Monthly Archives: October 2012

Some Not for Profit sound

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I’ve been pretty crazy busy the last couple of months trying to juggle assignments, studying for exams, a bunch of sound projects, upgrading my apps for ios 6, developing some new app ideas, work, life etc

I haven’t had much time to update my blog as of late but there are a few projects I have worked on lately through Risk Sound that I thought were worth a mention.

I worked on Australian and American soundtracks for Movember’s 2012 campaign with the awesome crew from Urchin. This included TV, Radio and Web based commercials. This involved voice direction, editing and mixing and mastering. It was also fantastic to be able to work with the very talented Tyler Coppin who was very generous with his time.

I also worked on the Movember GAP initiative soundtracks for the UK, US and Australia

For more info check out Movember

 

I also worked on the TVC for Steps for Independence Day which is a charity aiming to raise funds and awareness for people with spinal cord injury. The was no location sound supplied for this one so I had to do all foley, atmos and sfx as well as the mix.

http://www.stepsforindependence.com.au

 

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Using sox to convert WAV files to a-law or u-law for IVR

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Often I have to convert wav files to different and quite esoteric formats that can be used with IVR (Interactive voice response) and Phone systems of clients.
Most formats you can mix directly out of Pro Tools, or your DAW of choice, but sometimes I have to encode files as u-law, a-law or gsm which Pro Tools can’t do.
Do do this I use a handy command line tool for the Mac (it works on windows and linux as well) called SoX
http://sox.sourceforge.net/

Once you’ve downloaded the zip file you and extracted it you should have a folder called “sox-14.4.0” where 14.4.0 is the version number.
What I normally do is rename the folder simply “sox” and move it to my home folder. From here open the terminal (found in Applications->Utilities) and you can simply drag the executable file called sox on to the terminal window. Find the file you wish to covert and drag that on to the terminal window. This will then show the path on your system to the file to be converted. Then to create a 8000 kHz mono a-law encoded file type:

-r 8000 -c 1 -e a-law

or for u-law

-r 8000 -c 1 -e u-law

or gsm

-r 8000 -c 1 -e gsm

After this drag the folder where you want the file to end up, add a slash / and type the name of the output file ie /one-two-three-alaw.wav then hit enter and BOOM… you can use the time while it’s converting to practice pretending you don’t mind creating such low quality files…

The whole things should end up something like this:

/Users/homedir/sox/sox/ Users/homedir/audio-files/one-two-three.wav -r 8000 -c 1 -e a-law Users/homedir/audio-files/one-two-three-alaw.wav

SoX can do a lot more than this so it’s worth checking out the documentation at the SoX website.

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Kontakt Scripting Tools

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I’ve been doing a lot of work lately within Native Instruments’ Kontakt sampler which has its own scripting language. It’s quite powerful, works in pro tools and other DAWs and means you don’t have to worry about the pitfalls of dealing with Core audio and all that fun.
I thought I would share a couple of the tools that I find indispensable for working with Kontakt scripting.

Nils Liberg’s KScript Editor is a script editor (you probably guessed that part) with an integrated compiler and is a lot easier to work in that typing your code directly into the Kontakt scripting engine. By pressing F5 you can compile your code which is also copied to the clipboard to be pasted into Knotakt. It makes life so much easier.
You can download it from Nil’s website below
http://nilsliberg.se/ksp/

Ken’s GUIGenerator is a graphic tool to help you to create Kontakt performance views, or user interfaces, without having to code at all. It has a lot of great features and lets you name all your variables so you can easily hook them up to your script.
You can download it from musikbits below
http://www.musikbits.com/

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