There are two things that I’ve done consistently for 18 years I’ve been using a computer to make music is to experiment with random processes to generate something musically.

EXAMPLE ENSEMBLE: http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/AbletonLiveRandomizeExample.zip

Ableton Live has a ton of effects. People spend a lot of time and money (or time looking for W4R3Z, which imho is wasted) to find third party VST instruments and effects to give them a palette of sounds. But before you go crazy buying and downloading stuff, it’s a good idea to fully explore the stuff built in to Live.

The Live MIDI effects are an under-utilized resource for creative sequencing, and the MIDI effect rack I’ve built does something that is to me really inspirational: It takes a stream of midi notes and randomizes their pitch and velocity.

That doesn’t seem like much except for this particular context: If you have a drum rack after this MIDI effect rack, when a MIDI note occurs, it adds a random offset to the note number, and assigns a random velocity. If you load a drum rack with an assortment of sounds — in the case of my example, latin percussion samples — it will generate endless variety of drum patterns with continuously changing accents.

From left to right the components of this rack are

1. Pitch Effect. Adds a fixed offset to incoming notes.
2. Random Effect. Adds a random offset to incoming notes.
3. Velocity Effect. Randomly changes velocity of incoming notes.
4. Velocity Effect. Filters out notes with velocity outside the range lowest to lowest+range.

The actual rhythm is determined by the note pattern that’s playing in the current MIDI track. This is cool because you can use groove templates on (for example) clip with a steady stream of 16th notes, and the output of the rack will follow the groove template. Every time a note is triggered by the clip, a random offset is added to the pitch, which has the effect of choosing a different drum sound, with a random velocity.

The Macro controls on the left side give you control over various parameters.

1. Lowest: notes with velocities below this value won’t play
2. Range: notes with velocities above Lowest+Range won’t play
3. Pitch: Constant offset added to incoming note numbers
4. Rand Velocity: How much randomness is added to incoming note velocities

Here’s a use case: If you play the third clip in the KW Conga track in the example ensemble, it is a steady stream of notes with a pitch of C1, which in my drum rack corresponds to the first sound. If you don’t want a hit on every 16th note, turning up the Lowest knob will discard notes with low velocity, and turning down Range discards notes with higher velocity. You tune the velocity range with these two knobs to thin out the incoming stream of notes by discarding some of the lowest and highest velocity notes.

The Pitch knob is to get around a limitation of the Random MIDI effect — it only goes up to a maximum offset of 24. Since I have more than 24 sounds loaded in the drum rack, in order to play any of the sounds more than 2 octaves above C1, I have to add an offset. You can also play this knob — or automate it — to change the set of sounds played by the incoming notes. In this particular rack, all the flams are at the top of the drum rack’s note range, so if the Pitch knob is below 8, you won’t get any flams.

The Rand Velocity knob, if turned to zero, doesn’t change incoming velocities at all. This would be useful in the case where you want the Velocity of the Groove template to determine note volumes.

All this is harder to explain than it is to use. Try downloading the example ensemble and fiddle with the knobs, and I think you’ll find that there’s an intuitive feel to using this effect rack. The main thing you need to start with is a drum rack — like the conga rack in the example — driven by clips usually consisting of C1 notes, which is the default lowest note for drum racks. The more sounds you add to your drum rack the more useful the pitch knob will be; if you only have 24 sounds, turning up Pitch will just cause notes to be sent to empty slots in the drum rack.

And if you don’t want to just let this sort of constrained randomness do its thing forever, you can record the output of the MIDI rack in another MIDI track, and then choose a few bars to loop, or find the 4 bars that’s almost perfect and tweak it a bit.

This sort of technique isn’t limited to drum sounds. If you’re using this rack with a pitched instrument it will do something random, and perhaps useful. With a pitched instrument, you can add a Scale Live MIDI effect, in order to constrain the notes played to the scale of your choice.

And that’s only the beginning of what you can do with effect racks. Live’s MIDI effect racks have the same ‘multi-chain’ feature of Live Effect and Instrument Racks — you can set up different chains of MIDI effects and use the Chain Select control to choose between them. And once you add in Max For Live MIDI effects, things can really get crazy.

http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/RandomMultitapDelay.zip

The Random Multitap Delay is a delay effect that randomly, continuously changes the delay time between the input and output. The delay times are based on musical note durations – ¼ note, ? note, ? note triplets, etc.  My goal was to use random processes in a way that preserves rhythmic integrity — the output stays in time with the input and any other rhythmic elements in the music.

