It was hard to put the bunting out. It’s now 10am and I just thought I’d look at the forum only to discover that 12hrs ago the club meeting time was announced. That meeting time is now 5 hrs ago. I probably wasn’t going to get up that early anyway, but how about a bit more notice?
With such short notice it was a wonder than anyone turned up but that they did. We even had a contingent from the southern and western hemisphere, deprived of exercise. I was far too busy to take notes so let’s see what we remember…
We revisited last week’s demonstration of the new audio player (for the benefit of those who missed it) and discussed how it may be further enhanced to meet various artistic desires - that is for the future
It was tested playing four stereo files from internal uSD to external USB flash, each file just over four minutes long and the recorder used to record them as an eight track wav. The recording seemed flawless during playback.
Some live coding added a phase reverse for channel B (right) in the mixer to test if selecting the left channel from two of these recordings, phase reversing one and mono would null the results - it seemed to but with just 5 minutes to create the software patch we were not confident of our test - more to do on that… that is for the future
Can we colour the channels, maybe with an alpha channel blend? Seems overkill!
A similar MIDI player was shown to be partially working. Of course this was met with a fair amount of disinterest until the enhancement requests started to flow… that is for the future
Dynamic MIDI virtualisation was one idea for how to fill the centre void (like the waveform in the audio player)
Australia has a new PM - UK retains its clown
As well as some live coding we were also entertained by live gaming, audio virtualisation as a video game - it was almost like we were teenagers on the YouTubes!
Gin, wine, beer and coffee were consumed whilst accompanied by the persistent toll of a bell acting like some harbinger of doom - then we went to bed / work. Goodnight said Zebedee
Update! I fixed the issues with phase reverse and added to the mixer proper. I can confirm that all channels are recorded completely sample accurate and choosing any two left channels, phase reverse and mono will null the signal completely proving the signals are identical. This is a good result, validating the sample accurate record and playback as well as adding phase reverse (of right leg of stereo pair) feature which can be handy. For those interested in this test, here is what I did:
Add 4 audio players
MIDI learned the transport for all 4 players to the same MIDI control
Primed each channel to record
Started audio recorder - now recording 4 x stereo tracks
Used the MIDI controller to start simultaneous playback of all 4 players
Stopped recording 4 minutes later
Opened the new recording in one of the players - 8 channels of audio drawn in waveform
Recording multi-track file started to distort and warble after 107s - we use an off-the-shelf recorder which may have limitations - I will investigate what optimisation we can do
All channels were mono - need to check my test scenario, routing, etc.
Club members said they want different colour waveforms which is not a feature of the library - I will submit a feature request upstream
Some other bugs were noticed and fixed during this excursion - maybe it will be super reliable when it hits your machines!
This precision is opening all kinds of highly creative possibilities. And to have the confirmation of the accuracy is, in itself, excellent. We did three hours of wedding backing tracks using the old audio management facilities. This is a tremendously more useful tool in that sphere.
I’m off to record some birds and trains with it and see what I can put together once I have the recordings.
Just one thought, if one is playing audio tracks that are nulled to zero, would one still need to pay Supertramp for the test or only if it fails…?
… in the future
