MultiControl is by far the most popular software application I have created, as can be seen in the web traffic here on my site, and also on the download site at the University of Oslo where the app resides. This is a tiny application that passes on data from a human interface device (mouse, game controller) through either OSC or MIDI. When I first created it back in 2004, there were not so many other options.

My department, as most music departments, have been teaching software in a computer lab with a bunch of commercial (expensive) software: Notation: Finale, Sibelius Sound editing, mixing: Logic, Digital Performer, Pro Tools Sound programming: Max Writing: MS Word Spreadsheet: MS Excel Analysis: Matlab, SPSS The free software community has developed rapidly in the last years, and I now see that there are good, free and cross-platform software covering a lot of the functionality of the above-mentioned programs:

I am teaching a course in sound theory this semester, and therefore thought it was time to update a little program I developed several years ago, called SoundAnalysis. While there are many excellent sound analysis programs out there (SonicVisualiser, Praat, etc.), they all work on pre-recorded sound material. That is certainly the best approach to sound analysis, but it is not ideal in a pedagogical setting where you want to explain things in realtime.

I have opened for comments on the blog again! The comment option was closed a year ago after having received a couple of hundred thousand comments in a couple of days. Now I have updated to the latest version of WordPress, and have activated new spam filters. Hopefully, this can keep the spam out this time. At least it is worth a try. Happy commenting!

After I began using PDFCompress for minimizing PDF files, the only reason I have had for using the full Adobe Acrobat has been to combine PDFs. Now I realize that since OS 10.5 this functionality has been built into Preview. I guess I should really start reading the release notes of OSes and applications a bit more carefully, since I managed to get to 10.6 before I found out about this feature.

I was at the Musical Body conference at University of London last week and presented my work on visualisation of music-related movements. For my PhD I developed the Musical Gestures Toolbox as a collection of components and modules for Max/MSP/Jitter, and most of this has been merged into Jamoma. However, lots of potential users are not familiar with Max, so over the last couple of years I have decided to develop standalone applications for some of the main tasks.

When I got my Asus eee a few months ago I tested the built-in OS for about an hour and then decided to install Ubuntu eee (later renamed to Easypeasy) instead. I felt the Xandros OS was too limiting and wanted to test out something more powerful. One of the reasons for buying the eee in the first place was to test whether it would be useful for laptop performance, and then I needed an OS where it was possible to install Chuck, PD and SC3 without any problems.

Synchronisation is a core issue when carrying out research on multimodal sensing/acting and multimedia. My take on this has been through the work on GDIF, and we are currently implementing a GDIF/SDIF recorder/player using FTM for Max/MSP (see our ICMC2008 paper for more on this). I just came across a software called Thought Conduit{.external .text} which promises synchronisation of audio, video, annotations and even OSC-streams. This sounds very exciting and I hope to be able to test this in practice at some point.

Over the last few months I have saved up a number of drafts for blog entries, and am currently trying to get some of them online, while deleting others. Here’s one on active music software, and how both Microsoft and Apple try to get into this field. Active music is about creating solutions where the user experience is that of a participatory nature, as opposed to the (mostly) passive act of listening to pre-recorded music.

The latest beta version of Skype (for OSX only, apparently) offers something called “Skype Access”, which makes it possible to pay for access to commercial WiFi networks through a per minute basis using your SkypeOut account. I recall reading this when I downloaded the latest beta a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t think much about it before I opened my MacBook at the Brussels airport last week and saw a “do you want to pay using SkypeOut” message on screen.

I am back at work after a long vacation, and one of the first things I started doing this year was to reinstall several of my computers. There is nothing like a fresh start once in a while, with the added benefits of some extra hard disk space (not reinstalling all those programs I never use anyway) and performance benefits (incredible how fast a newly installed computer boots up!). I have been testing Ubuntu on an Asus eee for a while, and have been impressed by how easy it was to install and use.

I hadn’t thought about the lack of verb labels in Windows as opposed to OSX before I read this blog entry. The point made is that adding some meaning to the buttons we push greatly enhance the usability, since it is not necessary to read the text above the buttons. Look at the two examples below for a proof of concept: Simple idea and easy to implement!

I have been trying to create a booklet out of a standing A4 paper (the booklet size should be 105 x 297 mm), but this has proven to be much more difficult than I would have originally thought. It is a while since I have been doing things like this, and I still remember how easy it was to do such things back in the days when I used to use MS Publisher 1.

I have been using Leopard for a while, but hadn’t discovered some of the new features yet: Image adjustments Create alpha channels in images Combine PDFs Small enhancements, but they make for saving a few minutes here and there. Now I don’t have to open Photoshop or GraphicConverter to do simple image manipulation.

I heard some rumours about it earlier this year, but today I discovered the possibility of reading and writing ODT files from TextEdit. Great! {width=“320” height=“155”}

{#image489} I am doing some background research for a paper on “active music” and have been testing various audio software over the last few days. I was very excited about testing GarageBand ’08, since Apple has been shouting loudly about its new “magic” features. I have to say that I had some expectations that we would actually see some novel features here, especially since they promise a “hand-picked” band on a virtual stage.

I see that Jack is now truly multiplatform, including Windows. jackdmp is a C++ version of the Jack low-latency audio server for multi-processor machines. It is a new implementation of the jack server core features that aims in removing some limitations of the current design. The activation system has been changed for a data flow model and lock-free programming techniques for graph access have been used to have a more dynamic and robust system.

