The third in BeatServ's popular Dark Downtempo series of sample sets is now available for purchase up in here. As the poet once said, "let it flow. Let yourself go. Slow and low, that is the tempo." Of the three, this is the best one, IMO. Which isn't to knock the other two at all, of course.

Also too, Sonic Couture has a very nice release right around the corner. I've got a pre-release copy here, and it's gonna go over well with the synthy-nerds. James said it would be out by this weekend, but I just checked their site and it's not on there yet, and I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to say what it is or not. It rhymes with SchmovaSchmord, though.

Finally, I think we have this t-shirt shit figured out. I'm going to make a couple tiny changes to the artwork and such, but we're going to be looking at $20 per plus shipping, I believe. I'll put 'em up for pre-order when everything is sorted. We're going to have a minimum order, though, so we'll need a fair portion of people that previously said they were on board with this whole Full Of Techno shirt concept to actually be on board (325 or so when we did the vote on whether to do it or not a few months back.)

As the title says. Discord3 is now available for purchase in the AD store. Hit it.

Note the following: as we discussed here a couple months ago, this release, on the Mac side, is Intel only. No PPC version. Also, the 64-bit versions aren't done yet. Gonna be a couple weeks on those. One piece of good news for the AU users is that this AU (and all others following it) has MIDI Learn just like the VSTs always have. So that's fun.

Anyhow, let me know if you've got any issues, complaints, praise, comments, whatever.

One last bug to squish in Discord3 then we're good to go. I don't want to jinx anything, but I'd be shocked if you didn't have it this weekend. I'm in the process of making the audio demos for the store page while Adam hunts down this last little bitch of a bug.

And also, I got a quote from the t-shirt dude that will won't work; still quibbling on a couple details, but we should be able to get that shit in motion shortly, as well.

THIS POST HAS BEEN EDITED: All right. Pictured above is the final design for the "Full Of Techno" shirt. I'm going to price out screening and shirts this afternoon, and we should be able to start pre-orders shortly, in the usual manner. I'll edit this post with the details once I have them.

EDIT: Here is an image of the shirt I'm considering. It's 100% cotton, "pigment dyed" in the vernacular. I'm not going to go with American Apparel on these because, well, that company freaks me out a little bit, plus I don't care for their shirts as much as I used to.

We'll do this one like we did the last three, where you pay, and in a couple weeks you get the shirt. This time I'm going to put a little more thought in to the pricing model than the last one so I don't have to, you know, spend any of my own money to send you guys shirts.

Also, too, I would be shocked (SHOCKED!) if D3 wasn't released this week. We're just chasing little things at this point; it is mostly done on all three platforms otherwise. We'll definitely be releasing only the 32-bit versions first. Then, once Adam has completed the required course of medication and psychotherapy that is needed every time he turns on his iMac, we'll churn out some 64-bit versions.

I have nothing to add to this, except to point out that in 1982 I had those exact same glasses. Unfortunately, I couldn't grow a 'stache back then like that soup catcher he's sporting.

In all seriousness, we've decided, in the interests of not going out and kidnapping the first Apple employees we find and forcing them to mine salt for a couple years, that we will forgo releasing anything in 64-bit on the Apple side of things for a little while. Shit is in some serious drama up in that bitch right now, with the massive bloated pile of failsauce that is Logic Audio leading the way, so we're gonna just let sleeping dogs lie for as long as we can. Hopefully Apple will decide it's going to put all of its audio resources in to GarageBandPro and deprecate Logic entirely, thus handily solving the problem.

This shouldn't keep us from releasing a 64-bit Win VST, but we're going to release our normal package first, and then do that.

I feel a rant coming on.

Just uploaded a video preview of Discord3's highlights. I think I touched on all the major features; I'll do a full tutorial series once I have a 100% working OS X VST. The quality of Snaggit's video capture is fairly lacking; nothing to compare with Screenflow. But this should give you a good idea of what's going on with the three engines.

