Stupid Software Tricks

Yesterday I wasted a couple of hours trying to install Native Instruments Absynth 5 on my Windows PC. I have no doubt that it’s a great instrument — and overall, I’m consistently knocked out by NI. The installer for this particular synthesizer, however, left a bit to be desired.

I told it to install on the L: drive. That’s where I install all my software now, because C: is basically full. But it insisted that it needed a bunch of space on C:. Like, 2.5 GB in order to run a 650 MB installer. Weird. So I cleaned out a bunch of stuff from folders called Temp. Still not enough space. Next, I drag-copied a bunch of stuff from Program Files over to the M: drive temporarily and erased it from C:. Now I could run the installer.

At the end of the process, I found that Absynth had installed a 1.0 GB library of samples to the C: drive, even though I had specifically told the installer at every available opportunity that I wanted to install on L:. That meant I wouldn’t have enough room to copy the stuff from Program Files back onto C:.

Regretfully, I gave up. I ran the uninstaller for Absynth. But that’s not the end of the story.

The uninstaller did not remove the 1.0 GB library. If I were a less sophisticated computer guy, that huge folder would just sit there gathering dust forever, because I wouldn’t know where to look for it. Also left on the C: drive

Missing Information

Trying to do research into daily life in Chicago in 1885 without spending a ton of money. It’s hard! I’ve spent a couple of hundred on books so far. Ran into another one tonight that looks essential, but it’s $55, so I’m going to resist for a week or two.

There’s lots of good stuff at university libraries, but they won’t let me into the stacks at Stanford without a student ID card, and I’m not about to fly to Illinois to try to sneak into the University of Chicago library.

Tonight I was looking into the question of indoor plumbing. Or trying to. If you’re going to include a scene in your novel that’s set in a kitchen, you’d like to know whether there are faucets above the sink, or a pump handle, or whether the pump handle would have been outside the kitchen door. In that era, a lot would have depended on whether the inhabitants of the house were wealthy, middle class, or poor. Also, perhaps, on the neighborhood. I know Chicago had water mains, but I don’t know which outlying districts were supplied. And I don’t know whether houses would have had wells, because Chicago was built on land that had been a low-lying marsh. What happens if you dig a well in a marsh?

I’ve read that by the 1870s, a hot water tank would likely have been mounted above the back of the stove. The stove would probably have burnt coal, but perhaps gas — that’s another detail I don’t know. I know there were gas lines running under the streets, because when Chicago was digging trenches for cable car lines in 1881, rerouting the gas, water, and sewer lines complicated the process. But what were the gas lines feeding? Street lights? In-home lighting, or only lights in the business district?

And the big steam engines that provided power for the factories — coal or gas? It makes a difference, because coal smoke was a major pollutant at the time. When not choking on the coal smoke, however, Chicagoans in 1885 rode bicycles. The high front wheel bicycle was the latest fad. Citizens were sometimes arrested for speeding on their bikes (the slang term was “scorching”), because of course the bikes were the fastest thing on the street, short of a galloping horse.

And yes, there were a lot of horses. They pulled streetcars, private wagons, and so on. I found a wonderful little 30-second clip of a film of a Chicago street, made in 1897 by Thomas Edison (or someone in his employ). Amazingly dense crowds, and horses in the foreground.

What I really want is a time machine!

Not Fiction

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing another novel — poking at a few plot outlines, drafting a few scenes. Today I’m coming, reluctantly, to the conclusion that I’m not likely to be able to pull it off.

Technically, I could do it. I know how to sit down and write 500 pages of characters, action, and dialog, and because I’m a professional, they would be of publishable quality. The lurking problem is that I just don’t like people enough. Novels are about people, and I no longer care about people — neither my characters nor my (possible) readers.

The Rush Limbaugh/Sarah Palin Republicans have soured me pretty decisively, that’s part of it. I’ve also been musing lately about a few failed romantic relationships. (The failed ones would amount to precisely 100% of the ones I attempted.)

And then there’s the amateur music on Broadjam. I got a free membership to Broadjam laid on me (I may be doing some writing for the site), so I’ve been listening to tracks uploaded by other musicians. Now, these are the people who care enough about their music to record it, to finish recording it, to join an online site that provides networking with other musicians, and to upload their recorded tracks to the site — presumably with the idea that someone may want to listen. So basically, they’ve self-selected as the upper 50% of aspiring musicians.

