I had a real adventure last night, installing Windows 7. I ran into a problem so infuriating, and yet so completely boneheaded and ridiculous that I had to laugh. It’s described here. In essence, if you bought the EDU $29.95 Windows 7 Home Premium from Microsoft, the download file won’t actually work on 32-bit Windows XP. It unpacks all the files, and then tries to run a 64-bit
executable. Then it claims it can’t write to the install directory, instead of telling you the real problem — it can’t run the installer program.

Thank Jebus for the Internets — googling the error message turned up the forum discussion linked above and these
instructions on building a bootable Windows 7 Installation Disk.

I ran into another problem then — it might have been my issue, selecting the wrong install option from the menu, but I tried installs onto an existing Windows XP partition, and both ended up in an unbootable disk. Finally I punted — in XP, I deleted the partition on my new Windows 7 boot hard disk, and told it to do a full install. I was concerned this wouldn’t work, since I had the Upgrade and not the Full version, but apparently having a bootable XP disk elsewhere in the system let it do a clean install on an unformatted disk. Huzzah.

So I’ve spent several hours installing hardware drivers and my working set of software. Windows 7 feels faster than XP on the same hardware, but I’m not sure how much is actual performance improvements, and how much is having my main hard drive be a newer, faster hard drive.

The one big boo-hiss goes to M-Audio, who don’t have drivers for the Midisport 2×2 for 64 bit Vista or 7. WTF guys? Everything else seems to work great!

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

The way that Tim Exile’s “The Finger” is capable of completely destroying an audio source is intoxicating. I keep trying to use it ‘reasonably’ and end up doing things like this. Believe it or not, this started out as synth pad, a bassline, and a steady beat.

Then I started resampling the output of those things running through the Finger, then running the resampled audio back through the Finger, with the Finger automated with a lot of random keymashing. Then, while the mixdown was being rendered (in realtime, because there’s a juno 60 playing in there) I started randomizing The Finger’s patch, choosing different snapshots, morphing between snapshots …

I used to wonder how Rich Devine used to come up with some of the messed up sounds he did, and now I know: It’s a matter of Piling Things On Top Of Things.

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http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-AndNowForSomethingCompletelyAwful.mp3

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

So I downloaded the new ITunes last night, and tried out the Genius playlist feature. It is kind of amusing. First thing — it doesn’t know obviously, but it does a pretty good job if a track is in it’s database. For example if I chose Martyn’s “Vancouver” it puts together a playlist which is pretty much all dubstep — Scuba, 2562, Boxcutter, TRG, Burial, Blackdown, etc…

But I tried it on DJ Pierre’s “Box Energy”, and it starts out kinda OK — it grabs a couple Phuture tracks, some disco like Loleatta Holloway’s “Love Selection”, George Krans “Din Daa Daa”… but then it starts adding MGMT(?) Radiohead(??) , The Shins(???), Muse(????) and finishes it off with a healthy dose of Bloc Party.

As it happens, I at some point added my son Lucas’ ITunes library, as it existed about 3 years ago, so there are some things I don’t normally listen to. What the playlist really says is “OK here’s some old dance tunes, but dood that’s so 1989… let me play some shit I like.”

One of these things is not like the other!

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

I built a new computer.  I installed Windows XP SP3 on the new computer.  I install my working set of music software plus a few other essentials.  Everything works perfectly.

Except for 2 packages of VST plugins.  Every VST host application stalls when it tries to do the initial plugin folder scan.

I’ve been getting good support from the software vendor in question, who I won’t name for several reasons.  What it comes down to is that PACE has for some obscure reason decided my installation of the Operating System doesn’t meet it’s standards. Apparently, by preparing an XP disk with the service packs and device drivers — the process known as slipstreaming — confuses it.

What’s more the vendor of the plugins says that they can ask Pace what the problem is, but Pace won’t tell them. I’m a big fan of this plugin vendor, but I rate using Pace CP as one of their least good ideas. Pace is famous for fucking people’s computers up, failing to work, and generally being a pain in the ass. I’m just the latest in a long line of law-abiding customers who have been prevented from using the software I’ve paid for by a bunch of thugs peddling an idea that is long past its sell by date.

Motherfuck Pace and John Wayne.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

The Sonuus G2M Converter is, at $99 almost cheap enough for me to impulse-buy. But I’ve played around with guitar-to-midi converters from time to time and I’ve always been disappointed, and besides, after paying bills I’m already broke for July.

