From the title I thought the video might've been about this thing :v:
[video=youtube;up863eQKGUI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI[/video]
[QUOTE=RaTcHeT302;51470377]From the title I thought the video might've been about this thing :v:
[video=youtube;up863eQKGUI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI[/video][/QUOTE]
Thanks for giving me the next cover.
[QUOTE=RaTcHeT302;51470377]From the title I thought the video might've been about this thing :v:
[video=youtube;up863eQKGUI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI[/video][/QUOTE]
I was just chilling to the quirkiness of this video when he had to suddenly introduce the developers of Neverwinter Nights.
That game has a soft spot in my heart, that's just unfair
[QUOTE=mrkaki;51473092]I was just chilling to the quirkiness of this video when he had to suddenly introduce the developers of Neverwinter Nights.
That game has a soft spot in my heart, that's just unfair[/QUOTE]
It's not the old school NWN but did you get your free copy from GOG? I think the offer expired, but I'm not sure.
[url]https://www.gog.com/game/neverwinter_nights_diamond_edition[/url]
I remember kinda enjoying Neverwinter Nights 2 as a kid, but the combat was garbage, I straight up cheated and maxed out my character, bought some shitty looking cape and the stupidest armor available at the time, right after the swamp, at the first bar I managed to find :v:
I forgot if this was the base game or some expansion but you start out in some village where you can take part in some games, and at one point you befriend some elf tree hugger, some rogue devil lady, and some angry gnome.
Never liked the weird +1\-1 moral\friend\like system though. There was always that one option which gave you positive points for all characters, never made much sense, I hated that crap.
[QUOTE=RaTcHeT302;51473205]It's not the old school NWN but did you get your free copy from GOG? I think the offer expired, but I'm not sure.
[URL]https://www.gog.com/game/neverwinter_nights_diamond_edition[/URL]
I remember kinda enjoying Neverwinter Nights 2 as a kid, but the combat was garbage, I straight up cheated and maxed out my character, bought some shitty looking cape and the stupidest armor available at the time, right after the swamp, at the first bar I managed to find :v:
I forgot if this was the base game or some expansion but you start out in some village where you can take part in some games, and at one point you befriend some elf tree hugger, some rogue devil lady, and some angry gnome.
Never liked the weird +1\-1 moral\friend\like system though. There was always that one option which gave you positive points for all characters, never made much sense, I hated that crap.[/QUOTE]
I mean I get why it was implemented, that system had potential. It was just poorly executed.
I believe a better way to implement such a system would be for every character to have an "alignment impression" of you, which can change drastically when they first get to know you, but as you accumulate more shared experiences with them, the impression settles down on one of the 9 alignments.
Also, I'll have to check those GOG deals out. I still have the retail copies of the games, I just never bothered to check if they still work.
[sp]let's not derail the thread anymore, put the focus back on the video[/sp]
[QUOTE=mrkaki;51473365]I mean I get why it was implemented, that system had potential. It was just poorly executed.
I believe a better way to implement such a system would be for every character to have an "alignment impression" of you, which can change drastically when they first get to know you, but as you accumulate more shared experiences with them, the impression settles down on one of the 9 alignments.
Also, I'll have to check those GOG deals out. I still have the retail copies of the games, I just never bothered to check if they still work.
[sp]let's not derail the thread anymore, put the focus back on the video[/sp][/QUOTE]
I don't know, I don't have anything interesting to say about the video, and if anything we are bringing visibility to it. :v:
I mean it's floppies... doing floppy stuff.. I don't know.
Can we get a breakdown on how you achieved this? I know the floppy drive part is fairly straightforward at this point with an arduino running Moppy being able to drive 8 or 9 of them, but how are you driving more than that, the scanner and hard drives? Did you find the best results to be with them stacked, because it seems like the vibration from some would afect the others. How involved is the midi-to-music (or MP3 to MIDI to music) process?
I'm curious because your setup works really well for a lot of different tracks, and this is something I've wanted to build with one of my computer lab classes for a while.
