Sound Cloud Waveform Hider – Safari Extension

This is a VERY quick and dirty safari extension, all it does is include a single CSS file in your pages that contains 1 CSS definition that will hide any content that has the classname “waveform”. This rule will only occur if you are on a site that starts with the url http://soundcloud.com

Everything else is left as it was before, the progress bar, the loading bar, the comments, it’s just the waveform that gets hidden.

That’s all it does, but maybe it will make your life easier if you visit soundcloud a lot and you don’t like seeing the waveforms.

Marbs has released the first version of his U-load ucreate open client for loading custom loops into the ucreate hardware.

This is huge if you happen to have 1 or 2 like I do. I have the 1 that I stripped all the loop stuff out of, and I’m rehousing as an effects box almost.

But I still have one that is boxed and has been patiently waiting for me to be able to load my own custom 5 second long samples onto.

Marbs now has U-load for loading the samples onto the ucreate and LopGenerator for creating the specific 5 second long samples.

Uload is currently only windows and linux (I’m trying to find out if I can help with the Osx compiler. LopGenerator is available in all 3 flavors. They’re all up on Gitorious under GNU license.

Huge thank you from me to Marbs for spending the time to do this. I really look forward to seeing what comes of this first step.

Just saw an awesome link on the main uCreate blog post I made a year or so ago. The ucreate by mattel has such huge potential for such a cheap toy, but due to it’s locked down system that potential hasn’t been exploited to it’s fullest.

Someone at mattel really needs to understand that these could become the next speak and spell for circuit benders and diy music nerds and they’d shift tens of thousands of units, if they’d just leak or open up the communication protocols for “hackers” to create new interfaces, load their own samples and create their own audio filters.

Well until Mattel gets with the program we have a new hope, and that’s Marbs, go check out his site, bookmark it and follow along as he works out how to unlock the full potential of these awesome little toys.

http://marbs-online.blogspot.com/2011/02/ucreate-proof-of-concept.html

Marbs has been getting some help from Scragz http://scragz.com/ who was able to provide him some of the files before his uCreate arrived after being shipped half way round the world.

Wishing them both good luck with their endeavors.

…more details to come.

(check the comments, I’m posting updates down there)

Touch Arc is a Monome Arc emulator for development purposes. It is very much not intended to be “nice” to use or a competitor to the hardware, so please don’t complain about that aspect (if you want a useable and ergonomic interface that’s a joy to use, buy an Arc).

Touch Arc comprises two parts, a TouchOSC template and a Max patch that works as the middle ware and converts the Arc OSC your app is transmitting into a format the touchosc template can interpret, and vica versa it takes the touchosc template interface input and converts it into fake Arc OSC format that your app can handle.

This way developers can work on proof of concept, sound in the knowledge that once the arc hardware is released their applications will function.

The touchOSC template initially replicates all the in and out points of the Arc 2 (I’ll do an Arc 4 one later if there is a demand).

This means there are two duplicated UI’s for each encoder, these are made up of:

- 64 slider ui elements, which can handle values of 0 – 15 (these are the LED’s)
- 4 momentary buttons, that output every 100ms either -2, -1, +1, +2 (these are the encoder turns).
- 1 momentary button that registers as an encoder press event.

For the LED side of things, due to the limitations in the TouchOSC interface, the LED UI is made up of 4 multisliders each made up of 16 subsliders. We could have used 64 single sliders, but they can’t go narrow enough to get 64 of them in a row, even in landscape mode, this means the LED handling middleware needs to do a fair amount of math converting 0-64 into 0-3 + 0-15 coordinates. For this reason (and mainly due to hitting a brick wall with the range wrapping round at 64, I used Javascript as the main math function handling.

The interaction conversion side of things is a much easier straight translation, so I handled that with just Max. The encoder rotation interface is faked by firing a value every 100ms for as long as one of the valued buttons is pressed in the UI. I could replace these with a slider the more you slide it from the center the faster it fires the +1 or -1 values, but i figured for ease and simplicity this approach worked.

Source code is available on google projects, so you can download it and try it out http://code.google.com/p/touch-arc/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk. If you can find bugs or better ways of approaching the problem, I’m very happy to update the code, or please feel free to use SVN and update the code or post other examples directly to the project.

I have spoken to Brian at Monome and he’s very happy for me to make this available, if it makes developers lives a little easier pre launch, hopefully that will be of benefit to everyone.

Update:

I’m working on a native Max UI, to see if that renders better without so many hicups. It could also be used in app patches where you’d like an onscreen representation of the Arc UI. Should be ready for testing very soon.

For a long time I have been toying with the idea of creating a Control Voltage tuned Radio that I can DIY and add to my Eurorack Modular Synth setup.

