Robert Rowe

text, code, scores, applications, and recordings

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OSX Updating

March 7, 2016 /

I write music applications in C++ for the Mac OSX operating system. There are many advantages to working this way, and one big disadvantage. That disadvantage is that one is obliged to maintain low-level interactions with the operating system and development environment (something that can otherwise be happily left to commercial application vendors). The specific challenges are these:

  1. Working with Objective-C, Apple’s kludgey smalltalk-tinged C superset that they (and only they) use and foist off on the rest of us. The trick is to get in and out of it, and back to C++, as quickly as possible.
  2. Working with Core Audio, the OSX API for audio in and out of the operating system. While Apple does many things well (I have never owned another kind of computer), documentation is certainly not one of them.
  3. Figuring out how to use XCode to make all of this happen. This bit is probably the easiest of the three, but only because so many third party sources are available to explain it.

The application EZOSXOsc under the Code & Applications tab is the first public manifestation of all this: it produces an OSX app that allows you to click a button and turn a sine wave on and off. Not very exciting, certainly, but that’s the point: to produce an example that demonstrates as simply as possible how to compute a sine wave and send it to the speakers.

Interactive Music Systems (MIT Press 1993) online

January 7, 2016 /

The Text tab of this site contains an online version of my 1993 monograph Interactive Music Systems, originally published by the MIT Press. The Press graciously reverted the rights to me so that this work could be made freely available. While that part of the story is heartening, the path it took to make the book transition to the web is less so.

As a dutiful digital native, I have carefully backed up and preserved files from the beginning of my work with computers until today, just as we have all been instructed. “Back up your work! Back up your files!” bark the sysadmins. For example, I backed up and migrated the Microsoft Word files containing the original manuscript of Interactive Music Systems for over twenty years. What could be more ubiquitous and stable than Microsoft Word? Putting the book online, then, should have been easy. Pop open the files, copy and paste.

But the files do not pop open. They either do not open at all, or open to pages full of gibberish. This because (I think) I embedded graphics in with the text. Whatever Microsoft has done to maintain backward compatibility with ASCII text has not been done to keep graphics inserts working. I took the files to the preservation unit of NYU Libraries, and was told that my only hope was to find a very old computer. But even that would not be enough — I would need a chain of computers from 1993 to now, and to open and re-save the files across every intervening version and OS. So what you see here is the result of using those parts of the saved files that are legible, combined with OCR on scans of the rest. Obnoxious, but with any luck more durable.

The hoary advice to “always back up your work” is true, as far as it goes. But it has to be coupled with a second bit of advice — always open and keep current any files you intend to maintain at least once a year, so that they will grow along with new versions of the software and operating systems. If you don’t do that, you might as well not bother to back it up, because sooner or later you won’t be able to read it at all.

Blog Launch

January 6, 2016 /

As 2016 begins, I am beginning a new habit of posting blog entries on this page. Much of it will have to do with introducing content that gets added to the other pages, or whatever else seems topical or interesting. More to come.

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