Category Archives: Discrete Music

Connecting a Camera to Max/MSP/Jitter

Andrew Benson over at the Cycling ‘74 site put together a really solid post on connecting a camera to your Max patch:

Making Connections: Camera Data

He covers the hardware requirements (cost, Quicktime drivers for mac users, and manual controls) as well as the handling you may want in your patch.  What frame rate do you want to deal with?  What are a few ways you could extract useful information from the feed?

127th AES Convention

AES127So it’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to post here, but I just got back from a weekend of AES and I need to report on the happenings.

I made it down Thursday night and stayed until the end of the program on Monday: four long days at the convention and a great time catching up with friends both living in New York and visiting for the show.

If you haven’t been to an AES convention, they’re broken up into two distinct parts: a trade show, with equipment designers and manufacturers showing off their new products, and a technical session, where industry professionals and research can share their recent work.  Usually you can cover the trade show in a day, though this year it took a lot less time.  Through some combination of the economy and industry politics many manufacturers did not attend; I think the most conspicuous absence was Digidesign, since they usually have a huge booth with half hourly product demos.  For me the highlights here included the Shure booth, where I got to check out their new ribbon mics and visit with old colleagues, and the Grace Design booth, where they were showing off their new 500-series preamps.

The technical program was a little quieter than usually, but much more lively than the exhibit floor.  Some of my personal highlights were the Max for Live presentation, the Headphone and Earphone Measurement Tutorial, David Berner’s presentation on emulation of analog hardware in DSP, and a number of papers I had a chance to catch.

I’m planning to write a bit about some of the presentations I saw, so stay posted.  Also, hopefully this will be the beginning of a more regular posting schedule.

Pro Tools – Shortcut of the Week (2009.07.27)

Pro Tools is a strong multi-track editing program, but unless you’re willing to drop some change on a custom keyboard, it can be tough to learn all the keyboard shortcuts.  I’m featuring one a week in an attempt to highlight the tricks I find most useful.

Set and enable pre/post time roll: Option-Click with Selector before or after selection

This is a follow up to last week’s shortcut, and an easy way to adjust the pre and post roll times.  Don’t forget that Command+3 will get you over to the Selector tool.  Again, pre-roll is a great alternative to manually punching!

Creation ADC

creation_adc_500

The Altmann Creation ADC is a converter that contains ‘No Analog or Digital Filters.’  This is a really interesting claim.  Non-ideal brickwall filters will introduce some phase shift, but the consequences of not implementing the filters at all seems much, much worse.  Any content above the sample rate will alias down, creating a tones that are not harmonically related to the original signal.

Altmann Creation ADC

Pro Tools – Shortcut of the Week (2009.07.20)

Pro Tools is a strong multi-track editing program, but unless you’re willing to drop some change on a custom keyboard, it can be tough to learn all the keyboard shortcuts.  I’m featuring one a week in an attempt to highlight the tricks I find most useful.

Enable or disable pre/post time roll: Command+K

Pre-roll is a great tool for recording punch-ins, allowing you to specify exact points for both the start of playback and the record start points.  I’ve always preferred this to manual punching, probably because I haven’t practiced it much.  Regardless, being able to toggle the pre/post roll is a guaranteed time saver in a tracking session; I always find myself flipping between the two modes.

PS3SACD.com

I just stumbled onto this site the other day.  PS3SACD.com is a guide to the models of PS3 that support SACD playback, their availability, catalog, and mods to improve the audio quality.

Interestingly, none of the mods are circuit based.  They all have to do mechanical modifications, which will affect the resonance modes of the disc.  This improves laser tracking, but what if skipping isn’t an issue?  What sort of improvements will you hear?  I raised this question a while back, while discussing BluSpec discs.  It’s looking like I’ll need to dig into it a bit.

Pro Tools – Shortcut of the Week (2009.07.13)

Pro Tools is a strong multi-track editing program, but unless you’re willing to drop some change on a custom keyboard, it can be tough to learn all the keyboard shortcuts.  I’m featuring one a week in an attempt to highlight the tricks I find most useful.

Import Session Data: Shift+Option+I

When I’m doing a session with multiple songs for a group, I try to keep each song in its own session.  This always makes the edit and mix stages of the process much simpler.  After the first song I’ll create a new session and import the settings from the first song.  This shortcut makes things a bit easier.

2009 Art of Record Production Conference

The 2009 Art of Record Production Conference is happening November 13-15… at the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff, S. Wales.  While that may be a bit of a trip, it sounds like it’s going to be a great conference.  Pete Waterman, of Rick Astley and Kylie Minogue production fame, has been confirmed as the keynote speaker.

The 2008 conference was held in my backyard, Lowell, MA.  It was a fantastic opportunity to make some new connections and get some new ideas: the perfect way to spend a weekend.

Art of Record Production