Clematis!

IMG_3430

Our oldest clematis has grown dramatically this year. I think it has nearly doubled its blossom production since last year. I put several photos of it and one of the younger ones on my flickr site here.

Announcing Ronin

It’s baa-ack…

Image

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. read more

MIDI-CV Converter

I recently finished a MIDI to Control Voltage converter I’ve been working on for awhile. Here’s a photo of it before I installed it in my synthesizer’s cabinet:

IMG_3463

(That’s a flickr-hosted photo so you can click on it to find a larger version.) I thought I’d put this photo up not because it’s a stellar example of my DIY skillz–it isn’t–but because I was amused at how it inadvertently ended up being a little showcase of circuit-construction techniques. On the right we have a PC board I laid out and had fabricated by BatchPCB. You may recall having seen this PC board on my blog previously. If you look closely at the photo above you’ll see that the chip labeled “HDAC” has been removed from the board. That was the quad 16-bit digital-to-analog converter I was going to use for pitch CVs. I don’t know what happened but I burned up two of those chips (at about $25 a pop) before giving up. I don’t know whether I made a layout error, whether my power supply was bad, whether I had overlooked some key piece of information in the spec sheet, or whether I just plain had bad luck. In any case, after the Magic Smoke came out of the second chip I decided to try a different DAC. read more

Random Stuff

Mid-July already? Inconceivable. It’s been busy around here. Here are some random bits of recent news:

I’ve been mired in the AudioUnit version of Audio Damage’s new product. Actually it’s not entirely new; it’s a reissue of Ronin, one of our earliest products. We shelved Ronin several years ago because it pre-dated our current methods for building plug-ins, and this meant that updating it for AU was more trouble than we felt it was worth at the time. We never felt entirely good about this decision, however, so recently we decided to dust it off, give it a face-lift, bring it up to date, and do the AU port. There’s a screenshot and Chris’s usual flamboyant commentary here. read more