madox

Fantastic, thanks mate!

Hi, Nice job on your x0x - very neat. Do you really have no time for it? Seems a shame, like a lot of effort has gone into that one. higher state - what fun. btw, what reverb are you using in the demo videos? Good luck for your sale.

Hi, Thanks for posting back with a positive feedback for us to see. I was a little surprised to see this thread still active. I'm off to look at the bcbox mods you mentioned...

Hmm, I had forgotten about this project. Saw it a while, ago, and meant to check back on how it was progressing. Nice idea. Really hope it comes together.

;) Thanks. I enjoyed it, too.

The top number is callled '4' The bottom number is called '4' The music is called 'techno', or something Seriously though, I imagine there would be obscure latin names for these things.

That's pretty damn cool. Not easy to design that way.

You probably could, but really, it is not very hard to get dirty audio out of a micro. Not sure there is any special reason to have interest in this as a platform, unless you really like the sound, the hardware, or the interface, etc.

Yes, thanks indeed.

Hi Kaleaf, It's always a pleasure to help. Actually, it sounds like you are in a good position to start on this kind of design consideration. Please don't be discouraged (although one can usually expect some headaches along the way, learning electronics). I think you should really check out TheProf's suggestion, as he may have an easier/better solution for you. Actually, I would be interested to hear it too :) If you are not too concerned about using this particular pot, then you may consider using a dual gang pot, and have one for HID input, and one for LED control. This would not really be doing exactly the same thing, but it should be good enough for this. Remember that the LED is only an indicator. There would still be some things to consider with this approach though. One thing which should be kept in mind with dual gang pots in general, is that one cannot rely on the two tapers to be truely identical (in this case it wouldn't really matter). After being involved in this thread, I am a little curious to try out something like this design for myself on a breadboard. If I get around to it, I'll let you know how it goes. If you want to go through a text book to learn more about electronics in general (and cover this topic as well), I think a lot of people like The Art Of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill. I have the book, and find it useful for a lot of practical circuit applications, and design considerations. It is not overly mathematical at all, which is something one finds with the academic approach to electronics. I am OK with both types of text, but I often recommend Horowitz and Hill for people not doing electronics as a degree/career.

Hey, thanks a lot for bringing that up. I was considering buying panels from him. The photos look good. I guess I could probably find them elsewhere. Methink I should have a closer look around ladyada's forum.

Are you next in line? That's cool. So, who is jerwin? Ebay seller? Cheers edit - sorry, I just found jerwin's website. Should have looked first.

Yeah, that's pretty much where I'm coming from too. Hey, thanks for the tip. I may have to try this on a new installation, and see how it goes. Cheers

@stryd_one: Thanks again for the comments. I will keep this in mind for Cakewalk/Sonar. Sonar is the current Cakewalk DAW, right? That's how it seemed from their website. The only reason I had considered using Mac at all, was to try Logic, as I previously had heard of it commanding an excellent reputation. I can get access to Macs, to test on. I have used Linux for my daily computing for a couple of years. I find it pretty decent for this, but I haven't found it to perform so well for multimedia tasks. I tried the latest real-time kernel, and found it introduced a fair few bugs, and had issues with USB MIDI interfaces. Generally I don't think it gets great driver support. I feel like it may be a bit of a can of worms. Ardour seems to be developing into a decent program though, and some speak highly of Rosegarden, and Jack looks decent too. Overall, I think WinXP is a bit easier to work with, has performed better for me for audio, and I have a couple soft synths I like in XP. Cheers

Hi folk, Thanks for the replies. I will definitely be trying out a few DAWs before I settle on one, and testing the final few in the most detail. I haven't done any DJing for quite a few years, and I haven't tended to work in a live mixing on the fly kind of way, though I can see the benefit of that style of working. Live is definitely on the list, at least for a try. This is pretty much my take on things. EnergyXT is a cheapy program, and is actually a re-write of a feeby. The issues with the software just look like repercussions of bad software design/planning, and dire limitations of dev team resources. The hardware support is decades behind the market. I am willing to look for exceptions to this, though. For example, Reaper also offers a very low cost license, and appears to have a very active dev team, and frequent releases. I'm yet to test it though. The list was in no way meant to represent an order of preference; I should have mentioned that. I don't know much about Cakewalk, and will give it more attention. Thanks for mentioning Temper; I had forgotten about it. I have not tried it yet. I mostly do ambient, and chillout, and some tech and underground trance (not modern commercial style). I want intuitive and convenient MIDI editing. I value good MIDI editing features above built in synths or drum machines, etc, as I figure I will likely just use VST plug-ins if I want these anyway. I do want decent hardware support, but I figure any hardware with ASIO drivers will work fine with most DAWs. I am looking at a pair of Phonic Firefly 808's (I want the cheap I/Os; hopefully they won't sound too cheap). Yes, ideally I would try everything. In practice I will have to focus my attention to some extent. Reaper is definitely on my list of things to try. Do you do much MIDI editing with it? Do you have any issues using it to compose with MIDI hardware? Reaper doesn't seem to have such a good rep in this regard. I haven't looked into it much yet, though. Yeah, if some Logic users could chime in, that would be great! :) I think it will be a bit different/new to me too. That was my experience in the past too. I think the last version I used was with the first release of VST (I think it was just called Cubase VST from memory). My friend had it in his home studio. I found I couldn't do a lot of MIDI editing, that I used to do with my really old Amiga based sequencer, and left a bit unimpressed. My friend did more of his work in audio, with some work with MIDI as well, and I was pretty impressed with what he could do. I do tend to use mouse editing quite a bit, so that may turn out to be a good selling point for me. Yeah, it's getting that way. Ooh, that reminds me; I'm really not a fan of Mac mousing. I'm assuming one could just install whichever mouse one likes, though. I think the standard Mac mouses are just designed to look pretty. Logic does still seem to have a lot of really devoted fans. Thanks again folks. Comments are much appreciated.

