Giorgio Sancristoforo makes some wonderful noise toys. The latest is Full Blotter – very large grains psychedelic machine which takes your jolly little ditty and mangles it in to something other worldly…
I always appreciate a DMORAN button 🤪
Category: Noise
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Restoring sounds to the iPad via memory lane.
I was confused as to why the iPad would play music and the sound on videos but fell silent while playing games. I eventually realised it was in Silent Mode. Swipe down from the top right corner to open the Control Centre and tap the Bell icon to toggle Silent Mode on and off.
Best of all – this also restored sound to the wonderful SoundForest app which had been silent for a while. Created by Justin Alexander it seems to have been abandoned but still functions on the latest devices.
Many (many!) years ago I wrote a little thing for the Amiga called Beat Sheets which triggered brief sound samples. It was part of a series I created for children called Kids Disk, which were distributed on floppy discs for free from Public Domain libraries via snail mail. It was written with AMOS, which was pretty fancy for the time, probably in 512 kilobytes of memory. I did add a hard drive to the Amiga at some point which added 20 megabytes of storage – which I described at the time as “like having a vast empty warehouse to store stuff”; for context the SoundForest video below is 155 megabytes.
Lo and behold (isn’t the Internet wonderful?) someone had a video of Beat Sheets in action which they seemed to be running in an Amiga emulator…
Beat Sheets on the Amiga 1993 Fast forward several decades and SoundForest is a far more sophisticated app, downloaded from the App Store and running on a hand held device with a terabyte of memory. It follows the same idea of tapping sound samples into a grid. You can extend your song by swiping to the left for a fresh sheet. Tapping the top bar stops and starts the player and double tapping changes the speed. Different sounds are available in the various environments – jungle, desert, ocean etc. Great fun.
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Roland’s 808
Roland has made their 808 drum machine simulator freely available throughout August.
There are numerous software replicas of the 808 and Roland producing their own seems like Frank Zappa releasing his own bootlegged material in an attempt to cash in on the popularity.
The Roland implementation is, of corse, impressive…
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Freebies and the decline of civilisation.
It is a full time job trying to keep up with all of the stuff being made freely available, or at a goodly discount, to help people through their locked-down existence. For example Sound On Sound are maintaining a list of software deals available on noisy stuff. One such deal was from Heavyocity who produced a #StayHome instrument for Kontakt.
They asked for a $10 donation for UNICEF et al or it was available for free. Who can resist things that so delightfully bleep and bonk?
So I fill in their form to make an account – because how can you possibly buy anything without setting up an account and providing all your personal details these days? I am then sent off to PayPal to make the purchase/donation. I log in to my PayPal account but my money is rejected and I am sent back to Heavyocity with red text on my details. Red text is never a good thing. Apparently the email address I use for my PayPal account does not match the email address I used for my Heavyocity account. Who knew that was a thing? I can think of five domains I own and can use for email (there are probably more) and for most of them I will use a multitude of addresses as befits my needs. So I am a little peeved that Heavyocity has taken it upon themselves to specify which email address I should use.
Not to worry I shall just use my bank debit card. I am sent back to PayPal where I am now a guest. Before I can make my purchase/donation PayPal demands that I provide my phone number. I have had a PayPal account for many years and have never given them my phone number – which suggests that they do not really need it and so I never will. So declining to give them my phone number I return to the Heavyocity site to see if we can resolve this problem. Alas there Get In Touch and Contact Us links just take you to their Zendesk support pages with no obvious way to actually get in touch and contact them. As I do not do the whole TweetyBook thing that was not an option either.
So I just gave up and downloaded it for free. Â It is very good.
But don’t get me started on PayPal:
A promo code you say? Â Let me just type that in…..
