WIP: Custom program for printing to Epson dot matrix printer SomethingUnreal 2015-02-02 | I'm experimenting with making a program to print an image to my dot matrix printer much faster than when using the Epson driver (it avoids changing print colour often), and with a lot more options. Here's a speed comparison, plus an extra video at the end showing it being the fastest I've ever seen it print a colour image. Not shown in this video are the program's extra options for dithering, and being able to print very long images. Well, the program's not really shown at all here, since it's nowhere near complete yet (or even working properly), so this video just shows off the things that... sort-of-work so far.The printer in this video is an Epson LQ-300+II.My program sends raw ESC/P2 data (Epson's printer control codes) to any printer port that you have installed (including USB-to-printer adaptors), with no need for the Epson driver. It bypasses the page limit length enforced by the driver, provides detailed dithering options (including error diffusion, used in this video), and takes a different approach to printing colours. This approach is designed to be much faster than colour printing using the Epson driver, but my program has to fight against the printer's urge to merge everything internally and print all 4 colours slowwwwwly on every line. It seems to all depend on timing - wait a moment so that it starts printing - which I'm very disappointed in, because different printers will print at different speeds. This means it'll be hard to make a program that works well with any ESC/P2-compatible printer. It will at least end up with the correct ink on the paper - it just might take 10 minutes to print. Oh well~EDIT: Newer progress: youtube.com/watch?v=6gyzlScdiTQ
[Download] All my SC-88Pro MIDIs! SomethingUnreal 2022-01-17 | It only took 5 years, but you can finally download all the MIDIs I've made for the Roland SC-88Pro synth!Well, I actually started making a lot more than 12, but most of them got abandoned, and these are all the ones that managed to survive my short attention span and make it all the way through to completion. If you just want to hear them, I've already uploaded videos of all of them.I mention this in the video and on the download page, but these won't sound so good on non-Sound Canvas synths. I've made special versions of a few MIDIs, which are designed to work better on simpler synths (simplifying percussion and moving it all onto one channel, emulating slower attacks by using "expression" control changes, etc), which are included in the downloads where they exist, but it's very time-consuming and not always possible to even make it sound half-good, so I didn't do this for all of my MIDIs. They should sound fine on the newer SC-8850 too, and I'd be curious as to how they sound on an older Sound Canvas like the SC-55.BaWaMI, my MIDI software synth, can sound acceptable playing most of them - at least if you spend a minute or two adjusting volumes and instruments. You can also use it to see what the MIDI Unfortunately, it would take a lot of work in a MIDI editor to get them to play well on a Yamaha XG synth, though.You can grab the MIDIs from here:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidiweb.archive.org/web/20230606064954/http://robbi-985.homeip.net/88pmidiYou can also download BaWaMI from here, if you'd like:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/blog/?page_id=84#bawamiweb.archive.org/web/20230606064951/http://robbi-985.homeip.net/blog/?page_id=84#bawamiweb.archive.org/web/20230430225434/http://robbi-985.homeip.net/hosted_programs/update/bawamiI just hope that the people who wanted me to release these are still around to be able to have fun with them now...
Arduino MIDI Synth Demo Preview (square + noise) [download] SomethingUnreal 2018-10-30 | Up to 15 notes at once on an Arduino using no timers! Well, the quality drops a lot as the number of playing notes increases, but still!This is a demo of a MIDI synth I'm developing for the Arduino. Its sound is currently very basic - it has no concept of different instruments, can only produce square waves and noise, and each MIDI channel can only be at one of 3 different volume levels. It has no fixed sample rate, and is always producing a new sample as quickly as possible, which is slower when more notes play at once (in practise, the sample rate ranges from about 20 KHz down to about 6 KHz).It supports pitch-bends, modulation, monophonic/polyphonic MIDI channel mode, and some percussive notes. It also recognises some sysex messages, including GM/GS/XG "reset" messages and GS/XG messages to set a MIDI channel's percussion mode.--- TO USE THE CODE YOURSELF (hardware info): ---If you want the Arduino to accept MIDI data from "real" MIDI hardware (through a MIDI socket), you'll need to build a circuit with an optocoupler and connect that to the Arduino's serial RX port, "#define UseRealMIDIPort False" to "#define UseRealMIDIPort True" (this affects the baud rate used). Due to laziness, while testing, I used a program called "Hairless MIDI-Serial Bridge" and the virtual MIDI cable driver "MIDI Yoke" to send MIDI data straight over the Arduino's USB serial connection, instead of building the proper circuit.The code controls one "port" on the Arduino (a group of 8 pins determined by the specific Arduino board model), which connects to an 8-bit DAC (a simple R-2R resistor ladder) to give an 8-bit audio output. I'm using port C on the Arduino Mega, because that neatly corresponds to digital pins 37 (LSB) to 30 (MSB), but it may work on other Arduino boards as long as there is a port where all 8 bits are mapped to digital pins, with minimal changes to the code. The output port (PORTAudio and DDRAudio) would need changing to one consisting of 8 usable pins, and the maximum number of playing notes at once (NumSoundChans) could either be reduced (will save CPU time and memory) or, in the case of the Arduino Due, increased.You can see useful links and download my code for the current version from my blog:http://robbi-985.homeip.net/blog/?p=1948Alternative download link:https://files.catbox.moe/a2aszy.7zThe MIDI is being played on MIDITester:openmidiproject.osdn.jp/MIDITester_en.htmlMIDI file being played:http://robbi-985.homeip.net/hosted_programs/update/arduino/ss/Cutie_panther.midI did not make the MIDI, and I don't know who did. Please, people, at least credit yourself in the metadata ;_;EDIT: Lmao, thanks for thinking that "#define" is a hashtag, YouTube. You'll never be Twitter, so please stop trying.
Dojikko v2 SomethingUnreal 2018-07-08 | I've given my little robot a huge upgrade - she can now see the world properly! This video is just an introduction, and there'll be a proper demonstration of her path-following abilities later.Her brain is now a Raspberry Pi instead of an Arduino, and she sees with an infrared camera (for better low-light performance) in greyscale, instead of just measuring the distance in front of her. This means she can now have a proper goal - instead of just moving towards walls and then turning, she can now drive along a path! It uses a neural network to judge how quickly it should be driving and how to steer. Although she only sees at 128x64 resolution, this is a huge improvement! Currently, I'm still in the process of training her well (driving along paths with her recording the view and the controls that I'm giving her).================================EDIT: Since so many people have asked about the voice, I'll answer here instead of repeating it in the comments:It's Acapela Rosie, a voice for TextAloud for Windows. I played around with a bunch of sentences and the pronunciation editor to get the right intonation and recorded around 200 small sounds from there of the voice. Dojikko (running Linux) stitches those sounds together to make sentences.================================In a future video, I will also go into details of the circuitry, including the way that the Raspberry Pi can hold its own power on and only turn it off once it's finished shutting down, because the only explanations for how to do this that I could find online required a ridiculous number of components and constantly leaked small amounts of power when turned off, which this way does not. Plus, this way only requires a relay, transistor and resistor.- - - Please forgive the inverted colours of the subtitles! - - -I only noticed this after I had subtitled the entire video, and there's no easy way to batch-change this in the video editor. I tried using a hex editor to find/replace the colours, but to no avail... orzI _could_ pretend that it's a throw-back to the time when I used the colours this way, but it was actually a mistake.
