Glacial Communications

Adobe recently announced the Beta of Soundbooth, a Cool Edit/Audition-lite-y kind of audio editor. I had some good hopes for this, since I’m an old-school Cool Edit Fan who has since moved on to better Operating Systems. While I like Audacity, it does crash a bit more often than I’d like.
So far the beta sucks. Maybe. I can’t tell because I can’t get it to run, since it’s incompatible with SoundFlower, which I’ve been known to use on occasion. It’s also only available for x86-based Macs at present. (Why? do they just not get the concept of Universal Binaries, or are they doing something really dumb like using x86 assembly language subroutines from the Audition codebase?) That of course rules out trying it on my wife’s iBook G4…

Update: Apparently Adobe has a fix ready for the SoundFlower incompatibility, which will be ready in the next beta release. Also, from what I’ve been reading, it does sound like some hand-assembled and/or SSE2 specific code (likely borrowed from Audition) is in the Soundbooth code, explaining its non-Universalness (which is still kinda lame).

This was a halloween mix, with lots of Halloween-related content. Next week (even though it will be post-halloween) will probably be more of the same.

This was a “musical” show that was plagued with problems. Since Neal had guests (Travelogue – who are really quite cool), setup was a bit hurried, and required playing a bit of ReDada while we got things ready. There were also some volume issues (coming from running the DJX through a bass effects pedal) and at 11:56pm, my MacBook Pro crashed (it seems to be an actual crash rather than a random shutdown) when it was the only thing playing! More ReDada to the rescue . Garbs was a bit late, so we played mash-ups until he came in.
The podcast should be back in order now, though the quality may be weird.

Update(10/20/2006) – Turns out the podcast wasn’t quite fixed. The WRUW streaming peeps changed the URL I grab the MP3 from. I’ve fixed my script and I’m re-running it. Should be good to go by 2:30pm Eastern. (Note to self – It takes 20 minutes to download the archive??)

The first hour was a pair of four-elements based compositions widget and I wrote for the most recent Recycled Rainbow – however they were not played at the event, so we kept them for the show. Mine was a fifteen minute piece called “Air”, and widgets was a bit more all-encompassing (and 40 minutes long).

The second hour was a bit more diverse, consisting of the best of “Do or DIY”, some mash-ups, some chiptunes, and some other stuff.

Unfortunately, WRUW’s weekly archive is a bit hosed up at the moment, so there is no podcast this week. We suspect it will be back next week.

So, I’ve done some autumnal cleaning around here:

• Upgraded WordPress to 2.0.4
• Upgraded Spam Karma 2
• Upgraded wpLicense
• Changed the theme (to Ice)
• added del.icio.us integration

Remember how I mentioned we’d be revisiting the Tuvan throat-singing last week?

Well, we did.

This week’s show was every Tuvan throat-singing CD I could get my hands on, and some additions from Freesound, and a little contribution from the Delay Lama.

It was also 2 1/2 hours long, as Neal stepped out early to go see Ladytron. The podcast is just the 10:00pm-midnight section, as we can’t easily do all the cutting&pasting necessary to make the whole thing happen. Here’s where you can get 8/4/2006’s Dare Waves for the next week or so if you want the first half hour. After next Wednesday, the link will not be too useful, unless you want whatever Neal played in the last week.

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So, GarageBand allows the use of AudioUnit plugins, but not its competition – Steinberg’s VSTi plugins. FXpansion have a special adapter, but it costs $99, and I’m pretty well broke. Is there a way we can use instruments such as Delay Lama in GarageBand without shelling out any hard earned cash?

Sort of. There’s at least a way to record a VST as a “real instrument”. You won’t be able to fix a bum note without rerecording, but it’s better than nothing.

Get reFuse Software’s Ugly VSTi Host, and Cycling 74’s Soundflower (you could probably do the same thing with JACK, if you prefer it).

Copy Ugly VSTi Host into your Applications folder. Install Soundflower from the installer package, and copy Soundflowerbed into your Applications folder. You’ll have to reboot after the package installs, so do that.

Now fire up SoundFlowerbed, GarageBand and Ugly VSTi Host. Set SoundFlowerbed’s SoundFlower (2ch) to Built-in Output. In Ugly VSTi Host, set the audio output to “CoreAudio SoundFlower (2ch)”. In GarageBand, set the audio input (in Preferences->Audio/MIDI) to SoundFlower (2ch). Now, create a “Real Instrument” track, arm it for recording, and set Monitor to On. Now with any luck, when you play your VST instrument, the record level should appear in GarageBand. When you actually record in GarageBand, anything played should show up.

Pretty cool, huh?