June 04, 2006
How to make Electroplankon rock (a wishlist)
I've had Electroplankton for a while now, and I feel the need to document my experience. Reviews of Electroplankton in general are redundant, people either get it or they don't. If you're a music nerd and enjoy experimental music you'll love it. Enough said.
Hence, this exposition, or perhaps exposé - you choose. For anyone who came in late, Electroplankton is a title for Nintendo DS that basically has a set of 10 "minigames" that revolve around music creation.
Electroplankton is one of those titles that you hear about and assume that will never surface with an English translation. Lots of interesting titles come out in Asia and never see the western market. But then again, there's very little to Electroplankton and translation of the game itself would have taken all of about, say, 10 minutes. The manual is a work of art though, and well worth a look in it's own right. These days most games don't really have printed manuals of any description. Thanks be to the folks at Nintendo who have chosen to release this game and documentation in such a complete way to the western market.
What's fascinating about this title is not so much the fact that Nintendo have released a music title for their hand held, but the crossbreeding of music creation and art interaction could be so compelling and commercially successful.
Hopefully that's everyone up to speed. Electroplankton is a music toy. You could conceivably use it as a tool in your musical arsenal, but right now, it's just not suited to that, at least not in a regular performance sense. However. With some changes it could be absolutely mind bending. So lets call this the...
Electroplankton 2 wishlist
Or how to make Electroplankton ROCK...
I'm relatively optimistic, but I realize that most of these things just won't happen. This was created bearing in mind, and should be entirely achievable with, the confines of the existing DS hardware.
1. Collaboration.
Playing music together is fun. Playing games together is fun. The DS has in built wireless and support for online play. When Electroplankton initially came out the multiplayer scene for the DS was pretty weak - but now its starting to mature and the infrastructure is there. It would be an incredibly compelling title if the wireless sent timecode and allowed collaborative composition. Given Electroplankton's current setup which revolves around 1 plankton (instrument) at a time, the simple addition of multiple units synced wirelessly would realize it as a more complete performance instrument.
The speed of the wireless connection (802.11b 11mbits p/sec) is more than enough to support the transfer of basic control information, if not audio itself from one unit to another.
2. Two Plankton at once, on one unit.
Given that the DS is a multiscreen unit, and the second screen is at the moment mostly used as decoration (currently a closeup of the plankton that you are manipulating), the simple addition of a button on the touchscreen that swaps between 2 sets of plankton would be the ideal next step. I don't think that it would be necessary to have more than 2 plankton at once, (it may be beyond the processor and sound chip on the DS anyway) and having a limitation of 2 plankton would be a nice way to encourage more collaboration as well.
Currently without some recording hardware on hand you cannot record your compositions and from the perspective of the serial public transport commuter, it would be nice to have a wider sonic canvas.
3. More plankton
I like the plankton that came with the game, some of them have fantastic little personalities (at least in my mind), but I'm greedy and I would love it if there were more plankton to play with. The DS game cart could hold literally hundreds (thousands?) of plankton. Also, if the plankton were user editable (make use of the stylus to modify set attributes of the plankton) how amazing would it be if you could share your plankton via the DS's inbuilt wireless.
There's a variety of new sounds that are easily generated with Electroplankton, and having a some user editable attributes would be a nice way to diversify the sound even more, and also make it more functional as a reliable noisebox for performance.
4. Genepool.
Another compelling way to encourage interaction would to allow wireless gameplay that placed the your plankton and others in a pool, where you can affect the plankton by placing it in closer proximity to other plankton. As you get closer the behavior of the plankton could change. A simple and appropriate reaction could be falling into similar tempo with the nearby plankton.
The addition of collision detection would create interesting interactions from the user's perspective. Simple AI that affected the default behavior of the plankton when they are closer to other groups of plankton could be another useful idea for meaningful interaction. While I'm not suggesting that the plankton should fight or anything of that ilk, an appropriate auditory response to proximity to other plankton would further promote the idea of the plankton as interactive creatures in their own right.
(This thought is brought to you courtesy of flow.)
