Posted on August 19, 2014 by lsd

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Today I finished a pack of 100 coffee filters; that wouldn’t normally be much of a milestone, but this is the first pack of filters I’ve finished since moving to the US. After three months in San Francisco we’re feeling quite settled now, but through the stresses of moving, sorting out paperwork, and learning to live in a new city and country, making my morning coffee has been a reassuringly routine part of each day.

Australia and the US are similar in a lot of ways, of course, but we’ve still had to do a surprising amount of adjustment — much more than I expected. Of those adjustments, though, I think apartment living has probably been the easiest. We worried a little about moving in to a high-rise apartment building, especially given that we had to sign a lease before seeing our apartment, but it’s turned out very well; the building is great, and our apartment is quiet and comfortable, and seems to have plenty of room despite being smaller than our old house. Our two cats moved with us, and they seem to love it too!

Living without a car has also been surprisingly easy. Between Amazon and Google Shopping Express there’s not a lot we can’t get delivered, and San Francisco’s public transport has been pretty good, even if most of it is by bus. We’re also right near where the cable cars meet, and while the Powell-Hyde and Powell-Mason lines are usually too busy to catch, we can (and do!) often catch the California cable car, doesn’t get old. For the times we’ve needed a car around town, we’ve used UberX, which is super-convenient and (generally) cheaper than a taxi.

On the other hand, shopping has at times been a baffling ordeal; the common refrain is our house is “everything is slightly different and I don’t like it!”. It seems trivial, but having to find a new favourite brand of everything all at once, it really is a hassle. Even basic produce is a problem — good lamb has been hard to find, and this weekend we struggled to find a pork roast that still had its skin on (curse you, health nuts!). We’ve also had zero luck finding good Greek food, and little more success finding a good bahn mi like we’d have back in Melbourne.

It’s not all bad, though! Good Mexican food (and food from countless other Latin American countries, too) is cheap and plentiful, and it’s impossible to walk more than 5 metres without tripping over great bread, ice cream, or craft beers. Whole Foods is a great place to shop even if it does indulge in a lot of psuedoscientific crap, and Trader Joe’s is strangely awesome (especially the cookie butter!). This really is a great town to eat and drink in, both at home and out-and-about — we’ve just had to accept that food is different here, and learn how to make the most of that while we’re here.

Now that we’re settling in, I have time to get back to my hobbies (beyond exploring our new city, of course!); I haven’t done anything musical, but I’m starting Japanese classes again shortly. I’ve also built a new HTPC with a decent CPU and video card so it can do double-duty as a gaming system, running Steam in Big Picture mode and playing Wii games under Dolphin.

Well, that’s one box of coffee filters down, but I’m sure there’ll be many more to come!

Posted on April 29, 2014 by lsd

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This weekend was Ludum Dare again, and again Switchbreak asked me to write some music for his entry. It’s called Underground City Defender, and it’s a HTML5/Javascript game, so you can play it in your browser here!

The original idea for the game was to make it Night Vale-themed, so I started the music with a Disparition vibe in mind. The game didn’t turn out that way in the end, but that’s okay, since the music didn’t either! It’s suitably dark and has a driving beat to it, so I think fits the game pretty well.

My move to San Francisco is just a few weeks away, so I’ve sold most of my studio gear, including my audio interface and keyboard. That left me using my on-board sound card to run JACK and Ardour, but that turned out just fine — with no hardware synths to record from, not having a proper audio interface didn’t slow me down.

As some of you guessed, the toy in the mystery box in my last post was indeed a Teenage Engineering OP-1. It filled in as my MIDI controller here, and while it’s no substitute for a full-sized, velocity-sensitive keyboard, it did a surprisingly good job.

Software-wise, I used Rui’s samplv1 for the kick and snare drums, which worked brilliantly. I created separate tracks for the kick and snare, and added samplv1 to each, loading appropriate samples and then tweaking samplv1’s filters and envelopes to get the sound I was after. In the past I’ve used Hydrogen and created custom drum kits when I needed to make these sorts of tweaks, but having the same features (and more!) in a plugin within Ardour is definitely more convenient.

