2. A Quick Tour
The BinkyToy Application has two independent <<Groups>>, which you can think of as corresponding to two turntables. Each group contains several mixers for adjusting levels and adding effects, as well as the capability to manage control of an arbitrary number of audio files using the MsPinky vinyl control disc. The mix architecture for a single BinkyToy <<Group>> is shown in Figure 2.0.

Figure 2.0. The BinkyToy File Group Mix Architecture.

At the top is the stereo audio input signal,and at the bottom is a stereo audio output signal. Inside the Group the audio input signal can be switched between going through an FX mixer, or being routed into the Vinyl Demodulator. The Vinyl Demodulator is a processing unit that turns the audio input signal coming from your turntable as it plays the special MsPinky vinyl control disc into information that can be used by the Audio File Players to control playback of the audio files.

2.1: Audio I/O Settings
Let's make sure BinkyToy can talk to our sound hardware. Select the “Audio I/O” tab along the top. You will see a view like Figure 2.1(a) if you're using OS9, or 2.1(b) in OSX.

Figure 2.1(a): ASIO (OS9) Audio I/O Tabbed View.


Figure 2.1(b): CoreAudio (OSX) Audio I/O Tabbed View.

If you have no external audio interface, you will be using the Apple Sound Manager driver. You'll send the audio out of your Mac's built-in output jack and either listen to it with headphones directly plugged into your computer's audio output jack, or you'll connect a cable from the jack to your mixer or stereo system. In OS9, select either the the ASIO “Apple Sound Manager” or the “Sound Manager” from the “device name” menu. If these don't appear in the “device name” menu go back out to the finder and make sure you see these drivers in your “ASIO Drivers” folder.

If you have a dedicated audio hardware interface (firewire, USB, PCI or PCMCIA) and you're in OS9, select “ASIO” under the “Audio I/O” tab and select the driver for your hardware under the “device name” pop-up menu (all the drivers that you put in your “ASIO drivers” folder should appear there). In OSX, you will have to see whether your audio device comes up under the category “Separate IO” or “Combined IO”. Try selecting both of these options from the “CoreAudio” popup menu. As you select each one, look at the contents of the “input/output device name” popup menus. (NOTE: the first item in each list is always “None” so you have to actually click on the popup to see if there are any listings). Your audio device should appear under one or more of these menus. Select the name of your device under the input/output device name menu. In OSX, if you fail to find your device listed in the “input/output device name” menus for either Separate IO or Combined IO, you should quit BinkyToy and use the OSX “Audio/MIDI” setup utility to verify that your audio device is recognized by the CoreAudio system.

Once you have selected the ASIO* or CoreAudio driver for your audio hardware, all of your available inputs and outputs should appear in the input and output menus. Select the input channels where your first turntable is plugged into under “input source 1.” The second turntable, if present, is “input source 2.” How you set up your outputs depends on how many outputs you have available and cabled to your mixer. If you have two stereo pairs available, choose a different pair each for “output destination 1” and “output destination 2”. If you only have one output pair available, then all BinkyToy output signals will be combined and sent to that output.

2.2 IMPORTANT NOTE--“Buffer Size”: If using OSX, there is one setting in the Audio I/O section that is very important to the overall system performance of BinkyToy. This is the “buffer size” setting, which sets the number of samples in each frame of audio data that is processed by BinkyToy. In general, you want buffer size to be set to something small in order to give low-latency performance. But too small a buffer size setting will cause the CPU of your computer to get choked up. So you need to compromise. Although the default setting here is 64, this will most likely be too small to allow playback without glitches and hiccups. The best setting will probably be 256 or 128, depending on how fast your machine is. Too high a setting will introduce lots of latency, which is also undesirable. You should try various settings of this parameter to find the one that works best for you.

2.3 Vinyl Demod
Now go the tab called “Vinyl Demod”, also along the top. You should see a view something like Figure 2.3. Your MsPinky vinyl record, as you've probably noticed, has an annoying sound recorded on it that you don't want to hear, but which is meant to act as a signal for the software to follow. The controls under the “Vinyl Demod” tab are for setting the way the software reacts to this signal.

Figure 2.3: Vinyl Demod Tabbed View.

To check that you have properly connected your turntables to your audio interface, and that the outputs of your audio interface are properly connected to your mixer or sound monitor, select the “Off” option on the “Group 1” and “Group 2” popup menus. Now play a “NORMAL” music record (not the MsPinky vinyl) on your turntable. You should hear it pass through to the outputs of your audio converter through BinkyToy. Furthermore, make sure the music sounds “right”, i.e. is not clipped or distorted in any way, and is at a normal listening volume level. If you select “Ms Pinky Relative” or “MsPinky Absolute” from the “Group 1” and “Group 2” popup menus, you will no longer hear the sound on the vinyl through BinkyToy. You should keep in mind that having these menus set to something other than “Off” uses up some of your computational power, so only select something other than “Off” for as many turntables as you have attached on separate stereo inputs so as not to be wasting those precious CPU cycles. Select “Ms Pinky Absolute” for the vinyl demod button for group 1 and leave all of the sliders below it at the default positions. Similarly, if you're using the “2nd Generation” MsPinky record, select one of the “MP-2” options from the menus.