We're getting, like, totally close to having a D3 for sale. The user interface (which was something of a bear on this one) is 95% done, and the DSP is 100% done. In the above image, you can see the control layout for the P1 and P2 algorithms. Click the image for a full-sized iteration. The circles in the center section animate based upon shift settings, and the animations change shape based upon the buffer and mod settings for the left and right. Utterly pointless except as a visual reference of the state of the plug-in, but it looks cool and doesn't cost any CPU, and that ought to be worth something.

The final algorithm complement has changed a bit. The two algos in D1.5 and D2 are actually a single algorithm with minor filtering changes. Since the filters in D3 are much more capable, we got rid of that mode. So P1 is the original Discord algorithm, modeled on the H910/H949 style shifting, which we call Vintage in this context. P2 is a different shifting algorithm entirely which we call Clean. It is sonically quite a bit different than P1; at settings within 8 semitones of the original pitch it is much more accurate than P1, but when you get out past an octave in either direction, it gets quite hollow and metallic, for extremely cool overtones and false harmonic generation.

We also added a buffer size control to P1 and P2, which enable fine tuning for specific instruments or some interesting sound design (read: FSU) possibilities. For more percussive material with short transients, you want a small buffer size, and for material with longer envelopes, a bigger window is more appropriate. The buffer size can be set in one sample increments from 32 samples to 2056 samples.

Once again, this will be a paid upgrade. US$10 for owners of any previous version of Discord (1.0, 1.5, 2), and the price of the effect is US$59.00. I'll put up some sound files later today, and as soon as I have a working OSX version I'll lay down the stink with a video.

Those of you that follow me on Twitter have noticed that I have, of late, been spamming my Flickr account with pictures of a decidedly analog nature. For some reason I got a wild hare (hair?) up my ass (in thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I'd prefer a wild hair in my ass over a wild hare, although neither seem terribly pleasant) this weekend to take actual pictures on actual film, in real live 35mm. The picture above is from a four-lensed Lomo Action Sampler, stuck out the window of my SUV as I was driving through our neighborhood.

Now, to be honest, while I take a lot of photos and have since the early 80s, it's been at least a decade, if not longer, since I've last loaded a film camera, as I was an early proponent of digital. Some interesting things I learned this weekend:

1. Film cameras were, and are, a pain in the ass. You don't know what the fuck you're gonna end up with, and you actually have to plan. The Lomo cameras I shoot with aren't exactly models of modern technology, so I have to actually give some thought to aperture size, shutter speed, and ISO. On my Nikon DSLR I can just snap away, adjusting on the fly, and one of the 30-odd pictures I take of every subject is sure to look okay. Not so much here, which brings me to...

2. Just pull your wallet out of your back pocket, open it up, take out your debit card, and hand it to the first homeless junkie you find. And then tell him your PIN. That's what this shit costs. Well, it's not that bad, but by my math it's about US$0.50 every time I press the shutter release. Which makes me want to spend some quality time exploring point #1.

3. It ain't like a bicycle. I burned two full rolls before I remembered how the hell to shoot a fully analog camera.

My pleasant discovery, though: completely unlike digital cameras, where the photos seem kind of transient, when you take a roll of exposed film to the lab, and come back in an hour to pick up an envelope with a stack of photos in it, and you go sit in your car to see what you got, there's a certain... something... Completely undefinable. Don't get me wrong. I love my DSLR, and I'm currently snooping around the various camera stores for an upgrade path. But there's something to be said for pulling out the old shit and taking it out for a spin.

What does this have to do with music? Same thing. Put aside the new hotness for a weekend and pull out My First Four Track and write a damn song. It may be a huge pain in the ass, but it'll do two things: first, it'll make you appreciate the toil and hard work of your local plug-in makers (har har har), and second, there's never any harm in some new (old) perspective.

1. The New York Times has revealed the blindingly obvious. Their two key points: first, consumers will merrily trade quality for convenience, and second, the average listener wouldn't know good sound if it hit them in the head with an arm-length piece of two-by-four. To the first point I say "dear NYT: have you noticed all those Wal-Marts in the flyover states?" To the second, I say "fuckin' duh."

2. Discord 3 is inching closer to completion. We've got a fully working Windows build that is lacking only the eye candy and the MIDI features. I expect we will be in full beta by the end of the week at the latest. Although, what I expect hasn't yet met what I fear, which is 64-bit Apple builds.

