution. At a time when we have an opportunity to promote independent e-book publishing, the iPad is accompanied by launch deals from major traditional publishers. What does that mean for independent writers and content? Updated: As several readers have noted, one positive sign is that Apple’s book application supports the open epub format. We’ll see how this works, and how this interoperates with other devices over the coming days and months. (And it’s important, too – this is not Create Digital Books, but a lot of the information we want to read is published in e-books.)
• It’s not an open computer. It’s not a Mac. The bottom line: you can’t do the things that an open computing experience allows. You can’t connect the hardware you want, develop or run the software you want, or have the open-ended experience computers have provided. That’s not to say a tablet or slate or pad or whatever you want to call it needs to be exactly like other computers. On the contrary: if you believe in the computing experience, you believe it should work in new and creative form factors. (There was a time when the clamshell laptop was a new idea, remember, a time when computers were giant bricks you plugged into a TV.)

Limitations are a wonderful thing. Specialized operating systems for mobile make perfect sense. But that’s a design decision – it’s about the interface, the developer tools, the hardware. A mobile device can work just as well without being tied to iTunes or with actual ports on it.

I know what the objection will be: but this computer isn’t “for” people like me. But that’s the whole problem. Apple threatens to split computing into two markets, one for “traditional,” “real” computers, and another for passive consumption devices that try to play games without physical controls and let you read books, watch movies, play music, and run apps so long as you’re willing to go through the conduit of a single company.

And, of course, this wouldn’t be worth my breath if not for my real concern: what if Apple actually succeeds? What if competitors follow this broken path, or fail to offer strong alternatives? The iPad today is a heck of a lot slicker than alternatives. It’s bad news for Linux, Windows, and Android, none of which have really workable competitors yet. It’s especially bad for Linux, in fact, which had a real chance to make its mark on mobile devices. Edit: Actually, one major advantage of a big, splashy Apple announcement – a number of those manufacturers have started talking about their rivals, already in the pipeline.

These issues have always been a matter of open debate. Jean-Louis Gassée infamously got an “OPEN MAC” license plate for his car during the early days of Apple Macintosh. The “open” vision was the vision we got. It’s the Mac II. It’s the expansion capabilities of the Mac that allowed PostScript support, which let the Mac launch computer desktop publishing and ensured the survival of the platform. And it was a vision in contrast to that of one (younger) Steve Jobs, who argued against expansion and nearly made the Mac a failure, another forgotten 80s oddity. It was after Jobs was forced out of the company that the Mac platform, the Mac community as we now know it were really forged, built on the expansion and flexibility those later Macs offered. That expansion port was what enabled early products from Digidesign, which would later become Pro Tools – the very birth of digital audio production.

Like I said, I’m biased by my own opinion. But it’d be unfair, after years of being hard on small developers when it comes to issues of openness, if I held back here. This is the world’s self-proclaimed “largest mobile manufacturer,” the company that, as it reminds us in every press release, launched the computing revolution. I wish I understood why they were now running away from some of the basic ideas that made that revolution possible.

This is what I asked in January 2007 on this site, shortly after the original iPhone was launched:

“1. Will Apple lock down the iPhone, blocking Flash, Java, custom widgets, and open development from its new platform?

2. Could Apple’s multi-touch patents actually stifle growth of new, interactive displays?”

Unfortunately, that turned out to prescient. As for point #2, and perhaps no fault of Apple’s, it’s apparent that multi-touch gestures are now missing in prominent platforms like the Android because of fear of litigation. (Yes, the Droid in my pocket has multi-touch and even a multi-touch API, but nothing in the shipping apps, apparently because someone’s legal department got involved.)

And as for point one, just compare what you can do with a Mac to what you can do with an iPhone.

Ironically, at that same show, I saw the very thing the Mac users most badly wanted: a Mac tablet. But because an independent developer had to hack that product together, it was overpriced and not terribly useful. At the same time, I know some people bought them, because that’s what they wanted. They wanted a Mac tablet.