Neural Network Tries to Generate English Speech (RNN/LSTM) SomethingUnreal 2016-12-24 | By popular demand, I threw my own voice into a neural network (3 times) and got it to recreate what it had learned along the way! This is 3 different recurrent neural networks (LSTM type) trying to find patterns in raw audio and reproduce them as well as they can. The networks are quite small considering the complexity of the data. I recorded 3 different vocal sessions as training data for the network, trying to get more impressive results out of the network each time. The audio is 8-bit and a low sample rate because sound files get very big very quickly, making the training of the network take a very long time. Well over 300 hours of training in total went into the experiments with my voice that led to this video.The graphs are created from log files made during training, and show the progress that it was making leading up to immediately before the audio that you hear at every point in the video. Their scrolling speeds up at points where I only show a short sample of the sound, because I wanted to dedicated more time to the more impressive parts. I included a lot of information in the video itself where it's relevant (and at the end), especially details about each of the 3 neural networks at the beginning of each of the 3 sections, so please be sure to check that if you'd like more details.I'm less happy with the results this time around than in my last RNN+voice video (youtube.com/watch?v=FsVSZpoUdSU), because I've experimented much less with my own voice than I have with higher-pitched voices from various games and haven't found the ideal combination of settings yet. That's because I don't really want to hear the sound of my own voice, but so many people commented on my old video that they wanted to hear a neural network trained on a male English voice, so here we are now! Also, learning from a low-pitched voice is not as easy as with a high-pitched voice, for reasons explained in the first part of the video (basically, the most fundamental patterns are longer with a low-pitched voice).The neural network software is the open-source "torch-rnn" (github.com/jcjohnson/torch-rnn), although that is only designed to learn from plain text. Frankly, I'm still amazed at what a good job it does of learning from raw audio, with many overlapping patterns over longer timeframes than text. I made a program(*) that substitutes raw bytes in any file (e.g. audio) for valid UTF-8 text characters and torch-rnn happily learned from it. My program also substituted torch-rnn's generated text back into raw bytes to get audio again. I do not understand the mathematics and low-level algorithms that go make a neural network work, and I cannot program my own, so please check the code and .md files at torch-rnn's Github page for details. Also, torch-rnn is actually a more-efficient fork of an earlier software called char-rnn (github.com/karpathy/char-rnn), whose project page also has a lot of useful information.I will probably soon release the program that I wrote to create the line graphs from CSV files. It can make images up to 16383 pixels wide/tall with customisable colours, from CSV files with hundreds of thousands of lines, in a few seconds. All free software I could find failed hideously at this (e.g. OpenOffice Calc took over a minute to refresh the screen with only a fraction of that many lines, during which time it stopped responding; the lines overlapped in an ugly way that meant you couldn't even see the average value; and "exporting" graphs is limited to pressing Print Screen, so you're limited to the width of your screen... really?).(*)Here is the code rewritten from VB6 in a C++-like pseudocode:http://robbi-985.homeip.net/information/bintoutf8_pseudo.txtAlso, here is an English explanation of the idea behind how it works:http://robbi-985.homeip.net/information/bintoutf8_info.txtEDIT: I have released my BinToUTF8 program to the public! Please have a look here:http://robbi-985.homeip.net/blog/?p=1845
Noob Pancakes SomethingUnreal 2016-09-25 | This isn't going to become a thing on this channel - I was just hungry and wanted to record it... I think I should stick to computer stuff. If I hadn't put any effort into editing this, I would've put this on my other channel.
CrowdSound Retro Rock-ish Remix SomethingUnreal 2016-09-19 | I started playing around using the melody and chord progression that a huge number of people created together at CrowdSound, and ended up making this little arrangement for Bawami, my MIDI synth. It took a few hours over 3 nights.CrowdSound is a site where people were given a chord progression and song structure, and were then allowed to vote note-by-note to make a melody. It's an experiment to see if lots of people can work together to gradually make an entire song by voting on many tiny additions. Since people are making remixes already, I decided I'd try, too.As of the 15th of August 2016, only the melody is complete, so I imported the MIDI of the melody (from crowdsound.net ) into Sekaiju (the MIDI editor I use). From there, based on the chord progression, I made tracks for bass, percussion, overdriven and acoustic guitar parts, 2-part pad and a portamento synth sequence to liven things up a bit. Then I decided on how I'd switch between the various backing parts so they weren't all fighting for the spotlight at the same time. After that, I changed the velocities of all the melody notes (since I'm using a velocity-sensitive lead instrument on Bawami), to make it sound less annoying and repetitive and to complement the beat. I also shortened some long notes (which is within CrowdSound's rules for arranging) to let the lead stop for breath every now and then, added modulation (vibrato) sparingly, and decided to somtimes pitch-bend from one note to another during the conclusion instead of instantly jumping (I think this should be allowed, because a real human voice would have to do this all the time =P).In keeping with the openness of CrowdSound, you can download my MIDI (designed to be played on Bawami rev.132 or later) here:http://robbi-985.homeip.net/F_s_t_v2_copy/Own/crowdsound-985.midIt uses several GS "variation" instruments, so it will sound worse on GM synths. It also uses an instrument (12-string guitar) which is not present in Bawami rev.131, the currently-released version, but it should still sound fine on that version (it'll fall back to the "Acoustic Guitar (Steel)" instrument). That, along with many other changes, will be in the next version I release!This MIDI is playing on BaWaMI, which is a freeware, retro-sounding MIDI synth that uses subtractive synthesis. I've been working on it every now and then since 2010.You can find out more (and grab the latest version) here:http://robbi-985.homeip.net/blog/?page_id=84#bawami(Click its title to get to the download page)The 3D scrolling view of notes is MIDITrail:en.osdn.jp/projects/miditrailEVERYTHING IN A MUCH EASIER-TO-READ LAYOUT (aka my blog):http://robbi-985.homeip.net/blog/?p=1804
Arduino PID motor speed controller - Extra fun bits (part 2/2) SomethingUnreal 2016-09-13 | [STROBE WARNING!] These are a few of the bits that I cut from the main video because it was too long, including running it at full speed and a comparison with a super-simple system!You might want to watch part 1 if you haven't already, so that this makes more sense: youtube.com/watch?v=CKYR8au2nfE
Arduino PID motor speed controller - Casual demo (part 1/2) SomethingUnreal 2016-09-12 | [STROBE WARNING!] I threw this together from an old toy's motor, old printer's iR sensor, pizza box and some other things, to try out the PID controller algorithm after discovering it on Wikipedia and seeing that there was pseudocode, meaning that I didn't have to get a PhD in mathematics to be able to read the crazy-looking formulas that Wikipedia seems to be so fond of.I had planned to screen-capture my program while recording but completely forgot to at the time, so please try to survive my camcorder pointing at my laptop screen...Here, the PID controller is trying to keep the motor at a precise speed (and get it there as quickly as possible). It doesn't work well half the time because the L298 (H-bridge), responsible for switching power to the motor, doesn't seem to like making the motor brake. That means it speeds up much more quickly than it slows down, which the algorithm doesn't like (it's designed for linear systems) - it basically ends up trying too hard to slow down, resulting in a big undershoot. I might be able to somewhat compensate for that in code.I might try this with a Sabertooth motor speed controller (as used in my old singing motors project) in place of the L298, which can certainly force a motor to stop spinning, but the Sabertooth gives such a boost to the motor to get it up to speed that 90% of the PID's job becomes redundant... Oh well, at least it'd be able to hit any given note without me having to calibrate it first like I did with the singing motors. By the way, that's why this system measures speed in Hz - I originally intended for it to play music like a new kind of "singing motor".Originally, I planned to use a 3-pin computer fan instead of this motor, using the tachometer pin to measure the speed, but that required me to have a common ground for the motor and the tachometer, and I didn't have the right components available (I only had N-channel MOSFETs, but I needed a P-channel MOSFET). So I ended up throwing my own motor assembly together and using an N-channel MOSFET only (could only turn power on/off, not brake), which the PID system didn't like. I thought the L298 would fix that problem, since it'd allow the PID system to reverse power to the motor and brake it, but it turns out it's too weak to have much of an effect after all... =/Part 2/2 will show it running at full speed (with a more powerful PSU), show a much more naïve speed controller algorithm for the lulz, and just clear up a couple of details.