There are a ton of uses I can see in having easy access to the radio waves: random noise, strange sounds, fuzz and white noise.

But being able to control the tuning with CV so I can jump around the dial, or slew my way from one spot to another I think would be really awesome.  If for no other reason than I like the idea of programming up a sequence and then every time it runs it will be different since the sound source is constantly evolving and changing.

So research began by looking at how radios work, and things didn’t look good to start off.  It seems that radio tuning is all about capacitance, not voltage.

The simplest tuner consists of an inductor and capacitor connected in parallel. The capacitor is usually made to be variable (although the inductor can made variable it requires a more complex mechanism and is rarely used). This creates a resonant circuit which responds to an alternating current of one frequency

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuner_(radio)

This means “most” of the time the tuning pot is not a pot but a variable capacitor type thing, which means you can’t just swap out the pot with a CV source (which was my initial hope, ignorance is bliss).

All seemed at a lose until I found out that some radios use what is called “varactor diode tuning” this is a diode that in essence replaces the capacitor bit, but the neat bit about the diode is that it’s voltage controlled.  This means that the tuning pot will be handling voltage and suddenly we have somewhere we can bolt our CV into.

The next snippet of info, was that Ramsey (the makers of great electronics DIY kits) make a series of kits that all use Varactor Diode Tuning, include a $40 FM receiver kit.

So later part of 2010 I ordered one up, and it sat on a shelf for a few months whilst I tried to finish off other “higher priority” projects.

Then NAMM 2011 came around, and I was intrigued to see that Buchla, the makers of VERY high end modular synths was showcasing a new module the 272e which had 4 FM receivers that could all be referenced via CV.  Now their concept is very different to mine, they have digital tuners that you tune and they then allow you to control the outage from each using complex envelopes, there is no CV control of the tuning – that said they do look really very nice indeed.

Buchla patch Model 272e through the 296e Spectral Processor. from Richard Devine on Vimeo.

But if nothing else it spurred me back into life.  So earlier this week I soldered up the Ramsey kit.

With some awesome help over on the muffwiggler forums (MANY THANKS DAVERJ!)

I tapped into a couple of places on the PCB and hooked it up to a very low frequency Oscillator I had running a sine wave, and low and behold I had CV controlled tuning.

Now the tricky bit.  I doesn’t work great. It doesn’t work with CV only with the Oscillator, so it needs a stack load more tweaking and testing.  But my hope is in the next week to get it hooked up to Silent Way and have a fulling CV tunable radio incorporated into my modular synth.

I picked up a $10 blue toy megaphone/voice changer. It comes with 5 switches down the site to choose different voice changin effects.

After removing the PCB from the plastic case, replacing the microphone with a 1/4″ in, and the speaker with a 1/4″ out. Removing all the plastic switches, drilling out the holes, replacing with metal toggle switches. Finding a way to rewire the LED’s that show the audion level. Finding a way to supress the op/amp chip with a giant resistor so it doesn’t increase the volume 10 times. All I needed to do was stick it in a temp hardboard panel and mount it in my eurorack.

I rather like the effects, they really are very nasty.

It would be great if the intensity of each effect was controllable with a knob, but I tried and nothing seemed to work.

It would be great if the toggles could also be fired with CV triggers, but I have no idea where to start.

So for now, this is it.

I’ll find a link to the actual megaphone and will post here soon.

edit:

There’s a picture on the right of what I started with, it’s not my picture, just one I found on flickr that was the same.

Initial Inspiration came from Casper Electronics

http://casperelectronics.com/​finished-pieces/​megaphone/​cm2/​

Here we go…

http://cgi.ebay.com/​Multi-Voice-Changer-10-VOICE-EFFECTS-NEW-Megaphone_W0QQitemZ220694348490QQcategoryZ106259QQcmdZViewItem

Quick test patch, to see how we can control the ES-1 module from Expert Sleepers using Max/MSP.

Usually the ES-1 is controlled by Silent Way (which has a ton of awesome functionality; calibration, quantizations, LFO’s etc. But i really wanted a way that I could quickly get up to my neck in craziness using max/msp to control the ES1, so this is my first quick test.

Is it just me or does it seem exponential the sound (and Hz increase on the toptop z3000) as you slide the amplitude slider to the right?