[QUOTE=latin_geek;51476914]Can we get a breakdown on how you achieved this? I know the floppy drive part is fairly straightforward at this point with an arduino running Moppy being able to drive 8 or 9 of them, but how are you driving more than that, the scanner and hard drives? Did you find the best results to be with them stacked, because it seems like the vibration from some would afect the others. How involved is the midi-to-music (or MP3 to MIDI to music) process?
I'm curious because your setup works really well for a lot of different tracks, and this is something I've wanted to build with one of my computer lab classes for a while.[/QUOTE]
One Arduino has the capacity to support up to 8 output channels. One channel is one device. In my setup I have two of them working together, giving me a maximum of 16 unique channels. You can add more, and doing so would involve wiring multiple devices together to the same Arduino output. Basically just daisy chaining them, so while they won't be able to play any more unique voices, they will be physically duplicated and produce an overall louder sound. I have done this with the HDDs, so they come across louder.
Moppy is automatically programmed out of the box to send a square wave with every step signal output from each step signal pin (this is the thing you run the floppies to). This square wave can be amplified by virtually any audio amplifier. The hard drives work by sending this amplified output wave directly to the coils for the read/write actuator. It contains all of the elements to be a speaker, just in the reverse. They also work extremely well with pure wavelengths, which the Arduino will give you. You can get creative and give them something else (I've tried giving them isolated vocal tracks to vary up the beeping tones) but they really can't handle such a messy signal.
The scanner took awhile to figure out, but basically you just need a way to interface with it. Any motor is going to have a part number, and any part number can be looked up to find the appropriate data sheet. Mine in specific was a bipolar stepper motor, meaning it has two primary coils and thus would need a bipolar driver to properly interface with and control. I found one for $30, wired it up, and changed some Arduino programming to increase the step limits so it could move as far as possible. For awhile I had the CCFL lamp wired similarly to the front LEDs of each drive. Every time it received a step signal, the signal was routed to a transistor on the CCFL inverter to trigger it and allow the light to get power. In some of my earlier scanner videos you can see it. It pulses with each movement. Unfortunately however this is not healthy for the transistor. Each and every replacement CCFL and transistor I've attempted this with has eventually failed.
This is a MIDI device, and as such only works with MIDI files or direct MIDI input (yes, you can hook a MIDI keyboard to this and play it if you wanted to). You load a MIDI sequence into the program and press play and off it goes.
The actual process of building a MIDI to work with this can take anywhere from an hour to a week. It depends entirely on the kind of song, the kind of notes, how long the notes are, how many chords are in each channel, etc. I can get a song up and running in about 20 minutes but at that point it's far from perfect, it's just "audible" in the context that if I were to record it, you'd be able to vaguely get an idea of what it's supposed to be.
So what I do is I record them. I use a TASCAM DR-22WL and occasionally in tandem with some piezoelectric pickups and do four recordings. One of one stack of floppies, another of the next stack, one of the scanner, and one of just the hard drives. This gives me more control over mixing and also allows for greater overall clarity in the final product. I usually do a ton of recording while I'm working on the MIDI and generally end up with 8 to 10 revisions of the original MIDI. Hearing this in person and hearing it after it's been captured by a $130 recorder are two completely different things. I have no real-time, accurate monitoring system of how this sounds. So I make my MIDI changes, record a full mix, and then listen. Make further changes to the MIDI, record a full mix, and listen. This process is repeated until I am satisfied with the end result. And it of course eats up a metric truckload of time. A lot of the times I can't record because I have no absolute quiet environment, or a recording gets spoiled because someone decided they had to be noisy. But if you compare some of my earlier videos to now, the effort put into proper mixing shows. I used to just slap stuff together and record but now I actually take the time to try different things and get an accurate understanding of how those changes sound. As an example, this particular song had nine MIDI revisions by the time I had it how I wanted it.
I have them stacked because, as far as in-person goes, it creates a much deeper and richer sound due to mass resonance. They all vibrate off of one another and it is much easier to hear them. I use this arrangement in tandem with my contact mics to amplify them for in-person performances. In terms of recording it is both a blessing and a curse. I can get much more vibrant sound out of them when I record them with the recorder since they're just wide enough to be in the perfect cone of capture for the mics, but this is also bad because some floppies are louder than others. Some are really quiet. Others play bassy notes great. Others play the high notes really well. Sometimes I might have one too many floppies playing the same channels and it drowns out other important parts.
