Function: adjective

Etymology: Latin obstreperus, from obstrepere to clamor against, from ob- against + strepere to make a noise

Date: circa 1600

1 : marked by unruly or aggressive noisiness : clamorous <obstreperous merriment>
2 : stubbornly resistant to control :unruly

The word came to mind again when some new code I was working on was both marked by unruly or aggressive noisiness and stubbornly resistant to control. Here’s what it sounded like–be warned that it’s kind of loud in places:

Obstreperous

Usually when I play something like this for Chris he asks whether we can preserve it and add it as a feature to the product. Beauty is in the ear of the beholder, so to speak. This is why I don’t particularly enjoy most music classified as glitch and other genres that deliberately exploit DSP artifacts: it tends to all sound like a bad day at work to me.

UPDATE: Chris mentioned this post on his blog here; some discussion has ensued. A couple of questions regarding reuse of this recording arose, so I hereby state that the above recording is made available under the Creative Commons license stated here.

Discord 3 is the third incarnation of our pitch-shifting plug-in. This version adds two new pitch-shifting algorithms, one of which uses a granular synthesis approach to produce anything from smooth pitch shifts to chaotic clouds of sound bearing little resemblance to the input signal. We’ve also completely revamped the user interface (as you can see above), broadened the shift range to 3 octaves, improved the filter controls, and made several other little tweaks and improvements. Click here to go to the Audio Damage website to hear audio demos and get yourself one of your own.

Discord 3 actually went on sale late in the day yesterday, so some feedback from happy customers has already accumulated on Chris’s blog here. I’m going to take the liberty of quoting some of the comments here:

“The granular mode is super tasty.”

“Wow – I have only been playing with it for 5 minutes, and I can already say this is the coolest thing ever.”

“…buckets of fun!”

“Discord 3 is a lovely tool I will cherish forever.”

“Where have you been all my life.”

No, I didn’t make those up.

This product represents our largest investment of time and effort to date, but it was a labor of love. Chris and I are both drum machine nuts and we’ve been talking about doing a software beatbox almost as long as we’ve been talking about anything. Six or seven months ago we decided that the time had arrived to take a stab at it, and now it’s done. We’re pretty proud of it and we hope that you enjoy it, too.

On a vaguely related note, Audio Damage bought Apple’s new OS, 10.6 aka Snow Leopard, when it was released on Friday. It appears that all of our products run on it without trouble, which caused me to breath a hearty sigh of relief.

Does anyone besides me wish that Apple would drop the stupid cat-name thing? I can’t keep them straight. What are they going to do when they run out of big cats? I’m looking forward to OS versions with names like Civet, Tabby, and Domestic Shorthair.

Now available at the Audio Damage website is Ronin, our modular delay and filter plug-in. This is an update of a product we released quite some time ago but sidelined for awhile due in large part to the complexity of producing an Audio Unit version of it. We always kind of missed it, though, so we decided to dust it off and bring it up to date. Ronin sports the same delay algorithm that we used in DubStation but provides even more control over its wondrous capabilities. Click that link to read about it, listen to some audio demos, and grab a copy for yourself for only $49.

It has struck me that it’s ironic that we named this plug-in Ronin, since ronin is the Japanese term for a samurai that has no master, due to “the ruin or fall of his master, or after the loss of his master’s favor or privilege” (to quote Wikipedia, and note that I’ve been to the graves pictured in that article as described here and pictured here near the bottom of the page). Fortunately our Ronin’s master is not in ruin and the plug-in has regained our favor.

I’m pleased (as always) to announce the release of Audio Damage’s latest product. It’s called Eos; it’s a high-quality algorithmic reverb plug-in. By “algorithmic” I mean that it uses real-time processes involving delay lines and filters and stuff rather than the convolution-based approach that has become popular in recent years. By “high-quality” I mean that, in direct comparisons with some rather expensive hardware (naming no names) it can hold its own. It also has a CPU load low enough that using several instances at once won’t be a problem on any reasonably current computer. All this for $49. Yes, it’s a real deal. Click that big picture up there to got to the Audio Damage product page where you can listen to audio samples and buy yourself a copy.

I’d like to mention that this is also the first Audio Damage product that contains a significant amount of work done by someone other than Chris and myself. We met up with a fellow by the name of Sean Costello some time ago, back when we were researching frequency shifters for BigSeq2. That product’s frequency shifter module was coded by Sean. In an unrelated conversation, I discovered that Sean has a huge amount of interest in, and experience with, reverberation algorithms. To cut to the chase, the algorithms in Eos were hand-built by Sean for us. It’s quite a pleasure that Audio Damage has grown to a point at which we can pay people like Sean to contribute their expertise to our products. So, big thanks to Sean!

• Marcus Fischer posted a lovely piece combining sounds of the Pacific Ocean processed through BigSeq2 and a xylophone here.
• Matthew Davidson, author of the rather clever plug-in Volta posted a video demonstrating Volta controlling a Buchla 200e (drool!), which is in turn running through BigSeq2.
• Someone identifed only as elxicano (AFAICT) posted a demonstration video of BigSeq2 here.
• I know that Steve Hamann posted an audio demo somewhere, but now I can’t find it. Maybe he’ll post a link in the comments.

(Note: Two of those videos are hosted on vimeo. Audio Damage used to have a bunch of official demo videos of our products on vimeo. Vimeo removed them, trashing hours of Chris’s work, saying that they violated their terms of service which prohibit product advertisements or something. Chris pointed them towards several other examples of demo videos posted by several other companies on vimeo, but vimeo was apparently uninterested. Hence I don’t think particularly highly of vimeo.)

BigSeq2 is available for purchase now, in VST format for Windows and VST and AU formats for OS X. It’s US$49. If you’ve already purchased BigSeq, our previous step-sequencer-based plug-in, you can upgrade to BigSeq2 for only $10. Personally I can’t think of any way to buy so much fun in one plug-in for $49, but obviously I’m biased.

This one’s been a long time in the making, and I’d like to thank everyone who has voiced words of support and encouragment on Chris’s blog along the way. We’re pretty proud of the result, and we hope you enjoy it, too.