Isolationism

One of my original requests to Andrew was to extend Boodler’s scheduling time limitation (of just over one hour), which seemed too restrictive for those of us who “think big” and wanted something to happen further in the future than that limitation would allow — a perfectly reasonable request, especially when you listen for extended periods of time, and/or want to introduce a high level of randomness in your environments (including events’ overall duration).

(more…)

… But not because I’m spring cleaning. It’s been over a month since I’ve so much as touched the keyboard here—not that anyone’s noticed except me, feeling guiltier for every passing day. That isn’t to say that nothing’s happened; whether it’s worth sharing (or reading) is a different question altogether. I wonder lately whether I should bother to keep a blog at all.

(more…)

Recently I heard back from Topher, a fellow Boodler who had asked me some time ago about some difficulties he’s been having running it under Ubuntu. While I have a PC here that dual-boots to Kubuntu 6.06, I confess that Gentoo is my desktop distro of choice, and Boodler seems to co-exist nicely without requiring any extra effort on my part.

(more…)

I’ve been laying low these past few weeks with good reason: more layoffs at work, and greater pressure from head office to deliver the finished product (including a drop-dead date I’m pretty sure we’ll miss). I’ve still got plenty to do, but all the critical-path items are up to the developers.

(more…)

I’ve been working a bit more on Boodler in the past day or two; our lil’ squeaker has a pretty well-established schedule now, and he’s got us trained well: From the moment he’s out at bedtime we have a few hours (staying up as late as we dare) to ourselves to do what we please.

I’m hoping to pick up a small contract or two on the side to bring in some extra income; while I waited, I decided to do a bit of work on one of my favourite hobbies.

(more…)

As I’ve mentioned in this space before, I use a software package called Boodler to create environmental audio for entertainment purposes. Although I make use of it on a daily basis I haven’t actually done any soundscape development for a couple months or so; our newborn son took care of a lot of the time, but I needed a bit of a break as well—I had been working on some rather complex stuff to get different Boodler agents to be able to communicate with one another in real-time to be able to perform fancy scheduling tricks (like having crickets suddenly go quiet at the sound of a loud thunderclap).

(more…)

Gavin over at Machine Lake makes some interesting observations for the possibilities of environmental/ambient audio from perspectives besides my own (my interests are primarily for entertainment purposes as well as a sleep aide and treatment for some mild forms of depression), focusing on modern practical and branding applications.

(more…)

This is the first post in what will hopefully grow to become a small series about recording sound effects (especially the natural variety) with a special focus on use in environmental audio simulations. The reason for this little series is directly related to my hobby of designing such simulations using Boodler, an excellent, undervalued, and largely unknown piece of software for doing exactly that. My hope is to spread the word about this great piece of software to everyone from the casual listener to the sound professional in the hopes of meeting other enthusiasts to learn and share with.

The best way to get sounds for use in such environmental audio simulations is to record them yourself; while other means exist of collecting sounds, they may be of inferior quality, inappropriate for some reason or other, and sounds from other sources are probably use- and copy-restricted—After all, part of the fun is being able to share the fruits of your labour with others!

(more…)