3. I promise I won't mention the iPad once this week, unless something major happens. Or I gaze upon it lovingly too much, thus giving the Apple Mind Control Apparatus (AMCA) time to do its evil work.

Q: Can I use a USB audio interface with an iPad? A: Yup. There are some caveats, and they need to be paid attention to, but in general it Just Works.

Q: Caveats? You're gonna drop Latin in to this shit?
A: That's how I roll. Seriously, though, as far as my experimentation shows, the following information is true: first, the interface has to be class-compliant. That means that it needs to work in an OS X computer without a driver install. Second, it has to be USB1.0-compatible. No USB2.0-only interfaces. And finally, it has to either use less than 200ma of power or be externally powered.

Q: Hold on, let me get my... what?
A: A safe rule of thumb is that if it has mic pres (especially if it's able to provide phantom power) it's going to need a wall wart or something.

Q: Okay. Got it. What else do I need?
A: Pop over to the nearest Apple store and get yourself a Camera Connection Kit. This otherwise useless US$39.00 adaptor plugs in to the 30-pin docking port and gives you a USB port, ostensibly for hooking up cameras that have only on-board memory. As a camera connection kit, it's kind of stupid, because you can buy SD cards now that have as much storage as even a maxed-out iPad, so I'm unclear as to its stated purpose and the usefulness thereof. But as an audio adapter, it works fine.

Q: Okay. Last question. Does every audio app just shit its sound out the interface when it is plugged in?
A: Nope.

Long answer: there are several ways to give a program sound in Cocoa Touch. These are, on the whole, the same ways as in OS X proper. You can use OpenAL, but that's just a sample playback engine, really. There is also a system sound engine, or you can programically access the part of the OS concerned with playing back MP3s/AAC/whatever if you'd like. The final method, and the one that gives you bit-level access to the outputs, is to talk to CoreAudio, just like in OS X.

This final method is poorly documented and hideously complex, and even big companies fuck it up occasionally. But this is, as far as I can ascertain, the only method by which the USB outputs are utilized.

So, long story short: any App that uses CoreAudio for its playback, and does a good job of using it, automatically shunts its inputs (if it has 'em) and outputs to the USB device. Applications that use OpenAL (games for the most part, but some audio programs like the ridiculous-bordering-on-stupid Magic Piano, and many sample playback apps of that ilk) send the audio to the headphone jack or the onboard speakers only. Apps that use the system sound engine or access the iTunes library in some crafty way also can't access this method.

One exception to this rule is Korg's iElectribe. As I said, CoreAudio in Cocoa Touch is incredibly complicated and poorly documented, and even big companies mess it up. iElectribe is an example of that. iElectribe _must_ use CoreAudio; it wouldn't work any other way. However, when a USB audio device is plugged in, iElectribe crashes on start-up. This will no doubt bum some people out.

And last but not least: all that shit I said about the iPad above? It also applies to the iPhone. (And I assume the iPod Touch, although I've not verified this.) I will say, however, that I have OS4 in my iPhone, so I can't say for certain that it works with OS3.1. If someone has a CCK and an iPhone with OS3.1 and wants to verify this, that would be cool.

EDIT: I just tried it with my wife's iPhone, which is running 3.1, and it DOES NOT WORK. So if you were planning on going to get a Camera Connection Kit just to use audio from your iPhone or iPod Touch, you need to wait until OS4 is released for this to work. It works fine with OS4, though, essentially the same as with the iPad.

In my copious free time (all 8 minutes of it yesterday) I've got an interesting implementation of my RNN (Retarded Neural Network) rhythm sequencer cooking in Pd, with a piano and synth part played live. I shot some video of this heady event, but it was less than pleasing, because I don't own a Canon 5D Mk II, apparently. If I can come up with something that doesn't look like it was shot on a circa 2003 cell phone I'll put it up, with a full explanation.

(Related: Would it be totally offensive of me to do a Kickstarter campaign to buy an HD-capable DSLR? I think the answer to that is "yes.")