The other plugins probably aren’t surprising — Pianoteq for the pianos, Loomer Aspect for everything else — and of course, it was sequenced in Ardour 3. Ardour was a bit crashy for me in this session; I don’t know if it was because of my hasty JACK setup, or some issues in Ardour’s current Git code, but I’ll see if I can narrow it down.

Posted on March 3, 2014 by lsd

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Last weekend, almost exactly five years after I bought my Blofeld synth, I sold it. With plans to move to the US well underway, I’ve been thinking about the things I use often enough to warrant dragging them along with me, and the Blofeld just didn’t make the cut. At first, the Blofeld was the heart of my studio — in fact, if I hadn’t bought the Blofeld, I may well have given up on trying to make music under Linux — but lately, it’s spent a lot more time powered off than powered up.

Why? Well, the music I’m interested in making has changed somewhat — it’s become more sample driven and less about purely synthetic sounds — but the biggest reason is that the tools available on Linux have improved immensely in the last five years.

Back in 2009, sequencers like Qtractor and Rosegarden had no plugin automation support, and even if they had, there were few synths available as plugins that were worth using. Standalone JACK synths were more widespread, and those could at least be automated (in a fashion) via MIDI CCs, but they were often complicated and had limited CC support. With the Blofeld, I could create high-quality sounds using an intuitive interface, and then control every aspect of those sounds via MIDI.

Today, we have full plugin automation in both Ardour 3 and Qtractor, and we also have many more plugin synths to play with. LV2 has come in to its own for native Linux developers, and native VST support has become more widespread, paving the way for ports of open-source and commercial Windows VSTs. My 2012 RPM Challenge album, far side of the mün has the TAL NoiseMaker VST all over it; if you’re recording today, you also have Sorcer, Fabla, Rogue, the greatly-improved amsynth, Rui’s synthv1/samplv1/drumkv1 triumvirate, and more, alongside commercial plugins like Discovery, Aspect, and the not-quite-so-synthy-but-still-great Pianoteq.

I bought the Blofeld specifically to use it with a DAW, but I think that became its undoing. Hardware synths are great when you can fire them up and start making sounds straight away, but the Blofeld is a desktop module, so before I could play anything I had to open a DAW (or QJackCtl, at the very least) and do some MIDI and audio routing. In the end, it was easier to use a plugin synth than to set up the Blofeld.

So, what else might not make the cut? I only use my CS2X as a keyboard, so I’ll sell that and buy a new controller keyboard after moving, and now that VST plugins are widely supported, I can replace my Behringer VM-1 analog delay with a copy of Loomer Resound. I might also downsize my audio interface — I don’t need all the inputs on my Saffire PRO40, and now that Linux supports a bunch of USB 2.0 audio devices, there are several smaller options that’ll work without needing Firewire.

I’m not getting rid of all of my hardware, though; I’ll definitely keep my KORG nanoKONTROL, which is still a great, small MIDI controller. In fact, I also have two new toys that I’ll be writing about very soon. Both are about as different from one another as you could get, but they do share one thing — they’re both standalone devices that let you make music without going anywhere near a computer.

Posted on January 25, 2014 by lsd

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With new consoles on the market, and plans to move to San Francisco later this year, I figured it was time to cut down on some of the console clutter I’ve collected over the years. For now, I still have our 360 and PS3, but I’ve traded in a bunch of 360 games, given the Wii to my parents, and sold our long-disused PS2 and all our old PS2 and GameCube games. I’ve also sold off a bunch of DS and GBA games, and my DS Lite and GBA SP consoles themselves won’t be far behind.

Thankfully, if I ever get nostalgic, those systems I’ve retired — the PS2, GameCube, Wii, DS, and GBA — can all be emulated. In my last post I talked about using Dolphin to emulate the GameCube and Wii; for the PS2, there’s PCSX2, which like Dolphin can render games at high resolutions to improve quality; for the DS, there’s DeSmuME (and an excellent Android port of it, called DraStic); and for the GBA, there’s VBA-M.