5. Add a simple sequencer/recorder
It doesn't have to be Abelton Live, but a simple system that allows recording of your settings and songs would turn this into a performance device. Regardless any features that could be added, the addition of this to Electroplankton as it stands would see it turning up on stages all over the place. If it could reliably record your songs & settings for playback, it would be a viable option for anyone who wants some new and interesting sounds.
Electroplankton is a fun bit of software, and I'm aware we may never even see Electroplankton 2, but if even a few of these features turned up in a new version, it would be AMAZING.
Related Electroplankton webzen
Nintendo Electroplankton Site
Mile Zero - Composition in Electroplankton
Mile-Zero Electroplankton Composition - Innsmouth Blues
Tenori-on - Toshio Iwai's collaboration with Yamaha
MTV.com fluff piece
DJ Dave Hollands talking Electroplankton
flow - Indie microbe game with soothing ambient tunes.
Nintendo.com Electroplankton Wallpapers
Wallpaper 1
Wallpaper 2
Wallpaper 3
Posted by funnelbc at 12:57 PM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2006
jazzmutant lemur reviewed in keyboard
I was idly thinking about MAX/MSP and realtime music control, and went back to cycling '74 as food for thought. I wish to revisit that topic in some depth in the future, but anyway....
I noticed there's a reviews on the website for the one of the bigger music publications Keyboard Magazine. It's worth a read - the article is written by Peter Kirn (of CDM fame) and gives a good overview of the unit. Overall the feeling for the click lazy is that it's a really interesting, if somewhat niche peice of hardware, and you can expect to spend quite a bit of time customizing it (for better or worse). Sounds like the technology is still maturing from what I understand.
Keyboard Mag Review - Jazz Mutant Lemur
There's also a review in the current (newstands) issue of Electronic Musician, and it should be up on the website next month if you can't get hold of the paper magazine. Last year was the year of the affordable control surface, (as declared by me) and this year, maybe it can be the year of real time customizable music control surfaces. Or perhaps something more catchy. I think the Lemur is the tip of a very large iceberg for digital musicians though.
Posted by funnelbc at 02:26 PM | Comments (0)
June 06, 2005
macworld fluff review of reason 3
Just a quick one, there's a Macworld fluff piece on Reason 3. Of particular note is that they list support of only mainstream newer hardware with zero configuration as a minus. It'd be sure nice if every piece of software was configured for every possible control surface, but my experience with Reason has been that even if the control surface doesnt have presets that come with it, programming reason is surely one of the easiest programs that you can use for getting that MIDI control data happening. (just don't boot up reason without your MIDI device plugged in - it'll loose your settings - have they fixed that in 3?)
Anyhoo. Macworld reviews Reason 3
Posted by funnelbc at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)
April 05, 2005
free vst plugin : memory
This was linked on the good ship Create Digital Music and while i'm always into pinching their stories and rewriting what they said and crediting them but still basically using their hard work to give me content for the good ship onetonnemusic, sometimes the inspiration just doesn't strike. And truly, I wanted to let everyone and anyone know about memory and even better it's compatability with the even more awesome P5 data glove as a rather cheap and cool performance tool. But I couldn't. But just then I played with memory in Abelton Live and I decided - ye verily I need to go speak it on the mountain. If you are VST equipped, download memory as a free sound mangling tool to add to your arsenal.
Get it here Did I mention I pilfered this from CDM?
Posted by funnelbc at 08:47 PM | Comments (0)
October 27, 2004
Creative Inspire 5200 Speakers
For along time, Creative has been synonomous with top notch computer sound products, at reasonable, and these speakers represent this perfectly.
Originally posted Sep 11, 2003 by DJFROGi
Firstly, no, I dont work for Creative (but I wish I did!). I bought these speakers out of a need (or a want, really) for 5.1 sound. And as always, I didnt want to blow a hole in the side of my pants. I was estatic when I found these speakers for $195.
For those who dont know, the first number in the 5.1 refers to the number of satellites (speakers) in a setup, and the second number relates to the number of subwoofers. Don't let the price for this setup fool you- it sounds f*cking awesome. The individual satellites sound crisp and clear, and while quite small, can really pump it out when working in unison.
