Glacial Communications

Hydroplane – negative buffalo
Creative Mind System (some sort of self-help thing)
Yesterday’s episode of H.A.R.M.
some Burning Man material on YouTube

Podcast feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/PTBPodcast

So, I’m watching the History Channel’s Life & Death in Rome (the episode “Doom?”), and they’re talking about Alaric’s sack of Rome, when what starts playing?

Section 25’s Looking From a Hilltop.

One of my favorite songs, and one I didn’t expect to hear on TV. On my iPod, sure, but the History Channel?

My head exploded.

It’s probably not helping that I’m reading Philip K. Dick’s VALIS.

I’m totally spending at least ten minutes attempting some recording tomorow.

Well, ok, it’s not the coolest thing ever,

but,

We’re now listed in the iTunes Podcast Directory! w00t!

The funny thing is, FeedBurner is supposed to be getting us added to the Yahoo Podcast Directory, but we’re not in there yet.

Widget was not feeling well, so you’re stuck with a more-or-less archive show from me.

Episodes Featured (more detail on any of them is here):
• Episode 116:The Ryan Report’s 5th Anniversary Special! (8/9/99)
• Episode 61: some various random musical stuff(7/12/98) – This was way too dirty, so I cut it really early(like, five minutes in).
• Episode 12: Dead City Dispepsi (8/3/97)
• Episode 120: Deconstructing Phish (9/06/99)
• Episode 126: Rocked by Radio (10/18/99)

Interspersed between this (since we only have one cassette deck in the studio) were bits of Animals Within Animals – I’m not listening – it’s not on their website yet (that I can see), because it’s brand spankin’ new!

I’ve made a small change to the Press The Button Podcast feed – it’s now going to update on Thursday mornings rather than Monday mornings, which makes sense, since we’ve been on Wednesday nights for quite a while now.

The feed, if you are interested, is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/PTBPodcast.

So tonight’s show will be available tomorrow!

A Playlist of stuff on my iPod , specifically:

• Les Vampyrettes
• Some of Longmount Potioncastle’s prank calls
• three tracks from Tryad’s Public Domain
• I Hope You Do, by The Singing Saw Shadow Show
• Two collages by none other than Chunt
• some singing dogs
• Dr. Druid’s Haunted Seance
• A record called “The Rite of Exorcism

Casio Commander
Pisgah
the CD accompanying a book titled “Music, Cognition and Computerized Sound”
the Jim Jones Church singers
a little L. Ron Hubbard
Inuit throat singing
various other sources, including a medley of the Wilhelm Scream

I should have posted this, oh, last week but was kinda busy doing the show…

There may have been a vague theme of “sound colors” (but not really a synesthesia thing).

Most of the samples came from some flexidiscs in a book called “Sound Colors” (or something like that) from the Cleveland Public Library. Some others came from a Moog tutorial from the University of Iowa.

Some more experimedia audio, though at one point djay crashed.

Ok, I promised I’d write about how to do this, so here goes…
(also, anything you try in this post is AT YOUR OWN RISK – If you don’t know what you are doing here, DON’T DO IT. If you somehow break your actual copy of GarageBand, I CANNOT fix it for you. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.)

So say you’ve got this fancy-schmancy Intel-based Mac, but a lot of the plugins you use (or want to use) aren’t Universal Binaries yet. What do you do? If you’re running Logic or something along those lines, just do a “Get Info” on the application, and check the “Open using Rosetta” checkbox. No problem.

Now, say you’re like me, running poor little GarageBand 3 – it’s a Universal Binary, so it should open in Rosetta, right? Try it – do a Get Info – the “Open in Rosetta” checkbox isn’t there…

What to do? Luckily, Apple provided the answer here, in the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines. I first tried messing with the application’s Info.plist file, as it contains settings that can prevent/allow the use of Rosetta. Unfortunately, that didn’t help. For some reason, it still never provided the “Open in Rosetta” checkbox.

Time for the serious hack. We’re going to make a separate copy of GarageBand, and strip all the Intel code out of it, leaving only a PowerPC binary that has to run in Rosetta. You’re going to have to run Terminal for this (it’s in /Applications/Utilities, if you don’t have it on your Dock, like I do).

Before you get going in Terminal, you’ll first need to make a copy of the .app. in Finder, go to /Applications, and make a duplicate of GarageBand. you can call it whatever you like, but I called mine GarageBandPPC3. I’ll refer to it as this below.

Now, onto the Terminal work. First, lets actually look at the application itself
in your Terminal window, type
$ cd /Applications/GarageBandPPC3.app/Contents/MacOS/
$ ls -l

you should see three files in there, ChapterTool, GarageBand, and bomread. The only one we’re concerned with is GarageBand. Try this command:
$ file GarageBand
GarageBand: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
GarageBand (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable ppc
GarageBand (for architecture i386):Mach-O executable i386


from the prompt type these commands in to strip out the Intel code, leaving only the PowerPC version:

$ ditto -arch ppc GarageBand /tmp/GarageBand
$ mv /tmp/GarageBand .


now let’s try seeing what the file is:

$ file GarageBand
GarageBand: Mach-O executable ppc


At this point you should be done. Try running GarageBand3PPC from the finder. Do you see your PowerPC-only AudioUnits? Excellent! Is it running slow as hell? Probably, and there isn’t much I can do about that. Also, anytime Apple updates GarageBand, you’re going to have to do this again to make the PPC-only version match the UB version, unless, of course, the update allows opening in Rosetta

The real solution is to nag plugin vendors to build Universal versions of their AudioUnits (or even open-source them if they don’t want to do it – heck, I’ll give it a try if you’ll let me), but until then, maybe this will help you use the C3 Compressor to master your songs, or use daHornet or the Magical 8-bit plug as instruments in your next hit.

at least one song from exp037 – Wrexsoul’s Alchemy Sound
exp038 – Miles Tillman – Melt (played using djay)
Pierre Henry – Mise en musique du corticalart de Roger Lafosse
VVM – The Caretaker – theoretically pure anterograde amnesia

one bad apple ruins it for everybody.

random samples
Some assorted song-poems
Criswell

I think I’ve sorted out my latest issue with ccHost. For some reason on the last reinstall, apache started running as “dhapache” rather than “glacial” for a while, and I was getting all sorts of permission freakouts. After a relatively smooth reinstall, everything looks ok now. Feel free to give it a try!