Suffice to say, that right there is an image of Nerdgasm in its purest form. Imagine, if you will, if Jack White made IDM, and you'll have a good idea of what I've got cooking here.

The easiest solution is to upload the file to both your server and Soundcloud, then use the HTML5 audio embed tag on the one on your server, and follow it with the Soundcloud embed code. After this paragraph I've done just that. If you're using Safari, Mobile Safari, or Chrome, you'll see the built-in HTML5 audio controls, then (if you're not on Mobile Safari) you'll see the Soundcloud player. This sounds simple, but there's a couple problems with it which we'll get to.

As you can see, in browsers that are both HTML5 and Flash-capable, you have two players, except in Firefox, which can't embed MP3s, so you've got a big fat pile of failsauce because you see both but only the Soundcloud one works. God only knows what's happening in Opera or IE6. In Mobile Safari, you've got a broken lego block where the Soundcloud player goes.

In short, this method sucks, so we won't be using it.

Now, shit's gonna get a little technical, but it's fairly simple if you have even a rudimentary grasp of HTML. The HTML5 audio tag looks like this:

<audio src="/samples/round_CP.mp3" controls="controls">
</audio>

Now, the interesting thing we note, when looking at that, is that there's an open and a close tag. We can put code inside that, and the browser will use the HTML5 embed if it can, but if it can't, it'll execute whatever is inside the tags. If we put the Soundcloud player embed code between the audio tags, we get this:

Now, if you're on an HTML5 browser (besides Firefox) you see the audio embed off this server. If you're not, you get the Soundcloud player. This situation is slightly better, but it's still pretty weak, as Firefox just displays a dumb grey box with an X in it, because it can't play MP3s. Now, you'd say to yourself "self, I know OGG files are stupid, but why don't we take one for the team here and just put up an OGG, and put our Wave in Soundcloud, and we'll be good?"

Well, self, you've got a problem there, because you're back to square one. Safari can't play OGGs, and the whole purpose of this exercise is to have it play on everything. Throwing sanity to the wind, we double our MP3 file on our server with an OGG file, and we have both. If we alter the audio embed code to look like this:

<audio controls="controls">

******* INSERT SOUNDCLOUD EMBED HERE *******

<source src="/samples/round_CP.ogg" />
<source src="/samples/round_CP.mp3" />    
</audio>

...it will go through the list and play the first one it can. In this manner, anything that can play an MP3 file will, else it'll go to the OGG file, and if it can't do either of those, it'll go to the Soundcloud player. So, no matter what browser you're looking at this page in, you'll see some sort of player here that will poop audio, theoretically.

(important: the OGG file has to go first in the above code, else Firefox will hang in retard-grey-box-mode, because it thinks it can play an MP3, which it can't.)

So, this isn't awesome at all for two reasons: first, it doesn't play the Soundcloud player by default, and we want the metrics and the look of the Soundcloud player with the ability to play files on iPads. Secondly, we have to make a retarded fucking OGG file in addition to the semi-retarded MP3 we already had to make and the big fat WAV or AIFF which we uploaded to Soundcloud. But it'll play on pretty much anything, so that's something. (The 8 people that use Opera are probably going to be disappointed here, as Opera only understands WAV files in HTML5 audio embeds. Deep shuddering sigh. Don't you browser-making guys have a standards committee or some shit?)

So, in order to get around all this, one of two things needs to happen: either Firefox needs to support MP3s or Soundcloud needs an HTML5 player. I'm sure that one of those events (most likely the latter) will happen within a very short time period, so it won't be like this for very long. There are ways to default to the Flash player, with MP3 embeds as the fallback (the ideal in this situation) but those are going to get very technical very fast, and are outside the scope of this blog. For further reading, I suggest this site which shows one such method, or here, where you can find some more in depth information on the HTML5 audio element.

If one of my dear readers who is savvy in this sort of nonsense can come up with a quick-and-dirty method of defaulting to the Soundclound player, with MP3 embed as the fallback, we'd all love to hear about it. (And a final programming note: that audio file is the first recording I made of the CP80B once I had it mostly tuned. Shitty playing, but hey, never had a lesson.)