rekosn Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 awesome thank you Zoe! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZoeB Posted May 1, 2014 Author Share Posted May 1, 2014 You're welcome! ^.^ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZoeB Posted June 16, 2014 Author Share Posted June 16, 2014 I guess we now know what (one of the uses of the phrase) Squidge in the Fridge is: it's a track on the Caustic Window LP. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyrex Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
calx Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 :emotawesomepm9: :emotawesomepm9: :emotawesomepm9: :emotawesomepm9: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aphex_Squarepusher_Twin Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 :emotawesomepm9: :emotawesomepm9: :emotawesomepm9: :emotawesomepm9: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soma333 Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 FTPs ftw Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZoeB Posted June 17, 2014 Author Share Posted June 17, 2014 ZoeB thank you very much for doing what you did with IDM list. I just thought that stuff was lost forever. Aww, you're quite welcome! ^.^ I think I've been hanging out with Jason Scott too much; I've started hoarding quite a few digital artefacts relating to synths and electronic music, and had a few tangible ones sent to him... It's nice to know these mailing list archives aren't gone, and that people still want to read them occasionally too. I'm working on making a browsable archive of all these messages over at http://analogue.bytenoise.co.uk but it's slow going due to all my other projects, and I don't have anywhere near enough hosting space for the four million e-mails and USENET posts I've accumulated so far. Even locally, I've had to dedicate a hard drive just for messages now. You know you're getting pretty hardcore into something when you format a hard drive and need to manually specify the optimal bytes/inode ratio! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hijexx Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 Jason might be able to help you with getting things on archive.org if you don't feel like transferring over the net. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Gravity Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 ZoeB thank you very much for doing what you did with IDM list. I just thought that stuff was lost forever. Aww, you're quite welcome! ^.^ I think I've been hanging out with Jason Scott too much; I've started hoarding quite a few digital artefacts relating to synths and electronic music, and had a few tangible ones sent to him... It's nice to know these mailing list archives aren't gone, and that people still want to read them occasionally too. I'm working on making a browsable archive of all these messages over at http://analogue.bytenoise.co.uk but it's slow going due to all my other projects, and I don't have anywhere near enough hosting space for the four million e-mails and USENET posts I've accumulated so far. Even locally, I've had to dedicate a hard drive just for messages now. You know you're getting pretty hardcore into something when you format a hard drive and need to manually specify the optimal bytes/inode ratio! Ahh it's you who runs that archive? Nice. I was looking through it like a month or two ago when it had the IDM section and was wondering where it went to. Such an interesting read. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZoeB Posted June 18, 2014 Author Share Posted June 18, 2014 Jason might be able to help you with getting things on archive.org if you don't feel like transferring over the net. Oh, he already has, believe me! I've put a few things on there myself, such as some extracts from da Vinci's diary and some mailing lists, but there are some other things that are more likely to not really be considered free yet, for which I've been using Jason as a sort of buffer or proxy. You wouldn't believe how much stuff he's putting on there... I'm working on making a browsable archive of all these messages over at http://analogue.bytenoise.co.uk but it's slow going due to all my other projects, and I don't have anywhere near enough hosting space for the four million e-mails and USENET posts I've accumulated so far. Ahh it's you who runs that archive? Nice. I was looking through it like a month or two ago when it had the IDM section and was wondering where it went to. Such an interesting read. Yeah, bytenoise.co.uk is one of my domains, so anything there's mine. analogue.bytenoise.co.uk started off as just the Analogue Heaven mailing list, then I started adding other mailing lists, then USENET, and so I had to rewrite the code quite substantially to be able to just take a big heap of messages and automatically categorise them by newsgroup or recipient (which is as close as you can get to automatically working out the mailing list, I think, by looking for recipients of several hundred messages). So it's much more extensible now, but a little less tidy as it can't categorically say which messages belong to which mailing lists, what with crossposts and the like. In terms of where everything went, I've now got much more data, but that makes it harder to work out what I can show. I was going to at least include the whole IDM archive, but that alone is over 30,000 messages, if memory serves, which would push me over the file limit with the particular hosting company I'm with. And once you get several million files to work with, things start slowing down a lot, it turns out. I made a script that sorts through every single message, tarballing any that match a particular phrase. (Hence at the moment, it just shows messages containing "Doepfer", as a proof of method.) That script takes about a week to execute each time. Admittedly, I'm using a pretty ghetto setup: a Raspberry Pi hooked up to a 2TB external hard drive. The hard drive is actually bigger than the computer it's plugged into. The hard drive's also plugged into the mains, whereas the computer gets all its power from our router's USB socket. Anyway, I'll try to add more messages at some point, but it's pretty low priority compared to the writing I'm currently doing, plus people are starting to badger me to make more music... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyrex Posted June 18, 2014 Share Posted June 18, 2014 How much space do you need? