Rawwwwwr, let's talk about Wavosaur

Okay, so I promise I’m actually working on my 2022 media retrospective post, but I’ve also been itching to write about a particular piece of software that I’ve been getting a lot of use out of lately. I’ve been dabbling a bit with music production in tracker software, a style which is built entirely1 around the use of samples. As such, I’ve found myself needing to work directly on waveforms, editing samples out of pieces of media I’ve stolen or recordings I’ve made directly2. Having used Adobe Audition as both a multitracker and a wave editor for a long time, I rather like its approach as a dual-purpose tool. I do not, however, like Adobe, nor do I really want to wait for Audition to start up when I’m just chopping up waves. It’s too much tool for my current needs. I’ve also used Audacity in the past, which is a multitracker that certainly can function as a wave editor if you want it to. But, among other issues, it’s just not pleasant to use. So I’ve looked into a number of wave editors over the past few weeks, and have primarily settled on Wavosaur.

Wavosaur is not perfect software, I have a few quibbles that I’ll bring up in a bit. It is, however, really good software, with a no-nonsense interface that at least tries to be unintrusive, and is largely user-customizable. It’s quick to launch, and quick to load files. By default, it will attempt to3 load everything that was open when it was last exited, this can be disabled to make things even quicker. While this is true of pretty much any audio editing software, it supports the import of raw binary data as well as enough actual media formats that I can open up an MP4 video of an episode of Arthur that I downloaded from some sketchball site and start slicing up its audio without issue.

Navigating waves is pretty straightforward. Scrollwheel is assigned to zoom instead of scroll, which I do not like. An option for this would be great. It’s not a huge deal, however, since I’m moving around more by zooming than by scrolling in the first place. Zoom in and out are not bound to the keyboard by default; I set horizontal zoom to Ctrl+/- and vertical to CtrlAlt+/-. I might remove modifiers from vertical altogether, but my point is more that binding them to something logical makes navigating helpful, along with CtrlE and CtrlR, the default bindings for zooming to selection and zooming out all the way.

Wavosaur can deal with two different sorts of markers, and these are stored within the .wav file itself. Normal markers can be used to identify all manner of thing in the file. No data (like a name, for example) can be stored along with the marker, so a somewhat sparing use is probably best, but to my knowledge there is no limit to the number of markers that can be added. Other software does allow for similar markers to be named and then navigated by name, but to my knowledge none of these store these in a standardized way in the .wav file itself. I also haven’t seen other wave editing software that supports the other sort of marker that Wavosaur supports – loop markers. There can only be one pair of these — an in and an out — per file. Set your loops to the note’s sustain duration, and you have a very basic implementation of envelope control. While I don’t know of other software that writes this information, both trackers that I’m currently playing with — MilkyTracker and Renoise — will read it4. Wavosaur doesn’t really have a way to preview loop points in context, unfortunately, but the fact that it reads and writes them still makes for a useful starting point within the tracker.

My second-most-used wave editor over the past few weeks has been NCH WavePad5. Aside from the aforementioned loops, WavePad lacks two features that really makes Wavosaur shine for sample creation. The first is the ability to snap to zero-crossings. Doing this helps to ensure that samples won’t end up popping when they trigger (or, with loop points, retrigger). This can easily be enabled and disabled in the menus, though toggling it can’t be bound to a key for some reason. The second is the ability to universally display time in audio samples6 instead of hours, minutes, and seconds. When fully zoomed in, WavePad switches to time based on audio samples, but I couldn’t find a way to set it as a permanent display. Often, with trackers, it’s advantageous to have a fairy intimate knowledge of how many audio samples you’re dealing with in a given sample. Being able to permanently set the display this way in Wavosaur is very helpful.

