________ ________ _______

________ ________ ________
2018-09-24 / \/ \/ / \
/ __/ /_ _/
Who dis is? It's Cat back with a cool as / _/ / /
heck t-file for y'all. Slowly getting back \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
into the habit of posting. Weather is / \/ \/ / \
warming up so my mood is lifting somewhat. / _/ /_ _/
/- / _/ /
LOW WIRE continues on with moderate \________/\________/\___/____/
success, I'm three shows in now and I've
started fiddling with DJ software and my playlists are getting a bit more
interesting. I was really proud of the Japanese Grime show I did the week
before last but it didn't archive, this past Saturday was a good one too
though. Next week I'm gonna get back to a more simple playlist rather than
clumsily trying to do a mix and just a no-fuss genre.

The last show really stressed me the hell out, I dunno why I was so worked
up about it but god damn I had a whole mess of nightmares the night before. I
dreamt I was ready to go then time slipped and I was 15 minutes late, I dreamt
I was ready to go and suddenly all my gear was fucking up, I dreamt I was
trying to get ready to go and people kept getting in my way or otherwise
wasting my time. It was gruelling. What the fuck.

I dunno man. Had black-brain all week and I guess it just came to a head.
Whatever!

It might not be there at the time of posting this file but today or
tomorrow I should have the track lists mirrored on baud.baby for ya.

In other fun audio news, Solderpunk mentioned on Mastodon and later
wrote[1] about how tuning in to shortwave during his first S24O overnight
camping ride got gears turning (heh) about a radio/found sound recording in
the vein of my K6MWT recordings[2] which in turn got cylinders firing for me
again. I've been trying to stay active on aNONradio's OpenMic blocks, usually
these happen while I'm at work so I do what I can to stream remotely but it
was Sunday that I started properly thinking about retrying the K6MWT stuff,
with a few new tools under my belt, and thought it'd be fun to try and stream
it live over the OpenMic stream.

I did a test and the results were really wild, using the same music
generator I used in the old recordings (Drone FX) and the same K6MWT repeater
but I also threw a phone call from my Touchfone 12, behind some reverb into
the mix. It got me really excited to experiment. I threw a recording of it[3]
into files/K6MWT/ but just a heads-up, the audio is pretty quiet. This seems
to be my curse, I struggle with the same problem with the mic in LOW WIRE.
Maybe if I keep it up it'll eventually become endearing. Just crank the volume
up, it'll be fine.

You can hear me giggling at how great it sounds.

To tie it all together and make recordings or send streams I'm using a
program called Audio Hijack, I use it for LOW WIRE too, I had it set up with
Chrome, X-Lite and VLC as inputs, with Chrome running Drone FX, X-Lite
handling the call and VLC playing the Broadcastify stream of K6MWT.

For the stream itself I fiddled
_[Advertisement]__________________ with it a bit and that's where things
| | fell apart a bit. I purchased the
| Getting tired of this phlog? | desktop version of Drone FX and
| | swapped Chrome out for it in Audio
| Turn to aNONradio.net | Hijack and, I dunno, results were
| on Fridays @ 0100 UTC | pretty bad. You can hear it at the
| and | start of the recording below, it gets
| | like stuck on a sound and just buzzes.
| CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE! | I dunno if it's because it's not
| | optimised for newer Macs or if maybe
---------------------------------- it just didn't like the load my
machine was under, I'm not sure. I'll
fiddle with it some more. It wasn't expensive so I'm not hugely fussed but
it's disappointing because I'd like to have Chrome freed up as an input.

The hams on K6MWT were mostly just jamming the repeater with music, it was
less weird and more tedious and silly so I just started throwing things into
the mix. I read some Jared Hendrickson, played a clip of him too, and just
read some stuff that was on screen through the phone transmitter. I played
some DTMF tones, some of a HAARP transmission, a voicemail from who knows
where and anything else interesting that I could find lying around. It ended
up a bit of a mess overall but it was fun to pull at threads of ideas to see
what worked and what didn't.

I've already got some ideas of other things I want to try, though for
shorter periods and less ad-hoc so maybe I'll try again this Friday.

There's a few things I need to get a handle on first, though: I need to
figure out why Drone FX hates itself so much and I really want to try messing
with Pure Data as an alternative. I also need to sort out an input library of
sorts rather than adding and removing things ad-hoc and making a mess, there's
a bit in the recording from Sunday where you can hear some music break in
because I was looking for something in Chrome and Chrome was feeding the mix.
With a fixed set of "instruments" it should make it easier for me to put in a
proper effort to get the volume correct.

I put a trimmed version of the OpenMic archive[4] into files/K6MWT/ for ya
too. Feels good to find a creative outlet again, it's been a while.

One last story while I've got ya, since it's also audio related. A few
years back now I picked up a bunch of second hand audio tapes from Goodwill to
make mixtapes on, it fizzled out because the recorder I bought wasn't so hot
and I didn't want to shell out for a higher quality one but I never got rid of
anything, I just squashed it all away in the back of the cupboard. Cut to
today and I've got a phone pickups but need something to record them on so I
dig all that out to see if it'll do the trick, find batteries slam in a tape
and hit play to check the batteries work.

I expected to hear music or some dry dictation but instead I get the voices
of two teenage-ish girls doing a fake radio station, it really made me smile.
A friend and I used to do exactly the same back when we were kids, ours was
called Ted's Radio, these girls just introduce themselves "Hannah Hannah and
Cool Kat" but don't mention any kind of clever show name.

At first I thought it was from back in the 80s or early 90s because of the
music they play but they refer to them as "oldies" throughout I'm having
trouble pinning it down. It might just be a case of raiding the 'rents music
collection. One of the girls yells at her dad at one point because the record
player stopped working.

It's a pretty fun find, I'll hang on to it and maybe blast it out over
OpenMic one time.

And I'll be sure to check the rest of the tapes before I try using them.

[1] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/my-first-s24o.txt
[2] gopher://baud.baby/1/files/K6MWT/
[3] gopher://baud.baby/9/files/K6MWT/201809231236_recording.mp3
[4] gopher://baud.baby/9/files/K6MWT/201809230300_openmic-edit.mp3

EOF