Something Unreal

Here, I conneced a solar panel (via a transformer) to a sound interface as if it’s a microphone, to reveal the subtle pulsing and filckering of various light sources. If you don’t like 50 Hz, this video isn’t for you.

[Watch in HD]

Thankfully, the infrared light from my camcorder is apparently very clean (not pulsing), so I can use that to see things in the dark without affecting the sound.

The transformer is just designed to convert 230V AC to 12V DC, so its audio properties are not very good (it muffles things a lot). Ideally, I’d be using an audio transformer that’s designed to sound good, but this is all I had available. I am using it to remove the DC current that the solar panel makes, because I don’t fancy putting 17.5V into my Quad-Capture (sound interface)’s mic input. I originally tried to make a high-pass filter to remove the DC, using a capacitor and resistor, but it only worked until the capacitor became fully-charged, at which point the sound faded. It was much clearer-sounding than the transformer, but there was also a huge amount of background noise.

I want to revisit this idea in the future, especially to take it for a drive at night, listening to the street lights and car lights (since modern cars use PWM to dim the tail lights).

The 8 sets of lights are responding to the volume of playing music. Each set is made of 80 LEDs. The Arduino in my “soundcase” is controlling them, instead of controlling the 8 lights on the front of the suitcase. The cardboard box holds the original controller boxes that came with each set of Christmas lights, which have been modified (a transistor has been added to switch their outputs).

You can find out more about my soundcase by watching the second half of this video I made about the building process.

[Watch in HD]

The music used in the second part of the video is from the 2nd of 4 parts from the Commodore 64 port of the demo “Second Reality”.

I’m not sure which was harder to do – modify the controller boxes, or put the lights around the tree… -_-;;

This release fixes parallel port output, and adds an option of which parallel port address to use. The standard addresses 0378 (LPT1), 0278 (LPT2) and 03BC (LPT port on an old graphics card) are available.

I had left the parallel port output disabled by mistake again, while testing revision 16…

Usual download place~

This release fixes the bug where the text of the last file in the playlist would never return to normal (black, not bold) after having become red or blue.

Here’s the usual download place.

This is a big update, with the most notable change being playlist functionality. I’ve also sorted the playback position bug when looping audio files (until you disable looping…), and added tooltips to most controls (hold the mouse over a control such as a checkbox to see a little explanation about that control). There are also changes and bug fixes related to pitch detection (revision 14 broke logarithmic scaling while pitch detection was enabled, but it’s fixed again). I removed some controls that were broken or never even used in the history of the program, and added one. Full details are a long way below, after the page break below, which is after my waffling about the playlist system.

Here’s the usual download place.

(Click it to see full-size image)

Since the new playlist system introduces some new things, I’ll briefly go over it here. When you browse for an audio file, you can now select more than one (by holding Shift/Ctrl). If you do this, the Playlist window will appear with the queued files in a list. You can drag-and-drop more files to this list without having to use the old “Browse for audio” button. There are 2 special coloured files in the list: currently-playing and next (pre-loaded). At any time, you can double-click a file in the playlist, and the program will pre-load it as the “next” file to play, just like when you browse for an audio file while one’s already playing. However, by default, the program will automatically load the file following the currently-playing one as soon as possible, turning it blue, so that there will be no gap between the end of the current file and the start of the next file. If you like, you can set it to do this only when the current file finishes playing, so that the waveform displays won’t freeze during playback, or you can disable automatic loading entirely. That is the basic idea of the playlist system. Waveform Display has always handled 2 files at once, but it was never possible to see which 2 files you were dealing with until now.
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This version mainly fixes a “division by 0″ bug, improves PC speaker output (there’s a new “PC Speaker Settings” window!), and makes parallel port output work again (I accidentally left it disabled while debugging in revision 14). I’ve also got rid of my previous, bug-crazy attempt of getting the playback position while looping – now, playback position simply stops updating after the loop, and seeking continues to work.

Usual download link is here (now 1.97 MB), and full details of changes are below~

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This version fixes a bug which appeared when loading a new sound while one was still playing. Plus, there are lots of internal changes to improve speed (lower CPU usage), and there’s a new-but-buggy “Loop” function.

Here’s the usual download link! Because of all the changes I made to make the program more efficient, this download is actually half a kilobyte smaller than the previous version, despite me adding lots of text to “version info.txt”!

For details of everything that’s changed, please see below~

EDIT: Whoops, that EXE name had become “Waveform Attempt” again, like it was in ye olden days… Fixed. (more…)

I started making this program in late 2008 and pretty much abandoned it in 2009. But a few days ago, someone told me that they wanted a program like this, so I got my finger out and touched up a few parts, and am releasing it to the public now!

Waveform Display plays a sound file (WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, WMA) and, as the name suggests, shows a waveform of the sound as it plays. But it can additionally display the waveform on a Logitech G15 LCD, “bend” the waveform into a 640×480 picture, or send the waveform to an EasyLase. There are options to change the waveform scaling width-ways (time) and height-ways (amplitude), and there is also a VU meter with its own scaling options that can be reflected in up to 8 lights controlled via the parallel port. Playback speed can be changed from 1/8x to 8x, and it can handle files which are several hours long since it does not decode the whole file to RAM first. There are also some experimental (read: buggy and given-up on) options such as to play the sound on an internal PC speaker. There’s a very basic and glitchy pitch detection function, but it’s only designed for monophonic sounds such as speech.

(Click it to see full-size image)

You can download the program from here.

The current version is revision 13. The Miku image in the screenshot above is not included, to respect the artist. Instead, please enjoy a photo of my cat as the default picture. “version info.txt” (included in the download) has details about everything that’s new or has changed in each version. I’ve not yet made any documentation (info.txt), but I’ll do this soon and add it to the ZIP download. I’ll also add a section to the Programs page for Waveform Attempt soon.

On the night of the 24th of June, in a little underground venue, some fans got together and had an awesome time at what was the first ever entirely Touhou Project-based music event in the UK.

[Watch in HD]

The size didn’t stop everyone from having an awesome time. Several people DJ’d (including Piloru), and there were a couple of special guest acts – Masa-kun on the electric violin and Cassis and Ai-chan from the “Oh My Lord!” maid café. I helped out with fog and 2 laser beam-shows (which I’ll re-record and upload in their own videos some time), and Dnstje was kind enough to offer me his Bad Apple graphic laser show.

Is this the start of more to come?

As I was helping out, many of these video clips are all from around the DJ area, although I did try to move around a bit. Apologies for the distorting sound and grainy picture – it seems that very loud music in a dark place is not a good combination for my camcorder.

Just a quick and messy video showing the crazy-sounding interference my soundcase causes an LW/AM radio to receive.

[Watch in HD]

The soundcase is connected to the radio’s headphone socket, to give the soundcase some sound. The sound triggers the lights, which causes the interference sounds, and from then on, it’s a feedback loop.