Results for cassette

Goldbaby Productions has announced that the Tape808 drum machine sample library is now available with Maschine support.

Not another 808 sample! Well actually it isn’t… this is 407 samples taken from two 808′s recorded into an Ampex 351 1/2″ valve 2 track tape machine! That’s not all… We also put the 808′s through other vintage gear. Plus we recorded the 808′s naked into a Metric Halo ULN-2 firewire audio card. Then we chose the best samples.

The Tape808 library is available to purchase for $29 USD. Those who have Maschine and have already purchased the Tape808 can upgrade to the Maschine format for $1 USD (send Goldbaby your original order number and you will receive a special order form).

The free Cassette808 sample library now also includes Maschine support.

This is a free sample pack that was created by recording the TR808 to cassette.

More information: Goldbaby Productions

Cupwise has released Color Springs, a collection of programs for Nebula 3 by Acustica Audio.

What: A Gibbs spring reverb tank made in the early 70′s, of the type commonly used in Hammond organs and various Fender equipment. Two springs.

How: Sampled 14 different ways, some with the goal of capturing just the spring sound with little extra coloration, others with added flavor. The idea was to provide many variations of the spring reverb sound, giving several options for any situation requiring verb. Among the methods used- placing small objects on the springs (or wrapped around them), using the clamp (which I believe is to keep the pan/springs from moving around much during transportation) to dampen the effect, using different feedback paths, different sources of amplification, using cassette tapes, and playing the tones through the setups at different speeds/sample rates to shift the behavior up and down the frequency spectrum (check program specific details for more info on this). All were sampled with the RME hdsp 9632, at 96khz.

Color Springs for Nebula (full version required) is available to purchase for $6 USD.

More information: Cupwise / Color Springs

Celemony has announced Capstan, a tool to remove wow and flutter from audio recordings.

For over 100 years, music has been recorded on mechanical storage mediums, and for over 100 years such recordings have been plagued by the same problems: wow and flutter. Who isn’t familiar with the wobbling and warbling, the droning and dragging? Mechanical degradation caused by defective devices or sticking tapes, by aging or defective storage. Furthermore, wow and flutter were for the most part irremediable.

Countless recordings of renowned orchestras, big bands and rock groups are currently slumbering deep in archives because precisely this problem has rendered them unusable. The tapes worthless, the recordings lost to posterity. Until now.

For with Capstan there is now for the first time a program capable of removing wow and flutter from musical recordings – whether on tape, compact cassette, wax, shellac or vinyl. Capstan detects wow and flutter by analyzing the musical material itself, so the medium is of no relevance. In this, Capstan is clearly superior to solutions such as bias tracking, because Capstan still works even if the tape has already been copied several times or digitized only in low resolution.

Being musically intelligent, the Capstan algorithm is capable of recognizing not only the minutest amounts of wow and flutter but also continuous speed variations within the musical material itself and makes possible detailed editing that extends even to drawing in the curve manually. It is based on the patented DNA Direct Note Access technology made famous by the award-winning program Melodyne, which is used worldwide in all major studios for the editing of pitch and timing.

Whilst the precise detection of the wow and flutter represents the actual technological revolution, repairing the recording is easy: the musical material is simply played back with the velocity curve inverted. Pure varispeed – guaranteed free from artifacts.

Capstan will be available for Windows and Mac (standalone 64-bit) mid June 2011. Estimated price is 3,790 EUR. A demo version will be made available on the Celemony website.

More information: Celemony

Cupwise has released Cassette 1, a collection of Tascam 122 mkIII programs for Nebula by Acustica Audio.

The Tascam 122 mkIII deck was used, along with 11 tapes, to create this set. Some tapes were sampled twice, at slightly different speeds and with different noise reduction settings (B, C, and none).

Most of the tapes are/were highly regarded among cassette enthusiasts (they’re still out there!). There are type I, II, and metal type IV tapes. The deck has a rich history and is very well known for it’s reliability and performance.

The Cassette 1 Nebula programs are available to purchase for $10 USD.

More information: Cupwise / Cassette 1

Some interesting things I found recently:

# polynome 5000

polynome5000, amazing DIY controller by Colin Mann

Colin Mann on his polynome 5000 controller:

After more hours than I’d like to admit, even if I actually knew how many, I’m done. I started this, believe it or not, before the APC40 was even announced, and at the time there weren’t many products out there like it. Now, obviously it would make more sense to just buy one of those products, nevertheless, where are you gonna get an RGB monome with a nixie tube display that takes OSC commands? Exactly.

# Drumssette – By Mike Walters

Intro to The Drumssette by Mike Walters.

