Chris McCormick - News http://mccormick.cx/news Chris McCormick - News en Copyright 2008- Chris McCormick 60 chris@mccormick.cx mccormick.cx/news Openlab OpenNight tonight entries/openlab-opennight-tonight http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/openlab-opennight-tonight Openlab OpenNight flyer

Thursday 22nd of October, 2009 @ 7:30pm

The Roebuck Pub (SE1 4YG)

  • Rob Munro
  • Jonny Stutters
  • Ryan Jordan
  • Chris McCormick
  • Cane Toad Orchestra

I'm probably going to play a set with my Garage Acid Lab Pd patches, if I can get it together in time.

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/tags/music Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:10 CDT
cc65 2.13 release entries/cc65-2.13 http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/cc65-2.13 Woohoo, Ullrich von Bassewitz has made a new release of everyone's favorite 8bit compiler, cc65 - the first in a while.

cc65 has C and runtime library support for many of the old 6502 machines, including

  • The Commodore VIC20, C16/C116, C64, C128, C116, Plus/4, 510 (aka P500), the 600/700 family and newer PET machines (not 2001).

  • The Apple ][ and successors.

  • The Atari 8 bit machines.

  • GEOS for the C64 and C128.

  • The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

  • The Supervision console.

  • The Oric Atmos.

  • The Lynx Console.

This is the compiler that I used to create aSid, a program which turns your commodore64 into a synthesizer.

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/tags/music Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:09 CDT
Garage Acid Lab entries/garage-acid-lab http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/garage-acid-lab

The zipfile under the image above contains a Pure Data patch which procedurally generates a virtually infinite number of acid and breakbeat loops. I've found that it's quite a lot of fun to play with!

Start by loading the patch called 0_START.pd and then turn up the volume and the cutoff. After that hit the big red button a few times until you hear something you like.

I was making it into an RjDj scene, but I am not really sure if I'll ever get around to finishing it.

Garage Acid Lab screenshot

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/tags/music Sat, 26 Sep 2009 12:09 CDT
cryptolect entries/cryptolect http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/cryptolect This is a free album of breakbeats, bloop-bleeps, and guitars which I never properly released. So now I am. It is Creative Commons licensed, so feel free to download, copy, share it if you like it.

Enjoy!

cryptolect

It would be nice if a few more people hear it, so if you like it I would really appreciate it if you blog/tweet or whatever about it.

This album was composed with a type of old school software called a tracker early this decade, which was and still is often used to make video game music.

Thanks for listening.

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/tags/music Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:08 CDT
Two London gigs this week entries/two-london-gigs-this-week http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/two-london-gigs-this-week I am playing two gigs in London this week. The first one is a livecoding gig, which will be my first time livecoding, so I'm a bit nervous that I will be really boring. I will basically be constructing Pd patches and sequences from scratch.

The second one is an Ill FM gig which will be broadcast on the radio. I'll be doing my normal Pd-with-the-laptop-lid-closed-and-a-midi-controller set.

Wednesday night

++ PUBCODE2 ++

Part two in the first series of livecoded music events in London.

http://toplap.org/uk/

Live coding is a new direction in electronic music and video, and is starting to get somewhere interesting. Live coders expose and rewire the innards of software while it generates improvised music and/or visuals. All code manipulation is projected for your pleasure.

When: 7pm - 11pm, Wednesday 5th August 2009

http://toplap.org/uk/event/pubcode2/

Featuring: chr15m (making machines that make machines make music) MCLD (beatboxing + livecoding, is it possible?) Yee-King + Click Nilson (algorithmic choreography) openSlub (crowdsourced livecoding)

Place: The Roebuck 50 Great Dover Street London SE1 4YG

Map

Door tax: Free

Tube: Borough (5 mins walk) London Bridge (9 mins walk)

More info: http://toplap.org/uk/

Thursday night

Ill FM at The Others, Stoke Newington, N1 5SA, from 8pm

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/tags/music Sun, 02 Aug 2009 14:08 CDT
Free music by Chun Lee entries/free-music-by-chun-lee http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/free-music-by-chun-lee Whoa, this Creative Commons licensed album by Chun Lee rules so much! How have I not heard this before now? I have met Chun in person once just before he left for Taipei last year, and I already knew he was a great audio artist from the video he made with Olivier Laruelle, which is called 'Glass Cloud' and is also a song from this release. For some reason it's taken me until now to download and listen to the full album.

Anyway, it's really nice stuff. I am blown away by how much great music there is out there now released for free under Creative Commons licenses.

