Hell Labs

After some fun with “live” mod playing, Ademar asking me about mod playing and Paul Wise offering to maintain the project, I decided to do some work on the old xmp codebase and put it back into service. Recent changes include 64bit-safe code, an OSX driver, many Digitrakker MDL fixes and support for Atari ST/Falcon module formats. The changes were not announced, and it’s nice to see that someone already noticed!

My feeling is to rediscover an old toy long forgotten, and I’m very impressed with the fact that during the last week I could easily implement or fix things that were too hard or too boring to do many years ago. Also the code looks much uglier now. Do you have old Protracker mod files (or other obscure module formats) lying around? Give xmp a try and see if it builds/works correctly for you :)

It is worth noting that my previous work with HDA fixing the 5.1 sound output of a couple of HP machines and the LG LW20 was made much easier with this very nice tool called codecgraph, which takes /proc/asound/cardX/codec#Y as input and generates a neat-looking graph using graphviz in such a way that you can see how mixers, amplifiers and pins are connected and visually follow the signal flow inside your HDA setup. I’ve even added some stuff to it — mostly new codec samples and other ancillary work since I’m illiterate in Python (yes, I know, I’ve tried but I just can’t like the language). You can clone my repository with git clone http://helllabs.org/git/codecgraph.git, or get the official tree from Boto’s repository. Codec sample contributions are welcome!

Update: Codecgraph project page published, with SVG renderings of all samples from our codec database.

Those who got ahold of a Roland Fantom synthesizer and want to perform some basic patch transfer in Linux might want to have a look at Fsex, a set of Fantom SysEx and librarian utilities. It currently works with the Juno-G and, with a bit of luck, the Fantom-X. Fantom-S and Xa still need their model IDs and SysEx identity responses to be added to the code (would you do that?)

In its current incarnation (actually the first one) Fsex is able to transfer patches to and from the synthesizer, and allows one to list, extract or delete patches from Roland librarian files. It was written for my own needs so patches are the only data type currently recognized — support for performances, rhythms, arpeggios or other pieces of SysEx-transferrable information can be added later should anyone find that useful.