Internally there is a multitap delay, whose delay time is a multiple of the current rhythmic division. If you select ? for the tap length then the first will delay ? note, the second 2/8 , the third ? etc.

The effect switches randomly between the delays over time, effectively re-arranging the input signal in time, shuffling it up.  This is particularly effective on drums, because it will generate an endlessly varying rhythmic pattern that will still add up to the ear.

There are two identical delays for the left and right sides of the stereo signal. Since the current delay tap is chosen randomly, the right and left signals will be different even if all the controls are set the same.

It’s actually harder to describe what the effect does clearly than to understand what it does by tweaking the controls, and hearing the results.

In Use

There is a hierarchy of chaos in the controls of the Random Multitap Delay.  I’ll list them from least chaotic to most chaotic:

Sync and Stepped On

With both sync and stepped set, every rhythmic division, one delay is selected.  For example, if 1/8th is selected for tap length and 1/8th is selected for S&H, every eighth note a different delay tap is chosen.

Sync On, Stepped Off

Every rhythmic division a fractional value is chosen, that will select a blend of 2 delay times.  For example, if the tap length is 1/8th and selection value is 3.5, you will hear a 50/50 mix of the 4/8ths and 5/8ths delays.

Sync Off, Stepped On

The delay tap selection varies continuously, based on Rand Speed, but only one delay tap is selected at a time.

Sync Off, Stepped Off

The delay tap varies continuously at Rand Speed, and a mix of two delay taps will be heard all the time.

The meter and numeric display below the stepped button shows you how these controls interact.  They will show you exactly which delay tap is playing at a given time.  The delay taps are numbered 0 to 7, since I’m a computer programmer ;-)

Controls

Tap Length

This chooses a base delay time for the multitap delay.  These are standard musical divisions of time — ¼ note, 1/8th note, dotted 1/8th etc.

S&H

Controls the rate of change of the delay taps.  Every ¼ note (for example) a new delay tap is selected at random for the output.

Sync

When this is on, the delay time is selected based on the setting of S&H.  When it is off, the delays are switched between continuously at the rate specified by Rand Speed.

Rand Speed

Chooses the speed at which the delay selection changes. The numeric value below the knob gives the speed in cycles per second/Herz.

Stepped

Determines whether the delay selection is stepped (i.e. selecting just one tap at a time 0, 1, 2, 3…) or continous.  If Stepped is off,  you will hear a mix of two adjacent delay taps most of the time ( 0.3, 1.7, 2.1 …)

FB

Controls the level of feedback for both the left and right delays.

Cross FB

Controls the amount of the left delay that is fed into the right delay, and vice versa

L FB Mode/R FB Mode

Selects the filter that is included in the feedback path of the delays. High Pass, Band Pass, Low Pass etc. ‘Bypass’ is also an option, which removes the filter entirely from the feedback path.

Spread

The difference between the left and right feedback filter cutoffs.  At 12 O’Clock, L & R filters have the same cutoff. As you rotate left, the left cutoff reduces, and the right cutoff increases.  As you rotate right the left cutoff increases and the right cutoff decreases.

F

Feedback filter frequency

R

Feedback filter resonance.

As software projects go, PaulStretch is rather a shadowy enigma. Since I did the initial Mac OS X port, I’ve had very, very sporadic communications with the author Nasca Octavian Paul about it.

Then there’s the issue of versioning. Paul started a github repository, but it hasn’t been updated since March. It’s currently at version 2.2.2, but the only difference between 2.2-2 and 2.2-1 is that the version number it reports has changed.

At any rate, today I did a new build which is 1) OS X 10.6 (forward compatible with Lion, but perhaps not backwards compatible to Leopard or Tiger) 2) Up to date build, incorporating all of Paul’s changes. I also spent some time playing with it to make sure it works properly.

You can download it here: http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/PaulStretch-2.2.2-OSX-10.6.dmg

It also has the latest refinements of the build scripts used to build PaulStretch from source. I use CMake, which is Kitware’s cross-platform build tool. CMake keeps getting smarter, and my CMake recipe for PaulStretch will download all the prerequisite libraries, build them, and then download the PaulStretch source, build it, and generate an Apple App Bundle.

