IDLE HANDS

Just a quick note to say that the digital rust algo I made a while ago are getting stuffed into a VST.

The original implementation in an old post here were ofcourse to slow. I tried it anyway, and I was like “it cant be that slow” but then again I had it running at 9000% CPU in ableton live, and that is a bit steep.
I optimized it down to 120% per channel so I’m awesome at optimizing (more on this later). But I remade the whole algo implementation anyways. I figured out how to achieve the same result without packing and unpacking. You can even say that I’m emulating my original algorithm.

I’ve also decided that all future plugs from shuriken.se shall be black and white. atleast for a while.

Ok, so I might be late in discovering Grooveshark. And while I find it more awesome then Spotify I still cant stop to wonder how it all works. Seems like you can upload whatever you want, no matter if you own the copyright or not. So I tried uploading a few songs and they where available directly to stream. And I was like WTF, do they know if I own the right to this, there was no place I could agree to any licensing term.

THIS was a mystery to me, I needed to know.

The answer was easy, and as usual Wikipedia gave the answer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooveshark

This is interesting, they don’t really care about asking beforehand if they are allowed to stream, this gotta piss the Beatles lawyers off like hell. They share money from they get from tunneling a sales of a songs via iTunes or Amazon with the person uploading the song in the first place. If you are the artist, you get money for your songs from 2 places.

As a band though, there area lot of opportunities to get noticed, but you have to pay for them.

How do they pay for bandwidth?

So I made a new little hack for the Novation Launchpad a little similar to my older hack. This time though I have made the source a little more readable. It’s not a full solution that will make you be able to do everything. It’s a start though, you can build on it further if you want to though.

The download the bounce hack: launchonme_terminal_bounce_web
The download the stepsequencer hack: launchonme_terminal_step_web

I used to help people all the time. In real life or on the Internet. Both for m own knowledge and for being a helpful guy. Often it was stuff that they could not accomplish themselves, or something that was to hard for them. Examples of stuff I’ve helped ppl with, musical scores for video/computer-games, sound effects for such. Sourcecode to do hard or tedious task’s. For audio mostly but also other stuff. Most of the times it’s been for a specific project they where doing. In at least a hundred specific cases over the years I’ve been asked what I wanted I’ve answered “Buy me a nice gift when your project succeeds”.
This might be naive and trusty of me, especially since it in many cases concerned people that I did not know where well and never met in real life.
Most of these projects didn’t get finished, and the ones that did get finished failed to be popular/profitable.

Except one, it was a huge success. REALLY HUGE. like, dot-com huge. Not all my doing of course, I just helped with a tiny little bit. Still it was qualified work and we’d agreed on the gift thing. I waited by my email-client (not really, but you get the picture). Then I emailed and got tentative or not-really-rejecting-but-sure-feels-like-it answers a few times.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t whining, I was very careful of whining. I don’t want to be a whiner. I took special care not to write whiny emails. And I did not over e-mail.

Still nothing a year ago, when we agreed for a solution where music that I’ve been involved and licensing was mentioned (by me).

I came to think about this since it was about a year ago that that agreement was made (to look into licensing) and still nothing.

So for the last year and a half, I’ve given up on helping people to just about any extent on the Internet and I haven’t really released any VST’s over at shuriken.se.

This really feels like crap, I feel stupid because I’ve trusted people, but I still want to do it. I just cant anymore. Fuck that shit.

I think my creativity frightens people sometimes and sometimes it just perplexes them. But being uncreative frightens me more. I’ve got a void in my sole that I need to fill. Being creative is doing stuff, and making things that I cal put in the void makes the whole smaller. Learning is just the same thing as creating for me. Whenever I learn stuff I immediately think of way’s to use it for creating stuff. There are a lot of ways to be creative. Not everything needs to be something tangible, just sitting quietly thinking about the best way to make a bag or something else does the trick for me. I also need a bit of mundane ordinary everyday choirs to be creative. Without bottling up a bit of the creativity that way it wont have an outlet later.

I’ve read that Tim Ferris book about only working 4 hours a week. As nice as that sounds there are a few questions that you need to answer really.

Like, what would you with the rest of your time? And what would your goals be? What are your dreams?

I’m having a little bit of trouble with the last one. What do I really want to do. like _really_. If I only had 6 months left to live, what would I do?

I’m thinking about this a lot, because I haven’t really found a good answer. I know that most of the stuff I do on a daily basis are stuff that I don’t what to do. Like spending 2 hours going back and forth to my job. Mowing the lawn, or vacuuming. You know the basic stuff.

