Finally Ubuntu Microphone in

I've been slow to update my Ubuntu 6.10, mainly because the nvidia drivers need to be reconfigured (envy rerun basically), and minor other things might break. The microphone input didn't work initially, but only the other day did I try to fix it- apparently the alsa drivers didn't fully support the hda-intel MCP51 soundcard I had.

So the non-full update thing was to download the latest alsa driver, lib, utils from http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page and configure-make-install them. driver had to be configured with --with-cards=hda-intel.

After that:
/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
options snd-hda-intel model=laptop

After restarting, the gnome sound recorder and audacity recorder worked fine, but gephex depends on there being a /dev/dsp0. I only have a /dev/dsp, and creating a symlink with ln -s /dev/dsp /dev/dsp0 works well but doesn't persist after a restart. So edit /etc/udev/rules.d/60-symlinks.rules and add the line:
KERNEL=="dsp", SYMLINK+="dsp0"

Next Year

http://flickr.com/photos/released/2159331315/

I and a few others from Hackerbot put a bunch of work into getting the visualization running, and it worked mostly and was decent, but I didn't put much work into providing variation on the effects, I just let them go as is for hours. But the live video input was broken, mplayer on a pvrusb2 would work for a few minutes and then lock up so hard a kill -9 wouldn't even kill it. And the audio would work after it was futzed with but then stop upon trying it into a new graph.











http://www.flickr.com/photos/foist/2158862880/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/foist/2158071625/

Harrier from binarymillenium on Vimeo.

Gephex graph examples

I used to just keep my graphs to myself and only show videos of results occasionally, but from now on I'll be backing up all the good ones online suitable for distribution under the GPL.

Here's a couple:

http://code.google.com/p/binarymillenium/wiki/GephexGraphs



This one is cool:


galaxy from binarymillenium on Vimeo.

This is okay:


BW Plasm demo from binarymillenium on Vimeo.

Dorkbot show

This went pretty well, it was low-key- the tent I was in was something of a place to relax although some of the DJs played more danceable music, and half a dozen or so people might be dancing at any time. I showed off Gephex to anyone who was curious, and would leave effects running unattended for long lengths of time. Not nearly the same level attention or effort from me as my last show, but good enough for the venue.

I feel like I've done everything I want to do in Gephex, I have to start using it differently or try different software, but there isn't anything free I've found that and as powerful that is suitable for live editing of effects.

Things that would help:
Make the joystick input support all buttons on the logitech controller- currently only two buttons and one analog joystick are supported, I'm sure adding the rest is trivial if the module is recompiled. More inputs to make effects more dynamic would allow more fundamentally different effects.

But what really needs to be done that is outside the scope of what I can do is allowing patches to be selected and reduced to subsystems that can be better organized and combined with other subsystems. There's a limit to how complex a graph can become otherwise that contributes to the 'sameyness' of everything I make with it. I think they are working on this and there may be a beta version.

Better random number generation- perlin noise specifically plus more generic IIR number filter block. I think if I connect a square wave and a random number generator to a flip-flop I can improve the randomness by only infrequently sampling the random number. The feedback option works as a very poor filter and is inadequate.

Radio effect in Audacity

So recently I needed to figure out how to take some dialogue recorded in person and make it sound like it was being heard over the radio. There's no built in effect for that, but on a bulletin board someone suggested notch filtering 1000-3500 Hz as radio's do the same thing- that gets you in the ball park but it misses the distortion and noise and crackle of a radio. For that I used the 'satan maximizer' effect that came in the large set of ladspa plugins that work in Audacity. With a lot more tuning and research on the type of radio I wanted to imitate I could probably do better, but short of that it at least communicates to the viewer the intention of the effect without being perfect.