Music
December 23, 2004
freeform jam with adarachrisbrennan
December 23, 2004
Yay, a nice color text mode UI for Jesusonic. Extending my minimal-windows-ncurses subset for color was remarkably easy. Perhaps I should release the source to that portion, might be useful for people... <3 text mode, faking it even more...
So let's see, stuff that I've gotten done recently: + Ported Jesusonic to OS X. This involved mostly spending time retargeting the internal script compiler for PPC instead of x86. It wouldn't have been hard, except for stupid mistakes (particularly pertaining to loading 32 bit immediate values to registers, and not taking into account that addi treats values as signed (doh!)). What made it really frustrating is that _some_ pointers would be loaded right, and others wrong. Took a bit to figure that one out. Doing the UI was a breeze, since it just uses ncurses, and Core Audio support was pretty easy too, just read the PDF and boom it worked. Supporting multiple simulaneous devices, however, looks like it will be a pain in the ass. Some notes: on my old 667mhz G4 powerbook, it works decent, a little bit better than an 800mhz Via C3. The latency when using a firewire MOTU 896HD with it, was great. 8ms or so, I think. Feels really nice when playing the guitar through it, even with effects that add latency (such as high speed convolution amp modeling). The main remaining issue left is that pageup/down don't work, since the Terminal app hijacks them for the scrollback buffer (any way to turn this off perhaps?). Anyway, I think we'll be releasing the mac version along with the windows one by christmas. at least in some beta/preview form. + Been building the Jesusonic packaging app. This little bugger lets you package up effects/presets/data files, and resolves dependencies for you. Once they are packaged up, you can decide if you want to upload to jesusonic.com, etc. The other side of the app is one that lets you install packages, and choose which elements to install, handle if you already have some on your system, and whatnot. I want to make it very easy to both make packages and install them. This tool will probably be Windows only initially, but have no fear the format is just .ZIP so you can create/install these packages on pretty much any OS. + Added OGG Vorbis support to Jesusonic. Which means you can store whatever audio you want, and have effects stream it back as needed. Decoding OGG from disk is extremely simple from script -- it's transparent. Whenever you open a file that ends in .ogg, it tries to use it as a decompressor. + Upgrading my pre-prototype hand-made Jesusonic box to a new CPU and motherboard. Went from a 800mhz Via C3 to a 1.6ghz Pentium M. I have to say, I am extremely impressed with the Pentium M. Amazingly fast, the HSF is tiny and quiet, and it doesn't even get that hot. Now if only the price would come down. With the new board, I really have to try hard to max the CPU out (i.e. getting 20 effects in there at a time), and I can even crank the latency down a bit more. + Managed to order a Geode NX eval board from Arrow Electronics. In 6 short weeks I should be able to see if those will work well, too. They are a bit too expensive, too, though. So I guess I've been only really doing shit with the Jesusonic lately. I guess that's ok, too. Oh yes, actually last night I watched the director's cut of JFK last night. So relevant to today. Argh.
Getting so frustrated, porting stuff to the mac, and getting the powerpc assembly portions to work right, but now it seems like there's some other bug in my memory allocation code, ugh. Been hunting it for so long, and it's compounded by the fact that the only mac I have access to at the moment is on the other side of some terrible DSL that disconnects me after every 5 minutes (thank god for screen), bleh. I better get my old powerbook back from Brennan soon, or I'm gonna go insane with it.i rule, really.What do these two URLs have in common? http://web.archive.org/web/19990420022838/www.winamp.com/ vs http://www.digisette.com/en/products/DUOdx.asp. You're welcome for the idea, haha. Not that it appears to have been particularly successful...
December 2, 2004
Reward: To the first person who can get me a source to buy some AMD Geode NX DB1500 development boards, for a reasonable price (i.e. less than $700), within the next month or so, I will send via paypal or whatever, $200. The VIA EPIA boards are just too slow for what I need, and the pentium M boards are hot/expensive/etc. Thank you. <3
shit. shit. no really, shit. :( but everything's ok. anybody know how to do some good distortion/overdrive effects in software? All of mine sound way too digital... Definately gonna have the windows version of Jesusonic out by Christmas. Pretty much have decided it will be free, too. The effects included will be GPL'd.. On another note, amazingly, it took me all day to do the :wq for this, heh. I wrote it after midnight, now it's 4pm. anyway.
Holy crap. Ian earlier told me to listen to the band Dungen, and they are so fuckin good. The album I have is "Ta Det Lungt", and it's just ridiculously good. really. Anyhoo, I gets to go back east now, byee.
The Jesusonic Web Site is coming along, as is the software and hardware.
I really think that John Carpenter was on to something when he made Escape From LA..
Oh boy, sigh. I'm anxious to see how the provisional ballots look in Ohio. While it is doubtful that they will have an effect on the outcome, it would be interesting to see if they differ greatly from the overall vote--i.e. if they do, it would make one think that there had been some systematic (i.e. non-random) reason why a lot of people were not able to vote. 200,000 or even 100,000 people in a state of 5 million is a lot... Anyway...
The Jesusonic now can do a drum machine. The patchset in this ditty is one I hastily recorded yesterday.
getting there. Need to sand a bunch, make a lid for the far side, and get a thumbscrew for the right lid (it has a little storage compartment to put the power supply/etc in). Under linux, have the latency down to about 10ms, still working on getting it lower and more robust. I like ALSA a lot compared to other audio APIs (god knows waveOut and directsound suck for this sort of thing), though some things don't seem to work exactly the way I'd like...
Oh yeah, this episode of frontline has some good stuff in it, too. Particular the last chapter, where you see Kerry speaking right BEFORE the Iraq war, and you realize he saw it coming exactly. Watch it. Chapter 8.
