Steve Jobs the master of orbital dynamics

To submit your entry, follow the instructions below.

• Download and install the Osmos free demo. (Or purchase Osmos from the App Store.)
• Experiment with your gameplay to illustrate physics concepts using Osmos as your virtual lab.
• Review the official contest rules
• Create a video illustrating a physics concept.
  (If you want to record your screen, try Jing or ScreenChomp)
• Upload your video to YouTube, Vimeo, or Screencast.com
• Complete the submission form by 11:59 PM PST. January 2, 2012. (Deadline extended.)

Winners will be announced on January 4, 2012.

Visit GFBRobot to read the interview…

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Silk.
With the swish of a finger anyone can create beautiful, flowing art entwined with an ethereal soundscape, a world where riches of color spring from your fingertips.

All music and sound was performed on Jupiter 6 and ARP Odyssey, and features a brand new High Skies track. Compatible with all iPads, iOS v4.0 or later.

Simply add a comment to win a copy, we have three copies to give away. The draw will take place on Friday 27th May 2011. Anyone who wins and has already bought Silk will get a full refund, or is free to give to a friend.

Some sample images you can create with Silk…

Don’t forget to add a comment below to win, simple!
We do not keep email addresses and only the winners will be contacted, so there is no reason not to enter! Good luck!

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A supercooled album fractured with exclusives, classics and the new.
Richard Barbieri has exclusively re-recorded his classic Japan track ‘The Experience of Swimming’; Charles Webster has donated an exclusive mix from his brand new January Tuesday project, which was only recorded last week; and Eno colloborator Roedelius, one of the electronic pioneers alongside Kraftwerk, has donated his classic ‘Wenn der Südwind Weht’; plus an unreleased High Skies track and new material from Woob and Anne Garner.

Please help us to collect donations for Japan by spreading this link on Facebook, Twitter, forums and email.

www.microscopics.co.uk/japan
or
http://bit.ly/nsilence

View album and donate…

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6th Planet, brand new iPhone / iPod game from new indie developer Monkube. It’s a fusion of arcade game and comic book and features an electronic soundtrack from Leones, Robots in Space, Forest Fargloam and myself (with Gas-Microscopic). I also made some of the in-game sounds on my ARP Odyssey and old phaser pedal. Includes a full comicbook!

We have three copies to give away; just add a comment below to win…

Monkube.com
Sixty levels, ten worlds full of challenging obstacles, hidden levels if you’re good at the gameplay part, and master levels for the guy who’s done with the story mode and still can’t stop playing.

6th Planet features a full ten track ambient soundtrack by renowned artists and a comic book story created in coorporation with Vivifilm. Vivi-who? They’re an animated movie production company with two Oscar nominations on their impressive resume.

iFanzine.com 5/5
Five out of five chimps agree: this mega collaboration from Monkube and a number of art studios is the best darn iteration of “lunar lander” you’ll find on the iOS. Boasting perfectly fine-tuned physics, a wonderfully illustrated sci-fi story filled with as many twists as the game’s complex levels, and a pick-up-and-play interface, 6th Planet gives the iOS gamer just about everything he or she would ever look for in a videogame — and then some!

Qwertyhub.com 4.5/5
6th Planet it a fantastic game and is very easy to recommend. The gameplay is good enough to stand on its own, in fact, the game actually got more enjoyable the deeper into it I went (stages 48, 49, and 50 were my 3 favorites). Monkube didn’t stop there: every aspect is well developed to deliver much more than just a “good game”, it’s an excellent total experience.

Note: We delete all email addresses after we’ve contacted the winners.
Free draw will take place on Fri 11th March.
Add a comment below to win…

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Free Gas and High Skies tracks for all customers and subscribers to our occasional newsletter.

High Skies – The Good Earth mp3 (click to play snippet).
This is an old unreleased Gas track from around 1998. It’s a micro track at only 43 seconds long, that’s why the preview clip above is so short. A broadcast from Apollo on Christmas Eve.

High Skies – A Star in the East mp3 (click to play snippet).
A special Christmas mix from a future release. Sleigh bells, speech synthesizers and analogue crystals. Some of you may have a copy of this already but this is a higher quality MP3 and artwork.

The links to the full tracks will be sent out in the newsletter, which we’re hoping to get out today (Fri 17th) or tomorrow, so please let us know if you haven’t received it by late Saturday.

Anyone who purchases anything or subscribes before the end of the year 2010 will also get the free tracks.
Subscribe now…

UPDATE 1: It seems I posted the wrong version of A Star in the East. There is no Stephen Hawking in this version!