And CMake really is cross-platform — the same build recipe will work unmodified on Linux (which I have tested) and possibly on Windows (which I haven’t tried).

If you still have a PowerPC Mac, you can try using http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/PaulStretch-OSX-PPC.dmg which a friend of mine built, but it isn’t the most recent version of PaulStretch.

It’s hard not to be an electronic musician without developing a fascination with random/stochastic processes as a compositional tool. Particularly because when you pay attention to e.g. a Max Roach Drum Solo he seems to be balancing random choices with intentional ones. While Roach knows what he wants in broad outlines, part of what makes his playing great is that he has learned to simply allow his muscle memory and hind brain take over and introduce surprises. By letting go of a score and conscious control he’s participating in randomness shaped by his will.

Max spent a lifetime developing the skills as a musician to allow this sort of freedom in his playing. This demonstration clip is what happens when you set up many random Max For Live LFOs to modulate many, many different things. At the core, LFOs are modulating the Repeat and Grid parameters of a Beat Repeat effect. Then two more LFOS modulate the effect send levels, going to a reverb and delay. A third LFO is modulating the rate of the LFO modulating the Repeat parameters.

Then more LFOs modulate the regeneration level and ‘echo reverse’ parameters of the delay, and the size and predelay on the reverb.

One drum loop is the sole audio source for this. All this modulation introduces a currently fashionable sort of crackle where changing parameters introduces audio discontinuities.

Please go Here for latest build!

Paul added a new library dependency, which I hacked into my build recipe here: http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/PaulStretchBuild-2.1.tar.gz

Instructions for building

I have a completely UNTESTED binary for people to try here. It should work, but I can’t test it right now.

http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/PaulStretch2.1-OSX-10.6.tar.gz

If you’re not a command line jockey, just downloading and clicking on it will create paulstretch.app where ever you dropped the downloaded file. If you know about command line stuff:

This is built on OS X 10.6, 32bit. No idea what OS X versions will run it.

GO HERE FOR LATEST AND GREATEST

The world of open source software development doesn’t sit still. A program that I rely on to build PaulStretch on OSX is CMake, which is an open source, cross-platform program that hides some of the complexity of building software on different platforms.

If you’ve built any software on OS X or Linux you’re probably familiar with the “./configure ; make ; make install” method of working with source packages. CMake does that but it goes out of its way to handle the low level crap that is a pain in the ass to set up program configuration with autoconf. On top of that, it will run on any Unix, OS X or Windows. And on top of THAT, it will generate Makefiles, or project files for any of the commonly used integrated development programs like Visual Studio (on PC) and XCode (on Mac).

CMake really is as close as you can get to ‘write once, run anywhere’ in the world of C and C++. Not that there won’t be platform-specific stuff you’ll have to do, but it’s a lot easier and more concise in CMake.

Anyway, as of CMake 2.8, there is a powerful new CMake Module called ExternalProject. It automates downloading, configuring and building open source packages. I’ve used ExternalProject heavily in my day job, so it seemed natural to use it to streamline building PaulStretch. The result is maybe just as complex as the original build setup, but it is a lot more robust. Reading through the CMakeLists.txt files I’ve set up will be a good introduction to how things work in CMake — I’ve done a bunch of things in there you’ll want to know how to do for your own projects — use ExternalProject_add to download and build libraries, do some platform-specific configuration, create an executable, etc.

You can download the new PaulStretch Build package here: http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/PaulStretchBuild-2.1.tar.gz

The instructions are pretty straightforward:

0. Make sure you have the compilers and development libraries installed on your system.
1. Download the Tar file
2. unpack the tar file, somewhere you have write permission.
3. Run PaulStretch/BuildPaulStretch.sh

On OS X, this will create a paulstretch.app, that you can drag and drop wherever you want. On Linux, the executable will be in bin/paulstretch — it’s statically linked so it will run without needing anything besides the program file on your system. Or, for that matter, any other compatible Linux distribution.

The result is an executable program in whatever directory you’ve run this process in. The following commands would accomplish this whole process in a directory called ‘PaulStretch’ in your home directory.

mkdir -p ~/PaulStretch
cd ~/PaulStretch
curl http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/PaulStretchBuild.tar.gz | tar xzf -
PaulStretch/BuildPaulStretch.sh

After running these commands, on OS X your PaulStretch program will be ~/PaulStretch/paulstretch.app. On Linux, it will be ~/PaulStretch/bin/paulstretch.
As an added bonus, I took the time to try building on a couple of different Linux systems, to verify it works there.