Vegard mentioned QuickTime Broadcaster in a blog entry yesterday. While QT broadcaster is certainly easy to set up and use, I have found it even easier to use some of the video broadcasting solutions in Max/MSP/Jitter. The jit.qt.broadcast object allows for QT streaming, but I have found the jit.broadcast object using RTSP to be somewhat more stable. Using Jitter also opens for all sorts of image manipulation, text overlays etc. as we are used to in the Max/MSP world.

One solution to avoiding that chime on booting your mac is to hold down the F3 key at startup. A more permanent solution is offered through the StartupSoundPrefPane which is described in more detail here.

There is now a solution for using OSC with Ableton Live available from LiveAPI.org. This is one of the first things I am going to check out as soon as I’m done with my dissertation

{.imagelink}I have received a constant stream of questions for an Intel-version of the little MultiControl software I made many years ago. MultiControl makes it easy to use any standard game controller (HID compatible) to control music software through OSC or MIDI. Still only for OS X, but a Windows version will follow at some point. A UB-version of the application is now available here, and I will try and get around to making a Windows version one day.

I recently became aware of Skim, a PDF Reader and note-taker for OS X made by the team behind BibDesk. Skim is designed to help reading and annotating scientific papers in PDF, or what they say: “Stop printing and start skimming”. While v0.2 of Skim didn’t contain much more functionality than what’s already available in Preview, v0.3 starts to become interesting. Particularly the possibilities to save and print the notes taken separately.

A Microsoft demo of surface computing, showing several prototypes of “gesture control” (what I would call action control) in software.

Bibdesk is just getting better! In version 1.3.4 they have included searching inside linked PDF files in the library. It is not as powerful as the AI search functionality in DevonThink, but it is still very, very useful. {width=“500”}

Just discovered a very nice feature in Keynote. I have been complaining about the linear structure of Keynote, but found that it is possible to get up a menu of available slides by scrolling the mouse in presentation mode (at least when using two displays). That doesn’t make Keynote presentations non-linear, but it helps a bit. {width=“450”}

Made a visualisation of the structure of my web page with this DOM Visualizer Applet. {#image451 width=“460” height=“444”}

I tried to update to 10.4.9 yesterday, but got an error message, and when booting everything hangs. I haven’t found a good solution yet, but at least I came across a list of useful startup keys, some of them being: C : Forces most Macs to boot from the CD-Rom drive instead of the internal hard drive. Only works with Apple ROM drives and with bootable CD discs. D : Forces the first internal hard drive to be the startup disk.

I had the rather unpleasant experience of trying to update to 10.4.9 last night, which crashed and left my computer hang on bootup. Trying to boot with cmd-s gave me this nice message: Load of /sbin/launchd, errno 88, trying /sbin/mach_init Load of /sbin/launchd failed, errno 88 Fortunately, after reading this blog entry, I managed to recover doing something like this: Started my MacBook with a FW-cable from another computer. Downloaded the Mac OS X 10.

I also came across a list of useful keyboard shortcuts, the most interesting being: cmd opt i - to get “Super Get Info.”, a floating window changing with each file and folder you click on. cmd opt h - Hide other applications. cmd shift 3/4 - screen capture keys. 3 capturesr the full screen, while 4 only a selection.

Strange that I didn’t see this before. Apparently, W3C has made a draft for multimodal annotation called EMMA: Extensible MultiModal Annotation markup language. The abstract of the document reads: The W3C Multimodal Interaction working group aims to develop specifications to enable access to the Web using multimodal interaction. This document is part of a set of specifications for multimodal systems, and provides details of an XML markup language for containing and annotating the interpretation of user input.

I have been looking for a lightweight spreadsheet software, as Excel isn’t in universal yet and is nearly as slow as NeoOffice to start up. Often, I only need some basic spreadsheet functionality like summing a bunch of numbers, etc. and then it isn’t worth the effort opening one of the mastodont programs. So I have been looking for something similar to TextEdit in the spreadsheet world. Strangely enough, the only program I have found so far is BC Spreadsheet.

I learn new things every day. Gisela just sent me a hint about putting those super-long URLs between brackets to avoid breaking the URL when the line is wrapped in an e-mail application: <http://www.somesite.com/a/really/long/url>

I had a discussion about which software tools I use for my research, so here is a list of the most important (in no particular order): Firefox: with adblock and mouse gestures. NetNewsWire: for handling all the blogs I am reading. MarsEdit: to write blog entries. Publishes directly to my WordPress driven blog. OmniGraffle: for making diagrams. I even made my last conference poster with this program, works great also with photos.

I have received a number of Word attachments recently. Nowadays, I only touch MS Word when I am forced to by other people, as I rely on TextWrangler, TextEdit, OpenOffice and LaTex for my various text related activities. I started to summarize why I think people should avoid Word, especially as e-mail attchments, but then I found some web pages with more well-thought and well-rounded arguments: - Manuel M T Chakravarty’s Attachments in Proprietary Formats Considered Harmful

I recently discovered that it is possible to generate PDFs with video/animation included in the file using LaTeX. Works like a charm, but unfortunately the files only work properly in Acrobat (not Preview).