Why don’t I have dreams like wanting to go to Brazil and become a tango-master, or save the rain-forests or walking between Moskow and Bejing.
I have smaller, more mundane dreams.

to cheer me up, I read this article about why it sucks to have a record deal: http://www.toomuchjoy.com/?p=1397

This is a sample-disk. It contains samples, that you can use for creating music, or whatever.
The samples where all captured from a boom box I got on my like 8th birthday. (it’s the one in the picture). Needles to say, I’m not 8 anymore.

The waveforms are not taken from the FM band but rather the LM/MW bands. There are noise-samples that can be used for drones. Clicks and pop’s that might work splendidly for you as drums.

BEWARE, this sample-pack is not for everyone. Even though I’ve normalized and trimmed the sounds, they are not suitable for pop,soul r’n b and all that other radio-friendly stuff you hear on the… radio. well that didn’t make sense. (or did it?)

LICENSE:
Yeah, I’m gonna let you copy these samples as you wish, as long as you don’t charge money for them. It would be cool if you let the included  readme.txt follow them. If you happen to use them for a song that you can charge money for, be my guest. Hope you make a million money’s. You could also post links to your songs here.

Download the pack here: I heard it on the radio.zip

And here is the companionsong that you really cant not include
I heard i on the radio sample song.mp3

I’ve been using my Novation Launchpad for since Nov 11, not very much, but enough to make a review.

Installation:

So yeah, the drivers are not class-compliant so you have to install something that seems to be a lot bigger and carry loads of crap that I don’t really want on my computer. It would have been better to split that stuff. Also, turning on a single led somewhere or a little animation or anything that gives you an indication of it actually getting power from your USB port. Freaked me out.  It did not light up until I started Ableton Live, which I already have so I did not install that.

First impressions:

The packaging was nice. The device feels sturdy and rugged. The LED’s where  a lot brighter then I thought. But the buttons feels very cheap.  There are a few videos on the Internet where they show of the feature’s. One of the features is using the buttons as a slider or pan, where you can drag your finger from left to right over the buttons. They must have redone that take a gazillion time.

Impressions:

The buttons feel cheap, and clickety, and not nice. I’m getting more used to them but I’m really comparing it to the korg padKontrol and my moanonme wich features arcade buttons (they are awesome). and that might not be fair. I really like the integration into Ableton Live. It’s the reason I bought it and the buttons are good enough for launching clips. I’ve done some drum-editing and a little general midi-playing with it but that’s where the buttons fail.

Using as a Monome-cloe:

Well, there are a bunch of awesome Monome max/msp patches. These can be run in nomone, a little tool also made in max/msp. To  bad that the only available version of max at cycling 74’s site is the demo version of 5.1 (which is a beta for max4life). There isn’t the usual runtime that you can use. The 5.1 version seems to be broken.  The drag and drop wont work and layouting sometimes looks weird (as in stuff is placed over other stuff). Those issue’s have kept me from testing the really interesting monome patches.

Using the launchpad as a LittlePiggy controlsurface:

n0s of little piggy tracker fame suggested that you could use it to control the little piggy tracker, so we launched into a small prestudy. The bad news are that while it has USB-midi it’s not class compliant so connection to it will require someone to hack Linux drivers. That on the other hand doesn’t seem to be that hard a task. The chip used for communication (and logic) in the launchpad has a data sheet and also reference drivers-code available. I’m guessing that there is no logic at all inside the launchpad, it at most keeps state of the LED’s and maybe debouncing the buttons.  This will probably be doable. However, none of the devices we run the piggy on/from really has battery power to support the launchpad. so there has to be something made there as well. Something for the future maybe.

What I’m going to use it for in the future:

I’m definitively going to learn how to use it for launching clips better, but I haven’t felt that groove lately. and I will also program something nice for it.  No max/msp stuff though. Something on my Mac that interrupts the MIDI messages and let’s me manipulate that both forward and backwards, Creating step sequencers and whatnot. Building on the stuff I made with the moanonme. And probably very similar to little-scale’s max/msp linear sequencer patch.
Infact, I’ve already started. I have the basic framework up in a cmd-window program.  Gonna move that to a nice Cocoa application soon.

Conclusion:

The launchpads weakest point is the buttons. The features are great. The hackability is great and I’ll have much fun with that (I’m geeky).  Overall a nice buy that I’m not going to regret.

I’ve been experimenting with creating a VST with a supershape formula as an oscillator. The sound is pretty FM’ish I think. Dont know if I’m gonna finish this though. I’ve included a little movie that shows how it looks and sound.

Whaddayathink?