UPDATE 2: A good percentage of newsletters will get stopped in bad spam filters, or get returned from changed emails that people have forgotten to update. So please let us know if you haven’t received your free tracks yet and we’ll send you some more.

Happy Christmas humans!

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Woah x10. Apple has just announced the four winners of the prestigious apps of the year 2010, and have selected Osmos as the iPad game of the year 2010. Congratulations to Hemisphere Games!

Steve Jobs does all his re-entry calculations using Osmos for iPad.

Osmos includes music from Gas and High Skies (free MP3 downloads)

Also, coincidently Osmos (iOS) has just been updated.

Hey everyone! We’ve submitted a sweet Osmos iOS update (1.6.4) which should be available any day now. By popular demand, it contains:

• Game Center support!
• Skip a Level: Players will be able to skip up to three levels in Odyssey mode. If you’ve been having trouble with a specific level but want to continue the Odyssey (thereby unlocking additional Arcade modes), this update will be a big help!
• Smaller download size on iPhone, allowing it to be downloaded over 3G.

A note for iOS developers out there: we learned a useful lesson we thought we should share. Our last iPhone update (1.6.3) added Retina support, including a set of larger textures that pushed the .ipa file we submitted to Apple up to 19.3 MB. We thought this would squeak by under the 20 MB limit imposed on 3G downloads; but along the way, 1.4 MB was somehow added to the version finally available on the App Store. We’re not sure what in Apple’s process causes this, but we’ve submitted an 18 MB .ipa file this time to try to remain under the limit. Beware the bloat!

Cheers!

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One large Wordpress problem is that any image it scales down become very blurred, as below (grr), so please click on images to enlarge and sharpen focus. Also, the first image is 1920 pixels wide so you may have to click the image twice to zoom to 100%…

Click images to enlarge

A foggy miasma over a country stream

Ice and snow on branches

Radiation frost on a grill

 
Apple in the snow

more pics after the break…

Snow lane mist

Snow and ice branch

Hoar frost leaf

Hoar frosted watering can

Hoar frost on a grate

See our snowflakes pics from last week, click to see more…

Microscopics snowflakes…

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Front and Back.

Exactly the same quality as our Minimoog model, they are printed at 600dpi on 350gsm matt-laminated card, die cut and hand scored. 1:8 scale.

Gas 0095 on CD and Flac come with Moog Modular plus Minimoog and Gas 0095 models.

Also included with all t-shirt, CD and Flac orders is the micro Gas 0095 CD model (27mm high)…

Minimoog reproduced by kind permission of Moog Music Inc.

ORDERS
Gas 0095 – CD and Flac – free Minimoog and Moog Modular models
Microscopics MiniMoog Model
T-shirts – free Moog Modular model

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Paul Nasca is the creator of  superstar timestretch tool, PaulStretch, which stretches audio up to a billion times its original length.

J. BIEBZ – U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

We spoke to Paul, who lives in Romania, about the rapid rise to fame of his free open-source PaulStretch tool, why he wrote it, how it performs its magic and he also shares a few tips for any musicians using it.

MAT JARVIS: How long have you been programming, what makes you create audio software and do you have any other software available?

PAUL NASCA: I am in programming since 1992 but I do audio software since 1996. My first software was a non-realtime software synthesizer “Paul’s Sound Designer” a DOS program which lets you synthesize sounds by adding many waveforms.

Since 2002 I am working on open-source realtime software: ZynAddSubFX which has many sound synthesis methods and effects (including a new sound synthesis algorithm designed by me: PADsynth ). ZynAddSubFX is included in many Linux distributions (or at least in default repositories) and (I believe) it is much more used than PaulStretch.

Also, I wrote some minor audio software (like Hypermmamut, unfinished software which converts audio to images and vice-versa) and I contributed to other open source projects (e.g: I wrote a few effects for Audacity).
Another open source project written by me, but unrelated to audio, is some software which enhances pictures: zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/other/tonemapping, and here are some videos processed with it: vimeo.com/user1194931/videos.

Regarding on what makes me create audio software is that I like to make beautiful sounds and I try to experiment a lot with audio. Some audio software (or part of them) was created because different reasons (more personal ;-) (MJ: intriguing! ) .

Gas – Microscopic 600 (edit) by microscopics
Free downloadfor a limited time (89mb)

MAT: Do you make these audio tools to help with your own music making or for others?