This thing is, of course, monophonic, and who knows what it does if you play a chord. That is usually pretty comical, and not musically useful with this sort of device. What I liked is the way the sales copy seeks to turn the drawbacks with audio to MIDI conversion into a virtue:

“For optimal MIDI conversion, your guitar playing needs to be clean and accurate. Accidental notes, resonating open strings and other sounds can often be converted into undesired MIDI notes. Often you don’t hear these when playing guitar yourself, but can detect them easily when listening live to the generated MIDI.

“Striving to improve MIDI note accuracy, encourages clean picking and accurate fingering, with good control over non-sounding strings by damping them.

“Not only will your MIDI output be more accurate, your normal guitar playing will sound clearer and more professional. It’s like having a tutor sitting beside you giving you advice. It’s also great fun!

In other words this thing is no better than any other attempt to extract note & pitch information from audio, and you’ll have to practice to build enough technique for it to be even marginally useful…

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

The big buzz (and trending Twitter topic of the day) is Google OS. This will apparently comprise a minimal Linux Kernel, a graphical rendering engine, and Google Chrome. It will be perfect for what people spend 95% of their computing time on: dicking around in a web browser, and running web applicaitons.

This is all well and good for 99% of users, and not so good at all for people who actually do CPU-intensive computing. That means any sort of scientific computation, CAD, Image Processing, Gaming, and Music Software. All those applications require optimized native code processing, and are usually written in low level languages like C++. While the average person had enough computing power 10 years ago to satisfy their needs, those applications have no trouble soaking up all available CPU bandwidth.

If you read Slashdot or any mainstream Computer publications, they run articles every 6 months or so about how “Today’s software doesn’t take advantage of new Multi-core processors.” That might be true for applications (like Web browsers or Word processors) that spend most of their time waiting for a user to hit the next key or click the mouse, but it is not true of music software or any of the other applications mentioned above. I write software that routinely saturates as many processor cores as it can, and software like Cubase and Ableton Live do so as well.

When Google talks about the browser being the only interface to Chrome OS, and only portable web applications being available, it seems like a missed opportunity. They should allow native development, and expose an API for presentation, because it would allow people to write computationally expensive software that will run very well on their platform. A minimal Linux core and a streamlined GUI platform would be perfect for e.g. music software, and Google has the market presence to finally make Linux a viable commercial software platform.

But once again, as with Microsoft and Apple, the needs of musicians, graphic artists and scientists come last after the unwashed masses who just want to watch kittens play piano, and send nude pics of themselves to their innamorata or innamorato. This seems really short-sighted.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

So this NI Komplete Special is definitely the talk of the music production blogs today. It’s a great deal IMHO, but it raises some questions…

Q1: It kind of makes everyone who dropped $1200 on Komplete recently feel like a chump, doesn’t it?

Q2: Does this mean NI is hard up for cash?

Q3: Is this an indication that NI is no longer as relevant as it once was?

Personally I use all the NI stuff much less than I once did. I paid for Reaktor and several upgrades, before I started getting NFR review copies — the only instruments I don’t have are Massive, Absynth, Elektrik Piano and Akoustic Piano. Those might justify buying Komplete, but like a lot of people (I think) who have started doing most their work in Ableton Live, there aren’t a lot of reasons to go beyond the instruments built into Live.

The Live Instruments are by no means the be-all and end-all of virtual instruments, but they’re good enough to get the job done, especially when you’re putting something together whose musical charms aren’t primarily a matter of sound design.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

My posts about Paul Stretch may be the most widely-read thing I’ve done on this blog. I know that my build for Intel/OSX has been downloaded many times.

Unfortunately I don’t have access to a PPC Mac and I can’t be arsed to figure out how to cross-compile a PPC build, or do a universal binary version. I know that there are probably some actual Mac programmers out there — if you want to tackle doing a PPC build, I can host the install.

I really don’t want to get involved in supporting this — I’ve not heard back from the original developer at all, and if he’s not listening all I can do is provide the work I’ve already done as-is. The best I can say is that it’s worth every penny you pay.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

Notice my clever hash mark — because my posts get forwarded to Twitter … I’m becoming a blog/facebook/twitter whore.

 My friend Dylan wrote “Here’s a problem I’ve been trying to figure out for a while now: say you want to drop a track in from the very start instead of fading it in  slowly, but it starts before the first downbeat. (This usually comes up when I’m messing with acapellas, but can apply to a full song as well I suppose.) Is there a clever work-around to drag 1.1 back beyond the start  of the audio file so it drops on 4.2, for example? Then I could trigger  it however many bars earlier as appropriate to let it come in synced.”

1.1 is a convenience point so you can drag the ’start’ marker before 1.1.   That’s a time saving trick when you’re warping a track — find the first solid, unambiguous downbeat, and then set that as 1.1, warp from there (automatically or manually) and then drag the start point to the actual track start.

