Lusine Live Meets Thomas Fehlmann Live at Horst Krzbrg, Berlin
In the three month’s that I’ve been in Berlin I still haven’t gone out properly, through a combination of not really liking dance music, clubbing, or being up till 10 a.m.
But tonight, I WILL go out, to this night at Horst Krzbrg and it’s going to be awesome.
I built a patch which allows you to control any parameter in Ableton (through Max for Live) through the brightness of the webcam. It’s borrows sections of code from other patches, some of which is crazily complicated and difficult to follow, but I thought I’d pop it up in case anyone’s interested. It’s good for adding a bit of randomness to sets, and if you’re playing at venues with lighting rigs, you get a bit of a link between the lighting and the sounds, which is pretty cool/geeky.
The patch
There’s a video over on my video page which shows me playing my track Loud Cloud using the patch.
The final patch shown below has been divided into two sections so it’s a bit easier to read, the left left side of the patch relates to Jitter and the determining of the modulation value (including the refresh rate of the Jitter matrix and the scaling). The right side relates to the parameter grabbing from Live and the actual assignment of the value from the left side.
The video side (grabbing parameter values)
The Jitter/modulating (left) side of the patch works through the jit.dx.grab and jit.qt.grab objects in Windows and Quicktime respectively. It’s selectable through a gswitch2 object so that you can use the patch on OS X or Windows without installing extra weird video stuff.
When it’s been activated, the Jitter objects are banged to output the matrix. The spacing between these bangs is either a bar, a beat or a user specified length of time (in seconds). The metro object with specified parameters combined with a transport object (this links the patch to the tempo in Live) outputs bangs every beat or every bar, depending on the outlet.
A bit of a tip if anyone else is going to build anything similar, the user selectable time refresh for the video works through the qmetro object. Qmetro is used in preference to metro as the metro object can drop frames because it’s a low priority execution in Max.
The output of the Jitter grab is run through a small subpatch which converts the matrix from RGB to monochrome (with the jit.rgb2luma object) before outputting the mean brightness with the jit.3m object.
The output of the brightness subpatch is run through a function object. This object allows the user to draw their own transfer function allowing the control signal to adapted as necessary. The boundaries of this object are controlled in the inspector. This object handles scaling and control of the modulation parameter.
The assignment side
The assignment side of the patch works through a range of variety of subpatches. The GetAllTracksIds subpatch sets the live.path to the set, feeding this information to the live.object, which outputs a list of the tracks in that set.
This information is then fed into the GetAllDevices subpatch which detects any devices used in the aforementioned tracks. Once the appropriate device is selected in the umenu, the parameters of the device are determined through the GetParameterNames subpatch. The live.remote is the final object on this side of the patch. The path of the relevant parameter is set, allowing the value from the left side of the patch to control the relevant parameter. This side of the patch is heavily based on the patch OnsetDetection by Zlatko Baracskai.
Sharing’s caring!
If anyone’s interested in seeing the code or using the patch then give me a shout through the interrogation link and I’ll send you a copy. Also, if anyone’s got any lovely patches for me that they think I’ll find interesting (especially interested in glitch) then I’d really appreciate it if you fancy sharing your code!
laWrence
I’m very much looking forward to studying this again next year at uni.
Especially as Lawrence (who was in my classes last year), just posted his final assessment for me to steal.
SoundCloud in da house!
Check out this video of our new best friends extension.fm decorating their office with a shiny SoundCloud sticker, fresh from last night’s New York meetup!
Earlier this week they announced that their awesome Chrome extension now recognises SoundCloud widgets. If you are a Chrome user, check it out.
Worldwide Meetup Win!
A great way to end what was a stressful week :)
Today at Soundcloud Meetup
A user’s view of the sunset at last night’s Soundcloud Meetup at HQ.
Thanks to all of those who came, it was great to meet you!
Do you have any photos from your meetup last night? Get in touch!
Also don’t forget, there are more meetups tonight in Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Budapest!
I was stressing out so much about organising this whole Meetup thing, if you know me, then you know I’m not much of a party thrower, or an outgoing host generally.