I have arranged them physically and logically in a way where, for the most part, on my initial arrangement of channels it is a high possibility that I will get a good capture with even sound between both stacks. However, sometimes this isn't how it works out and I have to play musical chairs with the channel arrangements until I get the right mix.
If you are gonna do this for a computer lab, I highly recommend it. The floppies I got for free from work. The scanner I paid $30 for. The hard drives I also got for free. The amplifiers were $5 a piece. The only decently expensive components are the Arduinos, $60 total for two of them. I originally had UNOs but I upgraded to 101s for the faster clock speed (it really shows in some songs). You'll want some pickups for sure. The floppies alone are actually pretty quiet. Don't get me wrong, it's still plenty cool without the pickups, but it will be much better with them.
All in all this is something that would cost between $100 and $130 to really get going to this extent.
The video didn't cut to black at the end with a "Seeya Space Cowboy"
[i]RUINED[/i]
[QUOTE=CodeMonkey3;51477926]The video didn't cut to black at the end with a "Seeya Space Cowboy"
[i]RUINED[/i][/QUOTE]
Honestly I thought about that long after I uploaded it and hated myself for it.
[QUOTE=haloguy234;51477980]Honestly I thought about that long after I uploaded it and hated myself for it.[/QUOTE]
YouTube still doesn't have a replace video feature even now? It's so annoying when you are stuck with a muted video with many views and you can't do anything about it, your only option is to just lose every view and reupload the same video again where you'll barely get those views ever again.
Here's a teaser of my next one, it's a long time coming
[vid]https://my.mixtape.moe/plnwgv.webm[/vid]
[QUOTE=haloguy234;51477827]words![/QUOTE]
Hot damn, thank you. I really do appreciate the amount of effort put into mastering the MIDIs themselves, there's a world of difference between this and setups that just feed pre-existing files into them.
I'm sadly not too musically inclined so I'll most likely end up building it and playing regular geocities-tier files through it, maybe put the effort in for something special, like my national anthem.
So a licensing company on Zuckbook wants to partner with me and promote my videos and in exchange I'll get a cut of any revenue from them. I'm glancing over the contract now and it doesn't sound that bad.
Does anyone know who I could talk to who has experience with understanding these contracts? I'm very wary of it because it's Facebook but it might be very good for me.
The sound the floppy drives make when they play music is almost unsettling.
Makes me want some sort of sci-fi movie where the the cliche plot is the machine/computer is sentient and fucking with people.
Would make for a really powerful scene to have the dude walk into the server room and the computer starts playing him foreboding music with floppy drives like this.
[QUOTE=haloguy234;51480310]So a licensing company on Zuckbook wants to partner with me and promote my videos and in exchange I'll get a cut of any revenue from them. I'm glancing over the contract now and it doesn't sound that bad.
Does anyone know who I could talk to who has experience with understanding these contracts? I'm very wary of it because it's Facebook but it might be very good for me.[/QUOTE]
I'd really suggest an actual lawyer to review - You don't want to give up your rights to your IP, etc.
[QUOTE=bord2tears;51482590]I'd really suggest an actual lawyer to review - You don't want to give up your rights to your IP, etc.[/QUOTE]
I'd also look into the legality of getting money from doing covers of existing songs like this- I mean they're cool and I love 'em, but you might want to make sure you don't get the book thrown at you.
[QUOTE=bord2tears;51482590]I'd really suggest an actual lawyer to review - You don't want to give up your rights to your IP, etc.[/QUOTE]
From what I read and the questions that I had answered, it's contract specific to a single video. Basically I'd be signing over exclusivity of that particular video, but nothing in the contract dictates that I can't upload videos in the future and have the inability to monetize them or release them for public viewing without going through them first.
Basically it's just a deal for exposure. In the long term I'll get fucked because I wouldn't be able to monetize the video myself when it gets big, but in the short term it's purely for exposure and making a little bit of money off of it. Since it's solely for a single video and NOT anything else I do, I think it's a pretty good deal. I'm still having people smarter than I am look at it though.
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