Ironically, the biggest disadvantage of the iPad is that it’s not a Mac. So now we wait and see if someone can come up with intelligent new tablets that are at least more like PCs.

I know who I’m rooting for. And it’s not this.

Clarifications / thoughts from comments:

Of course, comments are here so that we can have a spectrum of opinions, and believe me, I do read and listen – including (sometimes especially) those with a different perspective than my own.

Some issues worth clarifying, respective to the above:

Several readers pointed out that I’m oversimplifying some of the relative historic “openness” of Apple. When the “Open Mac” battle was raging in the early Mac days (leading to the SE and Mac II), the connectors were indeed often still proprietary. The question was more whether to have ports or expansion at all. In the defense of the early Apple engineers, recall that, with the exception of formats like serial, standards were not as evolved as technologies like USB today. Even though there were already IBM clones, they were clones of IBM PCs, literally, not the open-ended PC market we have today. So readers are absolutely right – I was blurring some of the issues here. At the same time, this only underlines my point.

We’re again revisiting the question of what “consumers” need. The reason Jobs was opposed to ports, expansion, and the general ability of a user to service or upgrade a machine was because he perceived a need for a “consumer” device. In other words, he was making the argument then that his design is making now, and that some commenters are making, as well. Jobs was forced out of Apple, and the “Open Mac” won – and the rest is history. But my devil’s advocate question would be, given that computers with expandability won out in the 80s, why are we in a rush to eliminate that functionality now, in 2010, when even average consumers are more demanding and less afraid of technology? Is that who this is really for, or by the very virtue of its limitations, is this just a toy for gadget lovers? (I’m not asking that rhetorically; I think the readers making this argument have a point, and I’d be curious to hear people follow up.)

The other question is whether Apple was “open” in the intervening time period. However, here I have to invoke some history. Apple under Sculley was working very hard on interoperability with IBM, even though that ultimately failed. The Mac platform may have run a different OS, but it also embraced and/or helped popularize serial ports (hello MIDI), SCSI, and 3.5″ floppy drives (standard storage for the time). Under Amelio, Apple even pursued cloning – before Jobs reigned it in. (I’m not arguing that was a smart business decision, but it did at least qualify as “open.”) Mac OS X and modern Mac hardware are replete with standards, the Safari team is by far the most active contributor to WebKit, and the Apple OS team continues to work hard on interoperability.So, I may have been oversimplifying, too, but I can at least say this particular product is not characteristic of some of the more “open” behavior of Apple in other areas.

Finally, many of the comparisons have been made to the Lemur. I agree the Lemur hardware is aging and the software is relatively inflexible (certainly more so than apps made with the iPhone SDK). As for specifics of how the devices compare in multi-touch accuracy, or whether users will be as satisfied with the iPad as a wireless controller versus the Lemur’s Ethernet cord, that remains worth discussing.

Side note: Nowhere did I say that the alternative to an iPad has to be open source. I’m a huge fan of open source and truly free software. But by the measures above, Windows qualifies as open.

Audio processing and synthesis plugins are always a lively topic for musicians. Many contemporary music-makers rely completely upon their plugin collection for all their sound sources and processing routines, and it is not at all uncommon to discover that some of these composers have never learned to play a traditional instrument. However you feel about audio plugins they are a fact of life in modern music production.

read more

This is the multichord, a one-string musical instrument built by [Christopher Mitchell]. The string is a 20 pound mono-filament thread stretched between a wooden bridge and the read/write head of a hard drive. The idea is that the vibrations of the string are picked up and amplified acoustically by the sounding box that serves as the body of the instrument. The frequency of vibration (pitch) is changed by adjusting the tension of the string through the application of various voltages to the HDD head. A relief spring has been added to the head to take the resting tension off of it, making it a lot easier to fine-tune the settings for each note. A keyboard made of twelve buttons selects each different pitch as the string is plucked.

