Midi Analyser / Thru

I did a bit of work involving MIDI equipment a few years back.  Here’s a little debugging program that I wrote back then, which is useful now for when I want to have a quick play on my keyboard. It allows me to quickly connect my MIDI controller to my Audigy2 synthesizer, behaving like an in-software “Thru” connection.  It was never intended for other people to use so it looks ugly, but the readme file included should be sufficient to explain how to use the program.

Download here.

MidiCom screenshot

The Majestic Potato Cod

A cool screensaver where a load of potato fish swim around your screen and eat each other. While you’re at it, why not also post facebook updates via a potato?

Among my favourite animators are Cyriak and Terry Gilliam.  Although I don’t follow an interest in animation at all, I occasionally get bored and end up producing oddities such as this screen saver.  I created it in a hurry and due to extreme laziness it requires .NET Framework 4, probably won’t run on old computers, and will certainly have issues with Windows 8 (let’s face it, what doesn’t have issues with Windows 8?)

Download the majestic potato cod from here.

screenshot

On Windows, extract the screen saver from the downloaded zip file, right-click on the screen saver file and select “Install”. It’s really that simple… unless you use Windows 8 in which case you’ll need to sacrifice a goat, pray to Mephistopheles, fight with the kneejerk security design then eventually give up and install XP/Linux…

Although this screen saver also runs fine under WINE/Mono on modern Linux distributions, I have no idea how to package it as a Linux screen saver – if you do this then feel free to post a link or git repo in the comments section.

Dielectric: Electrical and acoustic spectroscopy via a PC sound card

This program generates a chirp signal, sweeping over a given frequency range, and drives a given audio output with the signal, while simultaneously analysing the signal coming from an audio input.  This allows electrical spectroscopy and acoustic spectroscopy from ~10Hz-100 kHz to be performed with a £40 sound card.  Note that AC97-channels (such as on-board sound) have lowpass filters built in, restricting the upper limit to around 25 kHz.  Tested with a Creative Audigy 2 ZS, using kX v5.1 drivers.

Download here.

test-120k-1k-fullrange