02.29.08
Posted in whiteLABEL at 4:06 pm by daz
So, here I am, quietly working away, sorting these plugins out, not saying much about it, slowly letting news out and gathering more downloads. So … come this afternoon i have passed through the 1200 downloads mark, and am simply amazed - I do hope what I’ve put out there is gonna be useful to some of you !! If you’d care to stand forward and let me know who you are, and how things work, or don’t work for you, that’d be just great… I’ve a pretty good view of the spread of y’all thanks to google analytics - you’re in 61 different countries, thats where … looking forward to your feedback
[update : by 10.03.08 downloads reach 2600 from people in 82 countries]
[further update : by 23.04.08 - 16000 from 121 countries !!]
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02.28.08
Posted in autoBED, whiteLABEL at 12:21 pm by daz
Having found a few nasties in autoBED a few days ago, I’ve made some changes and designated it v 0.7 :
lookahead delay now upto 2000 ms - was 1000
vst automation parameters tidied up, trimmed - down, re-organised
internals tidied up, some junk removed - download now a little smaller
choice of response modes - new led on right - when lit, fades are in db, when unlit, calculated using internal Voltage model.
download autoBED : 1.81mb zip … pdf manual : here
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02.27.08
Posted in really? how exciting at 12:31 pm by daz
Sound Artist Amie Slavin will be showing Sophia’s Web at this year’s SightSonic -The York International Festival of Digital Arts. We got a ‘phone call last night from one of the organisers requesting the presence of the piece, which will be on show from 14th to 17th March. More info here .
As if this wasn’t news enough, one of Amie’s other pieces ‘WavePOWER, WavePLAY, WavePOWER‘ will be featured as part of ResonanceFM’s contribution to the AV 08 Festival during their week long broadcast from the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.
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Posted in really? how exciting at 10:44 am by daz
An earthquake measuring 5.something on the rhictus scale was felt throught the country at about 1 am last night. It has emerged that the quake centered on the sleepy market town of Market Rasen, in the Lincolnshire Wolds. Much of the town, and several surrounding villages were flattened by the impact of the quake - felt as far away as 150 miles. Experts suggest that a shock of this magnitude may well be responsible for the birth of language in the near future - local inhabitants tend to be quite shy, and as far as communication with the outside world is concerned, all that has been heard in the last few decades has been a series of grunts from a local farmer, apparently ‘tending’ to his sheep. Although the area suffered wide-spread devastation, no rescue efforts have been launched yet, largely due to the inability of the emergency services to locate Lincolnshire. The most pressing cause for concern to emerge so far has come in the form of a whip-round by local villagers struggling to find the £4.19 needed to repair the extensive damage sustained by this sleepy, and overestimated village. Further afield, in the dangerous wastelands of Gainsborough, houses were said to have suffered extensive damage, although on inspection, insurance companies suggested that there was no possible way to verify the extent or cause of any damage sustained. One industry insider was heard saying ‘come on, this is Gainsborough afterall’.
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02.25.08
Posted in deeeeeLAY, whiteLABEL at 5:20 pm by daz
deeeeeLAY MK I is a stereo delay machine offering delay times upto 60 seconds, pre feedback filters, and cross-feedback. !! CAUTION EXTREME LEVELS !!
Get it here
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02.24.08
Posted in really? how exciting at 11:19 pm by daz
[just a bit of fun] Following on from this post in rec.audio.pro I decided to do a little experiment …William Sommerwerck :
Back in 1980 I attended the SCES and heard a demo from Peter Moncrief which purported to show the audibility of absolute phase by playing a 0.5 Hz square wave through an LS3/5a. There was an obvious difference in timbre between the B110 going in and coming out.
When I got back home, I attempted to duplicate the experiment, using Audio Technica electret headphones. (They were selected not only for their quality, but because their step-up transformers were electrically isolated, making it easy to reverse polarity.) A Heathkit generator provided the 0.5Hz square wave.
In the process of experimentation I discovered that the square wave _always_ sounded like “tick tock”. Always. I attached a ’scope and confirmed that the polarity didn’t matter — the first pulse I heard had a different timbre from the second.
