Coming off the high of a long day 1 (which I’d intended to go HAM on, and indeed, did), day two was for rabbit holes, and that was the name of today’s song:
I turned in at about 1am last night, and went to a pilates class this morning to keep up with my movement habit. There was some “the bus is in traffic, I’ll get out and walk” stressful drama, but it worked out. Once I got to RC and had second breakfast, I set up at a standing desk (love) and cracked open TidalCycles.
I decided that maybe today I’d work on getting custom samples available in my environment; I have this creepy sound of the Comcast elevators (thanks Christopher for the source material); they make (made?) this sound because the skyscraper doesn’t currently have a roof, so it’s basically a wind tunnel.
As I was prepping the sample (shortening it, converting, etc), I discovered I could access Max (which sounded familiar, because Aaron told me about it) on my computer, and that it comes hidden in my Ableton install. I looked at it a little bit, but resisted diving into that rabbit hole.
In doing this, I played with ffmpeg more. I was tempted to install Audacity, and probably will eventually, but learning to use that utility knife for audio conversion seems somewhat worth it. Right before meeting a friend for lunch, I thought I was stuck, but I’d done the conversion.
When I got back, I put time on the RC calendar to set up in a conference room, with the idea that I’d do my “jam on a song” on the projector, and people could just hang out, and read in the library about mental health first aid for a bit beforehand. What ended up happening, is because I was connecting to a TV, I had lots of issues with SuperCollider and its audio outputs, sample rates, so many things. So many things. And to boot, it seemed I didn’t actually get my samples loaded in SC sans problem before lunch, and generated weird fun memory issues, and I can’t understand wtf SC thinks Buffers are. What I’d intended to be a 30 minute jam turned into 30 minutes of me trying to get sound to come through that TV, and then some miracle of some noise happening infrequently for 30 more minutes.
Took a break from my own rabbit holes to talk to Aaron about his mission to write a test, and chat a bit about testing and monitoring and fun things like that. Then we sat down and looked at Tidal again, sans external audio drama, but still running into weird things, at one point getting some cool sounding weird bit smashing errors or something that I should’ve recorded to be honest.
After drastic-feeling amounts of futzing, I reinstalled SuperCollider, and before I could break it, I just moved my custom sample into the SuperDirt area and loaded it from there so it could just f-ing work. And jammed a little, and hit record.
Phew.
Tomorrow, I’m hoping to investigate as to if I can submit something to Synchrony, and work on that if so. Maybe a detour into visuals land?