A public demo of Renoise is now available for Linux. I love this tracker, especially for beat slicing madness, and I’m very excited to see a Linux release. It’s something like 50 euros to buy the full version.

Now, hopefully I can get it running on my Eee, and not run into the kind of issues I had with window size while working with wesnoth.

I’ll let ya’ll know how it goes.

UPDATE: So, as it turns out it the minimum window size for renoise is 990 x 700, which presents a slight problem on my 800×480 Eee PC…

So aside from being rather cramped on my tiny new toy, we are still looking at a fully functional tracker for Linux. We’re talking ALSA and JACK support for MIDI and sound routing excellence, aswell as support for both LADSPA plugins and native Linux VSTs(link to renoise forum listing currently functional ones, also check out jucetice). So, overall I suggest you pick this thing up and go play around with it since you can finally enjoy it’s /massive greatness/ under Linux. Actually if you’ve never used it you should give it a try no matter what OS you’ve got running, you may come to love it’s unique approche to music making, especially if you’re a techie and a musician.

Aside from Linux, there’s been a variety of additions and and bug fixes in the 1.9.1 release, including a great “Draw Mode” in the sample editor that you can use to quickly edit out pops and clicks in your samples (or however you want to change them), as well as the ability to create new samples on the fly by drawing thier waveforms.

There are a few bugs lingering in the Linux version, but it mostly seems to be with multichannel sound cards and ALSA. Also there are a few things I’d like to see added, namely DSSI support for native Linux synths, better integration with the Jack transport, and the ability to load mp3s. Then again this is just a beta.

Overall I give this a rating of awesome sauce or, if you perfer, sawesome.

This thing is crazy.

It’s basically a huge interactive kinetic sculpture. It moves and ripples and generally acts very un-wall like. I’d very much like to see this in person one day. Here is an except from the site:

This project was developed for a competition for an interactive art-work for the foyer of The Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre. The piece is a facetted metallic surface that has potential to deform physically in response to electronic stimuli from the environment (movement, sound, light,etc). Driven by a bed of 896 pneumatic pistons, the dynamic ‘terrains’ are generated as real-time calculations.

The piece marks the transition from autoplastic (determinate) to alloplastic (interactive, indeterminate) space, a new species of reciprocal architecture.

Mmmm… 896 pneumatic pistons

Here is a very low quality movie of it in action.

…Wow.

So I’ve just now found out that they’ve commercialized this thing and you can buy them (or rent maybe?) at this site. The fact that Coke and the McDonalds are using these things has somehow cheapened this whole experience for me. No, really. I’m more cynical and bitter now than I was when I began to write this post. Especially since the mass production of this thing has somehow resulted in a movie of it in action that is of no better quality. At least this one is on youtube.

Note: This is a rant and is meant in no way, shape or form to end any discussions about anything. These rants are meant to start discussion and (hopefully) open some minds to new ideas. Also, these rants are written by fairly seasoned pompous asshole who will not respond to comments or questions. Now here’s Tom with the weather.

You know what is really refreshing? When the manager of one of the world’s biggest rock bands makes a speech about how internet service providers (ISP’s) should cut off service to customers that get caught sharing music. This is so very refreshing for a few reasons.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just love this shit. Weird creations that blend organic and technological themes. Christopher Conte at www.microbotic.org creates just this kinda stuff. Ranging from Geiger-esque biomechanical work, to intricate mechanical (yet unfortunately static) insects. Wired has an article about this guys work if you want some more info on the peices. Insect Lab Studio also has more of this type of thing, but it’s all of the “clockwork insect” variety. I espcially like this spider and this beetle.

Also, this post prompted me to add an “Art” catagory to the site, so expect to see posts about interesting art and sculpture, especially peices that have a technological aspect to them or ones that simply appeal to the dirty little cyberpunk in me.

Anthony from freshplastic recently asked if I could provide a rough guide to installing Hydrogen, a free drum machine for linux on his EeePC. This has inspired me to post a HOWTO on getting additional applications installed on your EeePC without actually wiping out the default installation, etc.

First off I should state my assumptions:

• You’ve got an EeePC with the default “easy mode” installation intact
• You’re connected to the internet
• You’ve got enough space to actually install stuff
• You can type
• You can read

Ok, so with that out of the way, lets get to work.

Read the rest of this entry »

So I picked up an EeePC recently and i have to say, I fucking love this thing.

Does everything I need, and it’s ultra portable. Comes with an Easy mode menu thing that seems to work just fine for what i use it for, which is mostly firefox and msn. Anything more complex and i’m just a ctrl-alt-t away from a terminal and happy linux land.

I’ve been thinking though, this would work really well as a mobile music platform, you know, just something to toss ideas together on, drum loops, synth lines, etc…. I’ve got hydrogen running on it with a bunch of drumkits and thats working fine, but I’m thinking I might wanna pickup a 2gig SODIMM and install something like studio64 or Ubuntu Studio on here… we’ll see how it goes.