ZR has been added to build.last.fm. We're proud to be a part of the growing last.fm developer community.

If you're new to Zen Radar, take a moment to read about what this thing is and find out how to use it. If you have questions, check the FAQ, or feel free to contact us. If you're ready to get a closer look, create an account and dive right in.

In February, some colleagues and I built an interactive installation for the Designbox gallery entitled "Some of the Parts". User-submitted content (audio, images, video, text) was stored and organized in a custom content management system I built for the project, then visitors to the installation selected bits of content to display using a reacTIVision based table interface built by Jon from shovemedia. A custom publish and subscribe system created by Lee from Project Mastermind routed the content choices to a number of Flash-based visualizations that were projected throughout the gallery. Lee also built an FFT analyzer and data server that published real-time audio analysis data that allowed the visualizations to react to the music being played in the space. This was an incredibly complex system, but it worked beautifully once all of the kinks were worked out. Video is forthcoming, in the meantime, I've decoupled the visualization I wrote for the installation from the system to run stand-alone, analyzing mp3s that are loaded directly, and choosing content from the system at random, rather than relying on user input.

Here are two examples:
Grid
Wave

If you mouse over the right side of the display, you can open a control panel that allows you to customize the visualization in a number of ways, creating completely different effects. The two examples above simply represent two sets of default settings. you can click anywhere in the visualization to toggle full-screen mode.

This week I've been working on the new version of the website for Adam Cohen's awesome webcomic MOSE. I launched it yesterday to coincide with the opening of the Low Pop gallery show at designbox, which features several of Adam's pieces.

About a year ago, I built the original site around a custom CMS and email subscription engine. The new version uses the same system, and includes some upgrades for selling prints via PayPal, a random comic display, and some other tidbits.

The site design was produced by Adam's company Distill.

Jeff & I have been working on a service built around the last.fm & audioscrobbler album correlation science I've been talking about. It's now ready for semi-public use.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present Zen Radar.

The project is still in active development, but is fairly stable. We'll be adding new feeds and features over time.

After setting up a recent tracks widget for my homepage with Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler, I came to the disappointing realization many people have lamented. There is no album information in the recent tracks feed, and no easy way to get it through other means. I don't really understand why the album info is not provided in the feed - the album listening stats are available, so it's being stored in the scrobbler database somewhere. I'm sure there's a good reason for this omission, since there have been a number of requests for this feature on the last.fm forums.

Since album detail feeds are available (with track listings!), it's possible to correlate the artist and track names in the recent tracks feed to the albums. It's not an easy task, and it's not 100% accurate, but with a little effort, you can put together a system that can match album info to your recent tracks list, complete with cover art, URLs to the album pages on last.fm, the whole enchilada.

Here's the lowdown

Have you ever wanted to display your last.fm recent tracks (or any other info last.fm info for that matter) on your own site? If you're using the Zend Framework, it's amazingly easy. The Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler class in the incubator provides an easy way of using the Audioscrobbler web services.

I put together a brief tutorial on how to make it happen.

After years of neglect, I've rebuilt roblogic.net from the ground up. Stronger. Faster. Better. I'm sure my 12 monthly visitors will appreciate it.

Happy new year!

Beat juggling (literally) with reacTIVision:



I could amuse myself with this for days.

Here's an article about the setup

This week I started experimenting with reacTIVision, part of the reacTable* project. ReacTIVision is the object tracking engine, the synthesis and visual feedback portions of reacTable are not open source. The new version of reacTIVision, 1.3, contains a MIDI server with a very flexible configuration scheme. This allows easy mapping of controllers in applications like Ableton Live that don't support OSC, the protocol that reacTIVision has traditionally served.

Here's a quick demo video of reacTIVision controlling Live 6. It's not much of a performance, but you can see the potentential.

I've made some changes to the MIDI server to allow smooth CC interpolation, variable CC quantization, and some statefulness to stop redundant CC messages. This has made the MIDI functionality a bit more music-friendly and reduced the MIDI traffic significantly. Martin's reacTIVision code is very elegant - I'm a novice C++ programmer, but was able to dive right in and start working.

I'm hoping to develop an configurable visual feedback engine along the lines of reacTable that is geared toward controlling applications like Live, Traktor, Reaktor, etc.

Jeff and I spent some time this week web-enabling his fish lamp. You can see whether or not the lamp is running, and turn it on or off. We've got some other devices around the office running on the same system. Jeff & I are thinking about putting together a tutorial on the how to roll your own. There are a ton of practical uses for this kind of automation. I'm working on adding scheduling, building an admin interface, restricting access, and integrating webcam feeds. The system uses the X10 CM17a Firecracker controlled by flipit. Jeff's flash interfaces talk to PHP scripts that control flipit, and get and set device status from a small MySQL database.

I've been completely consumed by a web project for the past 4 weeks, and it finally launched today!

www.ydncwomen.org

It's a new group with some amazingly dedicated and competent women at the helm. They've been great to work with! I'm honored to have been able to help them get started.

If only my paying clients where this organized!