Once again, what will trip up the non-software-developer types in this whole process is step 0: making sure the dev tools are available on your system. That’s something I’m not going to explain here. Google it. You’ll need GCC installed, all the development libraries, and on Linux the development libraries for libasound — the ALSA sound library.

If you happen to be a Windows developer, you could take a crack at building using Visual Studio or MinGW. The CMake build files are theoretically portable, but you’ll have to download CMake for Windows (here: http://www.cmake.org/files/v2.8/cmake-2.8.3-win32-x86.exe)I haven’t done this, because I avoid doing development work on my Windows machines at home. If I’m at home, and farting around on the computer, I want to be able to just use music software, not build it. Plus you can download the Windows version of PaulStretch here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hypermammut/.

Let me re-iterate again — I don’t want to be tech support for this — if you can’t figure out from this post how to use what I’ve put together, you probably shouldn’t even be trying to build it yourself. Ask your kid nephew who’s a big H4X0R to do it for you.

Not my favorite track on the Just A Band 82 album, but this music video does rule. Apparently it was one of East Africa’s first Viral video complete with its own #Makmende Twitter tag. Makwende is apparently the Kenyan Chuck Norris, which the world needs now!

All the hootenanny about PaulStretch got me playing with it again, and this is what I came up with. As my vrave buddies used to say ‘very ambient.’

Download audio file (Chaircrusher-Expemsible.mp3)

http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-Expemsible.mp3

The source material was a couple of samples downloaded from the Internet — a drumloop and a bassline. I added the phaser effect. So the original audio was on the order of 2 seconds long.

This will be my last post on the subject. It’s been fun to get a lot more site visits, but just for perspective, my friend Jerry’s Retarded Ravers Of America site was getting ten times the traffic ten years ago that my blog does today. It also feels a little weird riding Justin Bieber’s coat tails to this new level of web notoriety. As it happens the PaulStretch OS X posts consistently generate more traffic than anything else on this blog, which puts me in my place–doing a port of PaulStretch may be my most enduring Internet legacy, even if I wish I was known more for my own music.

Anyway, as regards the “Love U” stretched version, there was some speculation that it was a hoax, and then some speculation that the ‘group’ claiming they’d made the track themselves was itself a hoax. I decided to investigate, and came to these conclusions:

• It was, in fact, produced using PaulStretch, perhaps even using my OS X port
• The actual slowdown was actually on the order of 10x
• It was pitched down a little more than a half-step.
• Either it was MP3 encoded at a low quality/bitrate, or slightly lowpass filtered. My version (which is encoded from the raw output of PaulStretch) sounds noticeably brighter.

Download audio file (JB-USmile-Stretched.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/JB-USmile-Stretched.mp3

The original:
J. BIEBZ – U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

GO HERE FOR LATEST AND GREATEST

Well, someone may — or may not — have posted a slowed down version of Justin Bieber’s “Love U” and as a result my janky little blog is experiencing a 25-fold bump in traffic. I’m hoping the fine folks at Midphase don’t mind — I have an ‘unlimited bandwidth’ account, but I think it’s only unlimited until you start saturating their net connection.

Anyhow, if you’re here looking for Paulstretch, get it from this post — the new build can actually load MP3 files due to a new version of one of the libraries it needs. If you’re still on a Power Mac, go here.

The build scripts are Here, but don’t even bother unless you are an actual programmer, because I can’t troubleshoot your problems for you. What I wrote worked perfectly from a standing start back when I wrote it, but library versions change, source code archive links get moved, and you may not have all the build tools on your machine.

Let the stretching begin!
EDIT: I listened again to the example I put up back when I first started playing with Paulstretch and I still really dig it. It’s the Bitone Troupe’s cover of Björk’s “All Is Full Of Love.”

Download audio file (BitoneTroupe-AllIsFullOfLove-Stretched.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/BitoneTroupe-AllIsFullOfLove-Stretched.mp3

I started my summer DJ mix with a track of sorts I made with my Zoom H4 of insect sounds in the evening here in Iowa City.