BUT — if you set the start marker NOT on a downbeat, you’re not going to get things the way you’d like.  What that seems to mean is ‘the downbeat is offset from what Live thinks is the downbeat.   This lets you play tricks like drag the loop to the middle of a measure, and then set the start on the downbeat, if you want to loop a measure, but combining the first half of one measure with the last half of the previous measure.

The only way I know how to do what Dylan wants is to always keep the start marker on a downbeat.  In Live 8 you can drag the start and end markers before and after the actual clip’s start and end. So you can warp the track starting at a logical place, and then drag the start marker to the downbeat before where you’d like the clip to come in.  In Live 7, you can’t go before or after the clip’s actual beginning or end, unfortunately.

Then, if there’s audio before the beat you want to come in on, use a volume envelope to mute it.  And you have to trigger the clip a measure before where you want the downbeat to fall.

Ideally there’d be a second type of start marker, that would mean ’start here, but keep the downbeats in sync’ — but there isn’t.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

Someone asked me this on twitter: “Is it possible to fix a tracks tempo in Ableton and then export it for use elsewhere?”

The answer won’t fit in a tweet, so I’m posting here.

It’s not a big deal but it’s not 100% obvious how to do this. If you only ever deal with Live, once you warp a track, you don’t need to have the track at a different tempo — you can just use it warped. Of course there’s a whole world outside Ableton Live so…

1. Warp the track as you would usually.  If you have Live 8 by all means set the warping mode to “Complex Pro” — this will give you the best possible sound quality, and since you’re rendering it to a new audio file, there’s no CPU usage penalty.
2. Drag the clip for the track from session view onto an audio track in the arrangement view. The keyboard shortcut for this is to click and hold the mouse on the clip and hit the tab key, and then drop the clip on the timeline at 1.1.0.
3. At the top of the arrangement view, drag the loop region to the complete length of the track.
4. Set the project tempo to the desired tempo.
5. Click on the loop region at the top of the arrangement view.  This will make sure that when you render, the entire loop region will be rendered.
6. In the file menu, choose ‘Export Audio/Video’ and save to a wav or aiff file.

This is how you’d, for example, take an 118 BPM disco track, correct any tempo fluctuations, and make a new digital copy at 125BPM.  Of cource, once you have the track in arrangement view, you can edit the track to create a new arrangement.  Helpful here are Ctrl+E to cut a track at a certain point, and Shift+mouse drag to duplicate a region.  Also, you can select a track region, and then use the ‘Duplicate time’ command in the editor.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/hallway-samples.zip

Objects involved: Screwdriver, Steel Thermos, Spraypaint Can, Rubbermaid Shelves, Sheetrock Wall, Stair Rail, Wooden Legs That Used To Hold Up Kitchen Island, Sniffing.

Recorded with a Pacific Pro Audio Large Diaphragm Condenser Microphone, Presonus Tube Pre, RME Hammerfall DSP + Multiface, 24-bit, 44.1 Khz. All samples normalized, a few really quiet ones treated after normalization to remove 60 cycle hum.

It’s interesting how much variation you can get by banging on wooden things. Most of the samples are quite short but they all have some room sound in them because I wasn’t super close the microphone. You can use them as a percussion kit without them sounding airless.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

http://www.symboliccomposer.com/page_main.shtml

Symbolic Composer has a certain appeal I guess, if Max/MSP seems too easy or inflexible. I’d even consider messing with it — if it was free!

But $495???

Keerazy.

Remember to make ANY SOUND with SCom, you write a lisp program. They have a giant library with loads of interesting stuff in it, and I can write Lisp. But damn, who is their customer base?

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

I guess I know why it’s so huge, but jeez, maybe they could split the application file from the included content? That is a 45 minute dowload at 400Kb/second! Imagine someone on dialup trying to get it!

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

This is a common ‘helpful tip’ about playing live or DJ’ing with Ableton Live — ‘put a limiter on the main output bus.’

After recording a set last night (which you’ll hear about when I get approval from one artist to use a track) I have spent some time rendering, tweaking, and then re-rendering a mix, because of leveling moves I made in the heat of the moment.  It’s really hard unless you have some sort of giant external meter to watch to keep things properly leveled.

Several times during the mix I brought tracks up to the point they were pegging the limiter giving you that dreaded ’solid ingot’ waveform.  I’m going to take the limiter out of my standard setup and resolve to watch the meters better, and use my ears. If you clip the main output in Live a little bit it does a fairly good job of soft-limiting to keep from going into digital clipping.  But it’s better that you LISTEN to what you’re doing and be conservative than to use the limiter as a crutch.