And the subwoofer hurt my manlyhood, put it that way. (wahey!! -ed)
As with most 5.1 setups, the subwoofer acts as the hub for the sattellites, which use RCA jacks. The subwoofer is then connected to the output device (TV, computer, whatever) with three 3.5mm minijacks.
There was a little bit of distortion in the satellites at extreme volumes, but only bogans and deaf people have it up that loud, so it's all good. And also, while the subwoofer looks plastic (plastic = crap sound quality) I opened it up to find good old plywood in there.
It will work best with Creative soundcards, but with a little know how, you can use adapters to fit any soundcard/receiver. I used my Soundblaster Extigy in it's standalone mode to do this, and I ihghly recommend that you use these two products hand in hand.
You will find better sound quality in it's big brothers, the 5300 to 5700 being the next steps up, but none of these offer the great quality/price trade off as the 5200 does. Also, the 5100 is available, at even cheaper price, but I'll let you guess what the sound quality is like.
Si if you're looking for a simple, cheap, yet effective 5.1 surround system, look no further then the Creative Inspire 5.1 5200 set.
-DJFROGi
Posted by funnelbc at 11:32 PM | Comments (1)
September 27, 2004
snapshot: soundblaster extigy
If you're like me, and everynow again you like to cheat at a gig by using a computer, this'll be for you. I bought this out of a need for a high quality, yet mobile, sound card. The added fact I owned a laptop made my decision a lot easier.
The Extigy came to my rescue. Installation is simple- it is a stand alone unit, and it connects to your PC through a USB cable. Asthetics have not been forgotten- it stands up like a funky little PS2.
It has support for Dolby Digital, CMSS, and EAX Advanced HD, with a ton of inputs. It has the usual line in/out mic in ports, plus OPTICAL In/Out, SPDIF In/Out, MIDI In/Out, and a four or so 3.5mm jacks for speaker arrangements (front left & right, back left & right, center & subwoofer).
I also like the remote control supplied with it- with the help of the supplied software, I can sit at the other side of the hall and choose tracks! Now thats cool. Oh, and of course, the remote control does all the other standard remote control things.
Put simply, for the DJ on the go, or anyone who owns a laptop and craves for better sound quality- the Extigy is unbeaten.
- DJFROGi
Posted by funnelbc at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)
Creative MuVo mp3 Player
There are quite a few options on the market for those who are interested in a purchasing an mp3 player, and it took quite a while for creative to pick up on the trend and put a mp3 player out on the market. This size of player has been hitherto dominated by companies who brought you such products as the super happy lucky computer fan, and extra prosperity guaranteed CPU cooler. It seems the innovation on the market has been largely pushed along by the gadget orientated Asian market. The fact that a big international player such as creative has picked on the trend indicates that they are paying close attention to products which would normally take quite a while to appear on our local market – which can only be a good thing.
Originally posted Jan 25, 2003 by funnel
The MuVo has a really simple method of uploading music to itself – you simply pull it apart and plug it into the USB port of your host system. The system recognizes it as another HDD and you can drag and drop your files straight onto it. It remembers the order in which you drag them, and when you start playback they are organized in the order in which you copied them. Simplicity itself!Copying is a little slower than we had expected, and it takes about 30 seconds per track, but this is nothing too troublesome. Eventually we’d like to see USB 2.0 support in future models of this drive (especially as higher capacity flash disks get cheaper) to facilitate quicker transfer speeds. You can also use it a simple flash HDD for file transfer of any type, which is safer option than a comparable zip disk, but with a few files on the drive, it wouldn’t leave a great deal of room for audio. The maximum size that creative release this model at is 128MB, which will also need to be improved in future models to be competitive.