Neural Network Learns to Generate Voice (RNN/LSTM) SomethingUnreal 2016-05-24 | [VOLUME WARNING] This is what happens when you throw raw audio (which happens to be a cute voice) into a neural network and then tell it to spit out what it's learned.This is a recurrent neural network (LSTM type) with 3 layers of 680 neurons each, trying to find patterns in audio and reproduce them as well as it can. It's not a particularly big network considering the complexity and size of the data, mostly due to computing constraints, which makes me even more impressed with what it managed to do.The audio that the network was learning from is voice actress Kanematsu Yuka voicing Hinata from Pure Pure. I used 11025 Hz, 8-bit audio because sound files get big quickly, at least compared to text files - 10 minutes already runs to 6.29MB, while that much plain text would take weeks or months for a human to read.UPDATE: By popular demand, I have uploaded a video where I did this with male English voice, too: youtube.com/watch?v=NG-LATBZNBsI was using the program "torch-rnn" (github.com/jcjohnson/torch-rnn), which is actually designed to learn from and generate plain text. I wrote a program that converts any data into UTF-8 text and vice-versa, and to my excitement, torch-rnn happily processed that text as if there was nothing unusual. I did this because I don't know where to begin coding my own neural network program, but this workaround has some annoying restraints. E.g. torch-rnn doesn't like to output more than about 300KB of data, hence all generated sounds being only ~27 seconds long.It took roughly 29 hours to train the network to ~35 epochs (74,000 iterations) and over 12 hours to generate the samples (output audio). These times are quite approximate as the same server was both training and sampling (from past network "checkpoints") at the same time, which slowed it down. Huge thanks go to Melan for letting me use his server for this fun project! Let's try a bigger network next time, if you can stand waiting an hour for 27 seconds of potentially-useless audio. xDI feel that my target audience couldn't possibly get any smaller than it is right now...EDIT: I have put some graphs of the training and validation losses on my blog for those who have asked what the losses were!http://robbi-985.homeip.net/blog/?p=1760#settingsEDIT 2: I have been asked several times about my binary-to-UTF-8 program. The program basically substitutes any raw byte value for a valid UTF-8 encoding of a character. So after conversion, there'll be a maximum of 256 unique UTF-8 characters. I threw the program together in VB6, so it will only run on Windows. However, I rewrote all the important code in a C++-like pseudocode:http://robbi-985.homeip.net/information/bintoutf8_pseudo.txtAlso, here is an English explanation of how my binary-to-UTF-8 program works:http://robbi-985.homeip.net/information/bintoutf8_info.txtEDIT 3: I have released my BinToUTF8 program to the public! Please have a look here:http://robbi-985.homeip.net/blog/?p=1845
Random Old Rubbish (Part 2) SomethingUnreal 2016-02-29 | The second and much-shorter part, as I clear out some random rubbish (and come across some non-rubbish!) in my room. There are a few more old electronic devices, including a ~25-year-old LCD game, plus some paper stuff...This time, I didn't throw away or dismantle everything in the video! I did thoroughly rearrange whatever remained afterwards, though.
Server that actually looks (and sounds) like a server SomethingUnreal 2016-02-28 | I was recently with a friend who runs a server which is a lot more impressive than mine, so I thought I'd show it off. It also sounds like a jet engine.For a start, it's actually in a rack-mount case (2U), with ~17TB total disk capacity and 20GB of RAM (it usually has about 24, but he had to remove some to use in another machine, hence the sticks of RAM lying on top of the case). It's running a few VMs for people (with Arch Linux as the host), acting as a NAS, and doing a few other things like running some IRC bots, but he shut it down and rebooted it so that I could hear the fans rev up. =D
Random Old Rubbish (Part 1) SomethingUnreal 2016-02-27 | I was going through and throwing away a load of random rubbish (mostly toys), and some of it was interesting, so I decided to record it. Some of it's around 14 years old. I didn't intend for 50% of the video to be about Beyblades.
Stress-test Audio CD SomethingUnreal 2016-02-15 | Never mind just gapless playback - let's throw 99 tracks at various CD players (hardware and software) within 40 seconds and see how they handle it!The music I used is "Nature's Gasp" by Atmozfears & Devin Wild. Big thanks to Atmozfears for letting me use it here (now let's hope that YouTube's automatic song recognition doesn't punish me despite that...).This test just naturally emerged after I played around with splitting tracks in a hardstyle mix for seamlessly playing on a CD. The trick to ensuring no silence between tracks was to split on CDDA frame boundaries (every 2352 bytes, which makes 75 per second for audio CDs). It took me some time before I realised that Audacity can measure position in CDDA frames and that I didn't have to convert the number of samples into CDDA frames myself every time...I don't have a grudge against Foobar or anything - it really did get stuck in a loop of spinning up and down the CD the last time I tried it. Also, this may be my most anticlimactic and rushed ending ever.
