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

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.”

GO HERE FOR LATEST AND GREATEST

It has links to a more recent build, the PPC build, etc.

Yesterday I couldn’t spell OS X Developer and now, I are one!

With some help from my friends on the CMake mailing list I finally got a running standalone OS X application built out of the Paul Stretch source. As I wrote yesterday, it’s free, it’s easy, and it makes hours of freaky soundscapes out of any audio file.

Except for mp3 files. If you try and load an MP3 file it locks up. Oh, and it wants WAV or OGG files — as far as I know it can’t load AIF files. But it’s free, right?

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

Sorry for repost, but apparently, this post got trashed in my Blog SQL database. Eff me silly, computers suck. Apparently the post showed up long enough for MKB to comment on it, but then went to the great bit bucket in the sky.

The quaintly named Paul Stretch is a program that does extreme time stretching of digital audio. It’s free and open source, so anyone can try it. I even was able to build it on OS X, but not yet in a way that permits redistribution — you can do a lot of Unix-style programming on OS X and never build up the knowledge that building a native application requires.

Anyhow it turns any audio into pleasant ambient textures. Exampla gratia:

Bitone Troupe “All Is Full Of Love”
Download audio file (BitoneTroupe-AllIsFullOfLove.mp3)

The first 30 seconds or so, timestretched to several minutes

Download audio file (BitoneTroupe-AllIsFullOfLove-Stretched.mp3)

I’m putting together a set for a radio show on Saturday night on KRUI FM, so it was my first time playing with Ableton Live 8 and DJing. What’s it like?

Short answer — not different enough to have a lot to say about it but there’s a few topics worth covering:

Warping Tracks

Live 8′s warping is backwards from previous versions. Instead of grabbing a beat division on the timeline and aligning it to audio, now you grab an audio transient and drag it to the beat. Conceptually I can see why they did this but I can also understand the howls of pain from people used to the old method.

The good news is that it only takes a few minutes to adjust. I did 15 tracks for a mix tonight, and only the first one or two were a PITA. Then I had the hang of it.

The bad news is that Live is still kind of crap at tempo detection. Sometimes it gets it, but more often than not it gets lost and you have to junk everything it did. It doesn’t even get the transients right some of the time, which is theoretically an easier computational problem.

The best method I’ve worked out goes like this:

1. Find an unambiguous downbeat by listening to the track without the metronome to distract you. If there’s a transient at the downbeat, right click and set 1:1 to the downbeat. You can actually start the track earlier than 1:1 marker, so you can look through a track until the kick hits, and then drag the start marker back to the beginning of the widdly intro part.

2. Turn on looping, and set the loop to one measure starting at 1:1. Drag the transient corresponding to the beginning of the next measure to the ’2′ measure marker. This will give you a reasonable approximation of the track tempo.

3. Turn on the metronome, and start playback. Then use the up arrow key to skip forward to bar 17. Drag the transient closest to the downbeat to the ’17′ measure marker.

4. Skip forward through the file, dragging transients to measure divisions, if it looks like the downbeats are drifting away from the measure start.

When you’re done, turn off looping, and click save, so that the warping follows the audio file around between projects.

This works great if the track was made with a computer, or clocked by an accurate drum machine. If not, you’re going to have go through a measure or two at a time and pin the downbeat transients to the bar markers. This can’t be helped. It’s best to do this by ear — skip forward a measure at a time listening to the track against the metronome and only pin transients to beats when it drifts off. It will save time if you don’t sweat the small drifts in tempo.

EQ8, Instrument Racks, and Phase Cancellation

I’ve been dissatisfied with the EQ3 as a DJ EQ, but haven’t really found anything else that seems to work. I thought tonight I had a good idea of how to do a better EQ, but I was denied — undone by phase cancellation.

My idea was to use an Audio Effect Rack and 3 EQ8s in parallel. Set up a lowpass for the low band, bandpass for the middle, and highpass for the high end. Then automate the volume level of each EQs signal lane. You have to read up on the Audio Effect Racks in the manuals to get what I just said, but trust me on this for the moment.

The idea was this: isolate each band, and then control the level of each band as though your were running each one into a mixer channel. This should have solved the problem with trying to use one EQ8 as a DJ EQ — the bands interact in hard-to-control ways.

This didn’t work because the 3 separate EQ8s aren’t anywhere NEAR being in phase, at least when you try and mix a Low Pass, Bandpass and Highpass together this way. There were all sorts of weird behaviors, like the midrange apparently getting louder when you turned that band DOWN. Long story short, the 3 EQ8s are so far out of phase from each other they cancel out frequencies in weird and undesirable ways.

Oh well.

Macro knob mapping

I don’t know if this is new in Live 8 — I think it is though: If you have nested Audio Effect Racks, and you map an outer knob to control an inner knob, it picks up the name and range from the inner knob. I seem to remember having to rename the outer knob to match the inner one in Live 7. It’s the little things that count!

I’m linking to this product without any particular enthusiasm Black Magic Loop Creator.

What irks me is this image:

How many times have I seen a pic like this and thought ‘ooh cool!’ only to find out it’s imaginary? Just fucking stop it!

What’s even worse, when I first see certain pieces of actual hardware, (e.g. NI Maschine) they look like 3D Studio renderings, or actually, the pictures they release of the REAL objects are FAKE 3D Studio renderings! It makes my brain hurt.

UAD-1e Express Pack at AudioMidi.com for $99

Apparently Audiomidi isn’t the only place with this deal, but it’s an insane price. It lists at $499, and Audiomidi regularly has them at $299. At that price, you can buy more than one, and the drivers support up to 4 in one system.

This is a SHARC based hardware accelerator for running VST audio plugins. I tested both a UAD-1 PCI and a TCI Powercore for Grooves Magazine years ago and thought the UAD-1 was killer.