[Christopher] is continuing to post great hacks; we’ve seen a glove input and a giant VU meter from him in the past. Take a look at the multichord in action after the break.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

Ardour 2.8.6 is released. There is only one one difference to 2.8.5 - VST-enabled builds for Linux are possible. There are no functional changes, and absolutely no changes for OS X, so I am leaving the current version for OS X at 2.8.5. The release was done mostly for the sake of those Linux distributions which provide a VST enabled build and don't like to work directly from SVN.

The theme for my FAWM 2010 effort is “No Robots Allowed“.  A few days ago, I posted the original album cover art.  Today I’m presenting a draft of the composition rules I’ll be following in February.

Every year that I do FAWM, I choose a theme to challenge myself.  This year, I am doing away with all electronically generated beats.  The effect I’m striving for is organic rhythm — that is, the music is on beat, but the tempo is free to develop as the song progresses.

Why Bother?

This is something that has been lost in the age of sequencers, drum tracks, and MIDI quantization.  Although I never use quantization, my last few Jamendo albums have featured some very nice “hybrid” rhythm tracks: they are a mixture of electronic and live drums.

In one way, this is a type of freedom — I can compose any beat, and through careful manipulation, it will be jazzy, groovy, driving, whatever I want, whenever I want, exactly as imagined, with no errors.

In another way, however, it is a type of trap.  The music becomes “locked in” to a particular tempo, say 120 beats per minute, and stays there the entire song.

Now, it is possible to compose a rhythm track that alters tempo during the song — I did this very thing on “Hypothermia / The Illusion of Warmth” (from La vie sous la mer).  But it’s rather difficult to play after becoming accustomed to the constant beat of a drum track.

There are things in music, then, that are missing from a pure electronic composition — rubato, for instance.  This month, I’m going to try to add some of these things back.  Here’s how.

The Robot Rules

The rules below apply only to recorded tracks.  I am still free to use a metronome during practice time, or while developing a song.  The purpose of these rules is to ensure that the driving element of the song’s rhythm is, ultimately, the human nervous system, not a machine.

1. No sequencer, drum machine, metronome, or click track allowed.
2. All rhythms “natural.” If the tempo gradually drifts from 108 to 118 bpm in the course of the song, so be it.
3. Samples and MIDI are permitted, as long as they are “human triggered.”
4. Arpeggiators are NOT permitted.
5. Delays are permitted if they are very short, eg echo or slapback. Long, repeating delays that in themselves establish a tempo are not allowed.
6. Modulation effects (chorus, flange, phaser) at a particular tempo are allowed, provided they are long enough (or subtle enough) that their “beats” are not readily recognizable.

Final clause (the “escape clause”): these rules can be modified as the situation warrants.  In other words, I might learn things during the course of FAWM that require a meaningful change to the rules above.

With that said . . . FAWM begins in one week.  Looks like it’s practice time.

SCNR ;) mostly yet another bug-fix-regression dot release, nuff said.

Qtractor 0.4.5 (friskier demivierge) is out!

Change-log:

• Changing loop points while playback is rolling, with the play-head any near, was leaving audio clips out-of-sync.
• MIDI event list view was missing some selected items with the very same onset time, now fixed.
• When failing to detect a SSE enabled build, the CFLAGS variables are now properly restored to their previous sane state, preventing all subsequent dependency tests from false positives (bug# 565860@bugs.debian.org).
• MIDI clip editor (aka piano-roll) multiple selection has been fixed (again) re. move/paste-snapping consistency.

read more

Just a quick announcement, today.  Two days ago, the Jamendo community posted a list of important questions for the site’s administrators.  Yesterday the response came back.  I will summarize the three important points (as I see them) here.

Finances

The goal is to get the site to a break even point.  To get there, an initial donation campaign may be necessary.  However, the focus is on becoming more efficient so that big donation campaigns are not the norm.

Site Status

Attaining greater efficiency means dropping some of the sites features — however, these are the ones least used and hardest to maintain.  Some community collaboration in fixing errors is envisioned.

