xwindows <
xwindows@tilde.club> wrote:
On Sun, 17 Oct 2021, The Free Thinker wrote:
audio electronics tinkerers out there?
I'm not exactly an audio guy though; the most exciting thing I have
ever done with audio equipment around me was disassembling few of them
to replace failing parts, and that's it. My understanding of analog transistor circuits is currently not enough for me to design one.
Getting it working in Linux was a bit tricky and took me all
morning today,
Congratulations! Does it require special driver and software to play?
Yes there's a kernel driver module which I messed around trying to
build against the wrong kernel headers for a little while, and also
required a slight change to the code to get it to build against the
right ones.
http://hardsid.sourceforge.net/
It only supports up to kernel v. 2.6, so it's convenient that I'm
running a very old Linux install on this Pentium 1 anyway. Maybe it
wouldn't be so hard to build on a current kernel though because I
believe 2.6 was the last widespread change to the way kernel
modules worked. I bet that'd still take a lot more than one morning
to do though.
I thought the XMMS-SID plug-in for XMMS supported the HardSID. But
though there's some code in there for it and an option in the
config menu, it turns out it was never finished (still in the TODO
file) and non-functional. So I compiled the last version of
Sidplay2 and libsidplay, though that player is fairly awkward to
use and a bit buggy:
http://sidplay2.sourceforge.net/hardsid.html
Maybe I'll be able to track down the Linux version of TinySID with
HardSID support and try that sometime (I forgot to try the Windows
version when testing in Win98 actually):
http://web.archive.org/web/20100904013553/http://www.rsinsch.de/?id=7298b&s=k2&lang=en
[I just wasted 15min making another search for Linux TinySID, so
the rest of this post is rushed]
Any other SID lovers
Well, I didn't have chance to experience the 8-bit home computing/gaming stuff, and started out with PC; so... chiptune-wise, I'm more familiar
with something like Yamaha OPL3 (YMF262) which somehow got bundled with
my old C-Media CMI8738-based PCI audio card.
I'm from the PC era as well, I just had relatives who were getting
rid of their old Commodore stuff (in turn accumulated from other
people getting rid of it). Back then my C64 sat next to my Nintendo
64.
I have never programmed it with a real tracker, but I have played
around using a MIDI player on DOS called Midier [1] which I found
that it produced quirky but interesting sound. I have also played
the same card under GNU/Linux (ALSA MIDI) with instrument patches
loaded using alsa-tools' `sbiload`; while I found that it played okay,
the patches bundled there sounded way less impressive.
With no experience with tracker, and with no game that used the chip;
my usage just... never went beyond this, before the whole machine
got moved into the storeroom. My (very limited) experience in electronic music creation mostly rooted in the land of MIDI; and my recent attempt
to tackle MilkyTracker bare-handed in the dark was also fruitless
so... back to MIDI again I guess.
I've never got into making music properly either. The HardSID will
probably only be used for listening to downloaded SIDs, though
there is a MIDI driver for it in Windows. I've tried to get into
composing in trackers many times, but haven't put enough time into
it. These days I think I spend too much time doing things at the
computer anyway.
I'll have to get back to building my Theremin
Great! Hope I'd build one someday; although I'm not sure if I would be patient enough to practice and play actual music on it, hahaha.
For the time being, I make do with a lousy software-emulated theremin installed on my Android PDA phone whether I was randomly in a mood
for ghostly wail... *Sigh* playing actual music on it is tough.
It works best with some form of accompanyment, eg. piano, from what
I've heard. I've got some ideas for extra features, though not
having played one myself yet (not even a pretend one) they're
probably premature.
and eventually onto building my own (fairly scary) idea
for a new musical instrument
Electronic instrument I suppose?
Maybe Electro-Inflammable? It's based around the concept of the
Flame Amplifier, or Flame Speaker, where an electic signal is
applied to a flame and produces amplified sound by ionisation.
The idea is to set up a large flame (1m+ high - flame length
determines the frequency range) within an enclosed chamber and
interact the resonance of the chamber with the vibrations from
electrically induced ionisation, adjusting both and experimenting
with feedback effects.
Integration of the flame as part of an oscillator circuit
controlling the signal for the ionisation/speaker part, following
these experiments:
http://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/flame-amp/flameamp.htm
might be another interesting avenue of investigation.
One of my many mad scientist ideas that I never get around to.
I need to figure more out about making tall flames for starters,
without setting fire to too much (I do have the advantage of being
able to do these tests with an old fire truck nearby).
I'm also having some project in progress
that involves MIDI (not an instrument, but a very primitive form of
sequencer and synthesizer) that aims to retro-target some use cases
of yesteryear.
Neat, maybe less HardSID and more SIDstation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektron_SidStation
--
- The Free Thinker |
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