wnd's weblog

SID of the day: Smo0oth Crimin4l by Owen Crowley (CRD)

Smo0oth Crimin4l by Owen Crowley (CRD)

• Original SID (c64.org)
• Ogg Vorbis (low quality)
• MPEG audio, MP3 (even lower quality)

I'm not the world's biggest Michael Jackson fan, but do like some of his songs, this being one of them. In my opinnion Smooth Criminal (and this SID) makes it clear why Michael Jackson's music is not your usual pop music that you can barely notice from all that background noise. Late events with HVSC and Michael Jackson make this SID a great pick as SID of the Day.

HVSC and me

Now that I'm done with up to date copy of High Voltage SID Collection I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry. In a way I should be happy to finish something as time consuming as this but on the other hand I feel sorry that's it's done. How did it all begin? While I've always been great fan of chip music, I started to actively listen SIDs as late as in 2001. Until then I had only listened to my favourite songs from my Commodore 64 times. I'm not sure what happened back in 2001, but I got this great idea of listening all songs in HVSC. At first I did very little progress. I ofter had the same song players for tens of minutes if not hours. I started from root directory of HVSC and entered directories manually one by one. On the bright side I only needed to keep track of current file. In any case all this trouble caused me to practically forget my plans. At this point I was listening to HVSC 4.2 (update 27), which contained around 16000 SIDs.

Then maybe a year or two later I started listening to SIDs again. I also realised that I needed a better player if I was ever planning to see my plans through. I knew exactly what I needed: a player that would change songs after a few minutes and a keyboard shortcut that would have the player skip to the next song. Luckily this was easily done with combination of command line player such as sidplay2, Perl and extensively configurable window manager such as FVMW2. In late 2005, during the new year break, I was finished with HVSC. Little I knew...

The update to HVSC 44 was big. Apart from changing the numbering scheme, HVSC 44 contained almost twice as many files as 4.2 did. Since many files were either renamed, moved or updated, I decided not to try to follow the updates but to start from zero. I decided that I would listen through HVSC 44 like HVSC had 4.2 never happened. I was glad to realise that HVSC now came with song length information, so after a few tweaks to my Perl-script I was all set for another go.

After four years, some updates to the player script and fine collection of scripts to determine changes in HVSC, I have now listened every single song, including subsongs, in HVSC 51. I'm still unsure why I did this but I'm glad I did it. SIDs have been great source of joy, and at times, peace, when things have gone noisy or hectic at work. Although many songs are simply horrible, most are fine when played on the background. There are many songs I like and some that I really love. I have collected a list of songs I have liked during the years. I may not agree with all the songs on it today, but at the time I liked every single one of them. You can get the list here.

And then some figures. All in all I have now listened some 60,000 individual SID files. According to Songlengths.txt, HVSC 51 consists of 36,937 files that total in 53,815 subsongs or 1639 hours or 68 days. Since I haven't listened all songs entirely, I cannot use these numbers as averages directly. It is simply impossible to tell how much time I have spent listening to SIDs, but considering the fact that for example I have listened /MUSICIANS/B/Beben_Wally/Tetris.sid for days if not weeks, I think it only fair to say I have listened to SIDs for at least 68 days. I even think I can go as far as to say that I have listened to SIDs for 68 * (60000 files / 36937 files * 0.75) = 83 days.

What about the artists? According to my list of favourites my top-11 preferred list of artists goes as follows.

1. Rob Hubbard (14 songs)
2. Sean Connolly (12)
3. Chris Huelsbeck (11)
4. Jeroen Tel (10)
5. Laxity (9)
6. Thomas Detert (9)
7. Tomas Danko (9)
8. Glenn Gallefoss (8)
9. Johannes Bjerregaard (8)
10. Geir Tjelta (7)
11. Dwayne Bakewell (7)

SID of the day: Unforgivable by Stellan Andersson (Dane)

Unforgivable by Stellan Andersson (Dane)

• Original SID (c64.org)
• Ogg Vorbis (low quality)
• MPEG audio, MP3 (low quality)

I finished listening High Voltage SID Collection 50 a few days ago. If I remember right, this song was one of the last songs I had on my playlist. I only wish I had found it earlier.

