Mastodawn

pulusound Mar 16

its a veeery long tunnel though

join me in the tunnel tomorrow at 22:00 (UTC+2) https://cal.gravitons.org/event/pulusound-3rd-w3dn35day-online-gig

Pulusound - 3rd W3dn35day online gig

March's 3rd W3dn35day online gig is from the amazing Pulusound. Pulusound makes cyber-music in an increasingly incoherent assortment of genres using livecoding, retrocomputers, electronics and more. depending on the day it might be trancey, ambient, noisy, drum n bassy, chiptuney, and/or something else. it might even be (or not be) bonkwave. Check them out at: https://pulusound.fi [https://pulusound.fi], https://pulu.bandcamp.com [https://pulu.bandcamp.com]

#fediwave

currently figuring out connections

yeah im working on music (reconfiguring my Moonlander keyboard layout so it is usable on both macOS and Linux)

and then i find out my sc3-plugins is broken

oh man this is not looking good

pulusound

ok so the problem is supercollider 3.15.0-dev, not sc3-plugins per se. i guess i will try building 3.14

right. 3.14 doesnt build with Qt 6.10

if all else fails i will just livestream my struggle to get supercollider working

sufficiently advanced nix crimes are indistinguishable from magic and i now have a working supercollider 3.14.1. next, audio and controller routing

i was hoping to use Steinberg UR22 as my audio interface because it has mic preamps but it seems i dont have a way to turn on phantom power from Linux 😂

dont tell me i need to reverse engineer this shit

of all the things to put exclusively behind a software control

NEVER MIND there is a tiny switch on the back

i like how this interface inexplicably gets an extra space in its name. might have wasted a lot of time on that if i didnt happen to notice it immediately

pulusound Mar 18

theres no reason why a controller has to manage its own pages

pulusound Mar 18

this is a lot nicer than using the MFT side buttons

pulusound Mar 18

thank you everyone who came to listen, and special thanks to @thisoccasionalsociety and @meljoann for organizing 💜

i am going to get some much needed rest, will read all your lovely comments later 😅

good morning. there were a few questions in the chat which i will try to answer here :)

what is my software of choice?

this set had SuperCollider and TidalCycles (both operated via Emacs) on Linux, and the classic version of Music Mouse on Mac OS 7. the MIDI from Music Mouse played a SuperCollider synth via my DIY RS422 to USB MIDI interface which i think has clock voltage issues, causing MIDI corruption. i hastily threw together some defensive code to prevent stuck notes and such, but i hope i can come up with a real fix 😅 the uncertainty made it kinda interesting to play though

was it recorded?

not unless some incorrigible pirate (affectionate) did their own recording. please share if so! in the scramble to get things working on my new laptop, i didnt remember to configure auto-recording in OBS which i usually have enabled

was i trolling when i said almost everything went wrong?

thank you, but no 😂 just a few of the problems i had during preparation:

- SuperCollider 3.15.0-dev wont play some sc3-plugins UGens. rediscover the reasons why i was using the dev version in the first place (3.13 broken MIDI, 3.14 incompatible with Qt 6.10) and hack together a SC 3.14 + Qt 6.9 build
- my Moonlander keyboard layout written for macOS has problems with Linux. define separate Linux layers and add hotkeys to toggle
...

...
- RS422 to USB MIDI interface which worked on macOS produces no MIDI on Linux. lots of head scratching, rewrite the firmware code to use another USB MIDI library. works (why??), but...
- lots of corrupted MIDI. somewhat better when connected directly instead of via USB hub. hub power supply probably failing. rewire USB and write code to mitigate the remaining corruption
- also many difficulties flashing the interface firmware. bad USB hub was probably not helping
...

...
- need to reconfigure some buttons on my Winry315 keypad which has custom QMK firmware. QMK installation on my Mac has broken. set up latest version on Linux. nightmare merge conflicts with my code arise. start over with the new separate qmk_userspace model. some keycodes have changed. figure out what the equivalent new ones are
...

...
- configuring DroidCam OBS is a process. ok, i could use one of my normal webcams but they have worse quality. wifi gives jittery video. USB is harder to set up but works eventually
- changing PipeWire settings is hard when you copy-paste configs from the internet which contain subtle typos
...

...
- enabling phantom power on UR22 (which i used only once before) seems to require software control when you work in the dark and fail to notice the little switch on the back. build urcontrol. discover the switch. sigh
- etc

...
thus i made a last minute setlist of older tracks/patterns/patches/whatever. some of them sounded a bit different, maybe due to Tidal/SuperDirt updates or some screwup of my own, so this too took some additional fixing.

really i wanted to spend this time working on new tracks, more sound design for Music Mouse and my livecoding language for 68k Macs which is the main reason ive put so much effort into fixing this old computer. maybe next time :)

is that sound("crow") i hear?

the sound in question, heard towards the end of "a fleeting clarity", is a field recording from a train station in Tokyo (i forget which one but maybe somewhere near Koenji) during a rather quiet hour. i found the calm soundscape with crows and automated train announcements quite striking

thisoccasionalsociety Mar 18

@ahihi @meljoann

You were absolutely amazing! If that was your fallback position, I cannot wait for the opportunity to see what else you can do.

Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them)Mar 18

@ahihi @thisoccasionalsociety @meljoann very cool concert — hope you feel rested! Thank you for the performance, and to the organizers for putting it on!

Huey Mar 18

@ahihi oh no, missed it! Can I listen later?

@y6nH https://anticapitalist.party/@ahihi/116255009507937512

pulusound (@[email protected])

was it recorded? not unless some incorrigible pirate (affectionate) did their own recording. please share if so! in the scramble to get things working on my new laptop, i didnt remember to configure auto-recording in OBS which i usually have enabled

ACP