New Gadget Madly In Hope

29 December 2008

Wind Chimes 1.0.1 Live

Wind Chimes went live on Dec 22 (while I was away) so - enjoy it!

Next time I revisit it I may add fix things that have annoyed me about it for a while:
- maybe drop the sample rate so the sound won't break up so much while keeping the latency fast.
- fiddle with the timbre some more (you may have noticed that the attack portion of the sound is a bit modulated and "noisy" now.
- make the settings "word free" for better internationalization (that's a lot of design work, actually)
- get the automatic mode (or "raindrop mode", as I'll probably rechristen it) to work when the phone has the hold switch on.
- new chimes , movements, backgrounds, etc.
- come up remembering the last chime used. I don't know if I'll be making a whole chime-saving interface or social interface, but this is easy!


14:03:15 - jhhlnet - No comments yet, click here to add one

19 December 2008

Wind Chimes Update coming

Wind Chimes v 1.0.1 is coming... submitted tonight.

NEW! Hearts and Lights added for festive imagery!

HeartsLights

NEW! volume slider! it goes to 150% (because the chimes often aren't all playing at once and decay quickly)

Control screen v 1.0.1

This update fixes some pesky anomalies with 2.2 :

- sound continues when the "silent" button is down
- sliders jump to tapped spot

01:07:44 - jhhlnet - No comments yet, click here to add one

15 December 2008

Thoughts about SrutiBox

SrutiBox has been out for a few months now - and more than a thousand people have bought it.
Thank you very much!

It's been extremely gratifying to be able to contact a few of you in email and to read your positive comments!

Usually when I write a program, I get to some level with it and then it's not interesting to me anymore, but I'm finding SrutiBox is not one of them. I realize that it is not part of a real Carnatic music tradition - it's actually more of an outcrop of my own music in the 80s, which I called Beatless Music: music that was a kind of extreme rejection of the extreme beat heavy excesses of pop music, and also the ticky-tocky texture of minimalism and classical toccatas and the like. It's also in line with the philosophy of my old program RGS (which I may transmogrify into some sort of iPhone form). RGS is a real time sonic spectrogram paint program, and playing with it makes you realize that there is no real difference between chords, timbres, beats, rhythms and other characteristics of music - it's a matter of scale. Beatless music is an attempt to explore the scale of events below the level of a beat - and the new SrutiBox Churn feature is really good at that.

Here's an example of my "Beatless" music: Attention All Passengers", made with tape loops on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, an EQ box and a Casio keyboard.
21:23:08 - jhhlnet - No comments yet, click here to add one

05 December 2008

SrutiBox 1.2.0 submitted

There'll be an upgrade to SrutiBox to help out with fixing these iPhone 2.2 issues:
- sound shuts off when in Hold or Sleep mode.
- slider no longer jumps to tapped position.

It also has some new timbres -- I may come up with more in a point release, and have some new synthesis to make them more sruti-y -- and the amazing CHURN feature, where you get two entire sets of volume sliders which interpolate between their settings.

It looks like this:
Churn baby Churn

and it sounds like this:

Churn-1 mp3
16:56:19 - jhhlnet - No comments yet, click here to add one

04 December 2008

Updates to come

Sruti Box 1.2.0 is coming, to fix the very annoying 2.2 slider changes and audio blackout (when the ringer switch is set to off or in Hold mode).

also: more Timbres and maybe some other things.

10:39:49 - jhhlnet - No comments yet, click here to add one