Devil's Canyon 20th Anniversary Unlocked Pentium Specs Leak

Intel's Devil's Canyon CPU series is on it way, expected to launch on the 2nd of June and today detailed have surfaced about the 20th anniversary unlocked Pentium. The processor was announced by Intel a few months back and over the past week or we learnt that it would be the G3258.

Today Chinese.VR-Zone  displayed a screen shot from CPU-Z showing the G3258 to run a native speed of 3.2GHz with 2 cores, no hyper-threading and max TDP of 53 watts. No information on how well it will overclock with Intel's improved thermal interfaces material promised for devil's canyon but not long till we can see for ourself what the Pentium G3258 has to offer.

Drum Machine Project

I recently created a drum machine in C# using the directX sound programming library as part of a university project. Through the first and second years of my course programming a been prominent  part however this was the first time working in C#. The project was simply to create a drum machine with 4 voices, that could be play 4 bard of 4 beats. As I progressed in making the program some useful features were added such as:

• 6 Voices
• Voice active indicator
• Voice pan and volume
• Playback head
• Beat and bar indicator
• Set BPM and time signature
• 3 Presets
• Temporarily save presets

Visually I tried to keep it simple however with the additional added features it became slightly over crowded.

Infinity Drummer - The drum machine in use

Here's a short demo video of the drum machine in action. Please comment and let me know about what you want to see added and what you think should be changed.

Blink Stick

I got myself a blink stick! A small USB device with a single RGB LED I've not had much time to do anything with it yet but its built and ready to go.

Building is simple with only a few components to soldier then its all ready to go.  I'm looking to set it up to show email notifications from multiple email addresses to be displayed with different colors. If that goes well i'm already looking at doing a project with the BlinkStick Pro and some NeoPixles as the ability to control multiple LEDs could prove to be very useful.

Android Wear

Today Google announced Android Wear, a tweak/extension to the Android platform. Alongside this 2 Android Ware devices have bean announced the LG G Watch and the Motorola Moto 360 for launch this year. Both smart watches will run Android Ware, an extension of android mobile OS that allows for notifications to be sent to the watches.

The interface its self appears very similar to Google Now just scaled down. Ware devices will have touch screens and work mainly off voice commands however how well this will work remains to be seen.

If the watches are thing enough, ample battery life they and a good price point then Google may win over a large part of the growing wearable market.

The PONO Player

PonoMusic recently smashed there kickstarter goal of $800,000 with well over a month to go. Currently there at around $2.5 million of funding. But what is it?

PonoMusic seem to be selling more of a philosophy than a standard portable media player. The product its self is a triangular prism with a touch secrren, 64GB of built in a storage and a micro SD card slot that focuses on providing hi quality audio rather than a huge collection. This is by no means the first "high quality" audio file player. Astel&Kern have a range of these type of devices however they do not have an online store for such high quality audio.

This is possibly where Pono have ironed out the concept offering an online store for audio up to 192 kHz sample rate.  To put that in to perspective a standard CD has a sample rate of 44.1kHz. This raises another question of how audible is the difference and how many artists are being recorded at this level of detail.

Clearly there is a high demand for this level of audio fidelity however will we see much uptake when the product is launched?

Change of Plan

Dew to the ever changing nature of everything things change.
I know I've only made a few posts but dew to a LOT of uni work i'll be trying to post short updates about each one as and when I progress. Some of the projects ill be doing;

Creating a MIDI echo style plug in using cycling 74's MAX MSP.
Creating a multi guitar FX unit with looper this will also be done using MAX MSP.
Building an HTML site without the use of editors such as dreamweaver.
Writing a research paper as part of a small group project.
Recording, Mixing and Mastering a song.
Programming a drum machine in C#.

So it's gonna be a fun couple of weeks, now I'm of to uni at half 2 on a Saturday.

Mixing Project

One of many modules on my course is studio techniques where we cover recording, mixing and mastering. The most recent assignment for this module was to mix a song. We were provided with a multi-track session in Pro Tools 10 to mix. We were also expected to used some specific techniques such as parallel compression, parts doubling and side chain plugins.

After listening to the track in Pro Tools it was clear the track needed a lot of work, the drums were weak (the kick lacked attack), the harmonica was very shrill and the levels on all the tracks fluctuated a large amount throughout.  As my marks have now come back I can put it up for so you can listen. 

I'm happy with the out come but would like to spend a little more time on the track just to bring out a little more clarity to the vocals and to reduce the compression a bit in the first section.

The original song is Sister Cities by Hop Along and can be found on there bandcamp.

New Year, New Start

New year’s resolution: Post things on this blog.

With the first month or 2 of this blog being very slow I’ve decided that this year I will start to make more regular posts on here.  This post will mainly be about my work at university and will mostly be for my own benefit but you are more that welcome to read them too.

This week I have had to focus my attention towards finishing a group project I have been working on with 4 students from the Game course. The task was to create a game that would utilise the Kinect system. While the game students worked on this it was down to me to create all the audio for the game.

First and most obviously I need sounds of a bowling alley. After some phone calls to some bowling alleys’ it was clear I wouldn’t be able to get in and record audio before anyone turned up. So unfortunately I had to make the most of free sounds online with lots of editing. I used 2 online sounds to create the key things I needed. One the sound of a strike and the other a thunder rumble.

The strike sounds was cut up to single out a pin sound. After this the clip was copied and each then given slight variations in pitch and timing. This gave me 7 very different sounding pin strikes.

The thunder rumble was used to help with the sound of the bowling ball rolling. I recorded a coin rolling along a desk several times, once crossfaded this gave a long noisy rolling sound. I needed to fill out the low end. I tried to some EQ and pitch shift but still couldn’t get the right sound so instead I used the thunder rumble sound and it worked a treat.

Game music was also created and needed to fit in with the game. I opted for a laidback jazz style piece created entirely synthetically. The key reason for this was that it needed to be done over Christmas and I did not have access to the studios. I’m usually one to favour recordings over synths and don’t often enjoy making synth based music but I did enjoy this project.