8 Track Pi

8trackPiI’ve repurposed an 8 track tape into a case for my Raspberry Pi. Perfect for my XBMC Pi.

If you are doing this yourself, a few notes. The tape shell is in two parts. Try to find one that is clipped together rather then fused.  Look at the holes on the bottom of the tape to see what I mean. I had to dremal out some interior pins to make room for the Pi. Also had to cut a small hole in the side for the power. Please be careful!

Anyway, I love the juxtaposition of an ethernet cable going into an 8 track tape.

Creating music on Android

Lately, I’ve been looking into music composition apps on the Android. I’ve found a few that I like. Electrum is a straight-forward drum machine. I like that it is very similar to typical drum machine programming, so if you are familiar with that, then it will be easy to pick up. It comes with some built-in drum sounds, lets you download some, or add your own. Reactable (see screenshot to the left) is a fairly experimental composition tool High learning curve. You connect samplers, loops, sequencers, delay effects, etc, to make music. I can see making decent electronic music with this, but I’m still learning. I’m also experimenting with NodeBeat (fun and easy to use but creatively limited) and SPC (looks like a loop sequencer mostly but I haven’t spent much time with this one). I’ll probably write more on these later after I’ve had a chance to use them some more. Maybe even post some MP3s.

Svibice – 511 Vibrations Per Second MP3

I decided to participate in the Wikipedia names your band (and album cover) game which directs you through randomizing sources for your fake album cover. And them you mash them up using Photoshop, or in my case, GIMP. All fun and games until Vic required me to make the music to go along with the art. This is almost what I had in mind, download the music here: Svibice – 511 Vibrations Per Second

[The song is hyper fast, 160 BPM is fast for me, with distorted bass and waves of fuzzy guitars. Chanty cut up drone vocal.]

(source photo by Joao Carlos Alves, licensed under creative commons)

Plus-Tech Squeeze Box

plustech_prof.gifCrazy fun electronic/punk/cartoon/8 bit game music. Plus-Tech Squeeze Box is an electronc band, and according to the Wikipedia page, they are of the Japanese genre “picopop“… bleepy electropop. Of course I love that. I’ve found some excerpts from the CDs on their website. Amazon and CD Universe lists their “Cartoom!” CD as a > $30 import. Gah. Anyway, check ’em out. (via Comfort Music)

iTunes script to set ExcludeFromShuffle and RememberBookmark

I was kind of irked that iTunes makes it a pain to make ripped audiobooks behave properly. It irked me that audiobooks showed up in shuffle and wouldn’t keep a bookmark like ITMS audiobooks. Then I found in iTunes 6.02 the checkboxes to fix this. Nice, but I’ve got a bunch of audiobooks now and to go back and click all those boxes… anyway check out this javascript I wrote: MakeAudiobooksBookmarkable.zip. It is for Windows and iTunes 6.02 or higher, any track with genre “Audiobooks”, “Audiobook”, “Talk Radio”, or “Podcast” will be set as “Remember Bookmark” and “Exclude From Shuffle”. Use at your own risk.

Converting RAM (streaming Real audio) to MP3

What is RAM2MP3?

RAM2MP3 is a command line script (for Windows PC) that helps convert Real Media streams to MP3, so you can listen to the converted audio anywhere you can listed to MP3s, for example on your iPod. It is really just a short script that ties together 2 programs, Mplayer (to download the Real Audio to your PC) and LAME (to convert the audio to an MP3). (Please note I am not taking credit for writing this software, I am merely tying together 2 packages and simplyfing the conversion process with a small script.)

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