Wavosaur allows for resampling to an arbitrary sample rate. It has inbuilt pitch- and time-shifting, and a few basic effects like filters. For everything else, it supports VST in a straightforward way. You can build up a rack and preview things live, editing VST parameters while playing a looped selection of audio, and applying once things sound right. There’s some MIDI functionality, though I’m not sure the extent of it. Basic volume automation is included and works well enough. A wealth of visualization tools – spectrum analyzers and oscilloscopes and such – are included, and even have little widget versions that can live in the toolbar. It includes calculation tools for note frequency, delay, and BPM; BPM detection can also automatically place markers on beats. If you set markers at beats in this way, or manually, it will scramble audio based on markers for you.

I said I had a few quibbles that I’d like to get to. I already sort of mentioned one – while keyboard control is decent, not everything can be keybound. Like toggling snap-to-zero-crossings, there are quite a few actions that I would really like to have keyboard control over. Currently you can easily select between marker points by double-clicking within them, but the same can’t be done from the keyboard; overall, selection could use more granular control via menus and the keyboard. One very annoying thing is that doing an undo action resets the horizontal zoom out to 100%. If I’ve zoomed in on a section of audio that I’m looking to slice out into a new sample, I don’t want to lose that view if I need to correct a goofball mistake I made. Finally, something that a lot of good software has spoiled me for is a one-step process for making a new file from a selection. Right now it’s a two-step process of copying and pasting-as-new, which is fine. But it does sort of add up when you’re chopping up a bunch of samples. These are all pretty minor issues, and overall I think Wavosaur is a great little waveform editor. If you’re working with samples for trackers, I think it may be the best choice (on Windows, at least).


A doughnut in my ear: the Sony Linkbuds

Ever since I saw Techmoan’s video about the new Sony Linkbuds, truly wireless1 earbuds with an open design made possible by virtue of a doughnut-shaped driver, I’ve been enthralled. I always prefer open headphones, which can be tricky when you’re buying things meant to go in your ear. Even within the realm of full-sized, over-the-ear cans, it’s a niche market. People like having a silent, black background. I understand this, but it isn’t for me. For one thing, silence gives me anxiety. For another, the sort of platonic ideal folks tend to have for music – the live performance – is never a silent black box either. Ambient sound exists; even the much-misunderstood 4′33″ by John Cage is more of an exercise in appreciating ambient sound than it is an exercise in silence. Perhaps that’s a pretentious way of looking at things, but this widespread belief that audiophile greatness starts in a vacuum has certainly left the market with a dearth of open designs.

Earbuds themselves are a dying breed. In-ear monitors (IEMs) direct sound through a nozzle directly into the ear canal, where their tips are inserted. This gives a tight physical connection to the sound, and it – once again – isolates the listener from the world better, leading to a more silent experience. I’ve used – and enjoyed – a handful of semi-open IEMs, but… IEM fit is tricky. My ears are different enough in size that I generally need a different tip size for either ear. Even when I do get the ‘right’ fit, it nearly always feels like a delicate balance, and one that requires me to sit a certain way, move very little, and avoid shifting my jaw at all. For quite some time now, I’ve been using Master and Dynamic’s MW-07 Plus. Their design is such that an additional piece of silicone butts up against the back of the ear’s antihelix for additional support, minimizing fit issues significantly. They also sound great. I like these enough that I own three pairs of them2. Getting them seated properly can still be an issue, though, and… they aren’t open. They do provide an ‘ambient listening’ mode that’s sort of a reverse of active noise cancelling – using the inbuilt microphones to pick up ambient noise and inject it into the stream. It’s better than nothing. A new problem has started to manifest with the MW-07s in which that additional piece of silicone doesn’t always fit over the IEM tightly enough, and it obscures the sensor that detects whether or not the IEM is in your ear. The result has been a lot of unintentional pausing, and a lot of frustration.