Multi-strike, multi-pass, colour correction (WIP: Dot matrix program) SomethingUnreal 2016-02-10 | Showing off a couple more things not possible with the Epson driver: multi-strike printing and "quiet" (not really) mode, along with CMYK colour correction which is nearly invisible to my camcorder, so that part was a waste of video...This is a program I'm casually working on every now and then to print images on any 24-pin ESC/P2 dot matrix printer (ESC/P2 is Epson's control language for their dot matrix printers). It directly controls the printer by sending raw commands to it; you just need to tell Windows that it's a "Generic / Text Only" printer on Windows, not using the official Epson driver, and Windows will pass the commands straight on to the printer without trying to translate them.This is a standalone program for printing image files, not a driver for printing from any program. I've not yet released it, but I intend to some time. Compared to the driver, it currently allows:- Printing in (lower) resolutions for high speed (down to 60 DPI).- Detailed control over colour dithering/thresholding.- Very tall print-outs not restricted to a paper length (e.g. for continuous paper).- Printing only individual component colour(s) of an image.-* Faster colour printing by doing large blocks of each colour at once.-* Multi-strike printing (optionally offsetting each one to fill in the gaps between the earlier ones' dots).-* "Quiet" (multi-pass) printing (unfortunately, I can't control the actual speed).*The last three are somewhat "hacks", abusing commands to try to force unofficial behaviour, and as such, they rarely work properly in combination with each other. In particular, the last two often don't work when printing colour.By the way, printing in blocks of colour is no longer done by relying on sending commands with the correct timing (as it did in the previous video), which means it's now much more reliable and doesn't get messed-up by pausing the printer, image content, etc.Previous video: youtube.com/watch?v=4EGSB-g2IfQThe printer in this video is an Epson LQ-300+II.
Solar Panel Microphone (Experiment) SomethingUnreal 2016-01-31 | Here, I conneced a solar panel (via a transformer) to a sound interface as if it's a microphone, to reveal the subtle pulsing and filckering of various light sources. If you don't like 50 Hz, this video isn't for you. Thankfully, the infrared light from my camcorder is apparently very clean (not pulsing), so I can use that to see things in the dark without affecting the sound.The transformer is just designed to convert 230V AC to 12V DC, so its audio properties are not very good (it muffles things a lot). Ideally, I'd be using an audio transformer that's designed to sound good, but this is all I had available. I am using it to remove the DC current that the solar panel makes, because I don't fancy putting 17.5V into my Quad-Capture (sound interface)'s mic input. I originally tried to make a high-pass filter to remove the DC, using a capacitor and resistor, but it only worked until the capacitor became fully-charged, at which point the sound faded. It was much clearer-sounding than the transformer, but there was also a huge amount of background noise.I want to revisit this idea in the future, especially to take it for a drive at night, listening to the street lights and car lights (since modern cars use PWM to dim the tail lights).
[MIDI] Nomico - Skip! (Moetan ED) [SC-88Pro] (60FPS) SomethingUnreal 2015-08-11 | Here's the Roland SC-88Pro synth being pushed quite hard by the power of moe (ending theme of the anime Moetan, "Skip!", originally sung by Nomico, to my surprise). MIDITrail's fancy 3D view is good for notes, but doesn't show any control changes, so I included a scrolling view of those, too, next to the synth's display. And hey, why not 60FPS for those who can view that? =)This MIDI took me about 5 days to make, plus a few hours of tweaking at the end. It sounded like it was nearly finished after 2 days, but the hardest stuff was still left to do at that point (I do hate struggling to transcribe barely-audible parts, but they really fill in the gaps and make it sound complete).Firsts for me include the fast arpeggio effect (surprisingly, the 88P never complained about this), wah effect on the quiet guitar (on the right), and gratuitous use of "All Sound Off" whenever possible, to try to keep things running quickly enough. Also, 4 sound effects I've never used before!3 channels get re-used for different instruments (16 channels has never been so insufficient), but more annoyingly, the synth's update speed drops really low during the chorus because of all the playing voices, making pitch-bends sound jumpy, and it took a lot of tweaking and quite some luck to get a clean recording. I kind of wonder if it's just my 88P which slows down so much when many notes are playing (even if there are not many MIDI messsages), or if it's simply a limitation of its CPU speed. It might just be a coincidence, but it seemed to handle it better immediately after power-up, so perhaps it becomes worse as it gets hotter. In that case, maybe I could attach a heat sink to the CPU, or just put a fan in there (I don't really want to drill holes, though). The case doesn't really get very hot, though. I kind of wish I could limit it to playing only 32 voices at once, instead of letting it struggle with 64. Lowering release times only gets you so far.You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidiSomehow, the fact that an anime of Moetan had been made eluded me for 8 years and I only recently discovered it. "YOU MAGGOTS ARE HUFFING AND PUFFING--" oh wait, wrong English-teaching mahou shoujo.
[MIDI] Prince Of The Yolkfolk (DOS version) [SC-88Pro] SomethingUnreal 2015-08-09 | Something a little different this time. I had a burst of nostalgia and got this theme stuck in my head, so I decided to try to remake it for the SC-88Pro synth. It's the first MIDI I've made in less than 18 hours (including sleep)! It's also the first I've made for the 88P which doesn't use all the sound channels (4 are untouched), despite using 3 just for trying to emulate the FM snare. And the first that messes around with time signatures to keep in-sync with the original while still having the notes align sensibly in my MIDI editor...This is a remake of the music from the DOS version of the game "Dizzy: Prince of the Yolkfolk". It was released on many different platforms, and I'm sure the instruments vary a lot on the different versions, but I've only ever played the DOS version. It used AdLib music (technically, the Yamaha OPL2 FM synth).I've seen some remixes of this, but I tried to stay faithful to the original (including overlapping notes, monophonic channels and notes that get cut because of the limitations of the AdLib hardware). Originally, I was going to use a synth trumpet sound to really match the original, but I couldn't find a suitable FM-style harpsichord to go along with it, and synth trumpets sounded stupidly out-of-place when paired with the realistic harpsichord, so I had to go for modern-sounding brass instruments.Yamaha music on a Roland synth... heresy!You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidiP.S. You can hear the original here:youtube.com/watch?v=puMQKaTc51k
Inside a Cassette Deck & Dolby Noise Reduction Demo SomethingUnreal 2015-05-10 | A quick look inside a Yamaha KX-393 cassette deck from the 90s, and demo of Dolby noise reduction. That damn tape counter gives away all the times I cut out my failure to speak properly. =P Headphones are recommended for the noise reduction demo.The waveforms displayed while Dolby is selected are simulations - versions of the original audio processed by a compressor/expander. In reality, Dolby mostly only affects the treble (as you can hear), since that's where most of the tape hiss is, so you wouldn't get big low-frequency waves, but hey, it's easier to visualise this way.My usual video editor did not feel like working, so I made this entire thing in Avisynth - it's like coding, but for video. Please kill me now. Well, I used VirtualDub for the cropping out of all the dead air, my failures to speak, and misinformation which I said by mistake. On the plus side, I learned a lot of stuff by editing this way (such as how badly Avisynth is designed regarding modifying audio). Also, I didn't have to screen-capture anything to get those waveforms - they're being made in realtime by the Waveform plugin, which is processing audio from different Dolby simulations which are also being made in realtime by SoxFilter's "compand" function.This video didn't turn out as well as I would've liked - from the poor view of the mechanism to the incomplete demonstration of the functions and different tape types, and the fact that the only time I could record this (free of disturbances and noise) was a 45-minute slot was when I was half-asleep. So, if people are interested, I might re-visit this.With all the old technologies on my channel such as a dot matrix printer, FM MIDI synth, SC-88Pro and now a cassette recorder, perhaps I should rename my channel to "SomethingRetro". There's an old VCR here just waiting to be opened, too...
