Nodal

Computer Music magazine is not really my cup of tea. And there's a reason that too: the oh-so-dangerous semiotic fuel to the app upgrade race that happens to benefit only the advertisers that take up about 50% of the magazine's publishing space. In their correspondence section of the latest issue (June 2009), some reader complainted about their lack of coverage on freeware utilities, arguing that a digest of the most pertinent happenings in such a chaotic universe would be very welcome to Computer Music magazine readers. The magazine replied that, since freewares are free to try, why should they deny their reader-base such joy. Aren't they such darlings? Yep, that's right: Computer Music magazine is intended to be a buyer's guide, not journalism. Luckilly, they betray their intentions from time to time and in their single-page eye-on-freebies section of the same issue, they present us with the acknowledgement of the existence of a gem: Nodal. No tutorials, no raving reviews, just a screenshot and two paragraphs of briefly telling what it is. Oh, and a URL for whoever gives a fuck - and so I did. But enough with the bile.
Nodal is a MIDI manipulation tool. It's grid-like interface supports a non-linear sequencing of MIDI instructions in a circuitry logic. Remember Pipe Dreams? That's what you do to the MIDI signal in Nodal. The lenght of the side of each square in the grid is a beat in a definable BPM tempo. You can also create nodes in the plumming (hence the name), where you can edit many aspects of the signal and control it's flow around your circuit. The idea is to create a (not necessarily linear) sequence of MIDI messages, yielded to a third-party MIDI receiver. The downloadable pdf tutorial shows you the ropes proper, so be sure to get it.
Like they say on the webpage, Nodal doesn't make a sound by itself. In my system Nodal found the soundcard's synth by default, wich in turn produced sound. But you can route it to a hard synth, if that's your thing. Routing it to anything "software" is not trivial, though, and it depends on the MIDI slave, really. For example, Nodal can produce different MIDI notes, in different programmes (or "instruments"), in up to 10 MIDI channels. You must also understand that there's no concept of transport (play, stop, record, etc) yielded by Nodal, just the MIDI protocol. I tried to use Reason for a slave and eventually gave up when I learned how tricky that can get in a couple of forums. In those forums, people kept asking for rewire, vst versions, etc. But, if you a take closer look at Nodal, you will understand that this would cripple it's possibilities.
My suggestion is to use it on Plogue's Bidule, where you can liberally create MIDI-ins for whatever Nodal needs and route them to your weapon-of-choice favourite softsynth or effect, or even to Reason, through Bidule's Rewire. MIDI Yoke as a virtual MIDI port takes care of the harware-to-sofware bridge and Bidule picks it up with no fuss. I havent's tried Nodal on Audiomulch yet, but I guess you can get it to wait for an incoming MIDI message in mapping certain parameters.
What's exciting about Nodal is the possibilities it opens in MIDI management, be it generative music composition (scales, chords, etc), be it stochastic control over MIDI acessible parameters.

Faced with a new technical challenge, I came across another Sheep-DAW classic, at least in my book. Let's say you have a DVD from wich you want to extract the sound for, say, educational use (cough!). This seems like a very simple concept to grasp but, as I found out, not a simple one to put to pratice. Before you start to wonder wich cable to buy to connect your DVD player to the input socket of your computer's soundcard, hold your horses. Thou shall not waste your precious money, I tell thee! You just need your DVD-R drive and the googling I'm about to save you.

Want you want to do is to rip de DVD into your hard drive and convert the resulting .vob (video) extension files into wav files. To rip de DVD on to your hard drive, you'll need the DVD Decrypter app from DVD Videosoft, wich is malware-free (AVG scanned) and as freeware as they come. It's not open source, wich I find suspicious, though, so DO scan it senseless with all you can throw at it. This simple app just creates the vob files in a designated folder. There are not that many options: It's pretty much video origin specification, destination folder specification and go! The DVD I ripped was converted into eight different vob files and I don't know how or why. It doesn't really matter much if you're not ripping the DVD for the movie content, though it would be nice to undestand why.