Unfortunately, the distribution of clues among the participants is haphazard. Very few of them are entirely clueless: To paraphrase Lincoln, many of them

Happy Mixing

Here’s a music technology story with a happy ending. I did a brief sketch this morning in Steinberg Cubase 4.5. The main synth I was using was Spectrasonics Omnisphere. It sounded lovely — but when I exported the audio mixdown as a new stereo file and listened to the file, the results were decidedly glitchy.

I downloaded and installed the latest version of Omnisphere. That didn’t help. I tried bouncing the same MIDI track with a different synth; there were no problems. Figuring there might be a compatibility problem between Omnisphere and Cubase, I tried bouncing the same MIDI track in Ableton Live 8 using Omnisphere as the sound source. It was still glitchy.

So I went to the Spectrasonics support page on their website. I quickly learned that when a synth is streaming audio from the hard drive (which is what Omnisphere does, because many of its presets use really large audio files), a normal track bounce won’t necessarily work. The bounce is being done faster than real time, which means the data streaming from disk gets hung up.

I had never before noticed the checkbox in the Cubase Export Mixdown dialog that says, “Real-time export.” When I checked that box and did a new export, the mix was flawless. And it took me less than two hours of head-scratching to solve the problem.

I’m still learning stuff, even after all these years. And one of the things I’ve finally got nailed down (more or less) is how to troubleshoot technical problems. Download the latest update. Try to isolate the problem by changing some aspects of the environment. Go to the manufacturer’s website and search for solutions. And don’t start sending nasty emails until you’ve tried everything else!

Fleshing It Out

The creative process is mysterious, but Rule #1 is, follow your nose. Go with the flow. Do the next indicated thing. Sometimes you may have a fairly definite outcome in mind, sometimes not. Even if you think you know where you’re going, you may be surprised.

At one time I did a fair amount of composing in a computer-based home music studio. In recent years, not so much (and that’s a story for another time). This week I wanted to give myself an incentive to get off the dime and actually finish a piece rather than let yet another sketch gather dust on the hard drive. So I thought it might be fun to document the process of turning a sketch into a finished piece. As of today, it isn’t quite finished, but it’s far enough along that I can share the process step by step. I’m not even sure of the title yet, but I may call it “Casual.”

This is not, I hasten to add, a profound or deeply emotional piece of work. My personal view is that it’s just sort of mildly cool. It’s a flexing-my-rusty-muscles sort of piece. I decided up front that I would use nothing but Propellerhead Reason 4. I’ve done a couple of all-you-need-is-Reason pieces in years past, so I knew I wouldn’t be shortchanging myself in the sound resources department. Giving yourself some artificial boundaries for a given piece can help the creative process by reducing the choices to a manageable set.

I launched Reason and soon came up with a modest little groove in 7/4 that I liked. This initial sketch used

See Sound

After wrestling with Csound for a couple of days on my PC, last night I found a way to do what I want to do. Or at least I think I did. It may be weeks before I know for sure.

Csound started life, many years ago, as a command-line program. In those days, command-line programs were state of the art: computers with mice and windows were still a laboratory curiosity. In recent years several people have built “front ends” for Csound with the idea of making it user-friendly. But of course the authors of the front-end software are unpaid volunteers. Sometimes things break. Sometimes things are released without being rigorously tested on a variety of systems. Depending on the details of your computer system, using a front end, or attempting to, may actually make your life worse rather than better.

I had sort of forgotten about blue. Blue is a very nice front end for Csound … in Windows, at least. Though it’s theoretically cross-platform, having been written for the Java Runtime Environment, in the MacOS blue is a little cranky. This is because developer Steven Yi doesn’t have a Mac to test it on. Blue is his personal composition system — he makes it publicly available as a gift to the Csound community.

So now I can get Csound to respond, in real time, to MIDI inputs from a hardware keyboard and play notes out to my Firewire interface with acceptably low latency.

The next step is to figure out what sort of music I want to make with it. This is not a simple question. Every music software system has certain biases built into it. It will encourage you to consider things that it does well, and discourage you from considering things that it does badly. The trick is to understand those strengths and weaknesses well enough to work with them, while simultaneously keeping your hand and eye firmly on matters of musical expression. If you let the software dictate the music to you, the results will almost certainly be dismal.

Down in the Trenches

The trouble with free software is, sometimes you get what you pay for. Today I’ve been trying to get Csound to read real-time MIDI input (from a physical keyboard) and play notes or respond to slider moves. No luck whatever.