More coming soon…

Patch Attached Below:

----------begin_max5_patcher----------
657.3oc0W0ziaBCD8L4WgkOVklZa9HPus8P+CziUqpHfSVWA1Tvnlrq17auF
CjjskDbBDz1KfX.m48dya737xLK3JwVZAD7Yv2AVVuLyxRGpJfUyyVvzvsQI
gE5OCReNNLZObd8q3koLdBUpeG4XPQorMJpIZVnL5IFeyOxoQx5LZ6u.MGPr
WVcyws8J3wlkvh0oTr5meD6Aqh85rYUWlaHXiDooTtrEsR5VclgeSTxiAB9m
DqW2IUvMAWK3xB1yTcLxBzUyPMoHXb0MrKR+D5LTzEdRV4go5rBeHmElLlj+
gzrDlrLldWYNwknIqmALe4zP7ulS+UIkGs69VxqM0tFva6wk2JHthlObxQNO
4bH0DxKn5VGrq9mQtKiVu.HqpP.fqB4afc55cFWQnHRjQuk8mVUttUY7sOuB
fQZpais0bO3Xmcmry9l3PBKtmB4a4.9B1QcCnSPckRCZa6KUv5tJQNTkRDgR
0hxJkml4CRGBojhaw7R+sJQ+SOaNnpq8KcpEnqwTeAIB6oG.Enu5h62S2sDg
+uqaF6p2qBW6QFktYzHKBc6JJXa1ObkA2ux3421vzmxnfDWwwtDkfwUSTcfJ
dbWMFj.2S5HLvWn2U3hNC+IwX7g8.7E26enFCR63cGswfrvc.FCuQdzW+iMR
KSzDQg3qdRRyI5F5nDWCmjfG2AIQ6hRn6UlYzc0efcVVehes7Tu8wM6OHl4O
zKElv3+8+jSiup3uUtJDk4Qsou8LXfiPLlVHY7PISvO8iTmVEfO7QOwhio7S
GCmxhyDpADMf.7XmEOSwjmoPBMYPp5PP8iIzjho.CfDYZUIjAPJXZgD98Wgy
2.H4MocbtFfH+IUiHFpQn2W6JMDHod30Y+waXj2r
-----------end_max5_patcher-----------

Having assembled my MidiVox, I set about trying to use it in ableton with sequenced midi control and automation of the CC controls.

I hate dealing with native midi in abelton, the automation is never user friendly with a giant list of everything, and control isn’t exposed in the UI, so the only place to change the values is in the envelope part of the workflow. So I thought I’d delve into Max4Live and make a nice simple front end midi controller that can be added in front of the external instrument and contains all the default Live dials and is specific to MidiVox.

Attached is a zip that contains this first pass as an ableton instrument, as an ableton instrument rack including the external instrument and as the plain max patch. I have no idea if it will work on other peoples systems, as this is my first patch shared, let me know if you can get it working, or if there are issues. I have a ton of ideas for making it better, but for now it works and serves the purpose.

midvox_for_Max4Live.zip (0.1 release)

Ever since buying a couple of modules, I’ve fallen in love with analogue modular synths, they are addictive beyond belief and I’ve yet to find anything as engrossing as standing in front of it twiddling knobs for no apparent reason generating all sorts of swirling modulating filtering noise. I can loose hours very easily. As always though I’m never satisfied and I want to tinker. One of my projects I’m most actively researching is the idea of an arduino based Step Sequencer.

There are a million threads online with people desperately trying to get their trusty arduino’s to generate control voltage. The problem you have is that the arduino doesn’t live in a real analog world, it’s all about the digital. The only smooth it can do is PWM, and even then it’s really not go lovely to listen to. There are huge threads about people applying filtering, or faking analog with complex software, or powering 8bit, 12bit 16bit DAC and the huge amount of arduino sketches needs to handle them, and to be honest it’s totally terrifying for something that is as easy as turning a pot. So I decided to take a different approach. (if you really want to make music with an arduino, go see midivox, I just got a couple and they kick ass)

I want to keep the analog signal pure, and only handle the step side of the equation using the arduino. So the initial idea would be 8 pots, 1 thru 8. a single CV in, a single CV out. The arduino would be hooked up, so that when messages are sent down the USB connection, current passes thru 1 specific pot and comes out the other side.

So I can set up my “notes” with the analog pots, and then just trigger which one, when, how long and what order they get “played”.

After this initial prototype, I’d shoot higher and aim for 3 or 4 rows of 8 each with their own dedicated CV in and out, and gate outs, and tempo outs, and LED’s flashing, and a front accessible USB port, and way to store sequences on a memory chip that is slotted into the front and sequences chosen using nothing but the power of the mind, etc etc etc.

It seemed like a no brainer DIY project, that maybe one day would lead to PCB’s and kits and open source and all that stuff I aspire to do.

Due to my limited real knowledge thought I’m already overflowing with questions. First of which is how I do this, and what’s the best “switching” mechanism should I use. Should I use relays, optoisolators, Voltage controlled resistors, transistors or just good old plain Jane relays. I have some open question on the arduino forums so hopefully I’ll get some validation for my madness. Any suggestions feel free to jump in.