Niklas Saers' blog

Airtunes is/was Apple’s way of putting music in other rooms. It came with the Airport Express, but when the Airport Extreme was updated, Airtunes was nowhere to be found. Worse, Airtunes can only be streamed to one target?!? Now that Apple has released yet two new WiFi audio products, the iPod touch and the iPhone, why does they not include Airtunes capabilities? They should be able to both stream music and have music streamed to them! Apple, where is Airtunes heading? I still want the same music in every room of my apartment.

Too cool! Today I found pdf which is Pure Data’s take on mxj. It’s supposed to be API compatible with mxj, which is great because that’s what I use for all my Java-based externals. Suddenly I feel like I’m in the open again after having been digging myself further and further into Max/MSP. Don’t get me wrong, Max/MSP is nice but Pure Data is closer to my heart. Well, as far as software goes, anyways.

David has written new instructions on compiling Max/MSP externals using XCode

Trying to research what areas of Greece the eight church modes came from I used Google Maps. But to my surprise, neither searching for geographic places nor getting details of Greek cities worked very well with Google Maps for Mac. I hope Google will aquire more detailed shots for cities outside the US and make searches available also for historic places such as for instance Troy, where according to Mattheson the Phrygians with their mode lived.

According to Kulturnytt on NRK Alltid nyheter, iTunes music store is coming to Norway April 28th. Does this mean it’s coming to Sweden and Denmark at the same time?

Miller Puckette is writing a book on Theory and Techniques of Electronic Music. The drafts are available for download.

According to a mathematician and his student, violins are hard to play, and they go on explaining why.

I finished my first external Pure Data object, a note determining object. This object takes in the number of Hz a note is measured to be and outputs what note it is (the low A on a piano being 1, going up to 88), determining how many cent off it is and how many Hz extra there is (i.e, 415Hz = A flat (tone 47), one cent (minus 0.174Hz) low. Fourth output is a text with the note name, in this case Ab. This object uses equal temperament and was just an excercise for me to see if it can be done.

Here’s a screen shot:

The code is copyrighted Niklas Saers, 2004. I place the code under the two clause BSD license meaning I merely ask any redistribution, whether in source or binary, to reproduce this copyright.

I decided I prefer writing normal logic in a language I’m used to, so I went looking for a Python-external for Pure Data. And sure enough, I found Thomas Grill‘s py/pyext (built upon flext, a C layer for Python externals). I didn’t figure out how to install the binaries (didn’t take the time to experiment) so I just compiled them up. Works great.

Writing externals for this is supersimple:

class example(pyext._class):
  _inlets=2
  _outlets=1

  def _anything_1(self,args):
    print "inlet 2:",args
    self._outlet(1,1)

  def _anything_2(self,args):
    print "inlet 2:",args
    self._outlet(1,2)

This little code should be an external that prints out the argument it receives and sends the inlet number it received the signal on to the outlet.