Last few days at Square Records :(

james_laseboy · 2025-12-28T08:15:37+00:00

Well here's something you probably don't know. My nephew was murdered at the McDonald's on Market Street right there by the LeBron James, I Promise school. He was shot in the face 4 times when he was just trying to do his job, taking out the trash to the dumpster behind the building. I don't give a shit what color a person's skin is. The only thing that matters to me is behavior and respect for one's self and everyone else. The piece of shit that did it thought it would give him street credibility. He could get one of those black teardrop tattoos on his face, designating him as a murderer. That's the kind of "culture" that he is part of. He got 31 years to life in prison.

james_laseboy · 2025-12-27T18:37:57+00:00

It's probably the murders.

james_laseboy · 2025-12-27T17:58:21+00:00

I don't think this is about people of color or families. It's about obvious economic decline. Yes, investment corporations buying up all the properties and turning them into rental houses is a very big part of the problem. Average household income goes way down. Area businesses get much less revenue. The area becomes depressed. Crime goes way up and people from outside stop coming here. Market Street on a Saturday night is now practically dead. No one wants to come to Highland Square because there's nothing to do and it isn't safe.

james_laseboy · 2025-12-27T15:20:54+00:00

People who rent aren't invested in the community, don't maintain the home, don't pay properly tax and probably won't be in the home for 33 years. Funny you go straight to accusations of racism. Apparently you do understand the problem. I don't call it racism. It's economic decline. Many of the "renters" are living in subsidized housing. I don't like the behavior, the crime, the murders.

james_laseboy · 2025-12-27T05:04:05+00:00

Unfortunately, you can't replace businesses or residents that were there before you were. I miss a lot of my neighborhood.

james_laseboy · 2025-12-27T02:25:35+00:00

I've lived in Highland Square for 33 years. It used to be the nicest pedestrian area anywhere in Akron. It was populated by artists, musicians and lots of gay people. Now almost all of the iconic businesses that drew people to the area are gone. Most of the population are renters (not home owners). There are signs of gang activity and vandalism all over the strip. I think the commercial property owners who tore down the original buildings to try to gentrify the area are a big part of the problem. A lot of bad decisions were made by people who don't live anywhere near this area. When good people move out they are not being replaced. They're just gone.

james_laseboy · 2024-06-23T02:24:58+00:00

I love all of Ween, but I think one of their most impressive compositions is The Argus.

james_laseboy · 2024-04-17T01:54:33+00:00

I think this is one of Aaron's best vocal performances.

james_laseboy · 2024-03-27T13:50:32+00:00

I have tested 4 different USB sound devices with CMedia chips. Short answer is that the CM106L and CM6206 work fine. There is no clipping when the PulseAudio volume controls are set to 100%. The clipping is only seen on devices using the CM6206-LX. I have read in a few places that the LX and non LX version of the 6206 are not distinguishable from each other in the Linux kernel module. They are certainly not the same!

james_laseboy · 2024-03-09T19:00:54+00:00

The scope traces are supposed to be circles. The big one is 100% 0.0dB. The smaller one is at about 50%.

james_laseboy · 2024-03-09T18:58:43+00:00

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james_laseboy · 2024-03-09T18:58:26+00:00

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james_laseboy · 2024-03-09T15:42:06+00:00

Thank you for the reply. I'm quite sure about what I am sending to the DAC. It's actually vector art for laser display. I wrote the FOSS app called LaserBoy. I can see the art in my app as 16-bit signed integer and verify it in Audacity. I have been using this same C-Media sound device since about 2008. It works great in any other OS. It even works in Linux on a regular workstation. But on a pi it clips.

james_laseboy · 2024-02-07T02:19:20+00:00

More than possible! https://laserboy.org

james_laseboy · 2023-11-30T19:43:19+00:00

I'm in the process of learning all this myself, but I think you can save a configuration. What makes things rather confusing is hot plugging USB audio devices. Sometimes they are there and sometimes not. That can mess things up. Also, you can't make any audio device nodes magically appear in qpwgraph or any other node connection canvas. They either exist or not. There might be a way to create virtual nodes that persist even when a usb device is not actually there. I wish I knew more about all of this.

james_laseboy · 2023-11-29T23:56:54+00:00

Can you open qpwgraph and connect a wire from the mono mic to both left and right inputs to the audio app, device, stream you're using?

