Dead Presidents Society:

http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/dps/

Electronic Musician Article on the group:

http://emusician.com/interviews/feature/genius_bar/

This plug-in brings the concept of effects sequencing to your host workstation, and provides an intriguing method for creating unusual sounds and rhythms.  I find the interface intuitive, and the visual design is clean and well organized.

The plug-in and manual are availble at: http://illformed.org/plugins/glitch/

I downloaded the file dblue_Glitch_v1304.zip and extracted to my vst directory.  In my case, with Ardour on Ubuntu 8.10, the vst plug-in location was /usr/lib/vst.

Now that the plug-in is copied to the appropriate directory, I launched the vst version of Ardour using the command ardourvst, opened the mixer, and added the plug-in to one track.

In order to work with Ardour, MIDI transport must be disabled in Glitch, as shown below:

Disable MIDI transport

The 4 gray squares above, along with the step envelope setting still produce one output pulse for each step, shown in the sine_440_blank region shown in the tracks screenshot below.

Unfortunately, vst plug-ins are not able to track Ardour’s tempo map, which means the Glitch sequencer is free wheeling, and not in sync with Ardour.

VST Plug-in’s are not able to track tempo

http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=2561

I bounced the Glitch output to a file and imported that back into Ardour to determine the  tempo of the output.  The Glitch output appears to be 80 bpm default, though it is not in phase with Ardour since there is no sync.  This is usable if you just chop up the output and re sync it to your project.  I tried Ardour’s rhythm ferret, but the transients weren’t detected correctly.

This screen shot shows 3 output tracks from Glitch, which were adjusted on the timeline to start in sync.  The source file is a 440 sine wave, shown on the bottom track.

Tracks Screenshot

To give you an idea of how Glitch works, the Glitch settings for the sine_440_gater region are shown here.

Gater settings

The step envelope setting was increased to 2 steps, as shown below, to hear more of each effect.  The result is shown in the sine_440_8617 region in the tracks screenshot.

Multiple effects setting 8617

Glitch is a great tool for creating new sounds, and even though the Glitch sequencer is not in sync with Ardour, it is easy to chop and re sync if needed.

You will not be able to save presets in Glitch, so be sure and bounce your creations before closing Glitch.

When attepting to save a new preset, I receive the following error:
“[ERROR]: no support for presets using chunks at this time”

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Excellent directions are available on the Ardour site for building the application with specific options, including VST support.

Ardour instructions are available here:

• http://ardour.org/building

Following the directions on the Ardour site for building the application with VST support on Linux, here are the specific steps I needed to complete for Ubuntu 8.10. The package and library names listed below are for Ubuntu 8.10.

Building Ardour with VST support on Ubuntu 8.10 – The experience, packages and libraries.

All packages and libraries below were installed using the versions available through the synaptic package manager.

Packages:

• gcc/g++ 3.x or above
• scons 0.96 or above
• python (2.3.4 or above)
• gettext 0.12.1 or above
• pkg-config 0.20 or above
• libtool

Using synaptic package manager, I searched for each of these packages to see if they were already installed or mark for install. From the list above, I only needed to install scons, gettext and libtool.

Libraries:

• libjack0
• libjack-dev

• libxml2
• libxml2-dev

• libxslt1.1
• libxslt1-dev

• libart-2.0-2
• libart-2.0-dev

• libsamplerate0
• libsamplerate0-dev

• libraptor1
• libraptor1-dev

• liblrdf0
• liblrdf0-dev

• libasound2
• libasound2-dev

In general, I only needed to install the -dev package for each of the libraries above.

I chose to build version 2.8 of Ardour, as that is the stable release at this time, and my goal is to run vst plug-ins on Linux. The following are required for Ardour 2.x, and the specific version I needed for Ubuntu 8.10 are listed here.