So now you have vob files wich are only good for watching on your media player or for burning back to DVD. You'll need the small open source wonder that is VirtualDub and an encoder needed for it to do it's thing. The encoder is an executable updater, not your regular .dll, so you'll just need to unzip the folder, double-click the .bat file and you're good. Virtualdub is pretty oldschool and doesn't need installation: just unzip it and the executable file IS the software, not an installer - keep that in mind, for your own folder arquitechture concerns.

What VirtualDub does is converting vob video files into almost whatever format (yep: avi, divx, wmv, mpeg, the whole shebang) and with a lot of compression options in the video and sound department that, frankly, I never really explored because I always went straight to the 'save as wav' option that's sitting on the 'File' menu, waiting for a music producer to drool over it. I did preform a vob-to-avi conversion once and it worked out fine.

And that's it. No fuss DVD to digital video and digital video to digital audio conversion. All free. File it under Sheep-DAW.

Another Sheep-DAW must is Audiograbber. Audiograbber is a traditional CD ripper. It used to be shareware but it's gone freeware in 2004, wich means no please register windows, no experimental periods, no limited functions till you pay for it, you download it and it's yours. So why is it useful for music production? Two reasons: the line-in sampling mode and the mp3 compression (yep, you'll need to get the lame enconder somewhere else).

The line-in sampling is the most user-friendly way I've seen of doing a very obvious thing: getting your computer to record incoming audio in stereo wav format from the input socket of your soundcard. This seems like a very simple task, but most software has recording time or storage limitations (other than your hard drive capacity, obviously) till you pay and/or register - not with Audiograbber. Windows has a little app that does this (in mono) that has remained unchanged since v3.1 through to XP, that only records a minute of audio. Audiograbber was very obviously designed for ripping your entire music collection (be it CDs, LPs, cassettes, whatever) into mp3 format and the ergonomics show just that: it can start (and stop) recording on user order or on incoming sound over a used-defined decibel threshold, it automatically creates a different wave file if a user-defined period of silence goes by, it has different volume settings for incoming audio, recording and output, it has real-time recording monitoring (lag depends on your RAM resources, obviously), it has compression and peak-correction settings and it all can be set on automatic no-brainer mode if you're not into working out the details.

When I started doing field recordings, Audiograbber was right about the only free way of getting sound from your Minidisc into your computer and, as far as I know, this is still the cheapest and most clever way of doing it. For recording stereo sound to a digital medium, nothing is cheaper than a second-hand Minidisc that people on e-bay are dying to get rid of for peanuts since the portable mp3 player explosion. A DAT recorder is the quality option but it's more expensive (around ten-fold!) and you won't find DAT tapes on your supermarket like you find blank Minidiscs. New digital recorders are not only far more expensive than your regular second hand Minidisc, but they also come with built-in microphones, wich compromises versatility. And Minidisc microphones are pretty good for their price. If you're going down this road, Audiograbber is your only free, unlimited software option, as far as I know.

The other Audiograbber highlight for me is the mp3 compression. Most MySpace-like profile pages have storage limitations and you can't put up a regularly compressed mp3 file over 5 minutes long. Audiograbber allows you to compress the mp3 in diferent sampling rates, so that you can fit longer mp3s into less space, with a compromise on quality, obviously. All of this can also be set on automatic no-brainer mode, if your not into working out the details. It also converts mp3 into wav and the other way around too. A Sheep-DAW must, I tell you.

A Sheep-DAW staple must be Audacity. It's your regular WAV editor and it's as open source as they come. Audacity supports VST plug-ins and has a bucketload of built-in effects of variable quality and usability. The mild-mannered open source community provides the informal support every software user should feel confortable with in our dear post-modernity. Audacity converts to-and-fro wav, mp3 and ogg (you'll need to get the lame enconder somewhere else, obviously).
It's spartan no-bullshit GUI is intuitive and has just what you need. I wouldn't recommend translated versions, though. In the portuguese one it seems like they google-translated the terms and it's simply more confusing than the english original for pretty much everyone (yep, that bad). The looping function is a bit dumb and won't update de loop's left and right locators position sound-wise, if you move them - you'll have to stop playback and re-start, wich bums me out a bit. Another programming flaw (at least in my version) is the window management: it's one Audacity window for one Audacity project and/or wav file, so you can't really close a project file without exiting the program. Although there's a close option in the file menu, it's really an exit. It's a bit crappy when you're working on several files in one go and you have RAM restricitions, so no batch processing. And that's pretty much it, in the cons department.
In the pros, it's free, it's legal, you can (and should) share it, and besides the cons, I never needed any other wav editor.