Here is the track independent of the mix:

Download audio file (Chaircrusher-IowaEvening.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-IowaEvening.mp3

This is actually done in 4 tracks — 3 different recordings from different spots, mixed with one of them processed with Granite.

If you really are into Cicada sounds, I can also offer this:

http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/2010-07-22-Cicadas.flac

Which is 18 minutes from my back yard tonight. It’s a large file but there’s lots of good sound in there.

And speaking of which — a great investment if you do any sort of location recording — a wind muff! I got this one and it made everything I record outside sound better. I even use it indoors, because it seems to damp all air motion around the microphones, with the result of less ‘dead air’ self-noise.

New Sonic Arts has come up with a new granular synthesis tool they call ‘Granite.’ It is similar to many other of the granular synthesis tools, and yet has it’s own unique sound qualities.

This was announced last week and I ended up listening to the demo samples on loop for quite some time. It seems to be tuned to very musical throughout the entire parameter space, which is rare. Chief among the improvements I can imagine are filter types other than low pass, and an integral delay effect to go with the reverb. But since one can effectively do that with effects elsewhere in the signal chain, it’s a minor thing.

A brilliant feature of Granite is that aside from the usual free-form sound mangling one associates with granular synthesis, it’s set up to be a VST instrument you can play from a keyboard or synthesizer. Obviously with some sounds that can be more conventionally musical than with others, but it does come up with unexpected and pleasing sounds.

Download audio file (Granite-Tabla.mp3)

GO HERE FOR LATEST AND GREATEST

When I did the OS X build for PaulStretch, it became the most popular and enduring blog post I’ve ever done.

Paulstretch has kind of a funky user interface, but the way it sounds, and the sound variations it is capable of are fantastic. And it’s free. It also can take a 3 minute song and turn it into a week-long ambient drone. The dude who wrote it (Nasca Octavian Paul) shows up on the web every 5 years ago and drops a piece of interesting software, then disappears again. He’s never returned my e-mails, and I’ve maintained the OS X port!

Anyway, this is Paulstretch operating on “Mal Hombre” by the legendary Lydia Mendoza
Download audio file (LydiaMendoza-MalHombre-PaulStretched.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/LydiaMendoza-MalHombre-PaulStretched.mp3

The original. I should mention that Lydia Mendoza is absolutely fantastic. A pioneer of Norteño music, the popular music of Mexican-Americans in the United States, she plays that music kind of like what’s playing in Mexican Restaurants, only she’s as fearless a singer as Aretha Franklin. She can bring me to tears, and I don’t even know Spanish.
Download audio file (LydiaMendoza-MalHombre.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/LydiaMendoza-MalHombre.mp3

Christopher Hipgrave’s Ambient is a piece of software distributed by Audiobulb.

Ambient is based around granular synthesis of any audio file. It’s pitch shifted, delayed and filtered, and there are several controls you can tweak to control the sound, though ‘explore’ probably makes more sense in this context than ‘control.’

But it’s definitely worth 10 Eu especially if you aren’t a musician, but want to play with a cool audio toy — load anything and then fiddle with knobs, or just hit the random button for hours of crazy sounding fun.

It’s not perfect — there isn’t any way to map the knobs to midi, and the design of the user interface encourages exploration over purposeful control. It also has a tendency to turn any input into 100 buskers playing at the same time in the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. But it is a lot of fun — something you could turn a 5 year old loose on and they’d have a blast.

Quarry Process

This is Amibient chewing up a version of Meredith Monk’s Quarry Weave, as arranged by me using ImageLine Harmless as a sound source. It sounds like part of a the soundtrack for a Wim Wenders movie to me:
Download audio file (Chaircrusher-QuarryProcess.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-QuarryProcess.mp3

Quarry Weave

The source audio fed into Ambient:
Download audio file (MeredithMonk-QuarryWeave-ChaircrusherInstrmntl.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/MeredithMonk-QuarryWeave-ChaircrusherInstrmntl.mp3

I’ve been rather taken by using granular effects the past couple of weeks. Sure I should courriel that to Circa 2000 Twerk/Kit Clayton/Taylor Dupree, but whatever. I find things at my own pace. In particular, I like the idea of playing with a harmonically useful subset of the granular effect domain — In particular sending pad sounds through granular effects with pitch shifts like an octave or a major fifth.
The contenders:

ArgotLunar

Argotlunar has the advantage of being free. Beyond that it does have it’s own distinctive sound — it has a large number of parameters, all of which can be varied randomly. The best effects to my mind require limiting the number and range of random variations, since you can only control their depth, not their speed.