PAUL: It depends: Paulstretchwas made for myself, but after hearing the results I decided to share it. On the other hand, ZynAddSubFX and the PADsynth algorithm was made with sharing in mind.

MJ: What was the original inspiration, why did you decide to create such an extreme timestretch program?

PN: A few years ago I heard about 9 beet stretch (MJ: A 24 hour streaming version of Beethoven’s 9th) and I thought that it would be nice if I made myself some stretches. I searched for a program to do it or at least for an algorithm. I couldn’t find anything useful, so I decided to think how I could make it by myself. After a few days I had the idea of Paulstretch and after another few weeks I made an improved version of this new algorithm.

MJ: The long stretches are remarkably smooth, how does it perform its magic?

PN: Before describing how it makes the sound smooth, I want to tell you about how do I model the sound. I described it here: zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/doc_0 in this discussion is important the first two points (MJ: a very interesting piece on the theories of producing quasiperiodic waveforms, as opposed to static periodic ones,  to create sounds with life and variety, like real analog synthesizers as opposed to the static waveforms on most plugin synthesizers. A must read).

So basically I model the musical sound as a collection of “harmonics” and each “harmonic” is composed from many close frequencies with random phases (like you do a bandpass filter of a noise to get one “harmonic”). This idea models very closely the sound of ensembles (like large choirs, orchestras, etc) (MJ: Zynaddsubfx does create some remarkable choirs).

Paulstretch works in this way (for each step): take a buffer from the position x of the input audio, do the FFT of the windowed buffer, randomize the phases, do the IFFT and overlap-add to the output audio. The output audio amplitude is corrected by a small amount of tremollo (to avoid changing the overall amplitude caused by the overlapping). The value of x is incremented to a value which depends on the stretch amount (for very large steps the x position is incremented with a very small step and for huge stretches is incremented only once a while – which depends on the stretch amount). You can see an example where the input position of the buffers are shown in the image above.
The most important thing in each step is randomization of the phases (which is described in the point 2 of above, of how I model the sound). This makes the sound smooth and non-repetitive.

MJ: So is PaulStretch breaking the audio down into its component frequencies, modulating/ randomising their phases and reconstructing it back together again?

PN: Yes, the trick is to randomise the phases and to change slightly the position of the input buffer.

MJ: Interesting. So is that similar to how digital reverb works, with modulated and randomised impulses?

PN: Not exactly, I simply replace the original phases with random phases (more exactly, I discard the phase information for each buffer and I add random phases). You can see in the code at: Stretch.cpp in function FFT::freq2smp, where I make the phases random.

MJ: Do you have any tips for musicians?

PN: Yes I do:
1 Use very large window sizes (few seconds) and small amount of stretching to get the “essence” of the music (which keeps only the overall chords).
2 Play with the “Bandwidth/Spread” (from Process tab)
3 With the Arbitrary filter, remove a bit from the high pitched sounds
4 Right click on the Play button to hear the original sound
5 For the best results use PaulStretch for sounds which contains choirs/ensembles

MJ: It’s been out for a while, over four years now, so were you surprised when it suddenly became so talked about on the Internet? Have the number of downloads suddenly rocketed?

PN: Yes, I found last week that I received many emails and I didn’t know why. I did a search and I found the reason. Yes, the number of downloads skyrocketed.

This is the graph showing the downloads spike on the day the Bieber version was posted. Before the spike it was happily being downloaded at a respectable 20 copies a day, then overnight jumped up to 10000 a day at the peak, and has now settled to around 1000 downloads a day. This is just the Windows and Linux version, with the Mac version on another site I’m sure having a large spike too.
This really goes to show how much exposure counts in software as much as music. It was the same software that has been freely available for the past four years, the only thing that has changed is that people are now aware of it. Well deserved exposure too.

MJ: Do you have any future plans for new features or refinements?

PN: Yes, I hope that in the next days (or weeks) to release a new version. This new version will have some bugs fixed, parameter loading/saving and an experimental stretch mode which tries to preserve better the attacks (to stretch less on attacks).

MJ: Many thanks Paul, so what is next and what are you currently working on?

PN: In this period I am doing the master studies (in IT). Also, I am doing some small experiments regarding the audio software, I work a bit on ZynAddSubFX and PaulStretch (depends a lot of how much free time I have).

Many thanks to Paul for taking the time to answer our questions in the middle of his studies and creating remarkable software.

You can try PaulStretch for yourself and his other audio software, all free to download…
PaulStretch (win/ linux)
PaulStretch (mac)
ZynAddSubFx (win/ linux)
PADsynth (win/ linux)

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