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Second Flight / Eternal Blaze, Bleeper-Style (Bawami PC speaker demo [rev 98])

Posted on May 10th, 2012 in Music, Programs, Videos.

Yes, Bawami can play on the PC speaker! Here, you can see my MIDI player doing a few things that my old Bleeper Music Maker never could (such as pitch-bends, and working on Windows 7!).

The wonderfully detailed MIDIs played here are made by SX. The songs are “Second Flight” (OP theme of Onegai☆Twins, TV ver) and “Eternal Blaze” (OP theme of Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha A’s, TV ver).

[Watch in HD]

BaWaMI is a work-in-progress program of mine. It’s designed to play MIDI files (or live MIDI input) on the soundcard, with instruments being made from a filtered “Basic Waveform”. However! I decided to add support for using the PC speaker as much as possible. For Bleeper Music Maker, MIDI support was merely an addition, but Bawami was designed for MIDI from the start. This means it has a knowledge of pitch-bends, vibrato and instrument volume envelopes, which are all put to use when it controls the PC speaker.

Also, Bawami communicates with the PC speaker’s timer chip on the motherboard directly and can tell it to simply “start” making sound and worry later about when to stop it. BMM could only tell Windows to “beep” for a given duration, and since it couldn’t look into the future to see when it should stop, it had to repeat many short beeps, which sounded bad when only playing one note.

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Bawami Portamento Bug [rev 96]

Posted on April 27th, 2012 in Music, Programs.

The first run after attempting to add portamento support to my MIDI player amused me, so I grabbed my camcorder and recorded it. I should probably mention that it now works with single notes (per MIDI channel), but sounds out-of-tune if more than one note plays, as all notes stop “sliding” towards the new pitch as soon as the first one reaches its new pitch. Shouldn’t be too hard to fix.

[Watch in HD]

And yes, that is a Yuru Yuri folder in the taskbar. I needed some light relief after Madoka, okay?

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Trying 1970s Beam Splitter On Panasonic Lumix G3 [3D]

Posted on March 6th, 2012 in Videos.
Tags: ,

I got hold of an old Pentax 3D stereoscopic beam splitter manufactured in the late 1970s and thought “Why not try it on my digital camera?”. So here we are! The splitter effectively turns the lens into a 3D lens, giving 2 views of the same scene side-by-side, from a slightly different perspective (shifted sideways).

[Watch in 3D - YouTube can't play embedded videos in 3D!]

I had considered using it while recording laser shows in the future, but because of the wide separation, and highly zoomed view required for it to work, that would probably just result in headaches when viewing it. Plus, the view is tall and narrow, which is not ideal for laser shows, where the beams tend to stay above eye level. Oh well, it’s still fun to play around with.

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Random Macro Clips

Posted on March 1st, 2012 in Random, Videos.

I got a cheap macro lens filter and took some videos of close-ups. Lens is 20mm (35mm equiv: 40mm) at F1.7 for a ridiculously shallow depth of field (only a tiny part, distance-wise, is in focus). I cropped the 1920×1080 video (instead of scaling it) so that detail isn’t wasted when viewing at 720p. The camera is a Panasonic Lumix G3.

[Watch in HD]

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Night-time Driving

Posted on February 27th, 2012 in Music, Random, Videos.

I got a new lens for my Lumix G3 camera. Its aperture can open as far as F1.7, so I wanted to try it out in the dark. However, driving was a stupid idea as the lens doesn’t have optical image stabilisation to reduce the shaking thanks to the well-maintained British roads. I tried to reduce shaking a bit in software afterwards, but it’s more distracting than helpful (I should build some kind of stabilising rig). After 02:45, there’s no software shake reduction. I was focussing manually throughout the video, which isn’t easy at F1.7 as the depth of field is so shallow.

[Watch in HD]

Colours are also corrected in editing. At 00:39, I attached a UV filter, which unintentionally added lots of flares from bright lights. I thought they looked nice at the time, but I got annoyed with them after re-watching the video for the 5th time.

My brother was driving, playing some music of his. You can find the music he’s made here. This particular track is “Remember This“.

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Lumix G3 sustained burst speed (this video is not useful to anyone)

Posted on February 25th, 2012 in Random, Videos.