For the Wii, GameCube, and PS2, I was even able to back up my save games, using GCMM and Savegame Manager GX on the Wii for the GameCube and Wii saves, respectively, and uLaunchElf on the PS2, to dump the saves to a USB stick. In both cases, I had to pull some tricks to run third-party code — on the Wii, installing the Homebrew Channel is fairly straightforward, but on the PS2 I had to use my Swap Magic discs.

To next-gen, or to PC?

New console launches are usually a cause for excitement, but their release just reminds me of what we’re losing with the end of the previous generation. Consoles have come and gone in the past, of course, but the move to digital distribution has made separating the consoles from their content much more difficult this time around. If I sold my 360 or PS3 today, I couldn’t resell all their digital content; I still own that content, and if I bought a new 360 in a few years I could reinstall it, but what about 5 years from now, or 10?

Even if it’s not perfect, the PC does offer a better alternative. Some old games are unplayable today, but if a game has a dedicated community, chances are that someone’s worked out how to run it on modern PCs. Steam’s DRM has so far proven mostly benign, and services like GOG and the Humble Store offer DRM-free downloads, too.

In fact, I seem to have made the jump to PC already, almost by accident. I’ve played a couple of big-name games this year, like Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider, but I’ve spent much more time playing smaller, more interesting games, like Kerbal Space Program, Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Kentucky Route Zero, Papers, Please, and most recently, the Double Fine Adventure game, Broken Age, almost all of which are PC exclusives.

PC power

PC gaming has a lot of baggage — the image of the hardcore gamer that spends as much time upgrading and tweaking their Windows PC as they spend actually playing games on it — but these smaller games often defy that image. Most run on Linux and Mac OS X, and most also run on fairly modest PCs; in fact, I’ve spent more time gaming on my now 2011 Macbook Air in the last year than I have on any other system.

I’m sure I’ll want to play another big-budget graphical powerhouse eventually, and I’m not yet sure what I’ll do about that. By that time, a gaming PC with the power of the next-gen consoles might only cost as much as those consoles cost now. I like the idea of gaming laptops, but they’re expensive and clunky; only the Razer Blade delivers suitable power in a sleek, elegant form-factor, but at US$2000 it’s even more expensive than other laptops.

Posted on July 7, 2013 by lsd

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The draw of the familiar can be a funny thing; I don’t often replay games, but sometimes, after enough time has passed, all it can take is a brief mention somewhere to bring back a wave of fond memories, and the desire to relive them. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing exactly that, replaying two games that, beyond my nostalgia for them, couldn’t be more dissimilar: Alan Wake and Super Mario Sunshine.

With Alan Wake, all it took to get me playing again was a series of bargain sales of the PC version. My first time through was on the 360, with a borrowed copy, but it was always a game I wanted to revisit, both to play through the two DLC episodes, and to play it after having read Rob Zacny’s fascinating analysis of the game’s events.

I totally get people that don’t like it; the gameplay, while neat in parts, gets a bit repetitive, and the story walks a fine line between cleverness and being entirely up its own ass (a games writer writing a game about a writer who writes about writing a book?). That story really works for me, though — it starts with a bang, and the episodic pacing keeps the story moving brilliantly, with little goals and revelations that gradually reveal the key details about the game’s setting and events.

In comparison, the story in Super Mario Sunshiney couldn’t be more tedious, but once you get past the dreadful unskippable cut-scenes in its first few hours, it’s a joy to play. The tropical-themed Sunshine wasn’t what people expected after the groundbreaking Super Mario 64, and after being followed on the Wii by the incredibly inventive Super Mario Galaxy, I’d just about forgotten the great fun I had with it until reading Eurogamer’s recent Sunshine retrospective.

