Hacking on tracks

[mdlbear]

Audacity rocks, is all I can say. Just added the spin-up and spin-down effects to "Vampire Megabyte". Cool.

After experimenting unsuccessfully with various samples of a tablesaw spinning up and down, I decided to work directly in Audacity. Spin-up started with a 3-second sawtooth chirp going from 110Hz to 880Hz. I then applied a couple of distortion-type effects (with very little success), followed by gverb. That worked, very nicely.

After that it was just a combination of pitch and tempo changes to stretch it out to the right length. The spin-down was, of course, a shorter chirp in the opposite direction.

Oh, ok. If you're geeky enough to have read this far, here.

I'd still like some modem tones, somewhere around 300 baud. Which is something Audacity doesn't do, alas. May require advanced fakery. Or a real modem -- got one of those...

Comments

got one of those...

[gmcdavid.livejournal.com]

A 300 baud modem? That would be impressive.

Of course, I still have have an Epson FX-185 dot matrix printer. Works OK with CUPS under Linux, neither of which existed in its day.

Re: got one of those...

[mdlbear]

Well, it's actually a 56K, but it should be backward-compatible. Or I could do a little digging and get back at least to a 2400, which I know is backward compatible. Now, if only I could find that old acoustic coupler, I'd be all set...

[snowishness.livejournal.com]

Oh yay! I got music. With neat effects.

Cool. Sometimes my irredeemable curiosity pays off.

[mdlbear]

Tweaked it a little; should be up right about... now

My memory says

[capplor.livejournal.com]

that the 300 baud modem was a pretty pure sine wave tone. (1200 was a two-tone thing, one after the other) followed by a squelchy white noise fairly easy to fake by mouth. No?

Re: My memory says

[mdlbear]

I had the vague impression that what happened after the initial handshake tones was slow enough on 300baud to sound vaguely musical, but was probably wrong.

Back in my BBSing days

[snobahr.livejournal.com]

when 1200 baud first hit the market, I had a KayPro-4 (With an INTERNAL! 300 baud modem!)... I remember that about half the time, I would have to actually whistle into my handset in order for my modem to "hear" the board I was calling.