Coders Edge

Music is primary here!

I have two output devices on my computer for sound: the first is a card, the second is the on-board audio. Years ago it didn't work. I always used a dedicated card.

I run Linux, which I recommend. And you might already and not know it becase the Android is . . . drum roll please . . . Linux. And thus if you have one of those you are also. and because it's open source there are things that you can do with your android phone (it's designed as a tracking device) to make it much more useful, much easier to control. But why bother? It's a limited thing, it really ought to just be a control plane, only running a browser. Anything more than that and it isn't efficent. I might be useful as a digitial recorder. Any way, that was a far aside.

So I like to make mixes of songs of my own composition by layering tracks and then mixing them down into other things. Also so these creation tracks that are completely fabricated, and not scored in any way, and yet they could be. It would be hard to do. I like to do a lot of overlays of phase shifted reverb. So I make a reverb. Then I copy it a bunch of times. For each copy I do a tone shift on the whole thing, so that the frequency of hte whole track is shifted to some logical place, like a 5th, a 4th, 3rd, 2nd, etc. I love throwing in a 7 or an 11. And the music, or if you can call it that if you leave out the tracks from which these were produced, what is produced can be very spooky and sometimes soothing, or just a lot of energy, a powerful transe inducing effect.

Well, I was getting some glitches with the sound. And I was getting the audacity to just crash after about 50 seconds. And so what to do? Uncheck something that, in the set up it says to uncheck if you are recording stereo tracks while playing them back (that is just what I do). I don't know how it got rechecked. And the next thing? increase the buffer space. I changed the nubmer there from 1000 to 5000. and walla, the problem . . . well one other thing, I decided to switch to the other card. And I have not tested to see if the on board sound will still crash with the other values. but it works now. And I could do a test, and switch it back, but instead the head phone now comes out of the sound blaster card, and the onboard audio is for the stereo when I'm playing videos on line, listening to music. I bookmark my selections, and I like to jam from the keyboard.

I use a Zoom device, over USB to do the recording. I make my recordings at 48000 hz, and I also use 32 bit sampling.

I do like using higher frequency recording as well. But it takes up a lot more space. The sound is amazing. I usuallyuse the 48000, that works fine for me.

There is a lot of improvement that can be applied to audacity. It benifits from methodolical adherance to documentation of the sound chain. I do a lot of various effects, and I make sometimes 20 or 30 tracks, before a final mix, all of them different effects, and some of them phase shifted. And the final product must be normalized. But normalizing might be best done in slices. A very loud part might be best left out of the normalization, because it might tend to make everything else be far too low. In any case there is some art to it, I do enjoy using these tools, and I hope to produce some stuff for realease. I'm not shy about my poems so why not my compositions? My earliest produced thing goes back to 1991, but I never tried to promote my songs or ever play them out. I wouldn't mind doing it now. But I need to make a play list, and I need to have a CD that could give out, or a play list on one of my pages.

Well, so there I am, bragging again. The whole point of this was how easy it was to make audacity not hang, when it had been hanging. It merely meant going into the preverences and tweeking things until it worked, trying a different output card, an audio card that is up for it, and increasing the size of buffers. Awesome. So what is holding you back? Make some bob-bob and woe with your copy of audacity so it can be played on the old-fashioned . . . ray dee oh

So say a prayer for all of us who can't ever seem to get to that place of releasing our work. We have the material, but we just can't seem to get up the nerve to post it. I should just start doing it.

May 22, 2016

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