Software

L is for Live Coding

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Who does not love the confluence of coding and music? I know I do and live coding adds a performance element to the process.

Live coding involves writing code that is producing music from scratch and editing and changing the code as the music develops.

As can be seen here once values are changed the revised code is passed to the computer for processing (when it flashes pink) and the revised music is played…

There are an increasing number of languages available for live coding. The above example is Sonic Pi which is probably the easiest to start with as it comes as a ready to go app and does not require any faffing around in the Terminal etc. Others include ChucK, Alda, Extempore which grew out of impromptu (Mac only) etc. There is some debate as to whether graphical languages count as coding but I say they do so that is the end of that debate.

Here is an excellent demonstration of the process by Andrew Sorensen using Extempore…

So that this A to Z thing does not become a catalogue of old records L is definitely not for the greatest record ever made…

A is for Audio Units and April Fools

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Who does not love mangling some noise with some new Audio Units? I know I do and my Downloads folder is invariably over flowing with Wiggles, Moniques, Hats and the like.

The latest batch included Izotope’s Mobius Filter, PSP’s StompDelay and WavesFactory’s Phi.

Audio Units in Ableton Live

The first adds a flanging, phasing, equalisation type effect within a simple and effective interface.

The second provides a plethora of settings for delays, echoes, loops and related effects.

The third utilises the universal Golden Ratio (hence the name Phi) and applies that to enhance even the most mundane recordings. There is probably no type of audio that would not be greatly improved with the use of this plugin.

Chuck them all together and you get Don’t Do Meths…

https://soundcloud.com/duncan-moran/dont-do-meths/s-R4Drh

Only one of the three was released on April 1st 2016.

Yosemite on a 2007 iMac

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One star reviews in the App Stores are a constant source of fascination and the release of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) has provided rich pickings. Of course it is frustrating when things are not working properly but many reviewers seem to imagine that the problems they experience with their computers are universal and affecting everyone – there would be rioting in the streets if that were the case. Some even seem to suggest that positive reviews are some form of Apple inspired conspiracy…

who wrote five star

The reviewers share their homilies so the rest of us can benefit from their wisdom and insights. One common theme is that Yosemite should never be installed on an older computer as it will be unbearably slow…

Mediocre

I write this on a 2007 iMac with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor which is the oldest Mac that is able to run Yosemite. It is used and abused on a daily basis. The update to Yosemite was going to be the excuse to clear it out, reformat the drive and have a fresh clean install but I chickened out as it would be too much hassle to set everything up again and so Yosemite was just slapped on top of everything else…

Over 40000 emails (I did not notice the palindromic number when I took the screen shot)…

Screen Shot 2015-04-26 at 20.10.28

Over 1000 apps in the Applications folder…

Screen Shot 2015-04-26 at 20.11.06

A couple of hundred bits and pieces installed with Homebrew and a menu bar full of stuff half of which I have forgotten what they do…

Menu bar icons
Menu bar icons

Not to mention half a dozen terabytes of external storage hanging off the back.

So how does Yosemite run on this aged, under powered, over loaded wreck? Splendidly…

A couple of minutes worth of Activity Monitor monitoring the activity (that is what it does best) recorded with Screen Flow – so they both occupy high ratings but nothing too taxing.

Thankfully some reviewers manage to figure out that their frustrations are fixable…

15 min fix

Whilst others plant their tongue firmly in their cheek…

Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 10.34.03

Set up Xiki with Aquamacs

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Step by step set up using Aquamacs editor with the awesome Xiki…

From these instructions.

Ingredients:

A Mac running OS X Mavericks which should have Ruby 1.9.3 as the default version.

Jewellery Box to manage your Ruby versions (RVM) and gems

The Aquamacs editor.

Xiki

Recipe:

Open the Terminal and install the Xiki gem…

$ gem install xiki

Verify that all is well…

$ xiki

A Xiki directory will have been created in your Home folder so jump into that…

$ cd ~/xiki/

Then run the set up script…

$ bash etc/install/el4r_setup.sh

You will now need an editor that will see an invisible file (the dot at the start of the name hides the file from being listed in a Finder window: .el4r). I use BBEdit but the free version called Text Wrangler will do the job…

Show hidden files
Select the Show hidden items option

Add these lines to the end of the init.rb file in the .el4r folder within the xiki folder within your Home folder…

$LOAD_PATH.unshift “~/xiki/lib”
require ‘xiki’
Xiki.init

KeyBindings.keys # Use default key bindings
Themes.use “Default” # Use xiki theme

Fire up Aquamacs and it should drop you straight into Xiki…

Welcome to Xiki in Aquamacs
Welcome to Xiki in Aquamacs