Ten Years After

Rummaging around in here I discovered I still had a YouTube account, from the days before it became the quagmire of advertising and tracking it has become, which lead me to this old post from a decade ago:

http://blog.duncanmoran.net/archives/2437

The iPad was a mere one year old at the time but was already showing signs of its potential for making interesting noises. I suspect the missing video was for an, alas short lived and no longer available, app called Konkreet Performer which was an early attempt at new ways to interact with sounds on iPads:

A 2011 Konkreet Performer promotional video

Things have evolved over the years and today you have AudioBus to pump sound between apps, AUM to connect and mix instruments and effects and countless apps like TouchScaper and SoundScaper and even some that are not called somethingScaper. Although Smule still have some apps available their MadPad has also vanished; as has the Levenshulme Bicycle Orchestra.

The other video in that old post was a young Frank Zappa performing on a bicycle during the Steve Allen TV show in March 1963. Many years ago I read about this but who could imagine that decades later and thousands of miles away you can sit on a sofa with an iPad watching the video and also learn how, in late 1962, the young Zappa would hang out in Don Preston‘s garage improvising soundtracks to various film clips. Preston had a range of junk percussion ‘instruments’ he used including a bicycle.

Resolving Liquid and Hyperwords errors – com.hyperwords.liquidwordsfree

Even on a Mac things can go awry. The nifty Liquid app was spewing out errors in the Console

com.apple.xpc.launchd: (com.hyperwords.liquidwordsfree) Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.

Console errors

Others have observed that just deleting the Liquid app will not remove the errors. You will need to dig a little deeper and delete…

com.hyperwords.liquidwordsfree from the Containers folder in your Library

~/Library/Containers

com.hyperwords.liquidwordsfree.plist from the Preferences folder in your Library

~/Library/Preferences

com.hyperwords.liquidwordsfree from the system’s…

/private/var/folders/vx/qbl8t4dn1dsbjqc4_67vymg80000gn

(that last bit may be different for you).

If you have trouble finding these folders the nifty PopClip app can, once you have selected the text, offer you a folder icon that will take you straight to the desired location.

Alternatively the nifty Hazel app will find all those extraneous files, when you have moved the main app to the Trash, and ask if you want to delete those too.

Once it is all cleared out a fresh install from the App Store and all is well again.

Today’s secret word is Nifty.

Wireless MIDI controlling GarageBand

NOTE: This post is from 2011 An updated 2023 version is available here.

MIDI controllers control MIDI devices. They do not make sound no matter how high the volume is set.

One of the main requirements for having an app distributed through the App Store is that the app should work as described. So one star reviews claiming “it does not work” should be ignored.

If you have a Mac you have everything you need:

  1. Launch your MIDI app (in this case Pad MIDI on an iPod Touch)
  2. Launch the Audio MIDI Setup utility (found in the Utilities folder within the Applications folder)
  3. If you are seeing the Audio window select Show MIDI Window from the Window menu
  4. Double click the Network button to show the MIDI Network Setup Window
  5. Join a Session by connecting your device
  6. Launch GarageBand which will find all MIDI connections
  7. Play the app to play Garageband