Glacial Communications

Field recordings of Seattle, including some bits of one-time PTB performer (and Raver’s Edge founder) Monk.

A tribute to the late Robert Anton Wilson.  Lots of recordings of RAW, and live AN200 accompaniment. I tried to keep the settings as numerologically correct as best as I could, including one bit with all parameters set to, what else, 23.

I just uploaded a new version of MIDILights for your perusal. It’s now got support for using MIDI controllers to affect luminosity, hue and whatnot.

I also included a separate composition called MIDINotes, which is the macro patch I use to determine the note played, since QC makes that really hard. It doesn’t give the actual MIDI note, just 1-12 (C-B), or 0 if off. The “velocity” resembles actual velocity, but it’s not correct if you’re playing multiple notes at once, so beware!
I also removed the standalone executable – with QC’s crappy MIDI implementation (you have to choose the MIDI input inside the composition, rather than it taking a default and running with it), it probably didn’t work for anyone but me, or maybe someone else who ran MIDIkeys before starting it up. I may take a stab at doing some kind of CoreMIDI-based implementation, but it won’t be any time soon.

download it here.

These episodes featured much material from secondattention.org. 1/3 also included field recordings of a vacuum cleaner. 1/10 involved the destruction of a bathroom.

I’ve finally finished a Quartz Composer composition that I’m comfortable sharing with the world. It’s a rendition of the clavier à lumières, a kind of light organ from 1915. As MIDI notes come in, it renders the QC view in the appropriate color for the note. So if you’ve been wanting to do a version of Scriabin’s Prometheus: Poem of Fire, this will come in handy…
It’s nothing too fancy, other than the painstaking process I had to use to get something approximating a MIDI note number from QC. I may post about that later. Check it out and download it here, free.

Update: Download link was b0rken. I’ve fixed it, and as a bonus, added a standalone .app version for those who haven’t installed the OS X Developer Tools. Many thanks to SteamSHIFT for pointing out the brokenness.

MacWorld San Francisco is coming next week, and it’s pretty likely that iLife is going to get an update, with GarageBand getting revved to version 4.

Here’s what I’d like to see in a GarageBand update:

1. The ability to have multiple projects open at the same time. iMovie HD 6 can do this now, why not GB too? It would be nice to cut and paste loops between projects without stashing them in the library as a workaround.
2. More automation than what there is now (volume, pan, and the modulation/expression stuff on Software Instruments) – This probably isn’t going to happen (Apple do want people to move up to Logic, so they can’t give GB everything…). There are a few ways to fake this a bit, which I intend to demonstrate in a future article here later this month.
3. Allow opening in Rosetta (or have some other kind of workaround to allow PPC-only AUs on my MacBook Pro, or pay apulSoft to Universalize all his ports). Even if this doesn’t happen, my previous instructions should still apply.
4. Something like Quartz Composer for developing AudioUnits would be extremely cool – like an easy to use SonicBirth (I tried it a bit, but didn’t have any luck). It would probably lead to a glut of AUs along the lines of all the SynthEdit-based VSTis for Windows out there, but that’s a chance I’m willing to take. This probably outside the scope of iLife, but it would be killer inside, say the Leopard Developer Tools.
5. Heck, I’d still like to see Apple come out with the “Asteroid” device that caused all the rumor site controversy a few years back. I have extreme doubts that this is going to happen, since the project was supposedly scrapped, but it would have been nice.

This silly little blog is now OpenID enabled. If you have an OpenID provider (Livejournal, for example), you can comment as yourself, and don’t need an additional username/password/other nonsense.

Cool, huh?