In related news, sidplay1 (sidplay-base) and sidplay2 (sidplay) can now be found in Maemo Diablo extras devel. Naturally my repository contains both. Get your copy of sidplay1 for Diablo or Chinook, and sidplay2 for Diablo or Chinook.

0 days to go

There it is. Fully served, or "täysin palvellut". On 22 September 2008 I begun my non-military service and took a bus to Lapinjärvi training centre. Today, 18 September 2009, 362 after that bus ride, I'm on duty for the very last day.

In a way I'm very glad it's over -- after all, this thing prevented me from travelling freely -- but part of me will miss this. It was absolutely great to work here at Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. Thanks everyone!

While I also enjoyed working at Movial, I think my work here was much more important. Even though Movial also granted me freedom to choose how (and to a degree when) I worked, here at university I could truly choose my own pace. One day I would work for twelve hours straight, the other for three hours. Sometimes I would work in the middle of the night back home, only because I felt like that was the right time to do it -- and because I could. I can't help it, but my mind simply doesn't work from nine to five. It works when it chooses to work. I only wish I would have had time to finish what I had started, but like any other GNU/Linux distribution, a finished distribution is a dead distribution.

On Monday I will return back to my "normal" life and start working at Movial again. It is still unclear what exactly I get to do there, but that's probably not exactly public information anyway.

PulseAudio

This rant was originally going to be part of previous multi-rant, but it has then grown in size to be fully self-sufficient.

I'm not exactly the biggest fan of PulseAudio and based on my past encounters with it I tend to blame PulseAudio for all audio issues on GNU/Linux until proven otherwise. Take that in account when you read this. Technically I think PulseAudio is neat and it has some ambitious goals but right now it simply doesn't work for me.

rant mode on

If you ask me, PulseAudio is the source of all evil. Well, maybe not the source of all evil, but to me it has done more bad than good.

First of all PulseAudio hides real hardware mixers behind its shiny shell. That would be mostly ok if the real ALSA mixer would not be muted on default on most new computers we install. I can blame Ubuntu/ALSA for that, but as far as I can remember, Debian's ALSA init.d-scripts take care of that. ALSA mixers can be used even when PulseAudio is running (if you know how) but that's not the point.

Second, many (GNOME/Cubbli) users here at university who want to use their wireless USB headphones come to ask for help. They can't seem to figure it out themself -- and I'm not blaming them. Since I've only configured ALSA to use those headphones, someone had to teach me how to do it with PulseAudio. Here's how I was told to do it.

• Launch "Default Sound Card" from System/Preferences menu.
• Find that tiny window that just opened and choose PulseAudio.
• Launch pavucontrol from command line. I have no idea if this application can be started from the GUI. Go to Output Devices tab and select PulseAudio as default device. Intuitively the checkbox to do that can be found by clicking a down-arrow next to the device name.
• Since you still can't hear your YouTube video playing in your browser, go to Playback tab and move the stream to device called PulseAudio. As expected, you have to click that down-arrow next to application name to find that option. Repeat this step for all applications you have started before setting default audio device. Note that applications only show up here if they're running. If you want to set the device for your VoIP application, you'd better start it now. In worst case scenario you'll have to make a call to have the application appear here.

If I get this right, PulseAudio remember which output is used for each application. This way music and movie players can use your stereo system for sound, and your VoIP application can use the headphones. That's great and all, but if I never touch those settings, but then select different device as default output device, I'd expect the sounds to go to that device. Apparently PulseAudio does not only remember user's choices, but also remember what device was used when the application was started for the first time. I can imagine why people made it this way, but part of me is still wondering "what were they thinking!?"

Third, PulseAudio constantly crashes on me. When I started working here last year didn't know anything about PulseAudio. When I first launched alsamixer I noticed that strange audio device called PulseAudio. I then started playing SIDs with my ALSA-enabled sidplay2 only to find out that after an hour or two the sound was no longer working. Applications didn't compain about the device, the volume was set properly, but there was simply no sound. Eventually I killed and restarted PulseAudio and suddenly everything started working again. After a few days I grew tired of this, killed PulseAudio but never restarted it. Only then I realized what PulseAudio was. I realized PulseAudio was unnecessary source of trouble.

rant mode off