• libglib2.0-0
• libglib2.0-dev

• libgtk2.0-0
• libgtk2.0-dev

• libgnomecanvas2-0
• libgnomecanvas2-dev

• liblo0ldbl
• liblo0-dev

• libboost-dev

• libfftw3-3
• libfftw3-dev

• libaubio2
• libaubio-dev

Following directions for building with VST support, wine packages are also needed

• wine
• wine-dev

The Ardour Source code is available on the download page at Ardour:

• http://ardour.org/download

Once the source code was downloaded, I created an “ardourvst” directory in my home directory, and extracted the source code file in that location.

There are many options, listed in the Ardour tutorial. I chose to select Freesound support along with VST by running the following command line in the main directory of the Ardour source code.

scons VST=1 FREESOUND=1

The build ran for more than 30 minutes, once complete, the last line of output was:

• scons: done building targets.

Next, I ran the install with root access using the command:

sudo scons install

The result again was:

• scons: done building targets.

This version of Ardour can be run with the command:

ardourvst

Since I have not set any vst related environment variables, Ardour will search for vst plug-ins in the /usr/lib/vst or /usr/local/lib/vst directories which will need to be created or linked to if they don’t already exist.

I prefer to create a link from my home folder so I can load VST plug-ins to my home folder. You can do this by running the following command and replacing the first path with your preferred path.

sudo ln -s /home/yourpath/vst /usr/lib/

Or alternatively you can just create the directory

sudo mkdir /usr/lib/vst

I next closed Ardour, downloaded a VST plug-in, dBlue Glitch, and extracted the file to my VST directory where Ardour will look for it.

Launching Ardour again, the plug-in was available as shown below. So far so good, the VST plug-in is working!

My next post will cover the use of dBlue in Ardour.

Comments or suggestions are welcome.

Patch Names
Just open the Logic Project, hit command-8 to open the environment window, select the “MIDI Instr.” layer in the upper left corner, and copy the Nord Rack2 instrument. This can be pasted into your logic project, then create a new “External MIDI Instrument” in the arrange window, control-click on the track, select “reassign track object”, “MIDI Instr.”, “Nord Rack2″ and the midi channel you want to use. The environment is set to use MIDI channels 1,2,3 and 4, but that can be changed in the environment to match your internal Nord settings.

Performance Names
The multi-instrument named “Nord Rack2 Performance” contains the Performance names for the Nord Rack 2. The Nord receives program changes on the “Global MIDI” channel. which is set to channel 16 by default, and receives note data on channel 1. To handle this problem, the multi-instrument has channels 1 and 16 enabled. copy the Multi instrument to your environment, then create 2 “External MIDI Instrument” tracks, “reassign track object” to “Nord Rack2 Performance”, channel 1, and the other set to channel 16. Use channel 16 to change performances, and use channel 1 to record and play midi data.

Using 2 channels is not elegant, but at least you will have the performance names viewable in your Logic environment.

Download the project file with Environment:
http://www.box.net/shared/cd7lsln133

Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

Delicious

Since I experienced some problems getting MacCsound working on OS X 10.4, PPC architecture, I will provide the steps that made it work for me. I was missing the library libsndfile, which caused the MacCsound application to exit immediately after launch, with no visible error. I determined the problem by viewing the system log, and then finding the cause in the crash report.

1. First, you will need the CsoundLib framework, which is available from sourceforge.net. Download the appropriate version for your OS. I have read the the PPC version is needed for MacCsound, even if you have an Intel processor. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=81968

2. Unarchive the file, and run the CsoundLib.pkg file, this will install the framework.

3. Run the SupportLibs.pkg file to install FLTK, libsndfile, liblo, libjack, fluidsynth and portaudio v.19, if not already installed on your system.

4. Next, download the MacCsound application and examples from http://www.csounds.com/matt/MacCsound/doc.html

5. Run the .dmg file, and drag the MacCsound.app file to your Applications folder.

6. Let the learning begin, happy music making!

Please feel free to comment, or share your experiences with MacCsound.