Dojikko Gets Side Sensors SomethingUnreal 2015-04-20 | I've given her another 2 ultraound sensors on either side, so that she can see how well lined-up she is to walls on either side of her. This is to try to keep her heading directly towards a wall, so that the head ultrasound sensor will get the best reflections possible (assuming that her environment uses lots of right-angles).The Arduino fires all 3 ultrasound sensors and listens for their echoes at the same time in order to "see" at the highest frame rate possible (typically 20-50 FPS), but this causes issues with echoes from one sensor bouncing around and returning to a different sensor. Although the code avoids any clearly-bad echoes like this (e.g. 2 echoes on the same sensor), it's far from perfect, and she often thinks that she's crashed into something (an object is very close to the head) when she hasn't. I think there's also a strange bug in the function that times the echo delays, or something strange is going on with hardware interrupts, because the function sometimes returns 0 for a sensor which clearly has an object in range, and at the same time, the sound of the tone playing on the speaker (using the built-in tone() function) becomes distorted so that it doesn't even sound like a square wave anymore. I've never experienced that before, and I have no idea what's wrong there. Oh well, she looks cool aligning herself half of the time.Fun game to play: See how many inconsistencies there are in this video. It's a combination of videos recorded 7 months apart.
DIY Printer P7: Printing for the first time! [50 FPS] SomethingUnreal 2015-04-13 | It actually works! Well, its first ever print-out could certainly do with some improvements, but to be honest, I'm happy it's even intelligible at all! Part 7 in my super-basic, Arduino-controlled printer project.It should be better when I at least have a stable and level tray for the paper (or whatever) to sit on. I have an idea for an alternative to a heavy sheet of steel, which you should be able to see in the next video. Perhaps the PSU fan will have arrived by then, too...Also, enjoy the in-sync 50 FPS if you can! That pen flicks back and forth at stupid speeds, so a high frame rate is actually useful here.
DIY Printer P6: A servo joins the party! SomethingUnreal 2015-04-10 | Time for some real progress this time! The sixth part in this series where I make a super-basic printer with an Arduino.It's pretty much ready to print - just a little hot glue and a sheet of paper and it's all set! But unfortunately, this video is already ~8 minutes long, so that'll have to wait.After trying out solenoids and ruling out floppy drive motors because of speed, I looked at servos as a way of moving the pen up and down. I settled on Hitec's second-fastest micro servo, which is digital (means it's not limited to 50 Hz update intervals) and has metal gears (means it won't destroy itself quickly). It's designed for use in R/C helicopters, so I'm hoping this will handle the fast motions over a small range of travel, with a light load, well. I'm certainly impressed by it so far.
[MIDI] The River (Ghosts Of Paraguay) [SC-88Pro] SomethingUnreal 2015-04-05 | I tried to remake my favourite liquid dubstep song for the ever-aging Roland SC-88Pro synth (18 this year!), complete with fancy percussion and a reversed piano effect, because I wanted a challenge. I actually started this in August 2014, got it about 40% done and then lost motivation, and finished it off in the last week.The top-left is the 88P's display, the text below it is every MIDI message (displayed by Bawami, my own MIDI soft-synth), and the background is a view of most of the notes (top part - unfortunately, I couldn't capture the view of all 128 MIDI notes) and all control changes (bottom part). I'm trying something a little different this time - a smoothly-scrolling piano roll made possible by Sekaiju (the MIDI editor program)'s ability to print the pianoroll view. I used a virtual printer driver (PDFCreator) to print the pianoroll to a series of images, batch-crop (FSViewer) and stitch them together (IrfanView), and then simply pan it at the right speed on the video editor.This is my new biggest MIDI yet, both in duration and file size (138 KB) thanks to those thousands of expression changes to get the reversed piano effect (simply changing the piano's attack time did not sound good).I am working on a dedicated page on my web site for hosting all MIDIs I've made for the SC-88 Pro synth and any modified, "general-purpose" versions which I made to make it sound at least acceptable on other synths. Please be aware that it is often very tedious (and sometimes, downright impossible) for me to make simplified versions which sound good, so I don't intend to make them often. The page will also show the various features of the synth used by each MIDI, for any curious people like myself who find that stuff interesting. It'll also act as a warning for how bad the MIDI will sound if played on a different synth, since some of my MIDIs are basically built around the 88P.EDIT: It's done! You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidiI have a lot of MIDIs started but very little motivation to finish them recently. Among them are "Verge" (Shimamiya Eiko), "Borderland" (Kawada Mami), "Planeptune's Theme ver. Re;Birth" (Neptunia), "I'm Not Okay" (My Chemical Romance), "You Are Alive" (Fragma), fragments of various hardstyle songs, and the first one I ever started making for the 88P in 2012: "AirFort-JP Hardcore mix" (Minamotoya). I really have to finish at least some of these some time.If you like this song, please check GOP's other stuff:soundcloud.com/ghostsofparaguay
DIY Printer P5: Downdate (and 50 FPS test) SomethingUnreal 2015-03-14 | The most boring video in this series of me making a super-basic, Arduino-controlled printer. I made it at 50 FPS to try to make it more interesting to people who can play that, but that ended up making it out-of-sync at times. *Sigh*This is what happens when I don't plan everything through before I start making something (i.e. all the time). Sorry. Stuff will actually happen in the next one, I promise!
Clock Overclock SomethingUnreal 2015-02-01 | The circuit board inside this clock died, so I replaced it with my laptop. You could say that the clock speed is about 70x the standard speed (this is the fastest the mechanism can handle before it just oscillates) - I'm impressed it can handle this.The headphone output is connected directly to the coil in the clock movement and driven with a square wave. The coil is 250 ohms - some headphones are much lower than this, so there's no need to worry about damaging the laptop's headphone output, either! The gears, on the other hand, may wear out a little quicker than usual. =P
DIY Printer P4: Proof-of-concept with an LED SomethingUnreal 2014-11-19 | Part four in this series of "making of" videos where I make a super-basic printer controlled by an Arduino.There's still no pen, so I stuck an LED where the pen will go and made it turn on when the pen should be drawing, as a test. Then, I took a long-exposure photo while it "printed" with the LED, pointing the camera upwards slightly after it finished each row. What I ended up with was a photo of the image that it tried to print, with inverted colours and stretched a bit because I didn't move the camera at the right speed.It can also now print bidirectionally, and it's much faster to receive the data for the next row of pixels, because they're no longer sent one at a time.Illustrations are by とんぐ (Tongu) (Pixiv member ID: 258901) and CAFFEIN (blog: http://caffein89.blogspot.co.uk / Pixiv member ID: 13054).
