16/04/2002-17/04/2002 @02:13:14 ^03:33:59

Actually managed to make some record today

I dunno, I was just messing about. I'd loaded the sequencer to try and reconstruct a bit of track I'd heard - I couldn't work out how it had been put together. I slung a load of samples into the thing, coded them up, put them together and they worked really well!

I kept it, and stuck some bass on it, and blah blah blah I've got this evil downtempo breaks record that's dark like a tune you'd get at a garage night where people get shot:-) It uses snippets of that LibertyX remix competition vocal sample and, as I promised I'd make a track with this name, is called technical difficulties (look back to (9,10)/3/2002)

PS this impulsive development probably means yet another delay in the release of update-blog. Oh well. You lot'll never use it anyway:-)

My evil tracks encoding plan works! Well, kinda.

Following on: After working on said record I decided to investigate the Mad Plan For Releasing MP3s as it is known. This involved both hardware and software; RISC OS, and the ARM processors on which it runs, are not known for floating point support:-) A better solution was needed. How about this gorgeous box with its 800MHz Duron processor?? Today we managed to get the hardware side to work:-)

The headphone socket on my old A3010 (with the tracking stuff on) is and always has been connected to the AUX input on my stereo so I can use it as a sound monitor. Today I connected the line out on the stereo to the line in on the soundcard in my Linux box. This worked beautifully - I found, by using sox I could quite happily sample stuff by (with gorgeous long horrible command lines like sox -t ossdsp -r 44100 -w -s -c2 /dev/dsp sample.wav :-) )

But I needed an encoder. I chose the most obvious one I could think of, that is Lame (see below) But I couldn't get the right command line for this. I'd get segfaults from my .wav input files and white noise from my raw data input files. Oh well - I'll keep trying...

Lame 3.92 released - so I built it for Debian:-)

Yeah, go over to Lame's homepage or the mirror and follow the download links, or click here. The real reason I'm posting this is to say how I built it as a Debian package. (sadly it'll never go into the archive - it's not free enough)

Inside the source tarball there is a debian subdirectory. This is good - most of the setup has been done already:-) What I found I needed to do was edit the changelog file to bring the version number up to date (this is important - it reads this to make up the package name) I also found I had to make the file "rules" executable.

Now what you do is, you install a few packages to build the thing with. Stuff like dpkg-dev, debhelper, maybe dh-make (I forget) and some stuff needed to actually compile lame with (according to the source package Build-Depends: line, anyway); I had to install a thing called NASM. Once you've got all this, and fakeroot and the usual stuff you build kernels with, you do dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc in the top level of the source. It should build a load of packages in the parent directory - you can install them with dpkg -i.

Or scratch all this and use Ogg Vorbis. Yeah I know! What the hell is Ogg Vorbis?!:-)