Hi, I am looking for a new DAW, and would really appreciate any recommendations. I will try out a few, but I only want to buy one, and use it for quite some time. I'm not yet sure what I will be spending. I am running WinXP for my music, at the moment, and will be buying a new you beaut PC later in the year. I'm planning on buying a new firwire audio interface soon, which comes with Cubase LE. I am mostly using hardware synths via MIDI, along with a couple of softsynths on my main PC, and one old DOS box which boots as an AXS soft synth MIDI sound module. I have been using EnergyXT, but am pretty unimpressed with its limitations, and poor software design. What I liked about EnergyXT was its fairly intuitive interface, and ease of MIDI sequencing of external hardware instruments. As for the other options, I am pretty out of touch with the market. My (limited) impressions are as follows: Cubase will be my next trial. I tried it many years ago, and really didn't like the interface much. I felt it was a bit cluttered/disorganised, and unintuitive, though it did seem to be very capable, once oriented to it. Live seems like a different sort of beast, in terms of workflow, and it seems to have a lot of vocal support. Looks like a really polished interface. I have no idea what it is like to work with yet. Reaper seems to be a decent low cost audio recorder/workstation, and MIDI issues are getting some dev attention. Protools has worked on its MIDI features in its latest incarnation, though appears to still be really expensive. Logic is built on a really good rep, and seems to have good user opinions. Latest version seems to need some fixing though. Also, being Mac only would mean a couple of changes for me, though I am still considering it. FL Studio has grown up a lot, and from my quick try of it early last year, it seems to be a decent program, pretty easy to work with, and I was quite happy with my test run of its sample library. Cakewalk, I have very little idea about, except that I know its been around for a while. I know there are also some freeby DAWs, though I am yet to look into this in any concerted way. Thanks for any insight that may be offered, -madox

I don't think the price was an amazing bargain, but it would save a lot of hassle for someone, and the total price for the build would still be quite a bit less than a lot of the finished x0xb0x sales. I'm still trying to get parts to build two of these, having offered to make one for a friend. I'm pretty much just assuming that my end price will work out a bit better.

Hi, Just thought some may be interested in this ebay auction. Selling x0xb0x parts, except for the adafruit sourced parts, and case. 'Buy it now' is set to $358.00. The seller has listed the auction spelled xoxbox (o's not 0's). I think it is a bit cheaper than some comparable sales, but may have slipped the attention of some bidders. I'm sourcing my own parts, but this would save some quite some effort for a would-be builder. Hope it helps. edit- the sale is not mine btw

Hi Kaleaf, The circuit, as described by Ean of DJ Techtools, places a resistor and LED in parallel with the lower section of the resistor divider circuit. This would effect linearity of the output, with respect to wiper position. I expect that Ean is aware of this, and doesn't consider it to be very important for his application. I think you should consider buffering the wiper voltage with an opamp circuit, and adding DC to bias the LED to the verge of noticeable light emission. This will vary a little, depending on the LED you use, but you will probably be adding a little less than 2V to the wiper voltage. Most likely, you will be able to use the wiper voltage as an input to both the LED buffer stage, and the HID input stage. The buffer input impedance will be very high, and it is also likely that the HID input impedance will be comparable. If this pair of impedances are both much greater than the potentiometer impedance, then the wiper response remains essentially linear. Do you know what kind of input is used on the HID? If you don't have a schematic, then you should still be able to follow the circuit trace from an input pin to an IC chip or other electronic device. It would be worth checking this, to make sure the above assumptions will hold true. I think you will most likely need some help to design the buffer stage. Do you have any friends doing electronics? I can offer you some help from here, but I can't do any fault finding/trouble shooting; you would be pretty much on your own for that. However, this is usually the case with everything, at some point. Hope you don't mind me asking, but what is your educational background, and what is your level of interest in electronics? Let us know how you go with this.

From PM: Hi, I'm moving this back to the forum, where I think it belongs. edit- I'll try to make time to answer this for you tomorrow...

I'm late coming into this thread, but have you guys tried Korean savoury crepes? DAMN TASTY! Best I've ever had, by far. Lot's of cultures find some use for blood. I had congealed blood in China. My Hungarian workmate recommended I make a blood soup when I slaughter the two chickens I'm raising in my back garden. Hmm, chicken. They look tastier every day. Aint nothin like home grown animal flesh. Damn it, I wasn't supposed to think about food. I can't eat for 36 hours before my surgery on Wed.

Hi LyleHaze, Thanks for hashing out your experience with the Amiga. I have watched a fair few demos of OS4 on youtube, and I do think it is pretty impressive. I have always liked the responsiveness of Amiga systems. Not meaning to get into a red/blue thing either, but I think MOS looks pretty decent too. I still stay in touch with most of the Amiga news. I still like the Amiga user community too - there is a lot of good will there, and a great creative intellect. Somehow I find it easier to stay in touch with the news, now that I am no longer an Amiga user - less connected to the disappointment, and still able to get some level of appreciation from the achievements, without spending any money. Cheers

8) I couldn't afford to stay involved. Does your Miggy do everything you want from a computer? Is it good for a DAW? edit - Actually, I think the real thing that killed it for me, was the constantly disappointing behaviour of Amiga Inc.

Hi, I just wondered if you may have a -5V rail available, as it can simplify some op-amp designs. How about the other questions I asked, particularly regarding pot taper?

:) I still stay in touch with folks at amiga.org, myself. Don't use Amigas any more, though. Still a lot to like about the design, though. The new incarnations are a bit too hard to justify, for what they do, to get my $ and commitment, though.