Monthly Archives: August 2007

Share Your Library with “Shelfari”

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Last night, I discovered Shelfari, a social networking site centered around books.

Shelfari introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and passions with peers, friends, and total strangers (for now). Shelfari was the first social media site focused on books, and will continue to innovate as it brings together the world’s readers.

So far, I’ve put 95 books on my shelf for the world to see. Though I’ll have to start digging through boxes soon if I want to continue adding more. I’m being very selective of which books I’m making public. Not that I’m ashamed of anything, but I want to make sure that I display titles that are worthwhile, leaving out any and all potential filler, which I’m sad to say does take up too much of my physical shelves here at home. Besides, is anyone really interested in my copy of “Chicken Soup for the Soul.” (I don’t actually own that.)

Thanks to cornpone for the link. Visit his two sites, lemon pepper hot wing and trypanblue.

ShellVerb: Csound Command-Line Effects Processor

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About a month ago, peiman posted a question to the Csound Mailing list about the possiblity “to batch process several audio-files with the same csound code.” Prior to this, I had never considered using Csound in this manner.

After some discussion on the list about how to do this, I presented a simple solution using the command-line. This bash call was then refined by sand-6.

I continued to work on this, as there were still a few unresolved issues. For example, designing Csound instruments that would process mono or stereo files automatically, and being able to set parameters from the command-line. I wrote ShellVerb v0.1 to demonstrate a way to build these abilities into command-line instruments. Though I wasn’t completely happy with my approach.

I revisted ShellVerb yesterday, and came up with ShellVerb v0.2. This version, in theory, works identically to v0.1 as far as the user is concerned. However, I made some changes internally that I hope are a bit more clear to those wishing to analyze the file so they can write their own Csound based command-line audio tools.

It turns out that not only can Csound be used as a batch processor, but it also makes for a damn fine one. Csound is chock full of filters, envelopes, digital siginal processors, spectral processors, etc. From these synthesizer/dsp modules, one can design very complex effects units that would be impractical to implement in most other products out in the wild. Since the original post at the mailing list, I’ve heavily incorporated Csound command-line processors into some of the projects I’m currently working on, with stellar results.

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Fast Tracker II with DOSBox

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Sometime in the early 90’s, I was introduced to the DOS app ModEdit, a sample based compositional environment, known as a tracker. I never produced a finished piece of music, though I did screw around with it quite a bit. When I discovered Future Crew‘s Scream Tracker 3, I basically went through the same process, with the exception that I actually composed and released my first mod “Lore.” Terrible, it was.

Then came along Triton’s Fast Tracker II. This was light years ahead of trackers that came before it. It had an exceptional user interface, and many highly useful features not present in other trackers. It was very crude, yet an effective 8-bit era recording studio. And I have a lot of fond memories surrounding FT2.

DOS as an operating system is dead. Though it has been resurrected in the form of DOSBox, a cross-platform emulation environment that runs legacy DOS apps. Including Fast Tracker II.

Though I doubt I will ever again use FT2 as one of my primary compositional tools, I’m grateful that I’m able to revisit dozens of unfinished works, as it’s been fun recycling old mod loops with Ableton’s Live.

My only regret in life is that I never sent Triton my $20 dollars.


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