Music playback is reasonably clear, and the supplied headphones deal out a reasonable amount of volume – enough for most listeners. The sound with the included headphones is nothing special, a little high-end biased, but that is to be expected with a smaller lower current draw device. It’s not a terribly dynamic sound, but this is also dependant on the quality of mp3’s place on the device, and the set of reference headphones that we use (Sennheiser HD-265 Linear) tend to a more flat response anyway. Other users have reported improvement with different headphones, but one would also presume that it would drain the batteries at a higher speed to plug in a pair of massive enclosed cans. Battery life is okay – a pair of AA’s lasted about 10(ish) 2 hour listening sessions, the serious user would probably want to get a set of rechargeable batteries also.
It has just a basic selection of buttons, the power button which doubles as a play / pause button has to be held on for a few seconds for the device to power on. A multicolour led indicates on/battery low/paused. The fast-forward and rewind buttons work in the usual way, with a quick press skipping the track and a long press tracking forward/behind within the same track. The skipping between tracks is not exactly instantaneous but it’s acceptable. It has a loop feature which allows you to repeat a track, or more interestingly repeat a section of a song. Quite handy for anyone wanting to nail a lick in a song or the like.
In the time we had to test the MuVo there were a few noticeable niggles which are worth a mention. Whether it was just our clumsy fingers or the other sweaty journalists who hand handled it, the metal-like finish on the play/pause button was already flaking off. The plastic below is thankfully a pleasant shade of grey, but it’s still pretty surprising for a device of this kind to so quickly get a chip in the finish.In another slightly stranger note, our testing reverie was interrupted by occasionally by random blocks of hard digital distortion. The only way to get it to go away was by separating the flash disk from the body of the player. This was odd, to say the least, we couldn’t reproduce it by replaying the same track over, and it seemed to happen on various mp3’s. In repeated listening sessions, it only happened 3 times in about 30 hours worth of listening, but its irritating, and tends to throw you out of the music listening mood (Unless you are into hardcore, in that case you probably won’t notice ;).
Overall, its quite a pleasant device to listen to, being a solid state player there is only so much that can go wrong with it, and I’d be fairly confident that ones that hadn’t been handled by a squllion grubby PC journalists wouldn’t display the slightly odd ”static” problem that we experienced. If anyone has used it and experienced it with theirs, let us know and we will revise our final rating. There are many other comparable products on the market for similar or lower prices – It’s hard to justify recommending this over them – certainly not with the odd behavior that we observed…
Price: $250/64MB $330/128MB
Verdict:
Quality: 3/5
Value: 3/5
Functionality: 4/5
Overall: 3.5/5
Distributor: Creative
Web: http://www.creative.com.au
Posted by funnelbc at 11:34 PM | Comments (0)
soundblaster audigy 2 platinum
I have fond memories of our first “proper sound card” (Our Amiga 1000 from ‘88 featured stereo sound and much better games than our 386 sx-33 but that’s another story). It was the creative SoundBlaster 16, the model that creative packaged with a 2x CDROM for the princely sum of around $900. The addition of sound in all those classic games, Castle Wolfenstein, Commander Keen and the like made our pc pretty cutting edge. Having a sound card made your PC something special. Ever since then creative has been looking for reasons to make us upgrade to this years most zooty soundcard...
Originally posted Feb 22, 2003 by funnel
And by and large, it appears that they have been successful, and updating your soundcard has become a bi-yearly event for most users, and for those of us that use the pc for music creation – every time we can afford it. It’s appropriate that we look at the Audigy 2 from a musical perspective. When Creative bought EMU, they put the EMU10K chip in it for synthesis – a move that alone sold them hundreds of thousands of cards. This gave the SoundBlaster a pedigree that meant something to the music community. From 99 onwards, the SoundBlaster live in its various iterations became a decent entry level option for those interested in dabbling with making music on their PC.