Using the ’scope to show the polarity, I found I could mentally “flop” the “tick” and “tock”, and the inversion was stable with time. It was sort of the audio equivalent of the Necker Cube.
So, I’ve created wave files to have a stab at doing this demo (obviously knowing nothing more about it than whats provided in the post). I’ve discovered that the LS3/5a is a speaker designed by the good old beeb and considered somewhat of a classic. Of these, I have none, and I can’t even be bothered to look for the meaning of B110 - I bet its probably the code for the driver in the LS3/5a, or a magnet design number or somesuch. What I can provide is an approximation of a square wave at 0.5 Hz.
Okay, that’s great. To further explore this, I’ve created a pulse wave at 1Hz, and I’m not letting on which file is which.
They both sound similar, as they both consist of 19 clicks over a 20 second duration. The square wave maintains its peaks and a click is effictively produced everytime the waveform pass through zero, whereas the pusle wave peaks and then returns to 0 creating a click - hence the difference in frequencies of the originating ‘waves’.
The test is this :
Visit this page to download the zip file containing 2 wave files. Without looking at the waveforms listen to them. Are all the clicks in the file identical sounding ? Is it for both files, or just for one ?
Do your speakers sound different moving from + to - when compared to from - to + ?
When You’re done, visit this page to share your results.
That’s all really - on listenning, I [fwiw] experienced something similar to what William described with a definite ‘up / down’ feel to what I was hearing with the square wave and the ability to switch sides on the rythm, but I’m not sure if I got the same results with the pulse wave - I’ll try again in a few days time … in the mean while, happy listenning
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02.19.08
Posted in freqDELAY, whiteLABEL at 3:47 pm by daz
download freqDELAY : 1.66mb zip … pdf manual : here
freqDELAY is a multi-band freak-out delay machine. The incoming stereo signal is processed through 4 bands of delay with seperate control over delay time, level, feedback, filter shape, frequency and resonance. Additional multiplier controls allow the relationships between bands to be preserved whilst changing e.g. all delay times from one knob. Finally, mix control selects how much dry and wet signal to output.
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Posted in wavePLAY, whiteLABEL at 12:39 am by daz
download wavePLAY : 1.84mb zip … pdf manual : here
Designed by Sound Artist Amie Slavin, wavePLAY is a simple 4 oscillator wave-explorer synthesiser. Each oscillator has controls for wave shape (7 types) frequency, amplitude and pan. The initial idea for wavePLAY was to provide sounds for a piece of the same name by Amie to act as a partner piece to wavePOWER, a 20 minute voice and sound bricolage exploring amongst other things the potential of tidal wavePOWER as a means of producing clean, sustainable electricity. wavePOWER was broadcast / netcast on Resonance 104.4fm on feb 11th ‘08 and is scheduled for another airing sometime in march.
Read more about the work of Amie Slavin.
Read more about wavePLAY and wavePOWER.
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Posted in autoBED, whiteLABEL at 12:37 am by daz
download autoBED : 1.84mb zip … pdf manual : here
Imagine a scenario where you have a voice-over and a backing track, and want them to co-exist nicely in your production. Well, thats what autoBED is for.
Basic instructions for use (with reference to cubase ®, my host of choice). Assuming you have a stereo music track and a mono or stereo voice-over track, you’ll first need to create a quadro group track. Now route the music track to the group track inputs 1 and 2 using surround panner in Y mirror mode so that the left channel goes to quadro channel 1, the right to 2. Now do the same for the voice-over (keying) track, but this time, route it to tracks 3 & 4 of the quadro group. Now autoBED is setup for ducking the music whenever the voice-over hits the threshhold level. This screen-shot shows what happens with the envelope of a pure-wave-carrier and an ambient recording of a drumkit as the key - the key isn’t in the final mix for clarity’s sake :
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Posted in sideGATE, whiteLABEL at 12:32 am by daz
A simple gate, with a twist - sideGATE offers the ability to gate one side of a stereo channel according to the volume of the other side. In fact, the carrier and modulator can be mixed between both inputs. This allows sideGATE to work as a stereo gate, or as a mono gate with virtual sidechain input.