That article made me realise what it was that made Sunshine so different — that it takes place in a world that’s not designed precisely around Mario’s capabilities. Instead, it challenges the player to use their skills and Mario’s water-powered hover-pack to explore a more organic world. That’s never more apparent than in Delfino Plaza, the game’s hub world, which you can easily spend hours exploring in search of those elusive Shines.

Swimming with Dolphins

Oddly enough, I’ve been playing through Sunshine on PC, too, using Dolphin, an open-source, cross-platform GameCube and Wii emulator that improves upon the real hardware by rendering games at high resolutions. While rendering GameCube and Wii games at 1080p with anti-aliasing isn’t enough to make them comparable to more modern consoles, it really does help, especially with the clean, stylised graphics featured in most of Nintendo’s first-party titles.

Sunshine at 1080p really does look quite nice, but it’s nothing compared to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker — I don’t think Nintendo will have to change much with its HD remake of the game for Wii U, since with a couple of million extra pixels it already looks remarkably close to a current-generation game. The thing that ages it most is the lack of a widescreen mode, but Dolphin actually has a hack that adds widescreen support to many games, Wind Waker included.

The catch with Dolphin is that it requires a reasonably powerful PC. It doesn’t need the latest video card — my 8800GT is perfectly fine — but it does need a decent CPU, and it’s there that my Athlon II X2, overclocked to 3.58Ghz, is barely enough for many games. Wii games seem to suffer the most, perhaps unsurprisingly; Zelda: Skyward Sword is just a bit too slow to be playable on my PC, and from all reports, Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel don’t run smoothly on anything less than the fastest PCs available.

For Sunshine, I’ve been using a 360 controller along with a $10 Xbox wireless receiver from DealExtreme, and the xboxdrv user-space Xbox controller driver; with its analog triggers and the very GameCube-esque controller layout in general, it’s a great fit. For Wii games, Dolphin can emulate a Wiimote of sorts, but it’s much easier to use a real Wiimote via Bluetooth.

Posted on April 1, 2013 by lsd

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This weekend was Ludum Dare 26, and as usual when Switchbreak enters such things, I took the opportunity to tag along. The theme was “minimalism”, but his game, called MinimaLand, deliberately eschews that theme; it tasks the player with bringing life and detail in to a very minimalist world.

I wasn’t sure at first how to fit music to the game, but it soon became clear: if I was going anti-minimalist, I wanted to use an orchestra. Ever since I heard about the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra, a CC-licenced orchestral sample set, I’ve wanted to try recording something with it; what better time to try it than with a deadline looming!

Given that I had just a few hours for this, I kept the music itself very simple — just three chords and a short melody. The music itself is almost irrelevant in this case, though, since it’s really just a means of delivering those orchestral sounds to the player. Initially, the melody and harmony are on strings, with rhythmic staccato stabs on brass, then the whole thing repeats, with the stabs moving to strings and the melody/harmony to woodwinds and horns.

It’s funny that, even when I’m dealing with sampled instruments instead of my own synth sounds, I still think in terms of sound and feel first, and chords and melodies second. I guess that’s just how I roll!

Working with LinuxSampler

Not unexpectedly, I sequenced everything in Ardour 3 and hosted the SSO instruments, which are in SFZ format, in LinuxSampler, using a LinuxSampler build from a recent SVN checkout. I didn’t use anything else on this one, not even any plugins, since all it really needed was some reverb and the SSO samples already have plenty of it.

Recent versions of LinuxSampler’s LV2 plugin expose 32 channels of audio output; I guess the idea behind this is to allow you to run multiple instruments to dedicated outputs from within a single plugin instance, but I’m not sure why anyone would actually want to do that. I think my workflow, with each instrument in its own plugin instance on its own track, makes a lot more sense, so I patched the plugin to return it to a simple stereo output per instance.

Sonatina quality?

I’ve been keen to try SSO mostly to see just how usable it is, and in this case, I think it worked pretty well. With just 500MB of samples, it’s never going to sound as good as a commercial library (where individual instruments can take several GB), but some o