The Future

Finally, I quote directly Sylvain Zimmer’s answer when asked about the site’s future:

Our only plan is to choose a plan to continue There have been several of those presented to the board and we are currently very hard at work analyzing them and finding the right one for everybody. Once it’s choosen there will of course be an announcement. But the fact that we’ve received several offers kind of guarantees the continuity of the service. So that’s good news for Jamendo and that’s why I’m a bit optimistic, even if I don’t know 100% of what will happen in the next few weeks.

Meaning?

It looks like I still have a musical home.  Better yet, here’s how I said it in the forum:

Probably the fastest route to panic is seeing the things you love in danger. I’ve certainly been there over the past few weeks. For those of us who spread the word and mobilized the support … reading this is much like seeing the rainbow after the thunderstorm.

Snippets!

 

 

 

Greetings all, and we hope all of you have had a decent start to the New Year, and that it continues. Christopher and I have continued to work behind the scenes, building, testing, and evaluating, so i'd like to bring some of our discoveries up to date, and share what we've found......

read more

Ardour 2.8.5 has been released. Although I had hoped that the next release would be an alpha version of 3.0, we have accumulated too many critical bug fixes and a few nice to have features to let 2.8.5 wait any longer. OS X users of Ardour are STRONGLY recommended to immediately upgrade to fix a number of nasty problems that should now be gone. Similarly, anyone using MIDI control surfaces with a "Stop" transport button should upgrade NOW to avoid data loss when recording and using that button. Read more below for detailed release notes ...

read more

See rakarrack-users mailing list for announcement, and recent blogs for more information.

A tip for Rakarrack users upgrading from an old version:

The default GUI theme has changed from the 0.3.0 blue theme.  When you install the new version, Rakarrack will keep the same theme (colors/text/buttons) configuration you had before.  These settings are saved in your user home directory under .fltk/rakarrack.sf.net.    If you want to remove the color scheme you are using in your current version and use the new 0.4.2 theme, delete the rakarrack.sf.net/rakarrack.prefs file before installing 0.4.2. If you want to keep the color scheme you had before, you don’t need to do anything when you install 0.4.2 — the default behaviour is to preserve your user settings.

Of course, you can rename that directory, let rakarrack install the new default, and if you like your own theme better, just copy your old rakarrack.prefs file over the new one, and it’s back to what you had before.

[Benjamin] built a sequencer that uses a turntable and light sensors to lay down a funky beat. If you like creepy videos with repeated gratuitous corderoy-clad rear-ends we’ve got you covered after the break. Art film aside, he’s got an interesting project. Four light sensors are mounted below the turning record with LEDs hovering above. His hatred for old LP records is apparent because holes must be drilled in a disc for the light to shine through. The four notes in the sequence can be altered in voice and color, along with controls for motor speed and direction. The project also has four manual inputs to add some variety to the repetitive beat sequence. It’s a bit less practical than the penny sequencer but fun none-the-less.

[Thanks Cole]

Hi guys,

I have recently stumbled upon an excellent series of books/ebooks that explain how to get the most out of your home recording studio. It’s written in an interesting and down-to-earth manner, however the author, Brandon Drury, doesn’t leave out any of the gory details. The details are particularly gory because this book collection is known as The Killer Home Recording System.

If you click on the advert below, you will be able to get the first book in this series (Killer Home Recording - Setting Up) for free. From this you will be able to tell if you like the author’s style and info. Then when you’re ready to get more advanced, you can purchase the other books in the series that interest you.

With book titles like the ones listed below,  this series is definitely worth investigating for any home recording enthusiast.

• Murderous Mixing
• Audio Engineering
• Acoustic Guitar
• Electric Guitar
• Vocals
• Bass
• Drums

.

Artists and creators around the world have been moved by the suffering of Haitians in the wake of last week’s earthquake. There are ways we can help, like giving to relief organizations to give them the capacity to respond wherever needed. The next crisis could be halfway across the world or in our own neighborhood.