DIY Printer P3: A first look at the software SomethingUnreal 2014-11-17 | Part three in this series of "making of" videos where I make a super-basic printer controlled by an Arduino.Although it still doesn't look like a printer, I've been working on the software. Here, you can see the first stages of having the printer be controlled by the computer. The image data is actually being sent, but very slowly (think of it as a "compatibility mode") - I wanted to make sure I had two-way communication working perfectly before making things faster. As such, there are still debugging messages being displayed on the Arduino's LCD, too, left over from me trying to get things to work.The next stage will be to prove that the Arduino is really receiving the image data correctly, even though there's no mechanism to move a pen yet!Illustration is by CAFFEIN (blog: http://caffein89.blogspot.co.uk / Pixiv member ID: 13054).P.S. This video editor is bloody awful.
DIY Printer P2: Sliders and calibration SomethingUnreal 2014-11-13 | Part two in this series of "making of" videos where I make a super-basic printer controlled by an Arduino.Sorry for being really lazy about uploading this. Also, the upload itself finished a little quicker than I thought it would, so yay, the date at the end is in the future.
[MIDI] You Make My Day! (Otome Wa Boku Ni Koi Shiteru OP) (SC-88Pro) SomethingUnreal 2014-10-23 | I finally finished this MIDI for the Roland SC-88Pro synth (I abandoned it a few months ago). Gotta love those electro toms. This is the opening theme (originally performed by YURIA) to the VN 「処女はお姉さまに恋してる」.The original song has some heavy dynamic range compression so it sounds like this MIDI is lacking somewhat if you compare them, but I couldn't actually make out any more parts than this in the original. The 88Pro has a compressor effect available, but it can only use one effect at a time, and I was already using distortion. The high-pitched sound effects on the right speaker should be faster, but the synth can't reliably update the pitch much faster than this. There was an unexpectedly tricky selection of percussive sounds and panning needed for the toms, so I ended up using 4 separate percussion channels...You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidi
Printer-based ADV game (proof-of-concept) SomethingUnreal 2014-10-08 | Complete with typos! I wanted to try 3 things - ADV-style storyline scripts with branching, console mode, and realtime printer control without any fancy hardware interface. This is the (rather incomplete) result, but I thought it was already fun enough for a video.Thanks to code samples by a Karl Peterson, I now know how to send raw data to any printer, so I have no excuse to not make/modify/release some printer-related programs for the public. Oh no!This script language I made also allows if/then decisions and setting values of variables, but I haven't fully finished coding support for those yet. Unfortunately, I have no imagination at all regarding thinking up storylines, so this is all I could do for a video.The printer is an Epson LQ-300+II, running on Windows 7 using the "Generic / Text Only" driver. This driver is the key to being able to send raw text and commands to the printer.
Dot matrix printer interface: Software (feature demo / IRC) SomethingUnreal 2014-10-03 | The printer is a new, colour Epson LQ-300+II this time. Sorry in advance - I was tired after spending the whole night coding. Here's the program I made to send Epson's ESC/P 2 commands to a compatible printer and do fancy stuff such as change effects, colour, size, and even send non-ASCII characters as graphics in the middle of ASCII text. It's still a long way from a usable text editor, though.The program can also monitor plain-text log files and print new lines of text as they are saved. Here, it prints off live chat logs from 4 IRC channels. I optimised it a little for IRC logs, so that it can print different parts in different colours. I considered making it monitor my web server's log file, but visiting certain pages on my site can add dozens of lines at once to the log file, which would waste a whole sheet of paper in seconds.My program uses a USB interface, which I made with an Arduino, to communicate with the printer. The Arduino passes printer status info to the laptop, such as "error" or "paper out", and forwards data from the laptop to the printer's parallel port if the printer is ready.I'm using a different, brand-new printer this time because it turns out that the other, second-hand printer had a bad head with 2 or 3 dead pins, causing blank lines in the print-out. I actually recorded several videos on the progress of cleaning the printer and its head, and was able to fix one of the pins, but 1 or 2 never came back to life, so it'd make a bit of an anticlimactic video that I might not upload. By the way, I recorded the pins firing in slow-motion, and one was very slow while the other didn't move at all. I uploaded the video here: youtube.com/watch?v=zk3iJJ9PpDYPREVIOUS PART - HARDWARE:youtube.com/watch?v=PfhKc0gSNIw
Dot matrix printer interface: Hardware (building/proof-of-concept) SomethingUnreal 2014-10-03 | The printer is an old Epson LQ-300+. I want to be able to send my own commands to it, but modern computers don't have parallel ports, so I decided to make my own USB interface. I thought I might as well, if I'm going to be writing the software anyway.This interface (Arduino) goes between the printer and the laptop, appearing as a serial port to a program of mine which will be running on the laptop. In this video, for testing that I can communicate with the printer, the Arduino itself is sending the data, instead of my laptop. In the next video, the Arduino will be playing a simpler role and mainly just forwarding data from my laptop to the printer.NEXT PART - SOFTWARE:youtube.com/watch?v=oG4cm2Ay0GQ
[MIDI] Futari No Honey Boy (KissxSis OAD OP) [SC-88Pro] SomethingUnreal 2014-09-19 | This sure was a fun one to make! And more trying to make the Sound Canvas synth sound like it's speaking, yay! But unfortunately, I was pushing it so close to its limit that I actually had to cut notes at those points so that it could keep running smoothly. It's also extremely tedious to do, so I don't think I'll be making a whole song like that any time soon.This is a MIDI I made for the Roland SC-88Pro of the opening theme to Kiss×sis OAD, originally sung by Taketatsu Ayana and Tatsumi Yuiko, written/arranged by Takahashi Nana. Despite being pretty complex and having a part that was incredibly hard to decipher beneath all the other instruments (I could only clearly make out half of one bar, and had to estimate what the rest was), this one only took me 5-6 days.I decided to screenshot my MIDI player BaWaMI, chop it in half and re-arrange it into one long row of 16 MIDI channels at the bottom. I think this makes better use of the 16:9 video frame. Fun fact: Early versions of Bawami had the channels arranged like that, when they were narrower and didn't have those blue bars.You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidiI wonder if this synth is older than Ako or Riko.
