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My synth programming knowledge is spotty at best. I usually roll through presets and tweak the knobs a bit and call it a day. So I’m really enjoying this Synthesis Made Simple series over at Waveformless. I couldn’t find a post on there with a chronological list of the articles, so I’ve made one here:

• Welcome to Synthesis Made Simple
• Synthesis Made Simple: Part 1 – Overview
• Synthesis Made Simple: Part 2 – Oscillators – Meet the Waveforms
• Synthesis Made Simple: Part 3 – Oscillators – Combination Style
• Synthesis Made Simple: Part 4 – Bring the Noise – Noise Generators
• Synthesis Made Simple Part 5: Intro to Filters
• Synthesis Made Simple: Part 6 – Types of Filter
• Synthesis Made Simple Part 7: An Introduction to Modulation
• Synthesis Made Simple Part 8: The Envelope, Please
• Synthesis Made Simple: Part 9 – Your Friend the LFO
• Synthesis Made Simple Part 10: Using Modulation Practically
• Synthesis Made Simple Part 11: Putting it All Together
• Synthesis Made Simple Part 12: Where Do You Go From Here?

I just uploaded v0.20 of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store. Some small changes and one big one. It now supports Amazon’s Flexible Payments Service:

Of course I can’t actually offer it on my website as Amazon doesn’t offer the service in Canada. So that’s pretty weak. But for all you Americans: go nuts.

Update: I’ve pushed out v0.22 of the BSDDS, fixing a batch of bugs.

One of the nice things about finishing the new album is that I can indulge my useless creative impulses again without feeling quite as guilty. Last couple of days have been a flurry of making a tagging (aka non-hierarchical – delicious/flickr style) audio sample organizer. I mentioned it earlier here and here.

With a lot of obsessive struggling and swears, all the main functionality is there (in “sloppy learning-windows-programming-as-i-go” style):

It indexes a directory and all its subdirectories for .WAV files, saving them to a local database. You can select folders in the tree on the upper left and you can select files on the right side and they’ll play. If you right-click on files on the right side, you can enter tags (also known as labels and keywords). The tags are saved and displayed in the lower left panel. You can then click those tags to display the files tagged with them. This way a sample doesn’t have to belong to only one directory.

Also drag and drop to most audio apps I’ve tried works fine, preferences are saved via XML. The buttons at the top are just for easy testing and the search does nothing.

Welp, after my last post on the subject and emails to the author of Sample Tagger, I broke down and whipped out the C#. After a bunch of hours, I have this:

It indexes a directory tree on the left, shows any .WAV files that are in it on the right when selected. Selecting a WAV file plays it (or you can hit the play button). And you can drag and drop the files into any audio application I’ve tried (Ableton Live & Sound Forge). Next is library saving and tagging I guess.

Can I also say how freaking annoying it is searching for Microsoft development related documentation and tips and examples on the web? Let’s see, first there’s the difficult-to-search-for terms: C#, .NET, ADO.NET, etc. Then there’s all this other crap that gets in the way like ASP.NET, .NET being available in a billion different languages (C++, C#, Visual C++, Visual C#, Visual Basic, J#, etc, etc) so even if you do find what you want, it’s probably not in the right language or platform. Frustrating.