low fidelity != low consideration

[Rodrigo Constanzo's Landscape NOON experiments](https://rodrigoconstanzo.com/2023/09/landscape-noon-experiments/). #nowplaying

There are some inspiring thoughts in Paul Davis's recent post about open source and Ardour that are nice to think about while I'm slogging through the current stage of the move to libpippi / C astrid. I wonder if going forward, large-scale apps like Ardour ought to (as Rea...

[August McKinney's AudioSoup](http://www.augustmckinney.com/AudioSoup/audiosoup.htm) sounds lovely and takes a nice approach to simple grain visualization. #nowplaying

I started adding LMDB to astrid last week. It'll replace redis as a session store. It might also replace the redis buffer queue, too. I'd prefer that rendered buffers were available for any other process to sample from if they feel like it. Probably the same backend can be...

[Wonderful new collection of solo guitar music by Chris Rosenau.](https://chrisrosenau.bandcamp.com/album/a-light-that-cracks-through) #nowplaying

[Leslie Eaton and the Weird Winonans](https://leslieeatonandtheweirdwinonans.bandcamp.com/album/leslie-eaton-and-the-weird-winonans) #nowplaying

I'll take a bit of Spring now, thanks

Quick note-to-self to disable touch gestures on a linux wacom tablet:

(~) % xsetwacom --list devices                                                             
Wacom Intuos Pro L Pad pad          id: 8   type: PAD       
Wacom Intuos Pro L Pen stylus       id: 9   type: STYLUS    
Wacom Intuos Pro L Pen eraser       id: 10  type: ERASER    
Wacom Intuos Pro L Finger touch     id: 17  type: TOUCH     
(~) % xsetwacom --set 17 Touch off                                                         
(~) % xsetwacom --get 17 Touch                                                             
off

---

Log January 2024

Log December 2023

["The strong physical presence of the beats resulting from the two engines running at slightly different frequencies put me in such a trance that I nearly rode off the side of the mountain."](https://www.secondinversion.org/2018/10/02/phill-niblock-at-85-austere-unpopular-astounding-minimalism/)

RIP Phill Niblock. <3

lmdb looks like it might make a wonderful embedded replacement for redis in astrid instruments!

[a moth object](https://moth-object.com/snd/) #nowplaying

I've never had a punch-tape style label maker before. This is super fun. Labels for everything!

Radbound Mens' Three Pieces for Upper Partial Tones is very enjoyable on tape. Ever so slight wow and flutter bubbles nicely onto the surface of the long tones.

Printing is hard.

Hm, I just realized I probably need to finish the piano roll before I can finish 3walks...

Been taking some time again this weekend (while working on the new Audiobulb tape edition!) to keep moving bits of the current (soon-to-be-old) standalone astrid-seq, astrid-dac and astrid-adc into library functions in astrid.c. The first steps of this were setting up wrapp...

Very nice having a working cassette player again. I'm in a virtual jungle of lawnmowers with Coppice's Bypass Ideal tape. #nowplaying

Sam Scranton's new album _Body Pillow_ lives up to its name. Giving it a big hug again this morning. #nowplaying

The temp forecast here for the next 48 hours looks like a straight line. It'll be hovering a few degrees above freezing, day and night, just fluctuating by a degree or two. Odd.

The Rolling Stones doing Sympathy for the Devil always makes me think of slow panning studio shots interspersed with young people holding machine guns. Good job, Godard.

New Helado Negro day!! #nowplaying

I have the piano roll bug again. I spent a while tonight sketching some things with the Helio piano roll editor. It's really nice, very well done. I think I even like it more than the Reason piano roll, my old stomping grounds. Still, it makes a number of (very reasonable...

Spending a few days working on translating the Audiobulb & Friends tape booklets into a mini website.

This is a sketch for a revised standalone version of astrid python scripts. I've renamed the trigger callback to seq and added some new trigger types. The midi trigger is broken into cc and note, and the new serial triggers take a single string / byte blob. I also replaced...

Started thinking again how to do message passing within standalone instrument scripts. Swapping a param struct with an atomic pointer, maybe.

Took some interesting first steps experimenting with opening an astrid instrument message queue in the main thread and writing param updates into shared memory space. Decided to pause on the passive mixer and focus on the relays, motors and solenoids as percussion / activat...

Glued one of the mounts for the bass transducers to my child size violin to try running the first steps with standalone astrid programs through it. This is a test program that has 400 pulsar oscs spread across a pretty small param space. It doesn't sound like much really, but a good first step.

Started thinking about how to break out the control interfaces (message queues, buffer queues, etc) as library features for standalone programs.

Spending some more time with the relay board, I'm suspecting I've got the wrong transistors. They seem like the ones on the datasheet with the same labels, but I found someone who'd got the same parts mislabeled... the proper thing to do would be to test the components and verify they do not behave like the datasheet says they should. The lazy thing to do is make a new board with known components, which is probably what I'll actually do.

Began experimenting with standalone astrid programs that just use libpippi and a wrapper around the jack init code adapted from the dac/adc programs.