[Download] SC-88Pro LCD SysEx Generator SomethingUnreal 2014-09-18 | "Just a quick video"... yeah, that didn't happen. Here's the program I made to control the Roland Sound Canvas's LCD, as seen in my "Kill Me Baby" MIDI with animation. Someone was interested in it, so I finally cleaned it up and am releasing it for download now! It seems that my "download" videos are always unprofessional, even back to the Bleeper Music Maker days...Blog post with details and download link:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/blog/?p=1352The Microsoft VB6 Runtime installer is included in the download. You only need to use it if my program fails to start. Window 7 and later operating systems come with it pre-installed.The MIDI editor I use is the brilliant freeware Sekaiju (version 3.8, in this video):http://openmidiproject.sourceforge.jp/Sekaiju_en.html
[MIDI] Kill Me Baby ED (with animation) [SC-88Pro] SomethingUnreal 2014-09-05 | I couldn't resist trying to recreate the amusing dance at the end of the anime "Kill Me Baby" on this Sound Canvas's LCD, so that meant I had to make a MIDI of the music, too! This is the ending theme, "Futari no Kimochi no Honto no Himitsu", originally sung by Tamura Mutsumi and Akasaki Chinatsu.Never call a song simple until you've tried to make a MIDI of it. And trying to remake the inaccurate timings of the toms took a silly amount of effort. That said, this MIDI only took 2 days to make, and a third of that was spent on the animations. I ended up making a program to draw on which spits out the SysEx messages to control the synth's LCD, because I didn't fancy wearing out half of the buttons on the synth by drawing pictures on it (yes, the synth has a drawing mode - I guess Roland had some spare ROM to play with). Manually putting the commands to buffer and display every frame at the right time (there are 48 different frames) into the MIDI file was tedious.I have released the program which generates SysEx messages to control the Sound Canvas's LCD! If you're interested, please see:youtube.com/watch?v=yZLGj-4fWO4You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidi
[MIDI] Behind Closed Doors (Live In Arcadia) [SC-88Pro] SomethingUnreal 2014-09-03 | I tried to remake this thrash metal track originally made by my brother, as a MIDI for the Roland Sound Canvas synth! ...Then, I realised that he still hasn't uploaded it himself yet. Maybe I'll have to poke him to do that so you can hear what my sucky attempt at recreating the guitar solo was supposed to sound like. It also has screaming vocals, but yeah, that's not going to happen in a MIDI file.I got to try something I've never done before - a "compressed" effect on the percussion to make it sound more powerful, by turning down the cymbals when the kick and other bassy percussion plays. Because all those curves spam up the view of control changes at the bottom of the screen, I hid those ones at times in this video.My brother's music channel is:youtube.com/user/ArcadiaMetalUKHe was kind enough to give me access to the individual layers in his track, so I didn't have to struggle to hear notes hidden underneath other notes, which is what I normally have to struggle with when making MIDIs. He even gave me the original drum MIDI track, but that meant I had to set up my own user drum kit for the SC-88Pro that was compatible with the drums software he uses. The fact that the synth only has 2 discrete overdrive channels means that it sounds a little awkward during the transitions to/from the guitar solo. Plus, solos are always hard to transcribe anyway.All in all, it was a fun challenge! I ended up only using 8 MIDI channels (3 for percussion), which is the least ever in a MIDI I've made for this synth. I usually end up using at least 15 out of 16. As for the video itself, there are several fails because my old laptop died and I've clearly not got stuff set up correctly on my new one yet.You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidi(Thanks very much for the project files, bro! I wouldn't have managed this without them.)
Trippy MIDI bug: M (Above & Beyond Remix) SomethingUnreal 2014-09-01 | If it starts with "Check Sum Error", it's gotta be good! This bug happens after using this MIDI interface for a long time. If I disconnect and reconnect it, it's fine for several more hours, but I decided to record this trippy-sounding playback of this MIDI of mine. My favourite part is where the text at the end gets converted to a jingle bell.Here's how it sounds when played correctly:youtube.com/watch?v=s7pTnsJ67iwI decided to record how my "JUMPING!!" MIDI sounds when played in this state, too:youtube.com/watch?v=As4HaqptpCAThe synth is the Roland SC-88Pro, and the interface is a Roland Quad-Capture. I'm having to use an old driver (1.0.1) because the latest one is incompatible with a bad USB3 driver for my laptop. The bug might be fixed in later versions. The MIDI sequencer software is the wonderful Sekaiju:http://openmidiproject.sourceforge.jp/Sekaiju_en.html
The Making of Dojikko SomethingUnreal 2014-08-24 | A look at how the clumsy autonomous robot was made, and her very first versions, when she was worse than clumsy, before she was even slightly clever. There's more to show, but it was already approaching my longest ever video, so I decided to end it here.A later version can be seen here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6IlxuYVK9oShe's progressed a little further still, now - I should upload a video of her outside soon!Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com):"The Way Out""Dance Monster"
DIY Printer P1: Basic concepts & smoothly moving the motors SomethingUnreal 2014-07-06 | The first in a series of "making of" videos where I make a super-basic printer controlled by an Arduino! I recorded pretty much every step of the way, so you should hopefully be able to follow the progress from pretty much nothing (here) to something that actually works.I started this project almost a year ago, but I'm only uploading the videos now that I'm sure it actually gets somewhere and that I didn't just abandon it like I do with most of my projects.The rest of the videos probably won't feature so much editing work - I just needed to do that in this video due to my explanations that would be too hard to follow if I just kept my speech and video of my hand moving enthusiastically in front of the camera.I should've made a compilation of every time I said "Basically" at the end, basically.
Dot Matrix Print Head in Slow-Motion SomethingUnreal 2014-06-20 | I got a second-hand, old-style dot matrix printer whose print head that needed cleaning, so I decided to quickly record this while it was out of the printer.I'd love to see this with a proper high-speed camera.
[MIDI] (Guitars+Bass+Drums only) JUMPING!! (Kin-iro Mosaic OP) SomethingUnreal 2014-05-01 | Because I concentrated so much on the guitars while making this MIDI, here they are playing by themselves. Well, I also kept the bass because it's fun, and the drums because I can.Full version is here: youtube.com/watch?v=kptqzXlMnjs
[MIDI] Ayumi Hamasaki - M (Above & Beyond Remix) [SC-88Pro] SomethingUnreal 2014-04-25 | This time, I tried to remake a trance song for the Roland Sound Canvas synth! I first heard this song many years ago on an internet radio site and became addicted to it, although I didn't know its name. I re-found it about 4 years later in a StepMania song pack.This was surprisingly easy to make, despite having a few things that I've not used much before (delay echoes, changing of resonance over time, reversed kick). It took 6 days in total, but the majority of the work was done in the first 4 days.You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidi
Replacing capacitors in 40-year-old headphones SomethingUnreal 2014-04-16 | Or: How not to solder / How to annoy people by saying "cans" as many times as possible.These Superex Pro-B VI studio headphones from the 1970s belong to my grandpa, and sound amazing, but only when they work. Which, unfortunately, was not very often. I looked around online, and it's apparently fairly common for the capacitors to die with age. So I replaced each (0.0025 uF) with the closest value I could get hold of (0.0022 uF).Let-down noticed after a few hours: It didn't fix the problem. But at least that's two components that should last longer now. But if it's not the capacitors then it may well be the custom-wound transformers in each ear, which are obviously not made anymore. Oh well, it gave me an excuse to make a casual camcorder/chatty video for the first time in a while.