The monome community is about more than just the button-grid, open-source controller with which they work. They’re an example of the kind of collective spirit that musicians, digital or otherwise, can share internationally (see the map of these artists below). And they’ve put together a really beautiful, Creative Commons-licensed compilation of music.

Artists (including one track from the co-creators of the monome, Kelli and Brian): einpuls, Visinin, The General, Pauk, Glimmertone, Watson, Math Rosen, Lokey, Island Dweller, Oldman Intel, Made By Robot, Auditory Canvas, I Am Genko, Raja The Resident Alien, Samuel and the Dragon, Damien Shingleton, Maersk, The Superorganism, Modulogeek+Shoemucker, Beatpoet, The B-Roll, Hypno|sapien, Kid_Sputnik, The Sweaty Caps, HenderSounds, Dat Niks Klank, Swimming, Kcain/Tehn.

Full album:
http://einpuls.bandcamp.com/

100% of the proceeds go to Médecins Sans Frontières; the 27-track is pay-what-you-wish for $1 or more, downloadable in high-quality MP3, FLAC, and other formats.

And that’s just one way to help; there are others.

From the monome compilation press release:

The monome user base is a collection of people from across the world, brought together via the innovative, open source music production hardware that is the monome, They pride themselves on a tight-knit, proactive, and helpful community (post.monome.org), where collaborations and projects are frequently happening, the outputs of which range from new software patches to share, to Creative Commons track and album collaborations.

When the community came up with the idea of a compilation album to generate charity donations in light of the terrible disaster in Haiti, einpuls started gathering tracks for the album and the monome community answered swiftly with more than 25 tracks being submitted in just a couple of days.

The community teamed up with Summer Rain Recordings to compile the compilation, with the end result being a 27 track album, each track contributed for free. The minimum price for the compilation has been set to $1 with no upper limit. Every penny helps, so please donate what you can.

Einpuls – Sugar High by Monome Community

View Monome Haiti 2010 in a larger map

Calls for the Red Cross, More

Ernst Nathorst-Böös, CEO of Propellerhead, noted that they were putting a call for the Red Cross into their newsletter:

…and he wondered what other members of the industry might be doing. Do let us know, as perhaps we can share ideas. (This is not an advertisement for Propellerhead; Ernst didn’t even ask me to publish this. I just like the way they did this, and personally find this an opportunity to run with the same idea.)

I’m going to use this as a reminder to do the same with the CDM newsletter, and also seek out ways we can generally devote some space to effective PSAs — not just those that you sometimes see by default from Google, but productive uses of our real estate. I couldn’t figure out whether there are official Red Cross badges to use, etc.; any ideas?

The Red Cross has a fantastic site that explains how you can give money:
http://www.redcross.org/en/givehere/

You can even walk into places like Starbucks and Walgreens and give there; see the full list. The other important thing about The Red Cross is their ability to plan resources for unexpected disasters worldwide. Haiti is a reminder of how fragile and unpredictable our world is.

The Red Cross does have to approve any fundraisers that use their name, though there is an application process and that doesn’t stop you from sending them money as you wish.

Other ideas for ways of proactively responding not only to this crisis, but others, as well? What are some of the tools we can use as a community to support the work these organizations do?

The Misa Digital Guitar is a digital music controller like we haven’t seen before. The body, machined out of ABS, looks like a guitar. The player puts theirs hands in the same places you would on a guitar but the lack of strings make it something different.

The left had manipulates inputs in the form of 144 sensors, six in each of the twenty-four fret positions. The right hand doesn’t strum, but uses a multitouch screen to control the inputs. The UI looks solid, something you’ll have to see for yourself after the break. Tieing this all together is an AMD Geode processor running Gentoo Linux. That means this is open source and begging you to make it do your bidding.

[Thanks Zerowizard]

OSMP Episode 31 - PLOrk!

