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All information in these pages is copyright (c) 1989-2002 by Roger Nichols. All rights reserved. Permission for personal reference only, and may not be reproduced by any method without written permission.

Digital To The Max
By Roger Nichols

IBM has done it again. They have invented a new type of hard disk. It isn’t actually a hard disk in the round-flat-spinning-disk sense, but in the storage of data. The analogy (could they invent a new word for us digital guys) they use is more like punch cards. Thin sheets of cardboard with holes punched in them, just like the ones we love so much here in Florida during voting season.

You see, analog tape, digital tape and hard disks all use magnetic domains to retain information. As the data lays there, some of these domains change. This is what makes analog tapes change sound over time and digital tapes produce more errors. At some point in time the information will no longer be retrievable. In the case of analog data the process changes the data slowly but continuously. Every week the tape will sound a little different. For digital dates and hard disks, error correction will insure that you get all of your data back until the errors caused by the magnetic domain changes reach the threshold where error correction can no longer compensate for the dying domains. At this point there will be errors in the recovered data. The results would be an incorrect character in a text document, or a click in a digital audio file.

So, the IBM guys figured out a way to punch tiny atomic size holes (actually just dents) in a piece of plastic with a hot stylus. They heat the tip of the microscopic stylus to 750 degrees and when it touches the plastic it leaves a lasting impression. This is a physical change, not electrical or magnetic. The dents do not change over time, and you know how long plastic lasts in the dump. I have actually performed the same tests with a soldering iron and various surfaces (table top, plastic ash tray, my leg) and the concept does work. To read the data they set the temperature of the stylus to 550 degrees (not hot enough to melt the plastic) and move it along the surface. When the stylus enters a dent, the extra surface area conducts away some of the heat, lowers the temperature of the stylus, lowers the electrical resistance of the stylus, and is detected by the read electronics as a pit.

Because the process is mechanical, the reading and writing take about 1,000 times longer than the current hard disk writing speeds, so instead of one stylus the read/write head contains thousands of microscopic styli.

Remember I said that these dents were formed at the atomic level. This means that data density will be much higher than it is now. How about 2 billion dents per inch, which works out to deliver about 25 times the amount of data per square inch. A device the size of a postage stamp would hold 50 CD-ROMs worth of data. And you thought it was hard to keep from losing your masters now!

I still have some punch cards from 1963 that play back perfectly. They have turned brown, but the holes are still intact. The initials I scratched into a concrete sidewalk in Lake Charles Louisiana in 1955 are still there (I went by and looked last year.) Actually the longest lasting data is from early Egypt. Data was chiseled into stone tablets and is still recoverable 5,000 years later. If they had Pro Tools then, we could still recall their session documents! In an earlier column I discussed chiseling ones and zeros into stone tablets for backup.

IBM said it would probably take about ten years before these new storage devices will be available, but maybe I will cruise on down to CompUSA this weekend. I bet I’ll be the first in line.

MAX/MSP, and Pluggo
If you have not yet started to mess around with MAX/MSP, you are missing out on a lot of useful tools for MIDI, music synthesis, and DSP plug-ins.

Miller Puckette at IRCAM invented MAX around 1986. The commercial version was developed by Miller Puckette and David Zicarelli, and distributed for many years by Opcode. Now MAX/MSP is distributed and supported by Cycling 74 (www.cycling74.com.)

MAX is a program that allows you to process MIDI events by using an icon based graphical workspace. I built a program to remotely control four Yamaha ProMix-01 consoles from a Mac laptop. I could control the mix on all four consoles at once, set reverbs, and recall snapshots of different song sections without having to have the four consoles sitting in front of me. If there is a MIDI function that can’t be done with your current sequencer or other MIDI control devices, you can easily program it in MAX.

MSP is basically the audio DSP version of MAX. Anything you can think about doing to audio can be done in MSP. MSP requires MAX and therefore allows MIDI control in parallel with digital audio control. In 30 minutes you can construct a digital audio recorder. In an hour you can build a multi-track audio mixer. In 30 years you can build your own empire! .

I needed a utility that would convert old 3M Complimentary-Offset-Binary PCM audio into AIFF files. It took 45 minutes. When Pro Tools bounces to disk, it adds empty space to the front of the bounce file equal to the amount of delay in the audio chain. You can’t make a loop with an extra 17 samples of silence in the front, so I wrote a MAX/MSP routine to clip off all the silence in the front of a sound file.

There are 38 colleges and universities teaching music synthesis courses based on MAX/MSP. There are night school classes at Berkley that teach MAX/MSP programming.

Pluggo allows you to turn any DSP function you built in MAX/MSP into a stand-alone VST plug-in. You can then use it in any VST program like DP-3 or Logic. Do you want a multi-tap digital delay where the even numbered taps are played backwards? A couple of beers (maybe a six-pack) later and your done.

Maybe we will end up with a big shareware plug-in industry like we have with computer software. There is some great stuff out there, but there is always room for more.

I wish there was a MAX/MSP for video. I would like to build a routine that would automatically put those little black rectangles over my eyes in those old home movies. Or maybe just substitute Harrison Ford’s body in place of mine.