The problem isn’t that it sounds ‘bad’ — it sounds OK.  But it doesn’t sound great, because you lose all dynamics. If you’re DJing, everything you play has already been mastered and limited within an inch of it’s life, to limit it more is to second guess the mastering engineers, using much less sophisticated tools.

As for the general philosophical idea of DJing in Live — I love playing vinyl, but especially when it comes to making a studio mix, I like the flexibility that Live gives you, and freedom from cuing and beatmatching as primary concerns.  When I do one of my studio mixes, my concern is to showcase the stuff I’ve recently acquired in a way that is meaningful musically to me, not show off my skills.

I go through a lot of tracks to find the ones that speak to the mood I’m going for, and pre-sequence them, usually in order of tempo.  I actually do record the actual mix in real time — I’m triggering and fading and EQing live.  But I’m not above going back and correcting levels.  Or in the mix I just did, loop the end of one track to make the transition to the next more graceful.

My goal is to get to where I don’t have to tweak after the fact, and every time I record a set I get closer.  When I listen to the first mixes I did with Live a couple years ago they make me cringe.  I want to be able to get in front of a crowd and use the flexibility of Live to make it sound great and move a crowd.  Getting away from using the mouse and staring at the screen can make a big difference.  The APC40 is nice in that way, but actually the mappings I have for the XSession Pro are a more complete mouse-eliminator.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

My APC40 came yesterday, and I spent a few hours fiddling with it last night…

The build quality is impressive. Almost absurdly so — the knobs are big and solid, the faders are smooth. The hard rubber end cheeks are some designers wet dream — they seem to have no purpose except to enhance the ’stealth bomber’ profile. The case proper is sheet metal with smooth bends. It’s not really a criticism per se, but a plastic case would have made it more transportable — it’s heavy. This plus a laptop in a bag, and you’ll not want to be lugging it all over Berlin.

My only criticism of it design-wise has nothing to do with ergonomics: The faders and knobs will be vulnerable during transport, and the box it came in is pretty bulky. They need to come up with a padded bag with foam ribs at the side so you don’t break off sliders or knobs. If they made one with room for a laptop, I’d buy it — something like the M-Audio Oxygen8 bags…

In operation, there’s very little to write about; it does a good job of taking your head out of the computer screen, and if you’re comfortable with Live, it will make complete sense after about 5 minutes of use.

The one thing I found sub-optimal is the Device Control section. If you select an instance of a Live Instrument, the knobs are automatically mapped to … whatever the first 8 parameters the instrument exposes. These are almost never the most useful parameters to be tweaking, and in the case of Collision you have to hunt around the instrument panel to try and find what they’re changing.qqqq

So in order to mess with a Live instrument’s parameters you have to put it in an instrument rack and assign the macro knobs to something meaningful. For VST instruments and FX the new Live 8 parameter mapping UI makes it a little better — you choose which parameters are exposed and you can rearrange them. But the Device Control knobs are pretty useless for Live Instruments and FX unless you wrap them in a rack.

But all in all it’s a very nice controller for Live, and very nearly the perfect controller for live performance. It’s not revolutionary or amazing, but it solidly does what needs doing, and makes interacting with live a lot more tactile. Just being able to trigger or turn off multiple tracks is huge — it’s something I was always trying to do with the mouse, and it’s not a natural move.

Oh, and tried to look at the top secret MIDI handshake between Live and the APC40 with MIDI-OX and failed. They’ve set up the MIDI driver for the APC40 so it’s single client (meaning only one program at a time can access it) — so if I load MIDI-OX and try and run live, Live won’t talk to the APC 40, and if I try and load MIDI-OX after Live, it won’t be able to open the ports. Given that the only connection is USB, someone will have to use a lower-level tool to try and figure this stuff out.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

Cet obscur objet du désir

I ordered my Akai APC40 yesterday, and called them to ask if they were backordered and when they’d ship, and they said “we have plenty of stock and we’re shipping tomorrow” — meaning today. If you were wondering where to get one.

If you’re not aware of what the APC40 is, it is a MIDI controller tailored for use with the Ableton Live music software.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

Groove Quantization was one of the ‘big deal’ features added in Ableton Live, and I suppose if I’d read all the marketing shiznit more carefully I would have figured it out before now, but as usual I only learn by doing.

http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-LiveGrooveQuantize.mp3

So what I did here:

1. Load the track “Amazon” by El-B (from The Roots of El-B into live. (You can hear a sample of it here.)
2. Set 1.1.1 in the timeline to a downbeat. Make the loop region 2 bars starting there. Drag the ‘end’ marker for the track to the end of the loop. Drag the downbeat transients to line up with the timeline downbeats.
3. Right click the resulting clip and select Extract Groove(s)

Then you can apply your groove to any midi clip. Cool…

Other interesting things you can do with grooves:

1. You can drag a groove into a midi track to look at it, or e.g. trigger a hi hat. The beginning of the Audio example above starts out with the raw groove template played by itself.