I spend a fair amount of time listening to a Walkman or a DAP using full-size cans (generally Sennheiser HD-650s), but I also do like the convenience of casual listening from my stupid phone with no headphone jack via Bluetooth. Right now, this means either one of my several pairs of MW-07s, or the weird little doughnuts that are the Sony Linkbuds. I’ve been putting the Linkbuds through their paces for a couple of weeks now, and they’ve quickly become my favorite solution for casual listening. I will get into their caveats – which are not minor – but the TL;DR is that they sound good enough, they fit well, and they’re just… pleasant to use. I know the hot take is to say that Sony lost their flair for innovation and experimentation in the ‘90s or whatever, but they are still doing interesting things. It may not be particularly impressive on a technical level, but someone still had to greenlight the R&D for designing a custom doughnut-shaped driver for the Linkbuds. It’s a shot in the dark for an already-niche product market. These aren’t going to be for everyone, but if the idea of a truly wireless earbud with a gaping hole in the middle to allow ambient sound in is appealing to you – I think Sony did good.

Comfort

To start, the Linkbuds are extremely comfortable. Unlike any IEM I’ve used, they quickly disappear from my ear. If I shake my head, I’ll notice the weight there, but they stay in place fine. Being earbuds instead of IEMs, there are no tips to worry about sizing. But like the MW-07s, there is an additional bit of silicone – in this case, a tiny little hoop that catches behind the top of the antihelix. These are included in five sizes, and they help with positioning enough that choosing the ‘wrong’ size is detrimental to sound and not just the security of the earbud in the ear. They seem too flimsy to do anything, but they’re vital to the fit, and that flimsiness ensures that they remain light and comfortable. Aftermarket manufacturers are selling replacements for these; I’ve acquired some pink ones to make them a bit more me. The amount of silicone contacting the skin is low enough to keep itchiness to a minimum during extended wear – a discomfort that became a reality after wearing the MW-07s for long stretches.

Sound

The Linkbuds are not an audiophile-grade experience. Compared to the MW-07s, they’re… thin. But they don’t sound bad, they don’t sound particularly cheap or tinny. Their sound is rather hard to describe. Some folks have done frequency response charting3 of them, and… yeah the low end rolls off early and it rolls off hard. This can be compensated for quite serviceably with the inbuilt equalizer (more on this shortly), but these are never going to hit you with thick sub-bass. Music that relies heavily on this will sound a bit thin. Occasionally, a piece of pop music like Kero Kero Bonito’s ‘Waking Up’ will surprise me in just how much the production leans on the low-end. But for the most part, the equalizer gets the upper bass present enough that music tends to sound full enough to be satisfying.

There is one really peaky little frequency range somewhere in the 2500Hz band. I first noticed it on µ-Ziq’s ‘Blainville’, the repeating squeal noise was… unbearable. This manifested in a few other tracks as well4, but was also tameable through equalization. Beyond these frequency response issues, it’s tricky to talk about the sound of them. They sound big. Not necessarily in terms of soundstage, but the scope of the reproduced sound itself feels more like it’s coming from large cans firing haphazardly into my ears than tiny little doughnuts resting precisely inside them. I assume this can largely be attributed to the good fit – I’ve used high-end wired earbuds like the Hifiman ES1005, and when they’re properly positioned they sound great… but keeping them properly positioned is tough. Soundstage is fine, imaging is fine. I actually enjoy them quite a bit for well-recorded classical, particularly pieces for chamber ensembles. In a recording like Nexus and Sō Percussion’s performance of Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ, not only do the instruments feel like they exist in a physical space, you can almost sense where on the instrument a given note is being struck.

The app

I’ve mentioned the equalizer twice now, but before I can talk about that, I have to talk about the app. In general, a product is less appealing to me if it involves an app – this tends to mean some functionality only exists in a terrible piece of software that probably won’t exist anymore in three years. This is true of the Linkbuds as well, but two things make me reluctant to care about it: the functionality feels pretty set-it-and-forget-it to me, and they’re already bound to a phone by virtue of design. The app lets you set quite a few things including some strange 3d spatial stuff that I haven’t tested, a listening profile designed to liven up low-bitrate lossy compression, and integration with other apps. This integration is very limited, only supporting Spotify (which you shouldn’t do) and a few other things I hadn’t heard of6. It also lets you set the language for notifications (for low battery and the like), and upgrade the firmware. Then there’s the equalizer – five bands, plus a vague ‘Clear Bass’ slider. I’ve found I’m happiest with the following settings:

Clear Bass 400Hz 1kHz 2.5kHz 6.3kHz 16kHz
+7 +1 ±0 -4 -3 -3

This obviously isn’t going to work miracles with the sub-bass, but it does bring enough bass presence to make for a fuller sound, and it smooths out that peak in the 2.5kHz band. The equalizer has a bunch of presets, and lets you store three of your own presets. Frustratingly, while the app supports a bunch of different Sony headphones, it’s also a different app than the one used for Sony speakers.