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/tags/music Wed, 17 Jun 2009 06:06 CDT
OpenLab 5 : Cafe OTO, London, 25th April 2009 entries/OL-5 http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/OL-5 If yr in London, come check this out tommorrow. I am playing a set using Pd, during the performances section, which should be a lot of fun.

OpenLab 5 : Cafe OTO, 25th April 2009

Openlab are providing a day of workshops & presentations about opensource software, and performances in the evening at Cafe OTO, Dalston. There is a venerable lineup of OpenLab members providing some in depth knowledge during the day and some great performances at night. The preliminary line up goes like this:

DAY: Workshops & Presentations : 12 - 5pm (free entry).

NIGHT: Performances : 7:30pm - 12:30am (5 pounds entry) - doors 7pm

Presentations

Workshops

  • Fluxus (Dave Griffiths) : (free, 1-2hrs, max 10) The venerable OpenGL/scheme environment. http://www.pawfal.org/dave/index.cgi?Projects/Fluxus

  • APODIO (Julien Ottavi) : (1hrs, max 20) Gnu/Linux multimedia distribution LiveDVD

  • Introducing Processing for Visual Artists (Evan Raskob) : (10 pounds, 2hrs, max 20)

Performances

You are all very welcome - see you there.

MORE INFO : openlab

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/tags/music Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:04 CDT
maxmod audio library for NDS and GBA entries/maxmod-audio-library-for-nds-and-gba http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/maxmod-audio-library-for-nds-and-gba Wow, huge news. There is finally, after all these years, an awesome free and open source audio playing library for the Nintendo DS and GBA. Hooray! This is big news for me as Looper Advance has been built against the non-Free Krawall library for years now and it's always irked me, quite appart from making the GPL license on Looper Advance invalid, and probably illegal.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to update Looper Advance soon and then I can release it properly as 100% Free Software.

MaxMod appears to be pretty comprehensive in that its API provides for mod-playing, sample-playing, and direct access to streaming buffers. This basically means you can write apps which mix and match all three types of audio playback.

maxmod

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/tags/music Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:04 CDT
Some good tunes entries/some-good-tunes http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/some-good-tunes Yo, this is a killer live set by Maddest Kings Alive who is also my periodical co-collaborator in Chrism + Fenris whenever we are in the same city. Bit-tune lurve and artfully selected chunky loops, this live set really is The Business!

Also good and recently blogged on Offworld is Leaves by Mattison. It's a wicked irie dub of chiptune source material by the artist.

Who needs the record labels? Not me.

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/tags/music Sat, 18 Apr 2009 12:04 CDT
New RjDj release entries/rjdj-release http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/rjdj-release Moose and I are in Barcelona for a couple of weeks while I get properly up to speed on the RjDj iPhone code which I haven't really been involved enough with so far, concentrating mainly as I have on the server side of things. We are really digging Barcelona and its lovely relaxed atmosphere, great food, and amazing buildings everywhere. We have even tried to pick up a little local vocabulary. Today we plan on taking a day trip up to Montserrat by cable car.

The social and server side features I've been working on for the last 5 months for Reality Jockey Ltd. along with the rest of the team, are finally online, co-incident with an update of the main app and the albums being made free for a limited time. This is in huge part due to Andie, who really kept us all focussed and moving constantly towards this target. Live site, at last! Feels great.

This is pretty exciting for me as it's the first time a project that I've been a part of has made it onto the Boing Boing network. Offworld post, yay!

In addition to that, RjDj chose to feature a couple of my scenes, which I worked on in my spare time outside company hours: CanOfBeats, and GhostWave, which has propelled them to into the 'most popular' position on the website. They never would have been finished in time if it was't for Frank and Florian's hard work at the last minute, fixing all my horrible bugs and adding nifty features.

My excitement is only tempered by the fact that I wrote a large amount of the server side code, so if it collapses in a heap under the weight of the ogling internet it's probably my fault. It seems to be holding up alright so far though, with most of the heavy content in Amazon's S3 cloud, and liberal use of FastCGI and LightHTTPd. The backend is mostly written in Django + Python if you'd like to know. Python is a king amongst programming languages and it means that I go to work each day looking forward to writing code instead of dreading null pointers, buffer overflows, lack of type flexibility, arcane syntax, and all of the other horrid issues which plague other popular programming languages.

The other huge piece of amazing tech that I should mention and which makes up probably the bulk of the client side code is the free and Open Source (BSD license) Pure Data DSP patching language by Miller S. Puckette. Whilst not a wonderful general purpose programming language, it does one thing and does it superbly. All of the RjDj scenes are actually just Pd patches with a fancy image or two and some custom externals running.

Good times!

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/tags/music Sat, 04 Apr 2009 05:04 CDT