Author: Peter Swimm

  • Thy Name is Adventure – Oxygenstar

    thynamepack1Surely to be one of the best cassette releases of the year. O2star writes:

    OxygenStar – Thy Name is Adventure

    1.    Welcome
    2.    Melinda the Mermaid
    3.    I see a Voice
    4.    Apple pickin’
    5.    The Most Climatic Cat and Mouse Rendezvous in the History of all Mankind
    6.    Less talk, more travel
    7.    March of the Marsupials
    8.    My Favorite Forest
    9.    Look how I go
    10.  Disaster Avenue
    11.  Hello There
    12.  Save Me (featuring Gemmina Magnano)
    13.  Let’s Stick Together

    Here is the Album sampler:
    check it!!!

    … E+SAMPLER/

    As of right now, It shall just be a cassette release. I may setup a download link eventually…

    $10 SHIPPED to the US

    $13 SHIPPED outside the US
    or $8 dollars if you plan to buy it at Pulsewave tomorrow!!!

    Paypal: oxygenstarpower@yahoo.com

    Please put: “Payment for TNIA album” in subject line
    and you can email me seperately to confirm that I got the payment, sometimes Paypal can be wierd about that stuff.

    Buy one for your sister!! smile

  • Little Scale – The Third Laser

    00-third-laser-cover-artLittle Scale writes:

    Just some straightforward Nanoloop 2.3 stuff – if you liked Five Step Plan, then perhaps you will like this. Written and Recorded in Mumbai, India, from 23.01.2009 to 25.01.2009.

    The original Lizard Photo was kindly supplied by Scott “Jacko” Jackson.

    Track listing:

    1. Hydrogen and Hydrogen and Oxygen
    2. Rejuvination
    3. The Man at the Edge of the World
    4. Third Laser
    5. S.O.S.S.
    6. Burglar Time!
    7. Upon Returning to Planet X
    8. You Are Alone

    Download it here:

  • Midi synth Control of the atari 2600

    [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/E_6CYywmKzs" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]

    ThemindOfPat writes:

    Sort of like synthcart, only with more synth and less cart! Less hacking/drilling a vintage VCS, too.

    After months of distraction I finally got around to implementing: 1) my own clock so I don’t need an Atari MB, and 2) MIDI control. Laughably enough, it took me like 2 hours, so it was a welcome break from banging my head against other projects for days straight. I’m quite pleased with the results! Still would like to add a couple features but this is enough to run genuine “Atari sounds” off my sequencer… good enough for government work, as they say!

    Ignore the JX-3P and PG-200 in the background, those are for another project that I’ll stick up in a couple weeks. :)

    Also please ignore the distortion and amount of times I say “um.” I’m still getting used to recording myself.

    Questions welcome! Enjoy!

    PS: It pains me to use the tags “circuit” and “bending” just because I hate that cliche so much. Plus that crowd seems to more enjoy glitching known hardware rather than building predicable stuff from scratch. Still, hopefully it will be, as the internet says, relevant to their interests.

  • Skrasoft on 2a03 Bit Crushing

    I’ve always thought that simply bit reducing a sample was enough to give it that “2a03/7” sound, and Skrasoft has done some digging to why that is so.

    The Nintendo NES designers didn’t care much about audio fidelity, but did want some type of digital audio playback. You’ve probably played a Nintendo game at some point that warned you, through a wall of half-intelligible fuzz, to “skate or die die die die” or “double dibl.” It took special audio encoding to sound so terrible.

    Instead of encoding the volume of each point in time, many NES games stored a sequence of volume differences. It’s a handy format known as Differential PCM. If you have audio data that looks like, in PCM form:

    1, 2, 4, 6, 3, 2

    in DPCM form it becomes

    +1, +1, +2, +2, -3,-1

    To get the original data back you must add each term in the DPCM. As a breakdown:

    n[0] = 1

    n[1] = n[0] + 1 = 2

    n[2] = n[1] + 2 = 4

    n[3] = n[2] + 2 = 6…

    We get our original data back. The advantage here is that instead of caring about the largest value (6), the largest *difference* (3) is what matters. Most audio signals have relatively small differences compared to their highest and lowest values, so a high compression ratio is possible. Instead of needing a whole byte per sample, you could likely get away with a nibble. Of course, the Nintendo didn’t have that many bits to waste! It used 1-bit DPCM. That same PCM stream of numbers, converted to 1-bit DPCM and back, goes like this:

    DPCM: +1, +1, +1, +1, -1, -1

    PCM: 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2

    That’s not what we started with! This creates a distortion different from traditional bit-crushing. It has the effect of increasing noise and filtering the signal at the same time. Essentially the 1-bit DPCM format “chases” the incoming audio. High frequencies end up distorted into triangle waves.

    Check out the rest of the discussion with graphs and audio examples on his blog

  • Tom Woxom’s first album Kickstart on DHR

    dhr-09_thumb-newAnother great release from Da! Heard It, some details:

    Da ! Heard It Records is going back to the classics with its ninth production: “Kickstart”, the first album by Tom Woxom, a German composer fascinated by the Amiga 500.
    With help from his treasured computer, a couple of keyboards and software, Tom Woxom built himself a puzzling musical universe.
    Through ornate beats and powerful heady basses, this album lures the listener into multiple atmospheres.  Tom Woxom dares unusual pairings, as in Sofachips, where he combines a soul voice with an electro melody on the verge of dance music.

    Discover this innovative artist by downloading his album for free here: http://www.daheardit-records.net/en/discography/dhr09/