A final thing that the app allows for is the setting of the four tap commands that are available to you – twice or thrice on either Linkbud. These are limited to a handful of presets – one plays/pauses and skips to next track, one is volume up/down, one is next/previous track, etc. I wish these were just fully customizable. I find it easier to adjust volume with the physical buttons on my phone, so I’m using pause/next and next/previous. I’d love to tweak this for a couple of reasons – not having a redundant next command, and swapping the order of next and previous. Regardless, this is more useful than the hardcoded two buttons on my MW-07s. And while tapping on the Linkbuds feels silly vs. pressing an actual button… it is much easier.

A few final notes

Battery life is bad. I get it, the shape of them and the fact that half of the unit is a doughnut-shaped driver means there isn’t much room for a battery. But the reality is that the MW-07s last long enough to get through a workday, and the Linkbuds just… won’t. Which sucks, because getting through each new slogging day of work pretty much requires a constant stream of high-energy music. The case they come in doesn’t have a great battery either, and this is less forgivable.

Compared to the MW-07s, I really like the way the case feels. It’s made of the same plastic as the Linkbuds themselves, which just… has a nice feel to it. The case is also just weighted in a very pleasing weeble-wobbly way. The Linkbuds snap into the case very positively, whereas the MW-07’s just kind of flop into place. The Linkbuds’ case has a single LED, which reports the battery status of the case itself when you open it, and each Linkbud when you snap them into place. It only seems to report vague green and orange levels. The MW-07 case, on the other hand, has three LEDs which clearly correspond to case, and left and right. These LEDs have three vague levels instead of two.

One last silly detail that the Linkbuds get better than the MW-07 is the volume that they use for their own sounds. Tap confirmations and low battery notifications are soft sounds, played at reasonable volumes. The MW-07’s notification for switching on ambient listening mode is just a little too loud, and the low battery notification is absolutely alarming. This is something that a lot of companies seem to neglect – generic units are usually terrible about it. Master and Dynamic certainly tried harder than generic vendors, but Sony did it right. It’s a little thing, but little things add up.

I guess this post largely serves to take away my audiophile cred, but the reality as I age and my life gets more complicated is that there’s listening as an activity and then there’s listening as background. The activity is akin to enjoying a 15-year Macallan Fine Oak while background listening just gets you through the day like a few shots of rail vodka. The Linkbuds serve my casual background listening needs really well, and they sound perfectly fine doing it. They pale in comparison to my Sennheiser IE-800s, but… they’re supposed to. They’re doing a different job. And while my MW-07s may sound better, they’re increasingly not worth the hassle when I want to both listen to music and move my body. I hope Sony makes a second version of these. I want more doughnut-shaped drivers out in the world. I want Sony to really go ham on such an open design. I want Sony to keep being weird. But mostly I just want to know I’ll be able to get a replacement pair a few years down the line, because I think I’m going to want to keep using these for a while.


The low end of the high end

Recently, Techmoan posted a video about his daily driver Walkman. This sort of pushed me to go back and finish this post that I had a half-hearted outline of regarding my daily driver Walkman. I don’t really have an exotic collection; my interesting pieces are along the lines of a My First Sony1 and the WM-EX999, notable for its two playback heads, allowing for precise azimuth settings for both directions of play. I also don’t really take my Walkmans out much; they just hang out near me as I do my day job. What I want out of a ‘daily driver,’ therefore, isn’t something that stands out by being the most compact or affordable. Rather, it’s just reliable, pleasant to use, sounds good, and has the tape select options I need (Dolby B and I/II formulation).

