islands in the stream

I know a couple of people that read this are up on osx audio, and/or icecast and such, so…

I was reading loopers-delight, and one of the posters detailed a setup they used to stream a live set to the net. Not the newest idea in the world, but I’d never really given it much thought as something I could do if I happened to be playing a show in a venue with some wireless access.

Anyone using icecast or similar tech under osx? I’d probably be running the sound into cubase or Ableton Live to record, so would probably need to stream it from there (perhaps after some basic compression, etc). Anyone done anything like that?

All the phasmatodea stuff is freely licensed anyway. I don’t really expect anyone to listen in, but it would be something interesting to try anyway. Geek value.

Though the idea of adding a big pile of software to the already complex setup I have is probably asking for trouble, I might give it a try one day anyway.

If anyone has any experience doing this under linux, I’d be interested in hearing about it as well. I can always bring along the linux laptop as well.

Some info on doing this via icecast someone from the loopers list posted.

music thoughts

finally got around to syncing the mp3player/workstash/homestash to be consistent, and was thinking about cd’s I’ve bought over the last little while

The good:

Red Sparrowes/At The Soundless Dawn: really cool post-rock/post-metal/whatever. In the vein of Isis, Explosions in The Sky, GYBE, etc. Long cinematic[1] instrumentals. Very cool. High recommended.

Adrian Belew/Side B: second part of a triology. I like this one better than Side A, even though Side A features Les Claypool and Danny Carey. This cd is very low key, with a bit of a kraftwerk/80’s electro/new wave sound to it. And of course, plenty of odd lyrics and off kilter guitar sounds.

Jesu/Jesu: Jesu is Justin K. Brodricks new band. Broadrick is mr Godflesh. This album pretty much sounds just like Godflesh. In other words, it freaking rules. Utterly massive plodding machine provided drumbeats, walls of heavy droning feedback drenched guitars. This is the part where I throw a metal hand gesture and start looking for a goat to sacrifice.

Sunn 0))/Grimrobe Demos: Walls of heavy droning feedback drenched guitars. No drums. Still heavy as all get out. I like it. Too bad I’m out of goats now.

Fripp & Eno/The Equatorial Stars: Pretty good, pretty much what you’d expect from these two. Heavily processed soundscapes for the most part.

Drums & Tuba/Vinyl Killer: drums, tuba, and guitar driven math rock. Lots of looping. Tuba makes a surprisingly good bass in a rock context.

Zoe Keating/Once Cello x 16: heavily layered acoustic cello. Very driving and cool. Zoe is 1/3 of Rasputina.

Other Random Stuff:

The Swans/Children Of God/World of Skin: eh. About one in three songs are really amazing. The rest are kind of boring. But they all have _way_ too many vocals in them. Not really my thing I suppose.

Arcade Fire/Funeral: Yawn-tastic. Why did I buy this? Mediocre over produced lifeless indy pop. I’ll gladly give up one hipster point to not have to hear this.

[1] I say cinematic, meaning what I would like movie scores to sound like. But lets face it, 99.999% of all movie scores are horrendous cliche ridden coma inducing symphonic piles of worthless glurge[2]. Hans Zimmer, I’m looking at you. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to see a movie with a good score. How am I supposed to “suspend disbelief” when your blasting the tritest freaking orchestral bs at me in dolby 9.13 sound at 130db.

[2] glurge is not a word. Thats how bad movie scores are. At least there not musicals.

huh. How about that.

Apparently, part of the sounds for Microsoft Windows Vista is going to be by…

Robert Fripp.

See here.

That makes my brain hurt. I suppose Eno did do the win95 startup sound, so theres at least some precedent
of sorts. But still. One of my favorite guitarists… doing the windows sound? Weird.

Of course, if I had to hire someone to make a sound that represents a crash, I’d say fripp would be high on the list.

direct link to the video

show

Friday night, played a show at 305 South in Durham. Lineup was me, badger, and Anthony Stanton. I used a new setup for the show, using two midi controller keyboards, the powerbook, Ableton Live as a host, and two Reaktor softsynth modules. Each keyboard went to one soft synth, and out to a looper.

Setup seemed to work okay. The only problem seemed to be just too many options. For the most part, I just tweaked the settings that I had already setup to be controlled from the keyboard.

Seemed to go okay. No technical issues, and I think it sounded pretty good.

weekend

Not a bad weekend. Couple gatherings. “Everyday is Halloween” at badgers, including way more food than can be consumed.

Tried a new setup sunday over at badgers. More of a keyboad/softsynth thing. Basic idea is two keyboards and two soft synths, and some basic external post processing and looping. Hardware end seems okay, but not surprisingly, the software was more troubleprone.

I tried hosting two Reaktor softsynths in Cubase and setting up the routing I wanted, but it didn’t seem to want to cooperate. Then tried it in a demo version of Ableton Live, which seemed to work a little better, but eventually crashed as well. Need to figure out whats most stable before the show on Friday. But the demo version doesn’t allow you to save any configs, which is annoying, and the full fledged version is a bit pricy. Are there any good reasonably prices VSTi hosts for osx that won’t crash?

Went to the Laurie Anderson show afterwards. Pretty cool. Had an interesting coincidence. Discussed Project A119 on the trip over, which was then referenced in the show. A119 was a plan to detonate a atomic bomb on the moon. Apparently Robert McNamara mentions this in Fog Of War.