Create Digital Music » Buzz, Modular Studio, Back From The Dead

Buzz, Modular Studio, Back From The Dead

Buzz, the well-loved modular synth and effects studio, had appeared to suffer an untimely demise when the developer’s hard drive crashed. But it seems it’s back. Radian writes:

The original modular tracker/soft-studio Buzz is now being resurrected by the original dev (as well as the programmers still working on clones such as Aldrin.)

You may know the source code was lost in a HDD crash but re-constructing has begun from a 6 month old back up.

Early days yet, has many missing features at the moment. Just a little tip off, since I am excited by this.

Hint to one-person development teams: use Subversion! (Off-site repository, anyone?)

Related: buzz, development, effects, free, modular, patching, Software, synths, Windows & more.

14. By Peter.

2008-Jun-02@08:03.

Live Inspiration: Latest from Mutek, Movement Music + Visual Festivals

x0xb0x Kit TB-303 Clone is … Undead. Best Bet: Source Your Own

14 Comments

george

it makes sense, doesn’t it?
but why we had to wait all this time is beyond me, really…

June 2, 2008 @ 8:49 am

Kent Kingery

Here’s an even better hint. Simply do a backup every day. Even periodically burning a CD with the source to your project is better than nothing…

June 2, 2008 @ 12:34 pm

@Kent: yeah, but if you can go to that trouble, you can do Subversion. It’s really easy to set up, and once it’s there, you don’t have to touch it again. So it winds up being far *less* work, and helps with things other than data loss.

June 2, 2008 @ 2:40 pm

Alastair

Seconded. 3rd party SVN hosts are easier than ever to set up. We use Wush, but cvsdude and the evil Google empire come recommended too.

BTW

@Peter: did you finalise the line-up for thursday night yet? i’m on a late flight back to london but plan to come down beforehand.

June 2, 2008 @ 3:41 pm

Jairus

…so by ’six month old backup’ you mean ‘8 year old backup’, right?

June 2, 2008 @ 7:26 pm

Reese

We use Unfuddle for Subversion Hosting.

June 2, 2008 @ 7:33 pm

Peter Kirn

Wow, Reese, that looks really lovely. I’m currently on Joyent, planning to set up a couple of additional repositories.

June 2, 2008 @ 7:55 pm

stiff

Wow… No newer backup than 6 months? Not the way to use computers :/

Cool Buzz is back though. I used it quite a bit a few years back… Definitely capable of creating good stuff!

June 3, 2008 @ 1:36 am

kibibu

Oskari’s progress has been surprisingly and awesomely fast to catch up on the “last” 6 months.

The missing/lost stuff was all related to stereo machines (we are going back to 2001 here), but the API for this was all public so its a known interface to reimplement, and appears to be done already.

The compressed wave support had previously been reverse engineered by Marc (a buzz machine dev) and has been hooked up again.

Even the “hack” machines that directly access memory locations in the 7-year-old buzz executable are now supported properly somehow.

For us buzz developers and users, this really is a blessing, and will also hopefully mean that Aldrin and Buze (the clone) will branch off in slightly different directions, rather than being exact clones.

Exciting times.

June 3, 2008 @ 5:36 am

kibibu

Also, Assembla is another good SVN service, includes Trac.

June 3, 2008 @ 5:37 am

Tic-Tac Shut Up

Hallelujah! Very exciting.

And just when I posted all of my ancient Buzz tunes to my myspace.

I can make rhythms a hundred times faster in Buzz than in Cubase. I’m excited to dig into it again.

June 3, 2008 @ 7:09 pm

Myles de Bastion

Peter, just so you know Subversion is kinda old news these days, everyone is switching to GIT now ;)

Anyhow, wooo the resurrection of Buzz approaches!

June 4, 2008 @ 12:41 pm

Johan H

I’ve been using buzz for ages and we’ve produced our two latest albums + an Ep using only buzz, hardware synthesizers (of course microphones to) and soundforge so Iam REALLY looking forward to a new version. LOVE.