Phasik Flux

New Job

So I’m starting a new job today!  It’s going to be exciting, but sadly I’ll have less time to dedicate to other projects.  However, this could also be a good thing by forcing me to focus my attention on only a couple projects at a time.

Plan B

Ok, so I know I’ve been promising a new mix for a very LONG time now.  I admit, I’m a bit of a perfectionist, but lately whenever I start a project lately, either something unforeseen happens (ie: headphones destroyed in a tragic accident involving a disobedient 4 year old), or I get distracted with the many other projects I’m working on.

The large backlog of mixes for the original broadcasted LyraPhase radio show is now seeming quite insurmountable.  Because I have so much new music that I want to play, this has become an irritation to me.  I would really love to remix all my old sets, however I’m really itching to play some new stuff too.

Here’s the new plan, in easy to digest steps:

1. Create new mixes, or choose an old set to remix
2. Add new music
3. PROFIT!

So I’m going to either abandon the old numbering scheme I had, or simply insert new mixes as I see fit.  The goal is to give myself more incentive to release more regularly and make the show more structured in the process.  I’ve already taken steps toward completing 2 mixes.  I’ve added new tracks and restructured my promised psytrance mix “PsycheDatum” (aka: LyraPhase 004), and I just completed take 1 of a brand new dark minimal mix which I’m currently calling “LyraPhase 004.0 – Out of (REM) Phase”.

Overall, I’m much happier with the track selection for the original 004, and I’m more excited to play some of my top rated picks from the past couple of months.  Finally got my mixing setup in working order, and I’m playing with my new Korg nanoPAD as well.  I’m in the process of mastering 004.0, and may just need to touch up a couple parts due to some new MIDI mappings in Traktor that I’m not quite used to yet.

Either way, I’m feeling a large surge in musical motivation that I hope will continue through the summer.  This time I promise I’ll make a release before the end of the month.

So I finally got my KRK Rockit 8’s back from getting their tweeters replaced!  I’m extremely happy about having a good reference system to work with now.  It was quite hard to go back to standard consumer speakers after getting so used to the quality of the Rockits for so long.

Podcast:

Anyway, expect a remixed re-release of LyraPhase 004 – PsycheDatum soon!  Because I’m not planning on releasing many Psytrance mixes, I wanted to redo this one with a new track selection.  I may be releasing the original alongside it just because it contains a couple tracks I decided to scratch out from the setlist, yet I really did like quite a bit.  The main reasons for the re-release of this one is that I was unhappy with the flow, and the fact that I seemingly couldn’t stop myself from putting multiple tracks from the same artists on it.  I definitely blame this on the disorganized and frantic setlist planning done back when I had to make & practice a new set each week and still get myself through those last college courses in the fall.

I’m quite self critical sometimes, and really was expecting better although I was very rushed at the time.  Plus, I also have had a chance to give quite a large number of new tracks a listen in the past couple months, and just had to add a couple of them to the set.

Either way, if Psytrance isn’t your bag, then you probably won’t care either way.  In that case, look forward to LyraPhase 005, in which I made an adventurous attempt to mix Electro, House, Progressive, and even a bit of Trance-ish stuff.  It was a bit experimental, that’s for sure.  Still I’m really looking forward to doing some completely new sets, especially with all the excellent Minimal and Tech House I’ve been listening to lately.

On to other news:

Job Offer:

I’ve finally got a job offer!  Really looking forward to interviewing for a hardware (EE) related job this time.  I really have been needing some good electronics experience to put on my resume.  Definitely feeling like I need to brush up on my skills though.  Wish me luck!

Sound Production:

In the meantime, I’m checking out some sound engineering and production stuff while I still have the time to do so.  So far I’ve started reading “Computer Sound Design Synthesis Techniques and Programming” by Eduardo Reck Miranda.  I had no idea where to start, and this book seems like it’s a good point.  The first chapter goes over some basics of sound synthesis, and some real basic stuff about audio sampling, file formats, and ultra basic programming concepts.  It’s definitely written for someone who doesn’t know much about programming and how computers work, but skipping over those parts just makes me feel more productive anyway .  The way in which it describes sound generation using oscillators and function generators is also very intuitive from an Electrical Engineering standpoint.  I hope to learn a lot quickly from this book, and move on to other sources more directly applicable to Ableton and VST synths.

Any suggestions for reading material on electronic music production would be greatly appreciated!

On Friday & had a quite eventful day involving a bunch of lucky and happy coincidences, along with an amazing spurt of ultra-productivity!  Although it was an interesting day, that’s not what this post is about.

At one point, I was working on creating a CUE sheet for episode 004 and realized that GoldWave was clobbering all the PERFORMER attributes for every track in the original CUE sheet I imported!  That was definitely no good, and really irritated me at the time.

My current workflow for CUE-ing a mix is as follows:

1. Export tracks from Traktor to a directory (ie: “~/Music/LyraPhase/004″), then make sure tracks are in order & named in the format: 01 – Artist – Trackname.mp3
2. Make a tracklist text file:
   ~/Music/LyraPhase/004$ ls -l --color=never > LyraPhase_004.txt
3. Run my magical script to generate a CUE file with empty INDEX points:
   ~/Music/LyraPhase/004$ tracklist2cue.pl LyraPhase_004.txt
NOTE: all tracks have initial cutpoints of 00:00:00
Opening tracklist file: LyraPhase_004.txt
Writing cue file to: ./LyraPhase_004.cue
4. Import the blank CUE file into GoldWave, listen, do audio processing stuff, then edit the track INDEX points.
5. Save the wav & CUE files.
6. Find out some extra stuff is gone after GoldWave got through with it

Enter perl:

So since I really like GoldWave otherwise, I decided to go dust off my monk robes & dive into perl again.  The initial goal was to be able to read in the 2 CUE sheets, copy INDEX points from one to the other, and then save it again.  I also have been thinking about other things in the future I may want to do with CUE sheets, so I decided to try to find some perl code to do what I wanted.

After a search, I found a module on CPAN called Audio::Cuefile::Parser which really didn’t do everything I wanted, or fully support the entire CUE file specification as per the documentation here.

After 1.5 days worth of hacking at it, I’ve successfully got 1/2 of the problem solved.  So far my Audio::Cuefile::ParserPlus module will happily read in CUE sheets and print out the track information for you.  The next step is to make a file output method, which should be simple now that the hard part of parsing in things via regex is finished ^_^

Current code snapshot can be found at my GitHub Repository
Happy Hacking  ^_^

- DJ Phasic