Discord 2 Reviewed In Future Music Magazine

I just found out that Future Music ran a very positive review of Discord 2 in their August issue. The author almost gushes about the plug-in, and bestows upon it their Platinum and Value Awards. It’s also the longest and most in-depth review of Discord 2 that I’ve read.

I do have to wonder about the introduction, though. It’s almost completely fictional. Maybe the author wrote it at the pub after a couple of pints? For the record, Discord wasn’t our first product and Audio Damage was quite well-established by the time we released it. read more

Registration Re-Enabled

Well, that was pretty stupid of me. I went to some length to spam-proof the commenting mechanism of this site awhile back, and then I wondered why nobody posted any comments. I mean, I know there isn’t a huge amount of traffic on this site, but no comments at all? It seemed odd. Today I finally noticed that when I previously shut down the commenting mechanism altogether, I also disabled the user registration mechanism, and forgot to enable it when I turned the comments back on. If you’re not logged in you can’t comment, and you can’t log in if you don’t register… Duh. read more

Pardon the Dust

I’m about to mess around with the layout and appearance of this site. I apologize if you happen to visit in the midst of this activity and find things shifting around in odd ways. “Do not adjust your picture–the problem is not in your set…”

Extreme Origami

Our friend Ann sent me this link to an interesting Discover article about contemporary origami. There’s a photo of a dragon that’s probably the most sophisticated bit of folding in the world, as well as some of Robert Lang‘s recent insects. It’s an interesting article, particularly if you haven’t heard of Lang and his work.

Bob Dylan’s a Bloody Hypocrite

Bob Dylan wrote some amazing songs back in his day (which was around the time I was in diapers), but looks like he’s now at the point at which he’ll criticize the music biz with one side of his mouth while sucking up cash for endorsements with the other.

Quoting from this article : “Bob Dylan says the quality of modern recordings is ‘atrocious,’ and even the songs on his new album sounded much better in the studio than on disc. … Dylan said he does his best to fight technology, but it’s a losing battle. ‘Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded ’em. CDs are small. There’s no stature to it.'” read more

Apple Not Particularly Green

Macrumours.com notes that Apple doesn’t score particularly well in environmental awareness. Quoting from their site:

Late last week, environmental watchdog Greenpeace released their Guide to Greener Electronics (pdf) which rates how eco-friendly different tech companies are based on publicly available information. Apple scored 4th lowest, beating only Leveno, Motorola, and Acer. Among the top-scorers were Nokia and Dell.

[quoting from the report] For a company that claims to lead on product design, Apple scores badly on almost all criteria. The company fails to embrace the precautionary principle, withholds its full list of regulated substances and provides no timelines for eliminating toxic polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and no commitment to phasing out all uses of brominated flame retardants (BFRs). Apple performs poorly on product take back and recycling, with the exception of reporting on the amounts of its electronic waste recycled. read more

DIY PC Boards

I’ve made a couple of PC boards in recent months, and thought I’d mention here the resources I’m using. For schematic capture and PCB layout and artwork generation, I’m using a newish program called DipTrace. After looking at as many PCB design programs as I could find on the web, I arrived at two conclusion: 1) most of them are really expensive, as in $1000 or more; 2) most of them have really arcane user interfaces that might seem appropriate to some CAD/CAM expert working in 1993 but are completely opaque by today’s standards. I don’t have very sophisticated PCB-design needs, so spending a bunch of money on a huge package and spending a bunch of time learning how to use it really doesn’t make sense. Fortunately, DipTrace is a happy exception. It’s fairly easy to learn and use and it’s reasonably priced (particularly if you can get away with the “lite” version, which should be adequate for most synthesizer modules). Its supporting programs are also easy to come to terms with. I’ve created new part diagrams without trouble, including a somewhat tricky pad and hole layout for a rotary encoder. There are some minor clunky points in the user interface, and I’ve found that the parts libraries tend to have very small annular rings, but overall I’m quite happy with it. (The rings can be manually adjusted, of course; the trick is to remember to make the adjustment before you fabricate the PCB.) I’ve used it to produce two PCBs and both have come out very nicely. read more

More Audio Damage Coverage in Computer Music Magazine

Yes, it’s been a busy week for AD. Response to Reverence has been amazing, for which we are extremely grateful. Yesterday the new issue of Computer Music arrived in my mailbox, and besides sporting Chris’s lovely half-page ad for Reverence, we were surprised and very pleased to discover it contained a nice review of Discord 2. They gave it a score of 9 out of 10, little badges for Performance and Value For Money, and said this in summary: “Another useful, addictive and downright inspiring effect from The Damage. Sack off a night down the pub and use the money to buy it.” Thanks, folks! read more

Reverence: It’s a Hit

Our new reverb plug-in Reverence is enjoying a very warm welcome in the marketplace. It’s selling like crazy–it’s broken all of our first-days-of-sales records by a factor of two or more–and the buyers love it. There’s a nice review here at the Create Digital Music website.

Audio Damage Releases Reverence Reverb

I’m pleased to announce a new Audio Damage product, available today. It’s called Reverence; it’s a reverberation plug-in which recreates the effects typical of 1980s-vintage digital emulations of plate reverbs. (Yes, that makes it a software version of an electronic imitation of an electro-mechanical simulation of acoustic reverberation.) It has both their lush sound and fast & easy user interface. You can read more about it, listen to samples, and buy it at the Audio Damge website. read more