Time Keeps On Slippin' Slippin'...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
I feel bad about leaving that previous post up for 5 days, especially since Matrixsynth just turned five (CONGRATS!) and he posts more in a week than I do in a year. In my personal opinion, though, he needs to be medicated. He’s making the rest of us look bad.
Anyhow, the Bandcamp experiment is a smashing success. I will say that we used to move a lot more units when we printed real CDs and stuff. On the other hand, it was a gigantic pain in the ass to pack and ship them all (Hello, four trips to the post office in one day) and it’s really, really nice to have making the album itself be the hard part of the operation. I’ll put up a numbers post as soon as I have a bigger pool of data, but suffice to say that my experience with Bandcamp is, on the whole, quite positive.
The album is also in iTunes now if that’s your thing. Since the audience here is largely musicians, a majority of whom have released music digitally, I won’t go in to the vagaries of why I’d rather have a Bandcamp purchase than an iTunes one, given the choice, but it should be fairly obvious even to run-of-the-mill consumers.
And our newest game show: Feature Or Bug? While we build these AD products, there are a lot of cases of Shit Just Not Working Right. I’m generally in favor of trying to harness the event for repeatability, and Adam is generally in favor of making everything so it doesn’t, like, crash and stuff. Somewhere in the middle is where our product line lives. Now, before all the “I’m with boobs” comments come, which will make Adam look bad and me look cool, it is worth mentioning that the bug that resulted in that particular audio file is absolutely not something that can be included in anything. It’s a seriously unstable situation, and making the customer’s system freeze up is generally accepted to be a Bad Thing.
But that said, it does sound kind of cool, doesn’t it?
10 comments
Oh, it does sound cool. Yes indeed. But I used to use Metal Machine Music as a lullaby. I smell a remix contest, though.
-WGP
I have several records from about ten to twelve years ago in which that clip would fit right in.
The trouble with functions like that once made stable and repeatable is that they are often insta-ten-to-twelve-years-ago one trick pony functions, which make for good comedy but poor music.
does sound cool if you want to sound like Oval or someone on tigerbeat6 in the late 90's. ;)
but i liked it.. and my first thought was "circuit bent trance". there is some weird wonderful stuff happening in that sound clip. you guys must have a good time making things... in between all the hard parts anyways.
glad the bandcamp thing worked out.. i hope they get their label functions up soon.
Sounds like prime fodder for an Audio Damage "we dropped it and it sort of broke" sample library product. Every quality gene lab needs a pit of frisky mutants out back...
The sample library idea is a good one. As CR said, we really can't package and sell software that's in the sort of state in which that software was in when it emitted those noises, even though the noises are kind of cool at times. The problem is that since the software is literally doin it rong, all bets are off as far as its operation is concerned. On my system it might happily make strange noises with no other ill effect. It might do the same on your system, or it might make no sound at all, or it might cause everything to crash abruptly, or it might seem to work just fine for hours on end and then decide to crash when you happen to be on stage in front of a paying audience of 50,000. Dull as it may seem, predictability and reliability remain a high priority here at the Audio Damage Research Labs (Rocky Mtn. division).
However, we could record and preserve such noises for posterity (if not profit), I suppose. Usually I don't bother since, well, typically I'm trying to get on with fixing the problem rather than reveling in it. One of the most interesting sounds I've heard come out of a computer occurred when I was building the Pluggo vocoder. Something was wrong with the logic that set the filter frequencies, and I happened to be listening to it when (I think) all of the filters suddenly jumped from their nominal settings to something near 0Hz. This produced a wonderful cluster of resonant twang-like sounds, sort of like a dozen stretched metal cables being struck with a hammer or something. I said "I think" because I was never able to recreate the sound, much as I tried. I do wish I'd been recording everything coming out of my audio interface at the time.
I will admit that the possibility of remixes did cross my mind when I posted that sample.
--Adam
Hmm. That sort of summarizes the fact that most of Mr. Devine's output is due to malfunctioning software. That could've been his "mainstream ballad" piece, although it's kinda static to be his output. :D
Having said that, yes, it's kinda cool. I actually thought about continuing processing that to turn it into a nice polyphonic pad - I better ask Adam ask his permission...
More clips?
I think a few AD Sample Libraries of such sounds available on Bandcamp could be a nice little addition to your already very interesting offerings...
_aKido
For clarity, I've updated my post to state that the recording is made available under the Creative Commons terms stated here:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
(No, I don't harbor illusions about being able to enforce ownership of things that I post on the web, but since Peppe was polite enough to raise the issue of permissions of use I thought I should present an answer.)
--Adam
I'm with Adam, it just sounds like a bad day at the office to me ;0)
The whole 'Feature Or Bug' sound thing reminds me how useful a pre-record buffer is in a location recorder. The ability to record what happened 10 seconds ago is very, very useful...
I'm guessing a pre-record buffer could be a useful thing for you Adam.
Hugo
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