Title:

Banter:

Software Releases:

Muse Hit's 1.0

http://muse-sequencer.org/

Rakarrack listens to PipeManMusic's rant and answers (not really) http://rakarrack.sourceforge.net/now.png

Audio Releases:

Tips:

IRC User Raboof mentions another cool metronome called Klick - this one supports Jack Audio

http://das.nasophon.de/klick/

IRC User danni submits this video link demonstrating Ladish session management for Jack

http://vimeo.com/8530340

IRC User TheJesus submits this link to an 808 sample pack and another link to more details on the sample pack.

http://thedeepelement.com/tr808

http://trashaudio.blogspot.com/2010/01/roland-tr-808-sample-pack.html

IRC User Anchakor submits this link for the Princeton Laptop Orchestra - or PLOrk

http://plork.cs.princeton.edu/

IRC User holstein submits this tutorial on using Muse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11VWsbeT35s

IRC User Stuzz submits this link to a new FOSS manual on Ardour

http://ardour.org/node/3274

Pat of The Linux Link Tech Show made an interesting post to his blog about the current state of linux audio. To quote the beginning excerpt from his blog

"So sound issues STILL plague Linux in general. I think we can all agree that the decision to make Pulse Audio the default sound daemon in Linux has resulted in mixed results at best. While the creator of Pulse Audio has repeatably claimed the issue was entirely the fault of Linux distribution maintainers for not implementing it properly it still continues to be an eyesore more than 3 years since it was first introduced."

Pat reminds us that back in 2005, Linspire was using Jack audio as the main sound server.

To quote from the final section from Pat's post

"Mark Shuttleworth should hire Paul Davis, the programmer who wrote JACK and Ardour. I guarantee the current audio issues in Linux would be resolved in under a year and for good. The only major challenge would be implementing a simplified configuration out of the box that 98% of users would be happy with. The remaining 2% could go to the âadvancedâ settings and do their multi-track recording."

Discussion

Pat's full post can be read here:

http://pdavila.homelinux.org:8080/blog/?p=369

OSMP asked Paul Davis to respond to the content of Pat's blog post.

Paul's response was that he thought the post was sweet, but answered pragmatically he has discouraged the use of Jack for Desktop audio use. I asked Paul to clarify, and he stated quote "Jack doesn't provide 30+% of

what desktop audio needs" End quote.

Steve then asked Paul, "In a perfect world, money and politics aside, would you like to see the whole Linux audio stack (basic and advanced) to be done on Jack?

Paul response was - Quote "Yes, in that perfect world, that's about right, alas, we don't live in that world." End Quote.

Paul went on to say - Quote "More precisely, I'd like to see

(a) ALSA slightly redesigned so that it could easily be used for low latency & low power situations with equal ease, and even at the same time. (b) An application layer library that provides blocking i/o for apps that don't want to do callback driven i/o. (c) Some way for JACK to do re-sampling. (d) A resolution of the netjack mess and way to get that working with huge ease. (e) Something very much like JACK at the core of it all.

Paul at this point gave respect to Lennart's efforts with Pulse audio stating

Quote: "Any attempt to fulfill the same role (as pulse) is going to run into the same issues. Part of the reason why JACK "Works" is because JACK sets the rules; Pulse tries to let apps set the rules and works with them as much as it can." End Quote.

Steve asked Paul if he thought the root cause of PULSE audio's challenges was ALSA?

Paul state - Quote "Not directly, ALSA is an extremely flexible HAL (hardware abstraction layer) that has allowed people to continue to write apps using very different strategies for audio i/o. It has also continued to support the old OSS API in addition. This means that the Linux audio landscape is littered with hundreds of applications each of which can have its own little quirks... ALSA is great; applications using ALSA is not so great." End Quote.

Dan asks Paul:

In your opinion, do you think that pulse is going to resolve the issues with desktop sound currently plaguing Linux?"

Paul responds - Quote "I believe that it *could* - I'm agnostic about whether or not it will." End Quote.

Steve then asked "Would the ALSA overhaul you suggested earlier replace jack and pulse or would they still be required but work better on that stack

Paul responded "The stack would just be more integrated it would still be ALSA. there would be something a lot like JACK. there might or might be something like Pulse depending on what you think pulse is. Lennart and i have actually talked about the ALSA part" End Quote.

