Monthly Archives: October 2006

PTB – 8/4/2006

  By glacial23 | 10/5/2006 - 10:57 am | General, Press The Button Leave a comment

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.

Garageband – Use VSTi’s for free (sorta)

  By glacial23 | 10/3/2006 - 10:25 am | GarageBand, General 1 Comment

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?