But last night was really fun, I met some lovely people, and heard some great tunes.
I just wish I wasn’t riding an epic hangover wave right now.
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Borked ID3 tags got you down? Now you can edit your Audio post’s track info and album art! Sweet.
Yet again, Tumblr adds another banging feature.
These guys rock.
As if my slowly escalating Tumblr addiction wasn’t enough, I’m beginning to really look forward to Tuesdays because it’s the day when everyone’s Top 5 Last.fm Artists feeds update (courtesy of this awesome hack by Joe Lazarus). It’s always fun to see what everyone’s been listening to recently, in case I missed their audio posts.
Which makes me start to think - wouldn’t it be cool if last.fm introduced an asynchronous (i.e. Twitter style) follower model. For example, I don’t know him personally but I can see joelaz’s profile so I know that he has pretty good taste. I can visit any profile and see roughly what people have been listening to but I can’t follow it (without being friends or stalky) and get the updates straight to my homepage.
Last.fm’s recommendations engine is brilliant but it still misses a little bit of that personal touch. I’m quite likely to find the latest buzz band that is related to all the other buzz bands I’ve been listening to recently but actually what I’d really like to see is random, brilliant and unexpected new tracks. Hype Machine does this to a certain extent but it’s limited by it’s inputs and is not as universal as Last.fm. Adding a second social layer around Last.fm could be really interesting and would probably bring in plenty more users.
And while I’m at it, why doesn’t Last.fm do email digests? I know there’s gazillions of users and things would get pretty messy pretty quickly but if YouTube can do it… I’d love to receive a nice looking weekly rundown of all things around my musical activity (friends plays, my charts, upcoming events, new releases). It’s use and engagement would skyrocket. Maybe this already exists - if not, it would make an awesome hack day project.
Last.fm (and the community) already provide lots of awesome tools for managing and visualising your data and this post is by no means supposed to be negative. I just enjoy thinking about all that lovely information hidden away in those databases and how it can continue to improve my listening experience.
Agreed, it feels like there is a whole world of last.fm data that’s being under-used. General updates of trends within my friends or people I ‘follow’ would be great.
We just released 1.5.2 to the Chrome extension gallery. This new release adds support for SoundCloud!
In their own words - “SoundCloud is a new online audio platform that lets music professionals receive, send & distribute their music”. In our words - SoundCloud has a ton of amazing music that you need to to listen to right now!
Support for SoundCloud works both on soundcloud.com as well as any site that has a SoundCloud widget embedded (like this one).
SoundCloud support is really exciting because it opens up a direct link from the artist’s studio into the listener’s music library. If we think back to when bands used to record music for ten’s of thousands of dollars in a studio, then produce millions of plastic discs, then ship those discs to thousands of stores, then have listeners spend 20 minutes trying to open the plastic surrounding those plastic discs, well anyway you get the point. Now artists can make music for the cost of a computer, upload it to SoundCloud and within seconds it’s inside their fans’ music libraries. Pretty incredible!
In addition to SoundCloud, this release also adds Tumblr oAuth support. Previously, logging into Tumblr meant giving us your username and password. With oAuth, you now just tell Tumblr you trust us and they give us a token to use on your behalf. You can untrust us (don’t know why you’d ever want to do that!) any time you want and the token will stop working. It’s a lot more secure this way. If you are already logged in to Tumblr inside the extension, you may want to consider logging out and then logging back in with oAuth.
We’d love to hear what you think about these new features. Leave us a comment here or on our UserVoice page.
This plugin is fantastic, essential for any music fan, and worth converting to Chrome for!
They’ve just added soundcloud support, which means you can queue up tracks hosted on SC widgets and browse other pages, without ever interrupting play.
Swish.
c00lstorybro:wonderbreadandmayo:arealhorrorshowdevotchka:-nani:
remmbermytitans:1ov3r:iaznalvin:whatsupmandy:christinaligaya:samzilla
i would say yes to this no matter how ugly you are.
YES. YES I WILL GO OUT WITH YOU. FOREVER.
Never mind going out, I’ll marry you.