Gear:

Announcements:

Play klaatu's Multimedia Sprint promo

When - Jan 26th 14:00 to 06:00 EST NYC Time - go to irc.binrev.net #media for more details.

IRC User and bassman extraordinaire Mike Holstein will begin a new segment entitled 3 minutes with The Theory Ninja.  :theoryninja@opensourcemusician.com for topic suggestions.

Tunestorm01 - see here: http://opensourcemusician.com/index.php/Tunestorm01

Rants/Calling BS:

Steve calls BS on himself for getting the song title wrong from last episode. One Hundred Owls is the project name and the song is called - Insert Here.

Tech Segment:

Introduction to acoustic treatment.

http://www.foambymail.com/

http://www.pmerecords.com/Diffusor.html

Listener Feedback:

Mark Rufino's email

Hardbop200's Voicmail about Ableton Live rant.

Contact Info:

Wiki:

http://opensourcemusician.com

E-Mails

osmp@pipemanmusic.com

Twitter and Identi.ca:

http://twitter.com/pipemanmusic http://identi.ca/pipemanmusic http://identi.ca/guitarman

Blogs:

http://pipemanmusic.blogspot.com http://www.deadbeatguitarist.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/index.rss

Voicemail:

http://opensourcemusician.libsyn.com Forums: http://www.linuxmusicians.com/viewforum.php?f=41 IRC: irc.freenode.net/#opensourcemusicians

Podcast Out! Song: Delta Noodles by Carl Stephenson http://carlstephenson.info

Sometimes you meet a couple who are totally in tune with each other, and this is what I try to capture with this gentle melody.

Here's the seventh and final part of my ongoing series.

One of the grandest sights in Delhi is Humayun's tomb, a predecessor of the greatest mausoleum of them all, the Taj Mahal:

A little bit further down a view on the garden:

From a different corner:

We'll finish with our last panorama that shows the courtyard the Jama Masjid of Old Delhi:

That's all panoramas from this trip. Thanks for your interest.

Found this nice and simple introduction into hacking with Arduino, so for instance you can create your own USB controler for music or interactive installations:

http://tuxradar.com/content/arduino-hardware-hacking-part-1
http://tuxradar.com/content/arduino-hardware-hacking-part-2
http://tuxradar.com/content/arduino-hardware-hacking-part-3

It doesn’t officially begin until February 1st — but today, I created the album art for my FAWM 2010 effort:

About the Title

Every year I do FAWM, I try to challenge myself with a particular goal.  Last year, it was unusual chord and harmonies.  This year, the title comes from my central idea: no drum machines, only natural beats.  Meaning, I will try to write songs that use the natural rhythm instruments at my disposal (bass, guitar, keys, and a few small drums and percussion instruments).

As in previous years, the songs will be hosted on SoundClick as I write them.  However, this year, FAWM actually offers on-site hosting (for donors and supporters, which I am).  My songs will be directly playable at the FAWM site itself.

How This Was Made

The art was created using Inkscape 0.47 (for the robot and “not allowed” symbol) and the GIMP 2.6.8 for everything else.

Which brings up a related point . . . .

Fedora 12 vs. Ubuntu 9.10

Last month, I switched my primary operating system at home from Ubuntu 9.10 (64 bit) to Fedora 12 (also 64 bit).  Probably I’ll have to write a separate article for the reasons why . . . for now, let me say I tried Fedora 12 (32 bit) on an old notebook, and found it remarkably stable.

So this marks the second year in a row that I will use a Fedora system for mixing and mastering.  In Unexpected Places was created on Fedora 10 / CCRMA, which, to me, was legendary in terms of stability and power.  It looks like I’m going to be using Audacity 1.3.9 for the bulk of the production.

As for the music itself?  As I said, FAWM begins February 1st.  Right now, time to get off of here and get some practice time in.