Discord3

Discord3 is only partially a granular delay, being pitched more as a pitch shifter. It has 3 modes — the ‘vintage’ mode based on AudioDamage’s earlier version Discord2 (and the oldest and crustiest of the Eventide pitch effects), a ‘modern’ mode, and a grain mode. Their grain mode seems to produce more sustained output from sustained input, and at least for harmonic material, its ‘chaos’ control quickly makes a mess of its input. Not that it’s a bad thing.

Granular-To-Go

Granular-To-Go is part of the discontinued Pluggo plug-in suite by Cycling74. Presumably it lives on in Max For Live, but I’ve resisted the siren call of Max thus far. The range of sounds possible are similar to ArgotLunar, but the grain length range and offset are specified in samples, which isn’t a useful rhythmic value. The sound possibilities are quite nice, ranging from clattery washes to completely mental screeching.

Which Is Better?

As Ali G once said, “which is betteh? in da sense dat one fing is better den anutha?”

Not straightforward. Getting ArgotLunar is a no-brainer because it’s free and it works great. Discord 3 is really a pitch shift effect with a granular mode thrown in. It has a lot of deep programmability and could be used for anything from a ping pong delay to a sonic mutilator. Granular-To-Go — if you can get it — shows its age, both in the ‘dot matrix printer paper’ user interface, and relative unfriendliness of its controls. But it can do it’s own brand of shimmery craziness.

Download audio file (GranularTest.mp3)
http://cornwarning.com/xfer/GranularTest.mp3

First Harmless by itself, then ArgotLunar, then Discord3, then Granular-to-Go, then various combinations of the three in different orders.

Had a track on the back burner, when i downloaded the ArgotLuna granular delay effect VST plugin. Slowed it down 50BPM, put ArgotLunar on the pad synth, and there you are.

Argotlunar is pretty cool — I like especially automating the number of active grains because you can take it from a simple pitch shifted delay to a dense cloud with the twist of a knob. I adjusted the pitch shift to 1200 cents, which pushes the delayed grains up an octave. Due to the control resolution, it’s not precisely an octave which is actually better….

The main drums come from Audiodamage Tatoo. The other sounds were things I sampled in my studio and chopped up.

The name — “Amber Waves” of GRAIN — I kill me. It’s also (I just found out) the name of a porn star in Boogie Nights

As has been their wont, Warp released the download version of Autechre’s new album Move of Ten as a digital download in advance of the physical product. So I bought it yesterday.

I got the 24-bit WAV file version because, well, I have the hardware to play it and it was only a dollar more. I’ve spent a little time comparing the 320kbs MP3 file and 24-bit WAV files and it’s intriguing. I honestly can’t hear the difference — but then I only have a $500 playback system and nearly 53-year-old ears.

I messed about a bit with the track Rev(1) comparing the 2 files audibly, and then figured screw it — let’s get scientific. I loaded both the WAV and MP3 files and mixed the inverse of one with the other, trying to get as close as I could to do it 100% in phase. Then I normalized it.

This is the result:
Download audio file (Autechre-Rew(1)-MP3-vs-Wav.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/Autechre-Rew(1)-MP3-vs-Wav.mp3

The apparent difference between the WAV and MP3 is some white noise with a pretty wide stereo field. Interestingly, it’s not clear to me whether that’s what’s missing in the MP3, or what was added to the MP3. I suspect they added additional mastering processing to the MP3 to try and match the WAV and MP3 by ear.

If that’s the case, then the residual difference between the two could be the application of a digital exciter process, whose job is to subtly distort the signal to make it sound brighter and more ‘in focus.’

The Album itself is pretty ace, too, audio geeking aside.

GO HERE FOR LATEST AND GREATEST

My PaulStretch build was unfortunately Intel-only, and probably would only work with OS X 10.5 or later.

http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/PaulStretch-OSX-PPC.dmg

This is supplied with no warranty, express or implied, and no doubt, it will NOT run on some PowerMacs. I have no idea how binary compatibility works OS X and the PPC chips, except that it does not, as Apple is wont to say “just work.”