Just to be clear — the reason I’m tying myself in knots over this is because Csound is incredibly powerful and produces amazing sounds. It’s just user-hostile, that’s all.

I posted a long “help!!!” message to the Csound mailing list, and got a couple of suggestions from seasoned Csounders, but the suggestions only sent me wading deeper into the quagmire. “Try running Csound from the DOS command prompt,” I was told, “instead of using the GUI front end.” So I tried that. I know barely enough about the command prompt to launch Csound at all, but I managed it. A variety of non-musical events ensued.

With one test file, I could play the keyboard and see messages in the DOS window that indicated the notes were being received — but I didn’t hear any output. And while this file is supposed to run for an hour, allowing uninterrupted real-time input, it closed after a few seconds. Another test file kept running, but failed to respond to MIDI at all. I don’t know what the relevant differences were.

When I went back to the GUI front end, I found I had a new problem. I had created a musical sketch, which played just fine yesterday from the GUI. (This sketch had no real-time MIDI input — it was just rendering to the computer’s audio output interface.) Today, the same file produced only horrible

What’s Old Is Made New

Many years ago, I owned a Serge Modular synthesizer. It was an amazing beast, and I wish I still had it. Purely for nostalgia and sex appeal; I doubt it would still be in working order, and even if it was, I doubt I’d ever turn it on.

It was great fun to play with, though, because it was totally patchable. To make sounds, you connected physical modules with patch cords. One of the modules was a full-featured step sequencer. I spent many happy hours setting up odd patterns on the sequencer that would then play by themselves, producing trancelike variations that never quite repeated.

Being, this week, in a slightly demented mood, I decided to recreate the Serge step sequencer in Csound. Csound is less tactile, to be sure, but it’s also infinitely cheaper (assuming you own a computer) and ultimately a lot more powerful.

After a couple of days of tinkering, I have a musical sketch that isn’t too bad. (The mp3 doesn’t sound nearly as crisp as Csound’s native audio output, which is amazingly clean. But it’s not too bad.) If you’re a Csound programmer and want to know how I did this, here’s the code.

All of the intervals in this sketch are mathematically pure — that is, it’s an example of Just Intonation. Tuning on the Serge was always haphazard at best. And of course it didn’t have a reverb or a delay line. No, on the whole I don’t regret that technology has moved on.

Score for Games

Text-based games are not, by their very nature, multimedia-rich experiences. The developers of various game authoring systems have added, over the years, a few limited bits of media support. Authors can, for instance, clear the screen and show a still image. Or rather, we can do it in the game code, but we’re at the mercy of the end user’s interpreter software, which may or may not be able to display the image.

Macintosh users who want to play games written in TADS have been at a particular disadvantage. But CocoaTADS is a new and viable interpreter for TADS games on the Mac, which is good news indeed.

Better yet, CocoaTADS implements audio fadeins and fadeouts. According to a message posted today by developer Charles Srstka on the newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction, this is “by popular demand.” I had to chuckle, because as far as I’m aware, all of the popular demand is coming from me.

I’ve been beating the drum (so to speak) for audio fadeouts in TADS for a year or two now, principally because I’m also a musician and composer. If an author wants to include some background music that will play while the player is in a particular room, I feel it’s essential that the music be faded out smoothly when the player leaves that room. Abrupt cutoffs are jarring and amateurish, but not being able to cut off the music when the player leaves the Flower-Bedecked Garden and enters the Dank Crypt would be far worse.

The problem for me is this: Now I don’t have any excuses. I’ve asked for a fairly slick modern feature, and the developers (Mike Roberts and Charles) have done the necessary work — so maybe I ought to write a game that uses music, hunh?

Now all I need to do is think of a story that would benefit from music.

Super Collision

Being at loose ends this week, I decided to take a close look at SuperCollider. I’ve spoken to musicians who love it and use it extensively. These are experimental musicians, you understand, most of them working in university environments. Even though SuperCollider is entirely free and extremely powerful, it would not be a good choice for a pop musician.

Well, let me qualify that slightly. If you’re doing electronic dance music, you want to build a library of unique sound effects that nobody else will have, and you’re already conversant with computer programming, SuperCollider might be well worth looking at. But only an extreme masochist would try to produce a pop ballad with it.

I’ve already spent a lot of time learning my way around Csound, which is also free, extremely powerful, and unlikely to appeal to anybody but programmers and the academically