[MIDI] JUMPING!! (Kin-iro Mosaic OP) [SC-88Pro] SomethingUnreal 2014-04-13 | I tried to remake the opening theme of the anime "Kin-iro Mosaic" as a MIDI for the Roland SC-88Pro synth. The song is "JUMPING!!", originally by Rhodanthe*.Bawami, my MIDI player, is playing the MIDI just so that you can see what's going on, and it's sending the MIDI messages to the SC-88Pro synth, whose display is shown in the top-right.This was roughly as hard to make as "Mii-tan no Mahou de Pon!!" (perhaps there's something about songs that have two exclamation marks in the title). I put a lot of effort into making the guitars as accurate as I could, so here's a version with only the GUITARS, BASS and DRUMS playing:youtube.com/watch?v=p-KIekYxr-cI started working on this 4 months ago, then lost motivation, and then continued and finished it over the last week. Also, holy crap, I'm going to take YouTube's matching of third-party content at 0:17 as a complement of how accurate the trumpet part is.You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidiBaWaMI is available for download here:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/blog?page_id=84#bawami
[MIDI] Mii-tan no Mahou de Pon!! (Popotan) [SC-88Pro] SomethingUnreal 2013-11-26 | I finally finished this MIDI for the Roland SC-88Pro synth. This is Mii's theme from the H-game "Popotan", originally by UNDER17. Making a musical synth say "Iyaan!" was fun, amusing and surreal.I decided to do away with the "loli voice" effect that I used in the incomplete version (youtube.com/watch?v=wsQjKQw_nPs), because the effect broke whenever there was a strong pitch-bend.The 3D visualisation is MIDITrail, scrolling text is BaWaMI's MIDI message view (my MIDI player's interpretation of them), and in the top-right is the Sound Canvas synth's LCD itself.Production time took about 4 days, including time I couldn't do anything because I was at work or dead from this cold that I have. This is, without a doubt, the new most-complicated MIDI I've ever made, with many SysEx messages throughout changing the routing to the Insert FX and its parameters, along with tons of control changes, some instrument changes (16 just isn't enough), a user-defined drumkit, 3 percussion channels, and a healthy dose of pitch-bends (with varying sensitivity). My "Suwa Foughten Field" MIDI remake had some of these, but I think this sounds better, and certainly posed more challenges.Blog post with some links:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/blog/?p=1045Version at Niconico:http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm22915969You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidi
Cat plays with a drill bit and flips SomethingUnreal 2013-11-09 | The flip is at 01:34. No, we don't give her drill bits to play with - I was working on a project and heard this sound behind me. Perhaps she likes the sound and the way it rolls along.This is my brother's cat. She's about 2 years old.
ひそやかな欲望 / Secret Desire ~ Inu Remix (MISAKA #10032s theme) SomethingUnreal 2013-07-01 | I finally completed this remix of 「ひそやかな欲望～ミサカは，発生させます～」, the character song of Misaka Imouto from the anime A Certain Magical Index. I think it shows off her more hardcore side, where the original showed a gentle side. I certainly tried to pack it with energy in the chorus.This was my first time using both the Roland SC-88Pro and Korg Radias synths together. The Radias is playing most percussion and a high-pitched lead, and also processing a guitar sound from the SC, while the SC plays everything else (bass, pads, electric piano, lead synth, lead guitar, cymbals, etc). The 2 synths seem to work well together.What genre could this be? I wasn't aiming for anything, so I'm not sure. Hard dance, perhaps?MP3 (320kbps): http://www.mediafire.com/?vfw5s2sgud2dw9bNiconico for scrolling comments: http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm21264063It's been 3 months since my last video. Wow.
Ultrasound and Slow-Motion Recordings of Dojikko SomethingUnreal 2013-04-14 | The ultrasonic pulses that let Dojikko "see" her surroundings are normally inaudible to humans, but now, you can hear in detail exactly what's going on. The ultrasound is 40 KHz, about double the highest frequency that most people can hear. When slowed down, not only can you hear the transmitted pulses, but the echoes and the delay between them are clearly audible, too!I recorded the sound at a very high sample rate (192 kHz - at this rate, the microphones can hear frequencies up to 96 KHz). Afterwards, I slowed down the sound to a quarter of the original speed, 1/8th, 1/16th, etc, even down to 1/128th (at that speed, just 2 seconds would be over 4 minutes long). I also recorded video in slow-motion, but my camcorder can only go up to 200 FPS (1/8th speed when played back at the usual 25 FPS), meaning that lower speeds such as 1/64th aren't smooth, as I had to futher slow down the video in editing. But the main point of this video is the sound.
[MIDI] Nomico - Suwa Foughten Field [SC-88Pro] SomethingUnreal 2013-03-15 | I tried to remake the Alstroemeria Records song "Suwa Foughten Field" in MIDI form for the old Roland SC-88Pro. The song is a remix of Kanako Yasaka's theme (stage 6 boss of Touhou 10: Mountain of Faith). The original song was on the album "HARMONY", arranged by "Masayoshi Minoshima" with vocals by Nomico.This pushes the MIDI bandwidth quite far in places, and as a result, the timing of the notes is slightly off in those places (mainly when many notes need to start at the same time).Video at Nicovideo for those who prefer to leave scrolling comments:http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm20339204You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidiI used the freeware MIDI sequencer "Sekaiju" (3.2) by Kuzu:http://openmidiproject.sourceforge.jp/Sekaiju_en.htmlI also used GS Advanced Editor for setting up the Sound Canvas synth's various parameters such as custom reverb and delay, envelope settings, percussion settings, etc
Spring Breeze -afternoon- (Clannad OST) and BaWaMI [rev 106] SomethingUnreal 2013-03-14 | Here's the latest version of Bawami, my MIDI player, playing Kamoto's MIDI of the theme 「東風 -afternoon-」, from the visual novel Clannad.This video is both to show off some new things in my software, while letting you hear how it performs with this particular MIDI file. This is the biggest update since I first released Bawami to the public, and I changed even some smaller things such as the character of the reverb (there's now damping, so that hihats and treble such as the shakers in this MIDI don't sound painfully loud anymore). Download and full list of changes I made in this version (over 30!):http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/blog/?p=847Bawami's usual page:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/blog/?page_id=84#bawamiMIDI used in this demo:http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/F_s_t_v2_copy/Clannad%20OST/kmtcla11_88p.mid
