General

Sleepstream – ambient radio

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I almost forget. I took about a decade or two of music I have made partly with Harri and edited this into a stream https://jinx.dy.fi/sleepstream/
Music to dream to (may contain traces of nightmares)

As an exercise in futiliity I tried vibe coding. First I made a reverb VST-plugin with Juce and X-code, it works quite well. Made an graphical SFTP-client with Tkinter (and Python of course). I took about three days to make and works too.

Some little games that The Big Pickle and Gemini seem to have been pre-programmed for (Space Invaders, Boulderdash, a simple flight sim). All were easy to make and very dull. This I started to use regularly: https://jinx.dy.fi/~jussi/trim/ You give it a bunch of drum samples (or any other) and it either normalizes them or trims the silences in both ends of the sample and then normalizes. It uses a WebAssembly version of FFmpeg and does the processing in the browser.

General

A lot has happened

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I started to work as a full time lecturer at Oulu University of Applied Sciences. I have taught courses varying from Data Analytics to web site design, Contextual Design and project courses. Had one certificate on testing too and made part of a course for that. Then I started at the new unit at OAMK which focuses Research, Development and Innovation (TKI-yksikkö).

About music. Now learning (as a hobby) more about different scales, microtonality, transforming between scales and other fun stuff, including historical stuff of how different modes have sculpted the evolution of music. Hopefully something will come out of this.

Reading Peter Watts’ Rifters-series, Read Echopraxia and Blindsight too. Can recommend.

General

Behringer TD-3

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Another inexpensive 303-clone. 90€ from a sale. Previous excperience with such devices is Roland TB-3 which is of the Aira line and very much digital. TD-3 isn’t but it has an onboard distortion which i’m not sure. Behringer claims its all analog and it seems to make certain signature sounds much better than TB-3. Have to test this out a bit more. Here is the first sounds I got out. TD-3 got usb midi, din midi in and out and cv synch in/out etc. connections for semimodular/modular gear.

No effects, quick test on how the filter behaves with distortion

Laboratorio, Music

Behringer WASP Deluxe

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Just bought this one from a premature Black Friday sale for 199€. Thought it would be like another one Chris Huggett (RIP) originally designed but this is quite the opposite; it growls and gnaws like a.. wasp.

After turning the second oscillator up there is a slight or not so slight overdrive through the signal path that enhances the sound without becoming too overwhelming.

The sound of the multimode filter is interesting and not like anything else I have heard. Doesn’t sound like Bassstation’s filter either (that was designed to go after Moogs and other classics I reckon)

Modulation on this little synth is interesting too. Much of the sound comes from the fact that oscillators are digital controlled but rest is analog.

Wasp arpeggio with delay

Gear, Laboratorio, Music

Under the hood of a DDX 3216

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I got one of these for free. I use it as a submixer for a bunch of small noisey boxes and keyboards wihtout MIDI or CV/Gate inputs. The software on this thing is not bad, effects are not that bad but the hardware.. oh my. Most of the time it works but there is for example a tiny, tiny fan on the right side of the unit making a whirring noise. Why not use a bit larger one? This unit heats up you know.

The hot glue used by Behringer for gluing flat cables into place is probably oatmeal. When the VU meters start to light up by themselves it is time to open the hood (it really opens up like the hood of a car) and nudge the flat cables back into their place and maybe apply some better hot glue. Second time I had to do this. Now everything works again, for a while at least.

Behringer DDX 3216 hood open

Gear, Laboratorio, Music

Akai Tom Cat will not sync properly

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A cheap drum machine, not at all bad sounding. Decent on board sequencer and synth toms that you can play chromatically on its own MIDI channel. Howl-knob adds overdrive and distortion to the signal and at maximum will start emitting extra terrestrial audio signals even when not playing. Connect it to a modern DAW and you will not be able to play loops it with though. This is because the Tom Cat will return to the beginning of its own sequencer only when receiving MIDI SONG POSITION POINTER = 0-message which is sent by DAWs (as far as i know) only when you return to the beginning of the song. The Tom Cat will adjust to the tempo of the DAW and start playing at the beginning of the song but if you create a loop in DAW where the Tom Cat should jump back in time it will lose its sync. Only way to get the sync back is by starting from beginning once more. Frustrating but not a deal breaker. Maybe.

Akai Tom Cat