Writings
White Noise Sample-and-Hold my Beer Part II: Summer Breeze Makes me Feel Fried
This is part II of a two-part post detailing one of my Summer projects: The YASH Redux. YASH Redux is a sample-and-hold circuit driven by white noise with portamento and a test oscillator for fine-tuning and troubleshooting.
Read MoreWhite Noise Sample-and-Hold My Beer: Part I
Dedication: This post is dedicated to the memory of Ray Wilson, author and DIY Synth genius who passed away 10 years ago on July 21st, 2016. TLDR; i started this post midway through a surprisingly challenging project that caused a dark night of the soul. It worked out okay. Still, the flow/tone may reflect this.…
Read MoreRunning A University Linux-based Audio Lab: Part 6 — Arch You Ready?
Sometimes you are conservative, you stay the course, you do the cautious, reliable, boring thing. And sometimes you install Arch Linux on your lab machines, but only after flirting with OpenSuse.
Read MoreIn Praise of Tanh
Brothers, Sisters, Cat People and Dog People, Non-human humans and others, I write here today in praise of tanh (pronounced “tanch” like “ranch” — IYKYK.) If you regularly employ tanh to solve your computer music problems, great! If you are “what is tanh?” then read on! Problems You’ve got problems. I’ve got problems. We’ve all…
Read MoreSummer Vibes
It’s been a busy Summer for me. May and June were spent packing up my lab (new carpet!), finishing a paper for ICMC and then preparing to teach Summer Session. July was entirely absorbed with teaching (CPSC S134.) Now I am somehow already into week 2 of August and staring at the start of the school year in two weeks! I’m not ready.
Read MoreA New Computer
I probably set up and configure (or reconfigure) at least ~5 computers a year for professional audio. A few years back I started configuring some machines to use Arch while continuing to mainly setup and use/support KDE Neon. The two Linux OSes share a lot (and can be functionally equivalent), but differ quite a bit…
Read MorePriority: Wallpaper
I hereby confess that the “niceties” of a functional lab image have never been my priority. Part of a unified look-and-feel for any computer are the login-screen background, the default user wallpaper, and the lock screen background. In KDE Plasma 6 specifically, these are, eh, cartoonish. Regardless what one thinks of them, they certainly don’t…
Read MoreNew Article: Pro Audio on Linux
Like many of you, I keep an eye on r/linuxaudio for announcements, software updates, and generally to try to help people new to Linux audio when I can. To that end, I took a few hours and put together an introduction to pro audio on Linux here. I decided to host it on GitHub rather…
Read MoreBad Pipewire! Bad KDE Linux!
It’s the end of May, Spring is slowly giving way to Summer as the bees buzz around flowering trees and Pipewire is broken on KDE Linux again. It’s a poetic tale as old as time, well, at least as old as Pipewire. Or KDE Neon. Or both. (or maybe it’s just my janky old system…
Read MoreMultichannel Audio Devices and Linux (not a love story)
Something has been bothering me for some time since moving to PipeWire on my Linux boxes, and that is the way multichannel audio devices are handled. As we all know (and loath), Linux audio is complicated and terrible, but the upshot is that it gives us a lot of control and the possibility of extremely low latency — critical to realtime audio recording, processing, programming, etc.
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