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZoeB Posted June 18, 2014 Author Share Posted June 18, 2014 How much space do you need? For all of it, or just the electronic music specific parts? For all of it, so far the messages take up 92GB in 4 million inodes. I'm currently downloading substantially more. For just the synth building and repairing messages, probably 100MB or so would suffice at a guess, and maybe 40,000 inodes (files). For all the electronic music talk, somewhere in between, maybe 2-3 gigs, I'm not sure off the top of my head. As I found out the other day, one of the tricky parts is working out what constitutes a phrase only used in relation to electronic music, so I don't get many false positives nor false negatives. I thought I was safe with "spring reverb", for example, but it turns out guitarists talk about those way more than electronic musicians. I'll probably eventually write a new script to tarball messages based on the recipient though, then we'll be in business. Then I'll need to learn how to write code that scales better. :D But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyrex Posted June 18, 2014 Share Posted June 18, 2014 Ah, too rich for my blood - I was going to suggest hosting it here if you needed only say 10GB or so, but what you need would eat up all the space I have for WATMM and then some! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZoeB Posted June 18, 2014 Author Share Posted June 18, 2014 That's almost definitely enough space to cover all the electronic music talk (Analogue Heaven, IDM, Synth DIY, etc), in terms of bytes. You'd just have to make sure you still have some inodes left over! It's a lesser known limit of filesystems, but still a very real one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hijexx Posted June 18, 2014 Share Posted June 18, 2014 Are you storing each individual message as a file? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZoeB Posted June 19, 2014 Author Share Posted June 19, 2014 Are you storing each individual message as a file? I am. It may be a bit overkill, but it's the simplest way, and I'm all in favour of simplicity. My scripts extract the message ID from the headers, SHA1 it, and use the first two digits as the outer directory, the next two as the inner directory, and the rest as the filename. So if you know the globally unique message ID of the message you're after, you can pretty much instantly look it up. My design's very Git influenced. You could concatenate several messages together, mbox style, but then it's going to get more complex pretty fast. As I knew I'd need to dedicate a hard drive to this endeavour anyway, it didn't make much difference that it'd eat up inodes like they were the dots in Pacman. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
psn Posted June 19, 2014 Share Posted June 19, 2014 What about a database? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyrex Posted June 19, 2014 Share Posted June 19, 2014 What about a database? I agree - indexing all this to a database would be a more efficient way of searching/cross-indexing all the data... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZoeB Posted June 19, 2014 Author Share Posted June 19, 2014 The database consists of tables for messages, newsgroups and people, plus joiner tables to link them together as they're HABTM / M:N. This allows browsing in the following hierarchy: Newsgroup Year Month Search Search Search Recipient Year Month Search Search Search Year Month Search Search Search Sender This is my hasty sketch of the sitemap, which I used to get the breadcrumbs straight in my head. It looks like either I haven't yet implemented searching within browsing by sender, or I haven't yet updated my notes. At any rate, I am using a database, but I'm not storing the message bodies in them, only the relevant fields. For one thing, this allows all the tables to be fixed width. I'm currently making a tarball based on the search "^To: idm@hyperreal\." so hopefully in a few days we should know how much space that's taking up, in how many messages. Alas, I used to know before I imported all those messages into the big ol' katamari, but that was a while back now... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZoeB Posted July 21, 2016 Author Share Posted July 21, 2016 As far as the TR-808 sounds on his Polygon Window material go... If memory serves, the TR-808 rimshot on If It Really Is Me sounds like a sample to me because it's being played back at various different pitches, which is a trick my friend Alex and I used to do in Impulse Tracker way back. So you sample it for C-5, but play it back in B, C, C#, C, and repeat, for a nice bit of variation. When I first heard that album, it took me a while to figure out where I'd heard that sound before... :) Listening to Ageispolis for what seems like the hundredth time, it's literally only just occurred to me that the 808 kick drum toggles between two different pitches in a few places, making it more than likely it's a sample. I'm not sure why this didn't occur to me years ago. Likely it was just so familiar, I just accepted that it did that without thinking of what it implied. Admittedly, it's much more obvious with the presumably-custom kick drum sample in, say, On, which clearly sounds like it's played back at two different octaves. Also that aerosol hi-hat that's played down probably a few octaves in At the Heart of It All compared to its other appearances. In short, a sampler's a fine instrument to make good music on! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyrex Posted July 21, 2016 Share Posted July 21, 2016 Always interesting tidbits, ZoeB! We should nominate you WATMM's Electronic Music Historian/Researcher! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
psn Posted July 21, 2016 Share Posted July 21, 2016 Roland R8, probably. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZoeB Posted July 21, 2016 Author Share Posted July 21, 2016 Yes, an R8 with the Electronic expansion card. Which seems a bit redundant considering he had the Casio sampler, but maybe it didn't have enough RAM, and you'd need to find things to sample anyway. I keep forgetting how awkward such technology was to work with back then. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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