Steve’s Stuff

At Professor Harrison’s suggestion, I looked at Zexy (a Pd external) to see if it’s multi-track recorder object would be useful. I still run into the problem of having to rewind the object once it plays through the sample. The object looks interesting for multi-track recording and playback, but it’s not really any better than readsf~ for my purposes. It would be faster to simply rewind a file as opposed to re-opening it as readsf~ requires, but it’s not significant enough to forgive the following hassle . . .

The Zexy object uses the .RAW format, whatever the heck that is. I’ve never seen it before. It’s always frustrating to me that Pd always wants a screwy file format in order to work properly. Sure, it’s got a wave and aif player, but some of the objects need bizarre codecs that are long sense gone. How hard would it be to figure out something standard and stick with it?

I’m going to go with the dueling readsf~ files tomorrow. Hopefully that will behave as I intend. More on this later.

Now that we have terabyte drives, here are the next few advances to look forward to (complete with humorous names) . . .

petabyte (a quadrillion bytes)
exabyte (one quintillion bytes)
zettabyte (one sextillion bytes)
yottabyte (one septillion bytes)
xygabyte (one zillion bytes)
zyxobyte (one bazillion bytes)

OK, so I made those last two up.

According to a yahoo article, once we reach the 50T range, we can listen to a century’s worth of music non stop. When Cage wrote his 11 year organ piece, he didn’t think big enough.

Lets hope BluRay and HD-DVD are forgotten as quickly as the mid-90s Digital Compact Cassette (DCC). There’s nothing we need less than over-priced “premium” formats that offer such a small advantage over existing formats. The difference between LPs and CDs is pretty great: size, portability, longevity, price, etc. The difference between high def DVDs is . . . storage capacity??? Sure, this allows better video quality, but not *drastically* better video quality. Why should anyone start rebuilding their DVD collection just for an increase in video quality on a TV they probably can’t afford?

And don’t think for a minute that the larger storage capacity will change anything about extra features. There are still plenty of DVDs released with nothing but trailers and hilariously stupid DVD recommendations (e.g. Did you enjoy Titanic? You might also enjoy The Abyss, Evil Dead, Last Action Hero, and many other titles that happen to be from the same DVD studio!).

The worst aspect that nobody seems to be talking about is the DRM involved. If you try to play a BluRay or HD-DVD in a conventional play, it automatically downgrades its quality to “worse than broadcast”. This isn’t even about copy protection anymore - this is about forcing pointless hardware sales. What a shame. But, I would expect no less from the greedy entertainment industry.

This is an interesting piece on why HD formats have already failed.

I started doing serious work on the Pd programming for my project. The goal was to build a software sample player and live performance patch to tie everything together. As it happens, Pd is not exactly built for this.

There are two objects to read audio files: readsf~ and soundfiler~. The former streams the audio from disk while the latter writes the audio file to a table that you can then scrub through. The idea is that there are some rumbling, drone sounds that occur while the installation is at rest. As people enter the installation space, the patch begins to react and the calm, peaceful samples give way to more activity.

Anytime you’re working with audio files, you’re pretty much streaming them from, if you’ve broken your HD into volumes, the fastest part of the disk. This is crucial for uninterrupted playback. Unfortunately, readsf~ doesn’t work well with looping. Pd requires you to re-open the file each time you want to play it and then send the object a “start” message. This introduces unacceptable delay on the order of seconds (!) - may not sound like a lot, but your ear will easily pick up on millisecond delays. Mine will anyway. It’s not even that I’m getting a little zipper noise - it’s flat out dropping out for a second or two.

I experimented running two instances of readsf~ so that the second gets cued up seconds before the first finishes in hopes of moving seamlessly between the two. This works a little, but not great. It reduces the delay to a few milliseconds, but there’s still the issue of zipper noise.

One possibility is to tweak this configuration, but it’s horrible programming and needlessly complex. As a last resort, I will try sizable fade-ins and fade-outs to give me some breathing room with the overlap. It’s not a huge deal because I’m not working musically in the temporal sense. There are no beats or pulses - just atmospheric ambience. If I DID want to add beats, this will not work at all.

Soundfiler~, as I said before, writes the audio files to a table. This is great for short loops. You connect a sawtooth wave to a tabread~ (table reading) object and it continually cycles through it. You can even go backwards or scrub through the waveform. The problem with this approach is that all the sound files eventually get stored in the patch. My 60-second samples that I want to loop each need a 2.5 meg graph to hold them. Once more than two of these are present, Pd starts behaving erratically. It becomes unstable to the point that it’s unusable.

A possibility for this method is to cut my samples - maybe to one 8th the size. Then they will loop fine, but they’ll also be fairly short and anyone who stands just beyond the installation will be able to notice the same sounds repeating over and over again. I could work with randomly alternating samples so that periodically, something changes, just infrequently enough to not be easily detectable.

So, I’ve got one object that’s good for streaming, but bad for looping; and one object that’s great for looping, but bad for reading. As the guy trying to remove soap scum from his shower with a tooth brush always says, “there’s got to be a better way!”