Software

We have MS Teams at the University of Oslo (as in many other places), and it is increasingly used by administrative staff. Some academics use it as well, but less so in my experience. I use it when other people force me to, but I would never force others to use it. In this blog post, I explain why. No Linux support I have been using exclusively Linux-based operating systems for more than ten years. This includes Android-based phones and tablets and laptops running Ubuntu. This is partly an ideological choice, supporting Free and open-source software (FOSS). However, I would never have done it if I hadn’t experienced Linux-based products being more reliable, trustworthy, and (to me) easier to use. ...

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. Today, however, users would typically find more features in an application like Osculator or Steim’s Junxion. Still, MultiControl is downloaded hundreds of times per month, which should indicate that some people think it is interesting and useful. ...

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!

To follow up on my previous post about the differences between browser plugins, web interfaces and desktop applications, here is another post about my current rethinking of computer habits. In fact, I started writing this post a couple of months ago, when I decided to move back to using Apple Mail as my main e-mail application again. I had used Mail for a few years when I decided to test out Thunderbird last year. The most important reason for the change was the poor search functionality in Mail. True, the search function is fast, but it is very limited if you are looking for specific things. Thunderbird 3 has an improved search function with a very nice calendar view, so this seemed very tempting. Besides functionality, choosing Thunderbird over Mail was also an ideological one, since I wanted to try out using free software for all my main desktop application needs. More about that another time. ...

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. This has been a slow endeavour, and something I have been working on in between. ...

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. Then Ubuntu was an easy choice over Xandros. ...

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. There have been quite a lot of research on this over the last years, so it is great to see that this is starting to be incorporated in commercially available products. Early this year both Microsoft and Apple launched exciting new music software. The approaches are different, but both of them give users a more active music experience. ...