Software: MadTracker

Software: ModPlugTracker

It seems that tracking is a topic of interest. Marisa Olson reblogged the previous G.X post on tracking on Rhizome, and now Tom Moody has posted a followup. Tom had posted on the tracker phenomena and its historical relevance in two posts earlier this year (see post #1 and post #2), with questions about the origin of the scene. Most people might find a discussion on whether tracking was pre-, post- or proto-jungle a bit obscure, but as an examination of different tools and methods for producing music it’s pretty interesting.

For those of you who prefer action to theory, here are two more trackers: MadTracker and ModPlugTracker. Both are Windows-based, but ModPlugTracker is Open Source. And if you should want to make your sound deteriorate as though it had been recorded on warped vinyl and played a thousand times, check out the “ultimate lo-fi weapon” – the free Vinyl plugin (VST etc) from Izotope.

Art of Tracking: Renoise GUI

Want to be a digital breakbeat artist? Forget 303s, MIDI keyboards and software synths. If you want get down and dirty with sequenced music, tracking and MOD files is where it’s at. Often thought of as a hacker’s approach to music, tracking started in the Amiga demo scene as a barebones way of programming sound. It’s a bit like writing MIDI files by hand.

Kuro5hin has a good article and how-to on cutting up breakbeats with tracking. It lists possible software (such as Renoise) and gives a step-by-step breakdown of how to go about murdering the Amen Break (the biggest drum’n'bass break of all time…) For more insights into the origin of tracking culture, Salon.com has an article called MOD Love.

The Salon.com article points out that the analogy that tracking is to music what code is to software is a bit of an overstatement. Tracking, which involves writing notes and effects in hexadecimal code, is still much like sequencing. Its true significance seems to stem from the fact that tracking started as a DIY culture, by kids who had no access to professional equipment (and frequently, no musical training). But tracking also allows a mechanical approach to music that makes it attractive to practicioners of drum’n'bass, breakcore, digital hardcore or plain old noise.

Go forth and track.

The programme for Readme 100 - Temporary Software Art Factory is online. Expect project presentations, software art theory as well as live Excel art, lots of play with code, performative live perl scripting and code music.

The festival will take place in Dortmund 4-5 November, with the core actors of the software art scene strongly represented. The festival is hosted by Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund and organized by Inke Arns, Olga Goriunova, Francis Hunger and Alexei Shulgin, with Amy Alexander and Alex McLean assisting with the selection committee.

This year Readme introduces outsourcing to software art practices, a problematic but fascinating idea:

Web sites like Rent A Coder acts as connection points between coders and potential clients. Readme 100 will address some of the potential results of applying these ideas from capitalist culture to artistic practice.

Johnvey Hwang: Del.icio.us Direc.tor

At the Generator.x conference, Susanne Jaschko commented on the idea of true literacy in digital media as being unobtainable for most people. After giving several lectures where I’ve presented this aim given it has struck me that it is maybe too lofty or not even desirable for most people. But a demand for smarter and more open software should be fair enough.

Johnvey Hwang’s Del.icio.us Direc.tor is an excellent example of new ways of interaction between software and data. It is a pure Javascript frontend for the much-loved del.icio.us social bookmarking service. It runs entirely within your browser without downloading any external data, giving a nice GUI feel to the well-structured but intentionally old-school del.icio.us. So what’s so revolutionary about that? Well, the kicker is that due to the open nature of del.icio.us, Hwang is able to extend its functionality without owning the data involved or even asking for permission to do something with it.

In the commercial software and web-world, this would be a big no-no. Imagine a similar frontend for Amazon that stripped their campaign offers, recommendations and market-friendly fluff. The creator of such a tool would be served with a cease-and-desist in no time. Amazon owns not just its own information, but its right to present it in a certain way. Now any enterprising capitalist would argue that this practice is only fair, since it’s a dog-eat-dog world. And to be honest, a frontend that allowed you to browse books on Amazon but to buy them at a cheaper site hardly seems very fair. But there are plenty of other instances where an open, user-oriented data structure like that of del.icio.us would make a lot of sense.

I’m not an Open Source / FLOSS hardliner, but every time I start up Internet Explorer these days I shiver at the primitivity of the application. Compared to Firefox, it’s a closed and stupid tool. In Firefox I have about ten different plugins installed, giving me plenty of new functions, none of them cosmetic. This blog runs on [WordPress-http://www.wordpress.org/], where writing and using plugins is also delightfully easy.

Many web veterans are skeptical to the new AJAX paradigm for web applications. In a world dominated by hype and post-dotcom cynicism that shouldn’t surprise anyone. But the concept of interoperating networks of information services and user-pluggable software sure is sexy.

Software is engaged in the survival of the loopest. Each version of a script when first executed can turn out to be a Wild Type: a piece of code testing some parameter or behaviour of the system not meant to be tested by the programmer at that time. Mostly the Wild Type is on a runtime suicide mission but sometimes it hits the jackpot. Certain flaws, getting stuck in bottomless recursion for instance, prevents the user from terminating the program. Were it not for the ability of the user to jump outside the application’s loop and terminate it from there, a script fortunate enough to hit such a state becomes immortal.

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Tom De Smedt & Frederik De Bleser: NodeBox

Fredrik De Bleser just emailed to say that we had miscredited Just van Rossum as the author of the NodeBox project, when in fact it was created by him and Tom De Smedt. As he says:

We apologize for the misaccreditation and already corrected the post. Although it was written by Boris, it was actually I who inserted the Just van Rossum credit. Mea culpa.

Tom De Smedt & Frederik De Bleser: NodeBox

NodeBox is another drawing machine (or “state machine”) based on the DrawBot by Just van Rossum. Like DrawBot, NodeBox is based on Python and it offers the same great output functions: any drawing can be exported as a PDF. Furthermore, it is possible to use a wide range of python libraries like PyWordNet to create graphics and diagrams.

We’ve added a shoutbox for people who want to leave tips to good projects or just talk. Look in the left column, under categories.

We’re using a Wordpress plugin from Michiel 'McMike' Auerbach called "Roept U Maar" (”You call it” in Dutch.) The shoutbox was very easy to install, and even with some customized hacking it took only about an hour to set up and customize. You can use HTML code, so links can be coded as <a href=…> etc. We have also added a “Recent comments” and “Recent posts” feature to the article view, using a plugin from coffe2code.

Obviously, the shoutbox will be removed if abused, but we think it is a good feature. It’s all in the spirit of collaborative texts…

Texone: Tree

Texone has created several excellent libraries for Processing. His most recent release is a new version of proMIDI, allowing Processing sketches to send and receive MIDI signals. His other libraries are proHTML and proXML for parsing HTML and XML data, and proDoc for generating documentation for Processing libraries (similar to javadoc). All can be downloaded from his tools page.

Be sure to also check out the Tree project, which visualizes the structure of HTML documents as a forest of trees. Built in Processing, it uses proHTML to parse the documents and can even send MIDI signals to generate sound based on the document structure.

Freeware glitch: gleetchLAB

Via dataisnature: Giorgio Sancristoforo (aka Tobor Experiment) creates nothing less than “avant garde music authoring software”. His latest offering gleetchLAB is a full-featured tool for creating and manipulating “drones, glitches and amazing digital noises”.

The software currently runs on MacOS X only, and was created in Max/MSP. From the brochure describing the software:

The software is completely free, and can download from the Gleetchplug web site.