2. You can drag any midi file into the groove pool. Together with 1, you can edit grooves. In the case of the El-B ‘Amazon’ groove there wasn’t a hit on every 16th note, in which case I don’t know what it does to the timings of notes that fall in the holes, so I plugged the holes with new notes and fiddled with them until they fit the rest of the groove.

3. You can put a groove on a track, and mess with the settings — the random setting and groove amount in particular — until you like the sound created and then hit ‘commit’ on the clip. That quantizes the notes in the clip to the groove settings. Then you can drag the midi clip back into the groove pool and have a new groove.

4. You can apply a groove to many clips simultaneously. Like — every clip in your session. Select the clips to put the groove on in the session view or hit ctrl-A (or cmd-A) to select all. The groove box is in the same place as it would be for a single clip. Then you can choose a groove and it applies to all selected clips.

5. There’s a slider that sets the amount of groove from zero to 130% — I understand what 0-100 means: it drags the notes 0 to 100% of the way to the nearest groove point. I’m not sure what it means past 100%, except that a swing groove swings even harder, and if you have non-zero randomization set, it’s even randomer. At any rate it can sound very cool.

Image stolen from Rootoon.com

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

This is Dave Smith Instruments’ Mopho playing some patches generated randomly by the Mopho Pro Editor.

The Mopho Pro Editor is like any other editor for external MIDI instruments: It’s kind of buggy and ill-documented, and half the time something about it doesn’t work and you can’t figure out why. But when it does work, two features make it extremely valuable: The random patch generator and the ‘program genetics.’

The former is what it sounds like — it generates random patches, and you can control which parameters it randomizes. The ‘program genetics’ starts from two existing Mopho patches and ‘breeds’ them to generate new patches. The cool thing about these two features is that it generates sounds you’d never program on purpose; and in fact, I’m frankly mystified about how the Mopho’s fairly straightforward architecture could even make the sounds it does.

Example #1 — an assortment of generated patches, one after another, with tweaking:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/mophorandom.mp3

Example #2 — One of my generated patches, playing itself. I have no idea where all the crackly stuff comes from.

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http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/mophorandom2.mp3

Feel free to use these samples however you like.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

This started out as a comment on This CDM post but grew to the point I moved it here. Peter Kirn took this announcement as an opportunity to discuss free/open alternatives, which is great, but personally, I’ve really come to value the increased quality of software made by people who do it commercially over the myriad sketchy and semi-sketchy free alternatives. I’d sooner stab my nuts with a rusty fork than try and do anything with Pd…

Full disclosure, I’m friends with a couple of the Cycling74 guys…

Like a lot of decisions at Cycling74, what drives decision-making is the fact that they’re a small company — vanishingly small compared to e.g. Ableton.

While I don’t know the mind of Zicarreli, the actions of Cycling 74 over the years speak volumes: The company has stayed tiny as a conscious decision, and has only added new people when they find someone whose talents are unique and there is a good fit with respect to personality and philosophy.

Since Cycling74 is vanishingly small, they have to be very careful about what they say ‘yes’ to and they will say ‘no’ a lot. I surmise the whole partnership with Cycling74 came about because of personal contact, friendship, and shared vision between principles at the two companies.

Having said ‘yes’ to Ableton, Cycling74 is going to increase their customer base by a couple of orders of magnitude, and supporting this new base is going to be a challenge. Luckily Ableton has the larger staff and deeper pockets to share that burden.

Not continuing to support VST and AU and RTAS might be sad for those of us who bought those products, but it’s a completely understandable business decision.

Let it be said also, that while I love Pluggo and Hipno, they’re not what I’d call smooth or easy to use in VST hosts, for a load of reasons. The Max/Live integration might be closed source and a software monoculture but it will do a couple of really useful changes for musicians:

• Live is really good at timing, and is a straightforward sequencing environment.  Max? Not so much.
• Max will become part of a software ecosystem that — all bitching on the Ableton Forums aside — has considerable human resources devoted to quality control. Combine that with the much larger user base, Max will benefit in terms of reliability and performance.
• Max for Live will mean considerably more bushel baskets of cash showing up at Cycling74.  This bodes well for their continued existence as a company, and should make it possible for them to do even more cool stuff.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.