Episode: 466
Title: HPR0466: A technique for drum 'n' bass
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0466/hpr0466.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 21:10:11

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Hello everyone, my name is Sig Flub and I want to share with you a tiny program to help
you generate the NB songs.
So you can download this at http colon slash slash tmd dot fr e s h e l dot org slash d n b dot t j z.
Before you get anything, let's play a song from this program so we'll be right back.
Now, what's this song called?
Now, what this does is, and then I described this technique very briefly on episode two of DemarBust.
What this does is it plays a drum loop that sounds like this.
Over and over again, and the keys, Q, W, E, R, T, Y, U, I, A, S, D, F, G, H, J, K are mapped to bits of where the sample is in while it's playing.
So you push these keys together and it zores these bits together so that they are both one if either of them or both happen to be one.
And that's where most of the choppiness comes from. It's actually kind of simple. There are two more techniques in here.
Another one is you can press one of these bits and press the space bar. And when this bit is one, it's mute the audio.
You get kind of like sort of sounds. It's kind of nice for coming back up on beats or something like that.
If you have a really significant bit being muted, so you have a lot of time being muted.
And the third technique is the position of the sample is if it's not linear.
If it's a linear, the speed of it can be modified by the keys z and x.
So if you have like a beat that goes, if you speed it up, it can kind of hear that.
So if it's not linear, then the position in the sample gets returned to where it would be if it was linear, if that makes any sense.
If you play with it, you'll probably get sort of an intuitive feel for what it's doing.
So this is a scripts of sorts. The file has 2000, it has DNB, and also has testloop.wave.
And what you want to do is run DNB with the argument testloop.wave, and it uses that file as a loop.
Now, this script requires that you can compile things. It requires the STL development libraries.
You want to type STL-config, and if you have this program, well, that'll probably work.
If you don't have this program, you might want to do apt-get installed STL-double or something like that.
And the other thing it needs is SOX to convert the sound file.
And I hope you use this. I'm not really going to maintain it at all.
So it doesn't work for you. You're going to have to fix it yourself.
Like I know one thing it does is it's pretty much assumes that the audio buffer gets, it asks for, is what it gets.
So maybe if you have a USB sound card, you'll have a really huge audio buffer, and it probably won't work.
But you're going to have to fix that yourself. So, but you can use it, like if you can use it, you should use it.
And if you make any music from it, please let me know, because maybe I'll play this music on the radio show or something like this.
So take care, and if you want to email me about this, again, my email address is pantsbutt at gmail.com.
So take care, and bye-bye.
Music