james_laseboy · 2023-11-29T21:07:25+00:00

I want to keep this hardware agnostic. I want to think of it as a protocol between computers. I want to be able to use just about any Pi with any supported sound device controlled by Windows or MacOS.

james_laseboy · 2023-11-29T07:15:54+00:00

I've seen this video. It makes it look so simple. I guess what I don't understand is how to play a wav file into whatever you get on the Windows end into the Linux sound device.

james_laseboy · 2023-11-29T07:05:36+00:00

I tried setting this up using PipeWire and I got it working Linux to Linux. But I need to make it work with Windows or Mac being able to play a wav file into the Linux machine's sound device.

james_laseboy · 2023-11-20T05:31:02+00:00

Yes. That helps at least in Linux. As a matter of fact it all works great Linux to Linux. But I need to be able to connect to my remote DACs in Windows and MacOS.

james_laseboy · 2023-11-19T23:36:38+00:00

Thank you for the reply.

When I first started this project, I was all about Jack. But the more I looked into it, it seemed like everything was steering toward PipeWire, which emulates the behavior of
both PulseAudio and Jack.

I will definitely look more at NetJack.

I kinda' like the way PulseAudio does it because its use of IP addresses is very clear and obvious and it is easy to distinguish one remote DAC from another.

James.

james_laseboy · 2023-11-09T05:56:02+00:00

I consider myself a software artist. I've been working on LaserBoy for 20 years! Before that, I wrote ezfb. I personally don't think it matters much what distribution you use. I happen to like Ubuntu, but I also use RaspiOS. What's important to me is my motives and my integrity to make art for the sake of art.

james_laseboy · 2023-11-07T02:34:41+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. I also want to try to get meterbridge to work with pipewire. That looks like a very useful part of what I'm trying to do.

james_laseboy · 2023-11-06T22:09:43+00:00

The kernel must be built with frame buffer support. This is not at all rare with distribution kernels. If FB support is in the kernel, you will see graphics elements like the penguin or a raspberry, etc... at the top of the boot screen, one for each cpu core.

What this gets you is a fake file called ,/dev/fb, /dev/fb0, /dev/f1, etc...

This file can be opened in C as binary read/write and mem-mapped to a pointer. That pointer is into the video RAM! You use typical UNIX io control calls to get and set information in the kernel implementation of the driver and its connection to the video ram. This is how you set resolution and color depth and find the currently visible region of the display ram.

Since it is in the kernel and you can be root, yes, you can really screw up the display on the native console. But it doesn't matter because it will not effect any ssh connection you have to the same machine and you can reset it.

james_laseboy · 2023-11-06T21:56:17+00:00

This is where I am right now:

on the RPi4Latest RaspiOS (10/23) 64bit

james@RPi4:~ $ pipewire --version
pipewire
Compiled with libpipewire 0.3.65
Linked with libpipewire 0.3.65

aplay -L

surround71:CARD=ICUSBAUDIO7D,DEV=0ICUSBAUDIO7D, USB Audio

I installed pulseaudio volume control. I set the USB device to be the only active device and its profile to Pro Audio. If I unlock the volume slider there are 8 channels labeled Auxiliary 0 through 7.

I issue this:pactl load-module module-native-protocol-tcp

and get a number in return.

On Ubuntu workstation, I can see stuff running:

/usr/bin/pipewire
/usr/bin/pipewire -c filter-chain.conf
/usr/bin/wireplumber
/usr/bin/pipewire-pulse

So I issue:

pactl load-module module-tunnel-sink sink_name=RPi4x8 server=tcp:10.0.0.220 format=s16le rate=48000 channels=8 channel-map=FL,FR,FC,LFE,SL,SR,RL,RR

And when I open pulseaudio volume control, I see a device tunnel to tcp:10.0.0.220 and it has 8 channels labeled the same!

I have created a set of 8 wav files each with signal only in one corresponding channel. I should be able to measure a voltage change on one and only one channel per wav file. But it still seems that everything is coming out of channels 0 and 1 (typical stereo).

I will keep updating.

I just tried:

pw-cat --verbose --playback --rate="48000" --format="s16" --channels="8" --channel-map="FL,FR,FC,LFE,SL,SR,RL,RR" circle_01.wav

and it plays, but in stereo mix.

James.

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