Cheap DualShock

I recently got a chinese knock-off USB DualShock Controller (like what's used with playstation) and I've been playing with that and rejoice (you can download it here) I've been using it with Ableton Live pretty much like they show in this forum post.

The main reason I got the thing was so that my wife and I can play with some NES emulators and other questionably free things, but Nesticle is stupid and doesn't recognise it. Fortunately for me autohotkey allows access to the joystick to emulate key-strokes, which after a bit of coding makes it bearable, but I need to take some time to perfect the script & make it work 100%

With Ableton Live's key-mapping ability I might just do-away with rejoice, if only I could figure out a decent way to send the actual joystick data to Live in a way that works well.

Originally when trying to get the DualShock controller to work, I figured I would use PureData's [hid] object. Unfortunately I was on a windows machine, which uses [hidin], which is nowhere near as functional as hid, so none of the buttons would register anything.With hidin the D-Pad, joysticks & select/start were the only buttons working; but with hid they all worked perfectly. maybe I'm just missing some minor detail, but I'm definately not using OSC just to access hid to make a $10 controller work properly.

As I look at the controller, I can't help but to be tempted to re-case it with arcade buttons & replace the joysticks with knobs (2 each) to be a custom ableton controller, but I'll wait til after the numark scratch deck comes out to see if it's worth-while, I mean look at this thing, imagine using that as a HID with ableton live? heck, maybe they'll even release one AS a hid for controllerists.

Scratch Deck Controller Preview from semantik on Vimeo.

Anyhow, this has gone on long enough, so if all goes as planned I will post some source code later this week for comment & prosperity.

Ubuntu on pIII

If any of you keep up to tabs on my twitter, almost a week ago I installed Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty jackalope) on an old pIII donated to me by my father in law. It's got under 400mb of memory, a painfully slow proccessor, and I'm sure would crumble under the pressure of any windows distro.

With ubuntu though, it's practically a speed demon. I mean I've noticed a few slow-downs with Multi-tabbed browsing & multi-desktop stuff running at the same time, but this computer was about to be taking up a landfill.

I've been wanting to have another dev environment for some time now, and my collection of "broken" computers are far too broken to run period let alone install an OS. They've got BIOS problems, drives missing/broken, so I'm quite happy to have this new member of my network.

I've never really used a 'nix distro actually installed on a machine. I've played with pureDyne, Damn Small Linux, and Knoppix Live CD distro's and they're all great in their own way. The problem I've had with Live CDs is that they're hogging my CD drive, you can't install or change anything, and on some of them it's really confusing to mount an USB key, or even the hard drive.

The installation proccess with ubuntu was really easy (expecially on a machine I planned on making ubuntu-only.) I popped in the disk, filled out some forms, and let it chug away.

Mounting drives is now as easy as plugging them in.

My only issue now is that my internet connection is shite and upgrading, or installing anything is daunting (because if it fails, you have to start again.) But perserverence is key, and I'm sure someday I'll get a good connection.

I've been trying to install Pd-extended (the one ubuntu serves through apt-get is vanilla) But it's got 8 files that need to be upgraded & sure enough my connection craps out half-way through. so hopefully soon I'll have some fun playing with the linux-only capabilities in pureData.

Until then, I'll just enjoy the pre-installed games (they're crazy-fun) and keep trying.

update:

Ok. i figured out how to get a list of packages Pd needs installed, and now I'm only missing one.

It was pretty easy to find the list, just click the details button... the smaller files were easily downloaded & installed, the only one giving me headaches now is libflite1, it's like 14.1mb, and keeps failing on me. I downloaded it & some other attachments on a flash drive so hopefully this will get me on my way to actually installing Pd-extended.

New Year, new stuff...

Yeah, happy new year everybody ... The Krampus didn't get me this year, and saint nick was very good to me. I got a microKorg, and DS-10, and a Beadazzler; so very very busy the past couple of weeks making all sorts of sounds, and putting studs in my gig-bags.

The microKorg sounds so freakin' sweet, and has some great features and the knobs feel GREAT (but weird, I'm used to sticky Moog Rogue knobs. these move too smoothly) ... I'm very in love with the patch-editor that you can nab from their site. I've never really played with midi before, I mean, I've USED midi, but never anything with sys-ex, which is awesome ... I'm gonna try playing with pureData into this, controlling the midi, then editing the sound somehow, might even bring the arduino into the fun if I can get my hands on some midi jacks, I wanna be doing some fun stuff likethis : http://www.larsby.com/johan/diytar/ (Arduino + microKorg) .

DS-10 is also AWESOME... the real cart has a little cleaner graphics than diplodicus... but that's neither here nor there... it's all fun in the end.

Also I signed up for twitter today to play around with that ... Probably build something for flashDen or what-not with their API, maybe hook up an arduino and have it tweet every time a flea farts, who knows, it's there ... displaying the minutia of a lot of people's lives...

Hooray for sound.

I've been playing with PD almost daily since the move, and boy is it fun... it's even better with LoopBe1 an internal midi loop which let's you send and receive midi data in the machine.

I've found alot of stuff on chip-tunes and Lo-Fi sounds for PD on the web. Most notibly mmonoplayer.com has emulated the sound chips from several classic consoles. http://mmonoplayer.com/mspexternals.php They're mainly patches for MAX/MSP but some of the good stuff is available for PD as well.

loads of fun

PureData rocks, add on AudioPint & it KILLS

I've been playing around with PureData for about a week now, and it's so much fun and easy to use. I built a metronome with tap-tempo and BPM setting in about an hour.

You can also use pureData to make soft-synths that are midi controlled, and even use it to process audio being sent into your sound card. Low on cash? want a new guitar effect? write it in PD, plug into your computer & bam, amazing sound-warping possibilities.

But what about live ?? do I have to carry around my wimpy laptop? or my huge desktop ? NO that's where audiopint comes in, possibly the best/coolest idea I've seen so far. It's a near-indestructible pelican case full of computer hardware allowing you to run all your pureData patches. live.

drop it? who cares, pelican cases are like the little-black-box on airplanes.

check it all out:

http://audiopint.org/

http://puredata.info/

and lastly, a pelican case torture test.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgEefnTeOGU