FastReply – Lightweight template system for your emails

 

Install it here: FastReply Chrome extension

 

Note:

• it works even if Gmail's SmartReply feature is enabled, both can work together

• it works in Gmail and other webmails/websites

• FastReply on ProductHunt

• another small but useful extension: ShowSubjectGmail

Interested for future evolutions and other (smarter) autoreply email tools?
(several other hour-saving tools in progress)

Touches of colour on concrete

Painted together with my girlfriend some years ago ; this place is really inspiring. If you sometimes go from Paris to Orleans by train, you'll probably find where it is!

(Other pictures to be added here)

sdfgh – encrypted notepad: don't trust it, just read its 65 lines of code

Why another lightweight notepad with encryption?

Well, I needed an encrypted notepad for personal notes that has these features:

• Ask a password on startup
• Don't re-ask for the password when saving since we already asked that when opening (except if it's a new file)
• Open-source
• Dark mode colors
• The unencrypted plaintext is never written to disk
• I wanted to be able to read the full source-code before using it, without spending 1 full day on it (so I finally wrote it in a few hours)

Here it is:

https://github.com/josephernest/sdfgh

Labomedia's wiki

The FabLab / hackerspace Labomedia has a great wiki. Here are the latest articles and my (small) contributions.

 

MIDI Quantizer: my one-week journey into the Arduino world to build a MIDI event processor

Day 1: the idea

Sometimes I play and record synthesizer for a song I'm producing, but somes notes here and there are out of rhythm... I wish they had been perfectly in the rhythm out-of-the-box! Indeed, for electronic music based on loops, it can be annoying to have out of sync notes (well I agree that on some tracks, it's cool to have a not-perfect timing that brings "life", but not on all of them).
Of course, you can always use Ableton Live's "Warp" feature to correct the timing of the notes, or alternatively record first in MIDI, MIDI quantize, and then send the quantized MIDI performance back to the synth. But having to stop playing and go to the computer is sometimes not what you would have liked.

Idea: let's build a MIDI device that takes all incoming notes arriving on MIDI IN, quantize them (i.e. align them on a grid based on sync messages, for example a 1/16 notes grid), and send them to the MIDI OUT. All of that, realtime!

Day 2: get some electronic parts

I first needed some electronic parts to do that: a breadboard, an Arduino Nano, some resistors, capacitors, an optocoupler 6N138 (very often used for MIDI circuits) that I still had in my drawers, and a small ATtiny45 chip kindly provided by the cool local Fablab team.

Then I learnt how to do a basic Arduino program (with the usual setup and loop functions) on an Arduino Nano. If you have a Nano clone like me, you'll need to install the drivers (CH34x_Install_Windows_v3_4.zip) to make it work.

The next step is to be able to use the Arduino Nano as a programmer to upload code on a bare ATtiny45 chip. The interesting thing is that you can remove the Nano at the end, and your code will still be running on this small 8-pin standalone 1$ chip! To do that, first open the "Arduino as ISP" sketch in Arduino IDE, and upload it to the Nano. Then connect the ATtiny45 to the Nano using this schematic, use "Programmer: Arduino as ISP", and "Upload using programmer". In real life it takes a few hours to get all these things working, but more or less that's the summary.

Then I assembled a basic well-known MIDI IN and MIDI OUT circuits, routed to the pins of the ATtiny. I wrote some test code to send MIDI messages at 31250 baud and it worked!

An other awesome thing I wasn't even expecting: this device will require no 9V battery, no AA battery, no 9V adapter... Wait, are you saying it will not be powered? The answer is: MIDI powered! The chip consumption is so small that it can be powered by the MIDI IN cable itself (inspiration here), the only component needed for this is a large-enough capacitor, something like 33 µF.

Day 3: it works, now let's make a real PCB of it

Since it works on the breadboard, I decided to learn how to make a PCB that will be eventually manufactured in China (I phoned various local electronic companies in France: nobody produces PCB locally anymore...). For this purpose, I installed Eagle software, discovered how to find components (not easy to find them in the libraries at the beginning) and to do a simple schematic. Then go in "Board" mode and use the "Autorouter" to automatically place components on the board.

A couple of hours later, I sent the board Gerber files to Seeed China who will make the PCB for the crazy price of 5$ (for 10 units, amazing!).

Day 4: work on the code, and discover the software serial madness

Decoding serial port input raw bytes into useful MIDI messages is not as easy as it seems: certain MIDI messages are 1-byte long, some other are 3-byte long, etc. so I spent some time achieveing to do that.

I then discovered that receiving and transmitting bytes on a serial port (MIDI is just serial after all) is not an easy task if you have to do it via software. But wait, why do it via software? Answer: the ATtiny45 does not feature a UART hardware serial, so it's up to the software to do it. All works well when you play only a few notes per second on the keyboard, but things are more difficult if you receive more than 10 MIDI messages per second on the MIDI IN (and this is the case: BeatClock messages used for synchronization use 24 messages per beat): the chip is lost, and the bytes read and sent are ... simply garbage! So I tested various software implementations: NewSoftSerial, NeoSWSerial, AltSoftSerial, etc. but as of today, none of them solved the problem of being able to read and transmit bytes on the serial port at the same time with an ATtiny45, at 31250 baud.

Day 5: let's test with a chip that has a real serial port

I should maybe use a chip that has a real (hardware) serial port. An option would be the ATtiny4313 (20 pins), but I don't have any.

I then tested with an ATmega328p (thanks to Julien!), taken from an Arduino Uno. It works great out-of-the-box: the hardware serial does miracles, and there is no more issues, no more grambled MIDI messages!

Now I wanted to put this ATmega328p standalone on a breadboard, but it stopped working. Reason (discovered a few hours later): this chip was internally configured to use an external crystal clock, that I did not have. So you have to modify its "fuses" to make it work with its internal clock at 8 Mhz. Working again!

Only problem: the PCB that is currently being made at the factory has a slot for a 8-pin ATtiny, and now I need to use a 28-pin ATmega, oops! I'll figure out this later, and I'll use some wires for this v0.0.1 prototype.

Day 6: do nothing

Day 7: PCBs arrive at my door

(after the week-end)

Now the parcel finally arrived, after a long trip from Shenzhen, China.

Let's assemble the components:

(It was a bit difficult to host the 28-pin chip on a PCB made for a 8-pin chip, but anyway... version 0.0.2 won't have these cables anymore).

Surprise, it works!

The "MIDI Quantizer" device is ready to be used :)

Edit: I've now done it with a 20-pin ATtiny4313, so only 1 wire is needed:

I assembled two units, one of them was working straight away, while the second seemed to have difficulties sending MIDI to some synthesizers (some synths reacted with "Illegal Data" message). I suspected the internal 8 Mhz clock to be not perfectly calibrated. So I re-uploaded the code with a internal-1 Mhz clock setting, and then it worked. Might be a good idea to add a crystal oscillator for next version of the PCB.

An improved Launchpad for Ableton Live

The Novation Launchpad is a great controller for Ableton Live, especially because it allows you to play / jam / record without having to look at the computer screen.

Except for one thing: you can play a clip, record a clip, stop a clip... but you cannot delete a clip. This limitation can be annoying, because sometimes when playing with your synth/guitar/whatever you need to record many takes before having the right one, and you also want to be able to immediately delete the bad recordings. Strangely, this was not possible with the Launchpad (now possible with Launchpad Pro, but it is more than twice as expensive).

So here is a "MIDI remote script" (just a little .py file) that you can copy in C:\ProgramData\Ableton\Live 10 Suite\Resources\MIDI Remote Scripts\Launchpad (for Windows, or the equivalent folder on Mac), that adds this feature to the Launchpad: the bottom right button will be a "delete the currently selected clip" button.

Bonus: this script also transforms the last row of the Launchpad into "stop clip" buttons, which is quite useful.

Download: MainSelectorComponent.py

Enjoy!

PS:

• Don't forget to backup the aforementioned folder before adding this file, so that you can easily remove this extension if necessary.

• You can customize the Launchpad or any other controller as much as you want by editing these "MIDI remote script" Python files!

Void CMS – A lightweight website creation tool

Back in 2014, each time I wanted to start a new project and do a quick webpage, I had to create a Wordpress, create a new database by my hosting provider, edit the Wordpress configuration files about the database, and then navigate in the WP admin panel to create a new page, etc. Not lightweight enough! Also it was impossible to duplicate a whole website in 2 seconds by copying /var/www/wordpress1/ to /var/www/wordpress2/.

For all these reasons, I spent 1 or 2 evenings to juste write my own website creation tool: Void CMS.

100 lines of PHP code, and that's it! It works for both static websites and blog articles. Five years later, I still use it for a few projects of mine.

How do you write articles with it? Just open your favourite text editor, write a page (using Markdown syntax) and save it as a .txt file like /page/example.txt or /article/01.txt:

TITLE:Example

#Example page

This is a nearly empty page.

Do you want to get the latest news? The [blog](blog) is here!

You can try it here: Void CMS.

Joseph83 & 2Things - Smile (They Said)

Here is a song I composed and produced in London with the songwriter and singer Natalie Mitchell.

"The songs about
people hurting u
but just pretend to be happy
and it may work just smile."

Available on Spotify.

Here is the music video:

RaspFIP, ou comment (re)découvrir la radio FIP

Soyons clairs : FIP est l'une des meilleures radios en France (merci Radio France) à écouter pendant des heures sans se lasser : peu de distraction en parole (une ou deux fois par heure et avec des voix qui font la réputation de la station), et surtout de la musique. Et de la bonne musique - on peut passer en 15 minutes d'un jazz hyper pointu à une nouveauté indie-pop (qu'on a juste envie de Shazamer pour découvrir l'album), et avoir ensuite du J.S. Bach suivi par du hip-hop. Les années étudiantes où j'écoutais beaucoup FIP m'ont permi de découvrir des nouveaux albums chouettes toutes les semaines.

Seul problème : la station n'émet en FM qu'à Paris (105.1 Mhz), Strasbourg (92.3 Mhz), Bordeaux, et cinq ou six grandes villes, mais pas ailleurs, hélas ! Pendant longtemps j'ouvrais un onglet dans le browser à la page FIP, mais après il faut brancher son laptop à des haut-parleurs pour avoir un bon son ou alors se connecter via Bluetooth, de même on peut utiliser l'app FIP sur téléphone, mais finalement, son téléphone est occupé par ça, et j'ai remarqué qu'à l'usage, le fait d'avoir plusieurs actions à faire pour démarrer la radio faisait que je l'écoutais moins souvent que quand j'étais dans une ville couverte en FM, où il suffisait d'appuyer sur ON sur son "poste de radio".

Comme dans la plupart de mes projets open-source (exemple celui-ci) où je suis convaincu que le taux d'utilisation au quotidien d'un outil donné est inversement proportionnel au nombre d'actions nécessaires, j'ai cherché une solution où je peux démarrer cette radio en UNE SEULE ACTION.

Voici donc : RaspFIP - Un FIP player sur Raspberry Pi. Il existe sans-doute des centaines de media player sur Raspberry Pi, mais j'ai cherché à faire un objet simple qui ne fait qu'une seule chose :

• à l'allumage ça démarre automatiquement la radio FIP...
• ... et quand on veut éteindre on coupe l'alim et c'est tout,
• pas d'écran ni de clavier ni de souris nécessaire

L'utilisation est donc la suivante : quand on arrive dans la pièce, on appuie sur ON sur sa multiprise, et 10 secondes plus tard, la radio démarre (Raspberry Pi branché une fois pour toutes sur un ampli ou chaîne Hifi ou haut-parleurs). Rien d'autre à faire.

Après quelques années d'utilisation, je constate qu'avec cette méthode j'écoute à nouveau cette radio autant que quand j'avais juste à allumer ma radio FM calée sur la bonne fréquence (dans une ville couverte en FM).

Comment faire une RaspFIP ? Voir ici pour plus de détails: https://github.com/josephernest/RaspFIP/.

Low latency audio on a Windows PC with the built-in soundcard

(Edited 05 November 2019)

So you want to use your music production software, with low latency on your PC/Windows laptop?

You have basically two options:

• use an external USB soundcard (but sometimes you're not in your studio - maybe traveling - and it is not an option to have a soundcard in your backpack!)
• use a (free) driver named "ASIO4ALL"

Michael Tippach's ASIO4ALL is incredibly useful for the PC music community since more than 10 years, because it turns your cheap computer's built-in soundcard into a low-latency one! With ASIO4ALL, you can plug a MIDI keyboard and play piano or synth with no "delay". Without it, the delay of more than 50 ms between the keypress and the sound makes it nearly impossible to play.

But ASIO4ALL has one major drawback: it's not multi-client. This means that if your DAW is open with ASIO4ALL as sound driver, then, if you open:

• an external sound editor, such as SoundForge, to edit a sample
• or your media player to listen to a MP3 (for example to compare the mix you're currently working on with another song)
• or Youtube in your browser, to get some inspiration from your favourite artist

... then it won't work: the audio is not available for them: your DAW and ASIO4ALL have locked your soundcard.

This is really annoying and I can't count how many hours of my life I wasted since 10 years to find a solution for this (every few months/years I retried and retried and benchmarked every new method). (Ok switching to Mac would have been a faster solution...)

The real difficulty is that we would like to use

Setup (1): A music software in ASIO + a standard application like Firefox using the so-called Windows WDM driver

Here is a list of things I tried, unsuccessfully:

• Contact the author of ASIO4ALL and ask if a multiclient version would be possible

• WASAPI drivers: promising Microsoft audio low-latency API but unavailable in Ableton Live (even version 10)

• Asio2Ks [asio2ks_beta.zip, 118 KB], apparently not working anymore on Windows 7 / 64 bit. Copying the .cpl file gave nothing, and it seems impossible to open it once in C:\Windows\System32

• Vidance AsioMulti [asiomulti.msi, 4073 KB] (another link here), not working for the setup (1), maybe it would work for 2 ASIO programs, but not for 1 ASIO + 1 WDM at the same time. It made SoundForge crash when starting Ableton + SoundForge at the same time

• FL ASIO driver (coming with FL Studio 12 demo): you can have audio both in the DAW (FL Studio but also Ableton Live, etc.) and in another program, but unfortunately, on my standard i5 laptop, the latency with FL ASIO is much poorer than with ASIO4ALL and there are many "crackles" when playing a VST instrument, whereas with ASIO4ALL everything is smooth (no such problem even with the lowest latency value)

• Jack: the famous virtual cable solution for Linux, ported for Windows. I tried it a few days, but finally I always ended with artefacts, audio glitches, etc.

• Eugene Muzychenko's VirtualAudioCable, screenshot here, same problem, I finally didn't use it

• Vincent Burel's VirtualAudioCable (yes there are two programs by two different editors having the same name), I maybe should retry it again.

• Hi-Fi CABLE & ASIO Bridge, by the same author, is even closer to what I'm looking for. (Feature request: it would be great if it could set its "Hi-Fi Cable Input" device as default Windows playback device on startup of the program, and restore the standard speakers on exit). Strangely, it has worked once, but now, on startup of the program, I have a Buffer: 1024 blinking in red, and no sound, never mind! This might be because the buffer 1024 is too small for this software, but then it's surprising - AsioLinkPro works with a 512 buffer-size. Edit: now fixed after a reboot with a 4096 buffer. After some further tests, it finally does not work for the setup (1): this program does a bridge WDM => ASIO (ASIO4ALL in my case), but then my soundcard is no more available for ASIO4ALL in Ableton Live (screenshot here), which is totally logical. Conclusion: another bridging method is required, see setup (2) below.

Now, promising solutions:

• O-Deus AsioLinkPro 2.4.2: nearly working for the setup (1) described above (still some glitches when playing an audio file of < 200 ms. Why would you want to play such short files? This is useful when you browse your sample library: kicks, snares, etc. are usually short samples)

• O-Deus AsioLinkPro 2.4.4.2: totally working, perfect solution, in combination with ASIO4ALL. It even sets its device as "default Windows playback device" when we launch the program, and automatically removes it on exit... Except that this software is discontinued and it's impossible to buy a new license... (This has changed, see update below)

  Here is AsioLinkPro's clever idea: you still use ASIO4ALL as output, but this way:

  Setup (2):
  
  Ableton Live (or any other DAW)    --> ASIO: AsioLinkPro                  \
                                                                              --- AsioLinkPro mixer --> ASIO4ALL
  Firefox or Chrome or SoundForge    --> WDM: ASIOVADPRO virtual device     /
      or MP3 player                          (AsioLinkPro)

  Clever, because even if there are 2 programs producing sound, AsioLinkPro is the only one which speaks directly with ASIO4ALL (which would not support 2 programs).

  It must have been tricky to code it because it requires to code a "WDM virtual speaker device" Windows driver + an ASIO driver, phew!

  Even if it's discontinued, at least it gives an idea about how to do it. Let's write such a minimalist open-source tool?

  Note: not something very big and complex like Jack, but just a small WDM virtual speaker driver and an ASIO driver that both mix their content and send it to the ASIO4ALL output. (No GUI is even required).

Now, a working solution (update 2019):

• FlexASIO 1.5 allows me to get 3.6ms latency in Exclusive Mode (non multi-client) and 20ms on Shared Mode with my laptop's built-in soundcard. A few months ago, I was unable to make it work when testing the version 0.1, but the development is currently very active, and it has evolved into a good solution. Here is my configuration file (C:\Users\User\FlexASIO.toml):

  backend = "Windows WASAPI"
  bufferSizeSamples = 128
  
  [input]
  device = ""
  
  [output]
  suggestedLatencySeconds = 0.0
  wasapiExclusiveMode = true  # change to false to have multiclient

  FlexASIO works great, it unfortunately can only handle one input channel at a time.

• O-Deus AsioLinkPro 2.4.4.2 (link here) is now available for free (the family of the developer seems to have authorized the release, see this post for more details). A patcher is required, that can be found here.