The deck that I’ve ended up on to fill this role is the WM-DD11. Readers familiar with Walkman nomenclature will recognize ‘DD’ as indicative that the deck uses Sony’s Disc Drive mechanism. These mechanisms use a servo-controlled motor that butts up against the capstan via a disc, leaving the sole belt path for the takeup hub. They provide good speed accuracy, largely impervious to rotation and movement of the deck. They’re mechanically simple and quite reliable, with the exception of an infamously fragile piece – the center gear. Made of a deterioration-prone plastic, this gear has failed on essentially every DD Walkman out there. While the decks continue working for some time after the gear cracks, a horrid clicking sound is emitted with every rotation. Some folks fill the inevitable crack with epoxy, buying the gear some time. Replacements are also available. But every DD deck out there either doesn’t work, clicks, or has been repaired in some way or another.

My WM-DD11 does not have any center-gear-related issues, nor has the gear been replaced or repaired. Unlike most DD models2, the WM-DD11 has no center gear. DD models were high-end models, and the WM-DD11 sat in the strange middle-ground of a stripped down, low-end version of a high-end design. This is, to me, what makes the WM-DD11 special. It’s what makes it an interesting conversation piece, and it’s also what makes it a great daily driver. Like most DD models3, it only plays unidirectionally. This is, perhaps, inconvenient for a daily driver, but it also removes the b-side azimuth issue that affects bidirectional models4. Like most DD models, it has manual controls for a couple of tape settings – Dolby B on/off and Type I/Types II & IV. And while it lacks the quartz-lock that some DD models5 had implemented by this point, the standard servo-driven disc drive system is still more accurate and stable than other low-end models of the era.

The similarities largely stop there, though. Pressing ‘play’ on the deck immediately reveals the primary difference – lacking the soft-touch logic controls of most DD models, the WM-DD11 has a mechanical ‘piano-keys’ type transport. Unlike most piano keys, Sony did premium the buttons up a bit by keeping them in the standard DD position, on the face opposite the door. This means there’s a larger mechanical path than if they were positioned directly above the head, though I doubt this complexity really affects reliability much. People often malign mechanical transports, but I rather like the physical connection between button and mechanism. They tend to feel more reliable to me as well; soft-touch mechanisms still have mechanical bits, they just have to be controlled by the integration of some motor.

With the DD models, specifically, this tracks. The cursed gear facilitates things like tape-end detection in the soft-touch DD models. I certainly don’t think Sony knew this plastic was going to deteriorate; I don’t think they knew all the capacitors they were buying in the ‘80s were going to leak after a couple of decades either. But, despite the fact that there are only a handful more internal bits in the soft-touch transport, one of these has a critical fault. The gear itself is odd – a large, donut-shaped thing that goes around a metal core. It wouldn’t surprise me if this design led to the use of a plastic that wasn’t so thoroughly time-tested.

Costs were cut in some other places – the tape head stays with the body and not the door, there are some plasticky bits that certainly don’t have the premium feel of other DD models. But the WM-DD11 fits in a market segment that seems underappreciated to me. It’s high-end in the ways that matter, while being stripped down elsewhere. That middle-ground rarely seems to exist these days, with performance going hand-in-hand with luxury and the low-end solely existing at the bottom of the barrel. It’s a false binary presumably created by the need to sexy up anything decent enough to market.It’s hard to sell half the features, but I wish companies would try. I want the low end of the high-end market to exist. I want products like my reliable, simple, yet still very performant WM-DD11 to exist.


Commercial music media, a tier list

I’ve owned a lot of audio equipment over the years. Radio receivers, (pre)amplifiers, and equalizers of course, but more importantly the devices required for listening to… many different forms of media. I was late to the party for plenty of them, never an early-adopter and often only dipping my toes into a media after it was entirely out of production. At some point, streaming happened, and new physical formats just kinda… stopped.