3232×1824 (6MP) at ~4 photos per second with a class-10 SDXC card. At this speed, this is the highest resolution at which it can take photos non-stop. 4592×3448 (16MP) at 4 photos per second is possible, too, but the cache fills up after about 6-10 photos and then the speed drops massively.

With a higher shutter speed and lower ISO (yes, it seems it does some processing to reduce noise), the burst speed would be ever so slightly higher (although the cache will probably fill up). On a bright day, maybe I’ll repeat the test with some different settings.

[Watch in HD]

By the way, this video is not useful to anyone.

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Printer, why you no like Danbooru?

Posted on February 25th, 2012 in Random, Videos.

I would clearly find no use for this feature. </troll>

[Watch in HD]

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~Shining In The Sky~ (Clannad OST) on Bawami [rev 93] [HD]

Posted on February 19th, 2012 in Games, Music, Programs, Videos.

I’ve added support for reverbs to Bawami, my MIDI player. Also, there’s a new internal view here – scrolling text which shows every MIDI message played, and how it is interpreted. There are dozens of other changes, too, but the only other one audible in this video is support for the “maracas” percussive instrument (actually a tambourine in the original music).

[Watch in HD]

This is my MIDI software synth “BaWaMI” (Basic Waveform MIDI), so-named because it makes all its sound from one of 6 basic waveforms (sine, square, triangle up/down, saw or noise) with a low/high-pass filter applied (and now, reverb too). I’ve not yet released it yet, as there are still issues that need to be fixed before it goes public, but I’ll keep uploading these “preview” videos as I make improvements. =)

Here, it’s playing a MIDI (which I didn’t make) of the music 「空に光る」 (“Shining in the Sky”), from the anime Clannad (I believe it’s from the anime rather than the visual novel).

Channel 9 is supposed to play as percussion here, but my program currently only supports percussion on channel 10, so I told Bawami to at least play it as something percussive-sounding (a taiko drum).

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Just testing Bawami [rev 93]

Posted on February 19th, 2012 in Music, Programs, Videos.

I might need to fix this.

Whenever I make a change to the code, there’s usually something not quite right at first – that’s what testing is for! This time, I tried to make a big change. Of course, after making big changes, we get big bugs. =D

[Watch in HD]

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Bawami Preview [rev 92] (Touhou 06: Lunar Clock ~ Luna Dial)

Posted on January 31st, 2012 in Music, Programs, Touhou.

Although its been in a couple of my videos, I’ve not made a video dedicated to it – so, this is a demonstration of a new program I’ve been working on since February 2010. It’s called BaWaMI (Basic Waveform MIDI Software-Synthesizer), because it’s a MIDI file player that makes sound using only basic waveforms and a low-pass filter (hey, at least I was able to think up a name for once!). When I gave up working on Bleeper Music Maker, it’s basically because I started dedicating my attention to Bawami. But don’t worry! Bawami can play on the PC speaker too. =D

Here, it’s playing ZUN’s MIDI of the stage 5 boss (Sakuya Izayoi) theme, from his game “Touhou 06: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil“. Actually, it’s a slightly modified version that uses a “Synth Bass” instrument instead of “Slap Bass”, as I haven’t coded the slap bass instrument yet. Bawami misinterprets the pitch-bend sensitivity in this video, and as a result, the pitch-bends are overly exaggerated. ^^;

[Watch in HD]

By default, Bawami has 24 internal “sound channels”, meaning it can play up to 24 notes (or sounds) at once (after that, old notes will start being cut). There’s a setting to change this number, but I leave it at 24 in this video because the internal view (black window) can only show 24 sound channels at most. By the way, that internal view shows 2 tables – one shows information about each sound channel (such as the volume, panning, waveform, frequency), and the other shows information about each MIDI channel (pitch-bend, number of notes playing). Coloured lines appear between the 2 tables to show which sound channels are being used to play notes on which MIDI channel.

This program is the first one I’ve made where I focussed on trying to make it look nice from the start (although I took inspiration for the design from GASHISOFT’s “GXSCC” MIDI player).

The program is not quite ready to be released to the public yet, but I’m working on it! I’ll probably post more videos like this to show off new things that I add to the program, just as I did with Bleeper Music Maker. And, of course, I’ll record a video of it controlling the PC speaker, too. ;D

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