download sideGATE : 1.75mb zip … pdf manual : here … this one for : more info
When the modulator is higher than the threshhold, the carrier is audible, when lower, gated - leading rise to the sort of functionality needed to say, replace a bass drum with another sound using the bass drum’s envelope :
First create a stereo group. Route the synth to the left channel of the group, and the bass drum to the right. Set the channel knob fully to the left, and the sidechain knob fully to the right. This is the basic start-point as the bass drum now gates the synth.
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Posted in sidePRESS, whiteLABEL at 12:12 am by daz
This evening I’ve splatted a few bugs and ironed out some creases to improve sidePRESS.
- The newly implimented auto Attack mode now ties attack time to look-ahead delay time to save having to do sums,
- autoGAIN mode improved so it has unity gain with regular gain knob
- autoGAIN display now working for right channel when auto mode is on
- presets freshened up a little
oh, and I’ve updated the website too : [whiteLABEL vst plugins]
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02.16.08
Posted in really? how exciting at 4:47 pm by daz
Not the most conventional of valentines gifts, and a day or so late … I’ve received two 19 inch tft monitors - a whopping 2.62 Million pixels don’t you know - woo hoooooo - the studio [once relocated downstairs again] is gonna look great and have more space to move around in now I can finally pass on the two [stupidly deep] 17 inch crts we’ve been using for the last 4 years. And what did I give in return ? A years membership to talking books - more toys. Consider me a Happy Valentine.
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02.15.08
Posted in really? how exciting at 9:26 pm by daz
Watch out if you’ve got a Behringer MX3242X or similar !! I’ve just changed the plastic bevel on the side panels for the rack ears that arrived with the mixer 4 years ago … thanks to some rather short-sighted design, I’ve just broken off the headphone socket !! This is because the supplied screws are FAR TOO LONG for one of the screw-holes and when screwed in even half way bumps up against a floating piece of PCB holding the headphone socket [I know now ...] but seeing as I didn’t know, and I have a penchant for cross-threading screws, I carried on when it got a little stiff - A MISTAKE !! ….. CRACK ….. rattle, bump, off it goes.
I’ve been inside the case and its not gonna be difficult to fix but still …. arse
On a more positive note, I’ve now got the old laptop running as a virtual synth - haha - it’ll manage about 4ms latency comfortably running a single vsti with 3 moderately hungry insert fx, not bad for a vanilla dell pentium M 1.4gHz running XP on a paltry 256mb of ram with a cheap as chips internal audio chip.
Three cheers for cantabile : http://www.toptensoftware.com/cantabile/
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02.12.08
Posted in really? how exciting, wavePLAY, whiteLABEL at 11:13 am by daz
Amie’s piece “wavePower, wavePLAY; wavePOWER” got played on top London Arts Radio station Resonance FM 104.4 last night after a last minute ‘phone call from one of their programme managers saying they had an unexpected free slot and would it be possible to air the piece? possible? of course !! So we sat terrified for an hour as it streamed through one of our office pcs, hoping that the mix sounded as good on the net as it did in the studio. We were not disappointed!
So, two firsts - Amie had an hour of air-time, and I had one of my plugins used for about 10 minutes of the show.
“WavePower, WavePLAY, WavePower” is scheduled for another play in March - keep an ear on Resonance FM for more details.
Read more about the work of Sound Artist Amie Slavin.
Read about Wave POWER.
Get the wavePLAY vst plugin.
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02.11.08
Posted in sidePRESS, whiteLABEL at 10:55 am by daz
I’ve moved forward from gating / ducking to the creation of a compressor - one with a twist … Ladies and Gentleman, I bring you sidePRESS !! Capable of operating in stereo, dual mono, or serial modes, sidePRESS features switchable sidechains, lookahead delay, auto gain compensation, and pre/post reduction drive stage. What a monster.
get it here : http://www.roughdiamondproductions.com/whiteLABEL
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