The Drumssette was built by Mike Walters in 2010. The Drumssette is a Tascam four track cassette recorder that I turned into a programmable drum machine. A cassette with four tracks of repeating drum sounds can be mapped into a 16 step rhythm using the 64 switches on the interface. The audio on the cassette tape also clocks the sequencer. More details at www.mysterycircuits.com

# Want Encoders? Livid Reveals Hardware Covered with Them

Peter Kirn on the new controller by Livid Instruments:

Livid Instruments has just revealed their next hardware controller. Well, sort of revealed – this evening on Twitter, they declared that it was a “Top secret sneak peek of our new controller.” Top secret – you know, just on the Internet. No one will see it there. It’s full of encoders, if that’s your thing. It’s called, cleverly, the “Code.” In addition to accompanying Livid’s own grid controllers, put this next to a monome, and you can manipulate continuous parameters alongside triggers. I could imagine someone doing some insane granular patch with an absurd number of parameters using this.

# Music of Sound » CrowdSourced FX Library 2

Tim Prebble is looking for contributions for another "crowdsourced" fx sample library.

Seeing as how THE DOORS is hopefully going to finally kill the overuse of cliche doors, maybe we can also kill the over use of ‘DOG NEXT DOOR’ or at least provide some seriously good alternatives! But the world of dogs is vast & complex – some of the weirdest vocalisations I have ever heard were from a very small dog! So please comment on this post if you wish to be a contributor. As with the 1,000 doors aim (which we will easily meet) lets aim for 1,000 dogs so if each person records 5 dogs then we have a recordist limit of 200 contributors.

Some interesting things I found recently:

# Arduino Piano Squealer Synth

Marc Nostromo developed the Arduino Piano Squealer Synth for the Arduino Pocket Piano, an arduino shield produced by Critters and Guitari.

The engine implements a small monosynth with a few waveforms, a HP/BP/LP continuous resonant filter, decay and a few little own tricks that generate a LOT of aliases, making a great dirty digital synth. Since the Pocket Piano has only 3 potentiometers available for control (the 4th one being hardwired to the volume), I use a “page” system to implement series of 3 parameters to fiddle with. To switch “page”, use the rightmost note of the A.P (NOT the one under the led, the one left to to it). To help you know which page you are at, you can use the led: it will flash a number of time equivalent to the current page you are at.

The source code of the Arduino Piano Squealer synth is available under GPL License V3.

# Digital Mixtape

Digital Mixtape

Justin Cole writes:

My new design uses a small mp3 player that I disassembled and placed inside a cassette tape adapter for an ipod. This allows for mp3's to be played back through a tapedeck. This has all of the ease and technology of an mp3 player with the retro coolness of a mix tape.

# Lackluster: Portal EP

A lovely free album available to download in high quality mp3 and lossless FLAC formats. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License

The Portal EP was supposed to come out on another label in 2008, but the label went bankrupt and closed up shop. In email conversations with Lackluster, I offered to master the EP and do a net release on Cornwarning. So, 4 years after its original intended release, it is finally here.

Covering a variety of tempos and styles, from the beatless epic "Eons" to the mutant techno of "Lubiszewski Beats", "Portal" covers a lot of musical territory. What unifies the work is Lackluster's musicality. For me each track here is deep in emotion, despite their lack of lyric or explicit program.

# How to build an Air Guitar with Arduino, aka the AIRduino Guitar

The idea here is to build a wearable virtual guitar that is to be controlled with two hands much like playing Air Guitar. It has been created and prototyped during a two weeks project at ChalmersUniversity (Sweden) for a Physical Computing class.

The aim is to get the feeling of playing a real guitar. The AIRduino Guitar is made of one glove and one stick. The glove is used to set the tone and the stick to trigger the sound.

# Is this the ultimate male playroom?

For many men, their house is their castle. For one Canterbury man, his play room is a submarine complete with working periscope.

Wayne Eyre has turned part of his Spencerville property into a wrecked submarine featuring "plutonium-leaking" torpedoes, at a cost of $100,000.

In the rusting interior of the submarine, which appears to have beached on a deserted island, Eyre has all the creature comforts reclining chairs, a three-metre big-screen TV and a top-notch surround-sound system.

# Qeve: Free Live Visual – VJ Software, Built in Pd

From Create Digital Motion:

Qeve is a promising-looking, open-source visual performance tool built in visual patching environment Pure Data (Pd). It was built primarily on Ubuntu Linux but should also run with some adjustment on Mac. (Pd itself runs on Windows, but some of the visual dependencies are not available on that platform. I’d still recommend Linux.)

# Eric Beam Nebula Programs

Eric Beam has recently posted some programs for Acustica Audio’s Nebula: Tube 1500 “instant analog” & MCI Heritage EQ “I like it dirty”