Audiohackers JamCat design session At the last audiohackers meetup at Hacker Dojo I was talking with Laura and Kevin about the difficulties that I was having coming up with a way to build a small local network that I was calling a “JamLan”. I mentioned that I had been thinking about building a simple analog project that would use Cat5…

JamLan update I have been playing around with various network audio protocols recently, trying to come up with a solution for hosting music jams at the Hacker Dojo. I’ve been focusing mostly on Linux software since I have found that trying to find something fully cross platform isn’t very likely. The most promising software package has been PulseAudio. However, PA…

Local network audio I have been looking around at setting up a JamLAN (I think I just made that up) that could be used to implement a software-based JamHub. I figured that there would be plenty of ways to get this working on a local network (as opposed to over the Internet), but I was kind of disappointed. The basic…

New gear – foot controllers I’m going through some old notes that I’ve taken on possible future additions to my rig. Most of the stuff has to do with pushing the boundaries of my live performance setup, so lots of pedals and controllers. Here are the things I’ve come across. Behringer FCB1010 Behringer is known to make some kind of…

Electrical box stomp boxes I’ve been building some guitar pedals recently, and to prototype them I’ve been using electrical junction boxes for the enclosure since they are really cheap (~1USD) compared to 12 dollars for a Hammond aluminum box. Although they are cheap, junction boxes have some drawbacks. They are harder to drill for jacks and switches. They typically have…

Jam Boxes – browser-based collaborative music sequencer I competed in the recent NodeJS Knockout competition with Shane Tomlinson and Jeremy Flores, producing Jam Boxes, the awesome multi-user music sequencer. It turns out that the winning team also built an audio sequencer application, so I think we had the right idea even though we finished in the middle of the pack.…

Project: Libpd module for Node.js A few months ago I started a project to build a native Node.js module around libpd. The idea is to enable a way to run Pure Data on the server to enable creation of multi-user audio applications on the Web using Node.js. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Node.js, it is a server-side…

Project idea: percussive foot controller I’ve been playing around with my live setup recently, and I’ve become quite interested in foot controllers. Some common types are MIDI program change and CC expression pedals. There are also foot switches such as the sustain pedals found on most keyboard controllers. However, I’ve been looking at expanding beyond this for live performance. There…

Using Monkey’s Audio on Linux Update: I now use X Lossless Decoder for extracting .ape files on OSX. It’s nice to have the option of a native decoder. I came across a need to extract some .ape (Moneky’s Audio) archives from Ubuntu Linux. Monkey’s Audio is a lossless .wav file compression that preserves things like Sound Forge and ACID markers.…

Wavosaur – Replacement for Sound Forge I have been looking for a free alternative to Sonic Foundry (now Sony) Sound Forge for a while now. I’m not too demanding since the last version that I really used was Sound Forge 6.0, before Sony bought the product. I have tried to use the leading open source audio editor, Audacity, for a…