Sony's resin tubes

Sony has a history of making ‘lifestyle’ consumer electronics alongside their more boring, everyday items. From the 1980s My First Sony line designed to indoctrinate children into brand loyalty1 to the beautiful clutch-like Vaio P palmtop, the company has never been afraid to experiment with form, function, and fashion. Occasionally, they’ll release wild products like the XEL-1 which read like concepts but actually get released, albeit at silly prices. One such item was the made-to-order NSA-PF1 ‘Sountina’, a six-foot tall speaker released in or around 2008.

The voice of a wizard hacking away

My pals at Sandy Pug Games have opened up preorders for WIZARDPUNK, a zine of various wizard stories and whatnot. It’s full of brilliant work, and I highly recommend checking it out! I have a little epistolary slice-of-life piece in it, which I’m honestly pretty proud of. In addition to this, I was asked if something rather curious was possible, if there was any way some audio-producing computer code could be squished down to a reasonable size such that someone could theoretically type it in.

Rediscovering Compact Cassettes

This year has been a long decade, and seeking little pleasures has been of the utmost importance. Working from home has left me with the opportunity to listen to music more often as I work. I tend not to work in the room with my turntable, so this has largely been a matter of listening from my phone. This is fine, but I know I tend to have very different listening patterns when I’m listening on my phone vs.

Amplitude Modulation

I recently purchased a Sangean HDR-141 compact HD Radio receiver after the local station that broadcasts baseball decided to move their AM/MW2 station (and most of their FM stations) exclusively to digital HD Radio broadcasts. In their announcement, they established that the time was right now that 20% of their audience was equipped to listen. That’s… an astonishingly low percentage, especially given that the technology was approved as the U.S. digital radio broadcast format over fifteen years ago. I, myself, was able to find one acquaintance capable of receiving HD Radio (in their car), and this receiver only handled FM.

Adoption has seemingly been low in the other direction as well. Though the airwaves near me seem flooded with broadcasts, the only HD Radio content is coming from the aforementioned station. Part of this is almost certainly because the standard itself is patent-encumbered bullshit from iBiquity3 instead of an open standard. Transmitting requires not only the encoder, but licensing fees directly to iBiquity. The public-facing language is very vague on the HD Radio website, but receivers also need to license the tech and I imagine if this was free they’d make a point of it (and there’d be more than three portable HD Radio receivers on the market).


The Classic Sound of the Moog Ladder Filter (external)

Great little article from nearly a decade ago about Robert Moog’s filter that shaped the sound of synthesizer music. Oddly enough, while the article mentions some of the Moog module’s prices, it doesn’t actually mention the price of the ladder filter. Having been researching lately exactly what Tangerine Dream would have been working with at any given moment on Phaedra, I happen to have the 1969 Moog price list (PDF) in front of me – $730 for the full-fledged 904 Voltage-Controlled Filter. That’s about $4,900 dollars today, nearly ten times as much as Moog’s current ladder filter. Bonus link: Robert Moog’s patent number 3,475,623: Electronic High-pass and Low-pass filters employing the base to emitter diode resistance of bi-polar transistors (PDF).


Field recording with the Tascam GT-R1

Field recording of found sounds is a rather crucial aspect of the sort of sound design that interests me. Diving deep enough into this area, one will inevitably wish to experiment with contact microphones. Contact microphones are unlike ‘normal’ microphones in that they don’t really respond to air vibrations. But they are quite good at picking up the vibrations of solids (or, in the case of sealed hydrophones, liquids) that they’re attached to. This is a lot of fun, but there’s one problem – due to an impedance mismatch, they aren’t going to sound very good when connected to a normal microphone input. Compare this matched recording with this recording from a standard mic input.

The typical solution will be to go through a DI box or dedicated preamp. For a portable, minimal setup, this is far from ideal. I figured at some point, someone would have had to have come up with a portable recorder designed with sound design in mind, and containing inputs suitable for a range of microphones. I came up empty-handed. Then it occurred to me, this is really the same problem that guitar pickups have – they need a high impedance (Hi-Z) input for proper frequency range reproduction. Perhaps a portable recorder for guitarists exists. It does, and let me just say that the Tascam GT-R1 makes an awesome little field recorder.