In me on January 31, 2012 tagged site admin by admin
Hi there.
It’s been nearly a year since my last message. Stuff got in the way and I kind of got fed up with the site as it was.
So, I decided to write a theme from scratch. It’s mostly the first version of my site with bits updated. It’s HTML5 now, too.
There are some bugs to be fixed (probably in the hackiest of ways) but I’m mostly happy.
I’ve been busy, too. Booked some great acts in the first half of 2011, did some video art (clip TBA) and I’ve mostly been DJing (mixes TBA). And I’m learning how to write wordpress themes from scratch. Great fun.
On friday 11 february I played a set at Bosch Acousmatic. Apart from the usual tape stuff, I ran my set through a pd patch on my netbook. This went very well.
The evening was opened by The Acoustic Electric Chamber Orchestra. TAECO are Steven Vinkenoog and Frank Baijer who play guitars, balalaikas and toy microphones. The room and silence play a large part in their music. The set they played last friday was truly mesmerizing.
My set included more synthetic tones. I started with a drone which returned later in my set. I also used unprocessed field recordings to contrast the processed noisiness.
My usual rollercoaster of feedback loops was completed with a Pure Data patch. Pure Data, Pd for short, is Max/MSP’s half sibling and is an impressive piece of Free software. My patch isn’t very impressive but worked very well and the bits and pieces it was built from are available for download here.
Unfortunately, I forgot to switch on my Zoom H2, so no recordings. NOOOOOOO
To my frustration, I noticed that my trusty Edirol UA-25 refused to work properly on Ubuntu 10.04. I spend quite some time tracking this problem down; eventually I found out that USB soundcards are moved down in priority.
The result of this are, among other things:
Jackd won’t start
Pd won’t find the soundcard
Mixxx won’t start
In other words, no end of grief.
On Ubuntu, this started from 9.10 on (and because of this, also affects Pure:Dyne), on Debian this affects Squeeze.
Fortunately, there’s a simple solution!
On Debian’s bug-tracker, I found the following simple fix:
in /etc/modprobe.d/ create a file called local.conf. In this file, add the lines
alias snd-card-0 snd-usb-audio
options snd-usb-audio index=0
I decided to temporarily use youtube as a host for my videos. Saves server space and is easier to link and embed. Also, the HTML5-style links don’t seem to work too well from a remote server.
Oh well. I don’t really like it but it works.
Videos here. The direct download links to the .ogvs are still there for the flash impaired.
