Glacial Communications

djay, which I’ve covered before, has been upgraded. Of course, you already knew that, because it uses the insanely cool Sparkle framework, and it offered to download the update, install itself, and re-launch when you last ran 1.1.

I was way too ill to actually show up, but widget was just well enough to do the show solo. I think it ended up being a mashed discography of The Button compressed into two hours.

Christmas Mix (part 1 of 2?) – We’ll see next week.

All about cults and cult activities. Including, but not limited to:

• Jonestown
• Branch Davidians
• Heavens Gate
• Eckankar
• Scientology
• Raelians
• Falun Gong
• Mormons
• Ramtha

This was (is?) a remixed version of an OTE episode about mind control, similar to what we did a few weeks ago.

So, downloads off of Catalog have been less than inspiring. I’m debating moving stuff (specifically, the stuff without lots of naughty samples) onto Jamendo. I think it would stand a better chance at being seen, and people could always use their donation system if they like it. It’s non-exclusive, so I may give it a try with something.
I also considered whipping up my own hosting stuff in Rails, but the time’s just not there. I may still make a small thing (a la castr) for the verboten stuff. I dunno. Can anyone think of a better idea? I’m all ears.

I was playing with making Quartz Composer effects for iMovie last night when I made an interesting (though somewhat obvious) discovery. The “Audio FX” section of iMovie HD 6 is actually a number of AudioUnit components hidden inside the iMovie application bundle.

Go to your Applications folder, and do a “Show Package Contents” on iMovie HD. From there, you can find the AUs in the Contents/Resources directory. Copy all the .components to /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/. Done.

I’ve been thinking about building some kind of slightly digital synth lately. I’ve looked at kits like the AVRSYN and MIDIbox, but they end up being rather complicated. I’ve lately been brainstorming a synth that shouldn’t be horribly complicated to build. It’s almost like a mash-up of a few different projects out there:

• An Arduino for the brains, and even sound generation(it’s supposed to be similar in speed to the ATMega controller in the AVRSYN)
• Faders based on the (already Arduino-based) 6-packfader box
• The DAC section of the AVRSYN

If I can find an affordable LCD that can run serially at 31.25kbps(since the RS232 input will be handling MIDI), I may even be able to squeeze in a display, and switching between editing pages (ok, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch).
Now, obviously this wouldn’t win any awards for sound quality – It’ll probably be like a more limited AVRSYN with its 8-bit VA goodness.

Can anyone out there in the blogosphere tell me why this wouldn’t work? I want to get an Arduino anyway for some other projects, and who knows, if this works, maybe I’ll build a production one using an Arduino Stamp…