Providing more than adequate recording facilities, the Audigy 2 is a great place to start for someone who only needs a few channels of input to work from, and has ideally some SPDIF digital compatible mixing gear (If you want to get multiple tracks down at once), which for example, can be bought for as little as $900 for a Behringher UB series mixing desk. For most users 2 simultaneous inputs will satisfy their basic recording needs. Especially for those who just like to musically doodle down their thoughts as it were. Even in multi thousand dollar home studios, this is often the most regular recording that goes on – you could also hire a digital compatible desk for a weekend if you wanted to get down a full arrangement using your home rig. That’s part of the beauty of SPDIF, It’s dead cheap for the company to add it as a feature, and it’s a quite powerful option too. Anyone looking to build a project studio could certainly do worse than the Audigy 2 for basic recording functionality and nearly universal compatibility. If you were mad keen on the SPDIF and didn’t want to bother with the other features, Guillemot do a soundcard called the Fortissimo3 that comes with optical SPDIF for less than a hundred AUD.
One sore point from the creative cards from days of yore was the complete absence of ASIO support. For the uninitiated, ASIO is the chosen method for interfacing with programs such as Cubase and its myriad of plug-ins. (ASIO = Audio Stream Input Output) Previously SoundBlaster users have had to suffice with the direct X audio drivers which meant latency. ASIO provides an efficient way to manage all of the traffic and latency is reduced greatly, even on a fairly low-spec machine. This in itself is a good reason for many existing Creative customers to make the step up. Relatively low latency recording combined with facilities for everyday gaming certainly make this a pretty tempting option.
Creative usually bundle a fair bit of software with their higher end gear to try and make it more appealing for those of us who can’t justify the extra dollars by features alone. First up is the creative media player, which is – kind of crappy. You can make use of its native de-clicking (To remove vinyl clicks and static) or various other onboard effects from within the software, but it doesn’t really hold enough for this writer to want to uninstall Winamp. Basic functionality is there, but it’s all a bit superfluous. It comes with a limited version of Native Instruments’ rather fine Traktor mixing program which is well worth checking out. Creative also promotes the use of soundfonts www.soundfonts.com with the Audigy. Which are basically freely available midi patches. Handy and freely available over the net. It also comes with a special edition of Cubasis, which is ideal for anyone thinking of that first audio program – not the greatest in terms of features, but more than enough to get the swing of things. It also comes with a version of Ulead Video studio, which is most likely due to the inclusion of the firewire connector.
Connectivity wise, the card offers more than enough for recording from most garden variety music making devices – the quality is certainly comparable to other devices at this price point. If you were to spend the money on pure 24bit digital to analogue (D/A) converters in a card/breakout box, you’d struggle to get more than 4 I/O. Although the quality of the D/A converters would more than likely be a step up from the type found in the Audigy. Will you notice the difference as a project/bedroom muso? Probably not. Another reason to recommend the Audigy is that you get a card that should function perfectly for playback and sound in computer games and the like – with added hoopy features like EAX which any pure D/A A/D conversion card won’t. It has a 106db signal to noise ratio, which is quite impressive for a card of it's type.
We’ve mentioned a few things like digital/analogue conversion, 24-bit, Signal to Noise ratio, etcetera which we will look at in greater depth in different articles – further down the track, stay tuned for those. In summation, it’s hard not to recommend this, if not on the basis of the connectivity, but on the software bundle – or the fact that it’s a complete setup for someone looking to turn their pc into a musical sketch pad, or want to begin to explore recording on your computer without a massive financial outlay.
Price: $489.50 AUD at the time of writing from www.auspcmarket.com.au
Specs:
24bit 96kHz Recording
106dB Signal to Noise Ratio.
THX Certified
Dolby Digital EX
6.1
EAX Advanced HD
SB1394 Firewire
ASIO (finally!)
DVD Audio
Rather groovy remote control
Connectivity:
Coax SPDIF in/out
Optical SPDIF in/out
Headphone out
2 x Line in/mic in
Midi in/out
SB1394 (IEE1394 or Firewire)
6.1 audio output
Bundled with:
Soldier of Fortune 2
Hitman 2 Double Helix
Cubasis Suite
Ulead Video Studio
Native Instruments Traktor SE
Verdict:
Quality 5/5
Value 5/5
Functionality 4/5
Overall 4.5/5
Distributor: Creative
Web: http://www.soundblaster.com
Posted by funnelbc at 11:25 PM | Comments (0)