Waveform explorations...

Waveforms are often used as visual metaphors for sound. In actuality, the shape of the waveform is a poor representation because you can only see the top 30 dB of the harmonic content - the rest is hidden in the thickness of the line that is used to draw the waveform and other difficulties of trying to represent a large dynamic range in a medium that has only a tiny dynamic range (a waveform diagram). But the metaphor is useful, and as long as the sound is the important thing, then crude waveform diagrams are acceptable as symbols.

Image via Wikipedia

Possibly the most interesting use of sounds that were presented as waveforms was in the early 1980s, when German synthesizer pioneer Wolfgang Palm and his company, PPG (Palm Products GmbH) produced a series of leading-edge 'wavetable' synthesizers that used digital techniques at a time when analogue was king and Yamaha's DX series of FM synthesizers were being developed in Japan. Digital synthesis in a popular and affordable form is often credited as appearing with the DX7, but PPG's 'Wave' series of wavetable synthesizers used (for the time) sophisticated digital sound generation with analogue filtering and enveloping. By changing rapidly from one waveform to another - called sweeping' through a table of waveforms (a wavetable) - the sound generation produced much more complex and evolving sounds than more conventional synthesizers of the time with sine, square, sawtooth and triangle waveforms. I was hooked, and I've been a champion of wavetables ever since, although I also have weaknesses for FM and additive synthesis too, and I'm very confortable with subtractive synthesis.

So when I heard that a new Live Pack was available for Ableton Live, that provided lots of waveform samples and used Live's Instrument Racks and Simpler sample replay engine to produce wavetable-like sounds, then I downloaded the demo, auditioned the sounds, and liked what I heard. Very soon afterwards, I bought the complete set: Waveforming, from MESA+ (and not to be confused with the Dutch Nanotechnology research institute).

Waveforming provides 66 multi-sampled wave-samples, 270 Instrument Racks (plus Simpler Presets) as well as a few drum kits, sound effects, and sample songs (provided as Live Sets, so you caan delve into them and see exactly how the sounds are used in context!).

The sounds cover a wide range, and fall into very few of the classic wavetable cliche traps. I was very impressed with the breadth of sounds, and their usability - I was able to find timbres to fill all the niches I wanted, and overall the sounds seemed fresh and very usable (as well as offering lots of customisation options through macro controls, and lots of room for making new sounds by using the supplied samples). Of course, sound is very much a personal thing, and so these are my own subjective opinions, but I think I'm going to use the Waveforming sounds a lot!

Thoroughly recommended - try out the demo and see if your ears like it too!

iPhone Photos won't download 2

I've covered this problem before in a previous post, but it has resurfaced in a new variant, so it is time to mention it yet again.


Here are the symptoms: For the second time, my iPhone won't download photos to my Mac. This time, Image Capture refuses to acknowledge that my iPhone is even connected to my Mac, even though iTunes knows it is connected and is quite happy to sync it.

In fact, my newly updated to 8.2.1 version of iTunes was very happy to download and install the 3.0.1 firmware update to my iPhone recently, and I began to put two and two together...

My iPhone dock has been repeatedly reporting that it is not an Apple accessory (it is!) for some time, but it connects to my Mac via a USB hub, and I have been reading up on the Palm Pre debacle recently, where Palm and Apple are seem by some to be fighting an escalating war of attrition.

Many people seem to think that iTunes should be forced to connect to non-Apple USB devices because iTunes is popular (not sure I understand this, but...). It seems that each time Apple try to re-assert their right to make their software talk to their devices (standard practice for proprietary device software - my HP printer drivers do not work with printers from any other manufacturer, and I would not expect them to, nor would I expect any other printer manufacturer to try to make their printers talk to the HP software drivers), then Palm alter their device's software so that it will talk to iTunes.

Allegedly some part of the recent updates increase the tests that iTunes makes to determine if a USB device connected to it is actually made by Apple. One of the side effects of this seems to be that my iPhone is no longer recognized by Image Capture, and so I can no longer download photos from my iPhone to my Mac.

This was confirmed when I removed the USB hub, and connected my iPhone dock directly to my Mac. Suddenly Image Capture was able to see my iPhone, and I could download photos again. Prior to the updates the hub had not prevented this from happening. Putting the hub back in between the Mac and the iPhone dock made Image Capture unable to detect the iPhone again. Hmmm...

So it appears that collateral damage is happening as a result of Apple and Palm's activities. If you can't download photos from your iPhone, then try removing your USB hub and connecting your dock straight into your Mac... It worked for me, although if the current activities continue to escalate, then this topic may well surface yet again.

(Later) Actually, this was only a partial solution. The next time I tried to download photos, even with no hub present, and my dock connected directly into the Mac, Image Capture still refused to acknowledge that the iPhone was connected, even though iTunes disagreed and happily did a sync.

I'm also less than happy that my iPhone dock gives false (I'm not an Apple product) reports - apparently due to wear and tear on the connector, which seems weird given that the connector is bound to see lots of use... I do wonder if all of these are connected?

Conflict creates casualties, and this time it was me, an innocent bystander, who was hurt, if only metaphorically and sometimes recoverably. Let's hope that this can be solved amicably and we can return to a world where things don't suddenly stop working.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Apple gives Palm the boot - again (theregister.co.uk)
• iPhone users report problems with software update (telegraph.co.uk)

Publishing slowly...

Back in 2004, my main synthesizer, a wonderful Yamaha SY99, suffered from floppy drive failure. I got a replacement drive from the UK Yamaha Service Department, and because installing it was an interesting challenge, I wrote it up and made it available via my web-site. You can find it here, if you are interested.

Since then, others who have had similar floppy drive failures have come to me, and I've been meaning to update the pages with all the information that I've learned since 2004. It turns out that the floppy drives seem to fail after just over ten years because they use a belt drive system instead of the direct drive that you would find in more recent floppy drives. Of course, floppy drives have been largely replaced by those tiny sticks that have many names: Flash drives, USB drives...

So I've just spent a day writing up my latest discoveries about the SY99s floppy drive... And it seemed like it was happening very slowly. My major problem was the tables that I had made in a spreadsheet, showing the pins on the connectors and their function. Converting this to HTML so that I could put it onto a web-page didn't seem to be possible, so I did it by hand - slowly and painstakingly. If you look at the site referenced above, then you will find my hand-crafted tables there, in all their glory.

It then struck me that whilst there may be a clever way of converting from a spreadsheet table to HTML, if I don't know how to do it, then my ONLY recourse is to do it by hand. Perhaps I'm finding it difficult because I know how to code HTML by hand, and have never used any of the higher-level, more-abstracted ways of producing web-sites. The world is increasingly filled with people who know how to do things, and other people who do not know how to do those things, and I'm not sure that the polarisation, or the figures, are moving in the right direction. I think that increasingly fewer people know how, and that increasingly fewer people would even know how to find out.

I find this very worrying.

Even worse, I started out trying to reduce the entropy of the universe by documenting something useful to shar with others, and ended up at this gloomy place!