Again, if you download either of the disk images and they do not work, feel free to follow these instructions in order to build things for yourself. According to the aforementioned Anonymous Benefactor — the instructions do, in fact “just work.”

EDIT: If you want the latest & greatest go here

Judging from the WP Stats, my posts about the PaulStretch extreme audio timestretching application are by far the most popular blog posts I’ve ever made, indeed I think people will be downloading it after I’m dead if this domain outlives me.

Well, today I took the time to ‘refresh’ the PaulStretch stuff. This means I updated all the libraries it depends on to current versions and rebuilt the program. I don’t mess with the program source code itself — nothing has changed in appearance or tools.

The one thing that has changed — and it’s a biggie! — is that it now can load MP3 files for processing without crashing. Huzzah!

If you want to know what I’m talking about, check the original post here. I’ve updated the build scripts but the instructions here still apply.

The application: http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/PaulStretch-OSX-x386.dmg

The build scripts: http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/PaulStretch-OSX-Build.tar.gz EDIT: I had the link wrong. Sorry — one letter off.

The Disclaimer

I did this for my own amusement. I don’t want to be the guy providing tech support on Paul Stretch. So try and take care of yourselves. As far as I know no one has bothered to try and use my scripts to compile it for themselves, which I find annoying because A) people are so damn lazy and B) there should be hundreds of people around the world capable of building this program and troubleshooting any issues that come up. That’s why there’s no PPC or Snow Leopard build avaiable — not one damn person stepped up.

And as to the functioning of the program itself, or any new versions, that zynaddsubfx dude who wrote it went AWOL shortly after releasing the program. He’s never responded to any of my e-mails.

… or do I really need any more?

So my arsenal for music production comprises

1. NI Komplete 6 (Reaktor, Kontakt, FM8, Massive, Guitar Rig, Absynth, Battery)
2. Ableton Live Suite (Sampler, Tension, Operator, Electric, Collision, Analog)
3. Older NI synths (Pro-53, B4)
4. UAD-1 plugins
5. Xils (VCS3 emulation)
6. Xoxos drum synth suite
7. TRackS mastering plugs
8. Most of the AudioDamage plugins
9. AAS Ultra Analog
10. Image-Line Harmless
11. A few other free or cheap things
12. Ableton Live 8 Suite Built-in effects

I’m not rich — a lot of these pieces of software were Not For Resale review copies, or Audiomidi ‘No Brainer’ Deals, or (in the case of the UAD-1) insane blow-out deals. Others are incremental purchases, like the Audiodamage stuff.

I actually have licenses software I don’t actually have loaded on my computer right now.  When I got to add a compressor to a track I don’t even know how many choices I have — I have 4 I use regularly — UAD-1 1176LN-SE, UAD-1 LA2A, AudioDamage Rough Rider, and the built in Ableton compressor.  If I want an analog synth sound I have 8 or 10 choices, and that’s before I go to my outboard real analog synths.

I follow the usual suspects (KVR et al) for news on new virtual synths and effects, and only rarely do I ever see anything I’m moved to investigate — even if it’s free! And I haven’t even begun to mention sample sets, and doing my own sampling, live guitar playing, location recording, and screwing around in Sound Forge doing sound design.

Which raises a couple of questions:  Given the glut of different software synths & effects available, does anyone really need to make more?  When was the last time someone came up with something that pegged the ‘Oh Wow’ meter?  Honestly, there seems to be a lack of imagination amongst the people writing audio software.  There just haven’t been very many things introduced in the last 20 years that are great leaps forward.  We’re still living in a world based around analog and analog-esque synths, digital FM, samplers, delays, flangers, compressors, reverbs, and distortion devices.  And most of the people involved in electronic music production barely make good use of those.  In fact, most of them use all those tools, and all the computing power that was unimaginable 20 years ago, to make complete shit.

And a lot of electronic producers spend big bucks essentially recreating Herbie Hancock’s studio circa 1975, only with a computer instead of multitrack analog tape.

Which leads me to an inescapable conclusion — I can’t keep up, and it’s a distraction to even try.  I have enough stuff at my disposal to make it ridiculous to ever want more, and to the extent I am an actual musician/producer, every second I waste dinking around on the tools as opposed to actually making tracks is a waste of time.  Basta!

Not that I’ll actually follow that advice. I’m already excited to see what happens next week at Winter NAMM!!!