Long time no see, right? At least Duet Yourself-wise...

I barely had the time to double-click on a music app lately, due to increasing Duet Yourself-irrelevant issues that I have. But I did stumble across this very nice little app that turns You Tube into a potencial mega sample bank. And it's free, so file it under Sheep-DAW.

I think (but I'm not sure) it was Woody Allen who said that people should create art about things they intimatelly know about. YouTube and internet videos are such a part of our lives and of our sound world, that it becomes only natural to use it as part of our creative work.

I've been into watching cigarette ads, lately. Portugal was one of the first countries in the world to ban tobacco advertising, so it seems to me like such an extraordinary thing to be able to watch these gems of vintage marketing. I've been a smoker for a long enough time to have my own experience-based ideas about smoking and cigarettes, so I'm sort of imune to the ideas yielded by tobacco marketing. To me, tobacco marketing becomes a sort of abstract marketing, wich is fascinating. Their naive discourse is not any different from, say, a toothpaste ad from the same era and that is what's so obscene about it: people openly endorsing tobacco on prime time television reveals not only a time and place where values were completelly different but also shows us how marketing will always capitalize on a moral paradigm, whatever that will be. In revealing the mercenary nature of advertising, these ads become almost subversive. The portrayal of men, women, moral values, sexual atractiveness or social sucess reveals an underlying ideology so far-off of the political correctness of today that it astounds us that only a few decades have gone by.

I seem to be drifting a bit off-subject here but cut and paste techniques in whatever art form are great ways of exploring this contrast. For example, in Music has the right to children, Boards of Canada based their aesthetics on vintage children's TV to create a very appealing contrast between old and new. I'm not encouraging anything illegal, but please do check out these cigarette ads in a (cough!) musical way: Kool, John Player Special, more Kool, Salem, Kool again, Winston, Newport or Peter Stuyvesant. Check the related videos and you'll just keep getting more of them. A jingle is a very expressive and invocative piece of music, in an almost haiku-like way. Some of them work, some of them are just down right ridiculous, some of them work in a down right ridiculous way but they're all infectious and there's a compositional lesson to be learned here. The simplicity and directness of the music is also sort of subversive, not only because of what it endorsses but also in the sense that it does away with non-imediate music wich is the pop paradigm taken an extreme. The lullaby-ish flavour of jingles hit you below the rationale belt and the imediate recognizability of these pieces of music is a must.

So, what I am suggesting here is a structuralist approach (Hjelmslev style, if you will): download these for your own private (cough!) educational use and dissect these songs until you find the patterns. For an example, I noticed that these songs use that sacred rule of having something drastically changing in every bar, but the melody of the next bar usually kicks in during the rythmic fill of the previous bar - this is very clear in the lady be Kool song - it's almost like there's an interest on keeping the music appealing and with permanent novelty but without compromising a certain needed flow. In this song, there's also a semi-tone climb for momentum's sake, during the repetition of the whole pattern - novelty vs flow again. This ad relies so oubviously on the jingle, that the voice-over spoken word is just plain absurd, almost surrealistic, as if it's existence (a masculine voice saying something) is all that is required.

The semiotics of functional music, especially on a medium like TV, are very revealling of today's compositional paradigms. And with that little app, YouTube is yours for the (audio) taking.

Sheep-DAW: Intro

Fact no.1: Music software with all the bells and whistles is expensive.
Fact no.2: Music software without bells and whistles is often cheap or free.
Fact no.3: Music software without bells and whistles is often less user friendly.

In the end, music software/tools is not a substitute for lack of creativity (although yours truly often searches new tools to do that... so I'm casting away any innocence pretensions on my behalf here).

I'll be creating a series of posts, each dedicated to a single tool (sequencer, utilities, VSTi's, FX, etc)
You - the reader will try to post your choices for each tool.
The objective is to achieve a basic "Best Cheap DAW Set-up Guidelines"
(also, a nice funky acronym for this purpose is kindly welcome: for now I'll just call it Sheep-DAW)

Peace!!