2.4 Velocity, Metric, Position, and VU Meters
Once you’ve selected the appropriate option for the control vinyl you’re using, you should see the three numerical readouts (velocity, metric, and position) as well as the VU meters labeled “1” and “2” begin to activate. As you play the MsPinky record in the forward direction, you should see that both VU meters “1” and “2” show approximately equal signal levels. If one or both of these meters shows a very low signal level (or is all black) then you need to check the connections from your turntable to your audio converter. If you’re playing the MsPinky record in the forward direction, but the “velocity” readout is a negative value, this means you should switch the left/right channels of the input from your turntable. If you have chosen one of the “absolute” mode choices from the “Group1” or “Group2” popup menus, you should also see positive values in the “metric” and “position” readouts. The “metric” readout gives an indication of the relative error level in the position stamp decoder, and “position” is the output value from the decoder. If as you play the control disc at normal speed you see that “metric” goes above 0.5, then you probably have some problem with your stylus (maybe it needs to be cleaned?) or your turntable’s signal is somehow getting distorted before it arrives to the inputs of BinkyToy. As stated above, a good way to test your signal quality is to play a “normal” music record through BinkyToy. Once you have verified that playing the MsPinky control record at normal speed (whether it’s 33-1/3 or 45) and in the forward direction results in positive readouts for “velocity”, and that “metric” is a positive number less than 0.5, then you should be ready to begin controlling digital audio files with the MsPinky record.

2.5 Opening Files: Using the File Menu, or by Drag & Drop from Finder and other Applications

Go to the “File” pulldown menu and select “Open sound file.” Choose “Group 1” in the submenu, and you'll get a menu which will allow you to select a sound file. Select a file (.AIFF, .WAV, or .MP3) and you should see it appear in the “Group 1 Files” scroll-down list in the middle section of the BinkyToy window. See Figure 2.4. This section, and the section below, labeled “Group 2 Files,” are dedicated to the two audio file mixing sections of BinkyToy. You can think of them as turntables 1 and 2 (although you may be using only one turntable, or no turntables. It doesn't matter, you'll most likely be using both groups).

You may also drag & drop one or more files simultaneously from the finder directly onto the Group1/2 Files Scrolling List views. This is much quicker than the method described above! Also- once you have loaded a file into BinkyToy, you can open a duplicate of the file by dragging the file name in the Group1/2 list while holding down the “option” key. When you have the same file open on each of the two virtual turntables, you can beat juggle very easily! It's just like having two copies of the same record.

Drag & Drop file loading should also work from applications like iTunes, and from the File Finder utility built-in to the Mac OS.

2.6 File Playback Controls
Now you're just about ready to start scratching that file you loaded into group 1. In Figure 2.4 we see the section of the main window devoted to the audio files for Group1.

Figure 2.4: Group1 Files.

If you click on the name of a file in the column on the left side of the middle section of the Ms Pinky screen, controls should appear on the right which relate to this particular sound file. Note that every sound file that appears in the column on the left has it's own settings, including effects settings, playback controls and scratch settings, and clicking on it's name will cause those controls to appear.

The controls on the right will be opened to the “FX & Levels” tab when you have clicked on the file name. For now leave the settings as they are and click on that little green play button with the pink triangle in the bottom left corner that looks like the “play” symbol on a tape deck. You should hear your sound file play if all the previous steps have been performed correctly, and the button appearance should change to a stop sign. You should see a popup menu labeled “options”. The first three items in this menu are “Loop”, “Reverse”, and “Fat Resample”. “Loop” will make the file play over and over again, and “Reverse” will make it play backwards so you can hear the Satanic messages.

Figure 2.5: File Playback Controls.

“Fat Resample” toggles the playback between two scratching quality levels..“fat” and “skinny”. The “fat” quality scratching sounds better, but eats up more computer horsepower. Try scratching with “Fat Resample” checked and unchecked to see if you can tell the difference.

Now click on the button with the turntable icon over on the left. If you now play your Ms Pinky disk on the turntable, you'll find that the file plays when the disk plays, and follows any scratches you make with the Ms Pinky disk. Maybe the tracking isn't quite what you’d like at this point, but there are controls that can allow you to fine-tune the response. If you have not selected “Reverse” under the options menu, when you move the MsPinky vinyl forward, the sound should play forward. When you move the vinyl backwards, it should also play backwards. If the opposite is true, then you should reverse the left/right channels of your turntable's signal inputs.

Now try adding some effects on the sound file you're playing. In the “FX & Levels” tab, shown in Figure 2.6, select an effect from the “available fx” scrolling list and either drag it to the “FX chain 1” list, or click on the “>>chain 1” button. The effect will then appear in the “FX chain 1” list. You may also drag & drop FX from the “available FX” menu onto the “FX Chain 1” and “FX Chain 2” lists. Similarly, you can drag & drop FX from any FX chain list to any other FX chain list in BinkyToy. Holding down the “option” key while dragging an effect will cause it to be duplicated at the new position where you drag it.

Figure 2.6: FX & Levels settings for file playback.

Double clicking on it's name in the chain list will bring up an editing window for the effect. Most of the effects have presets, so try them out. Add some more effects to the chain, and notice how the sound is affected if you drag an effect into a different position in the chain. If you want to hear only the effect and not the dry audio file (the audio file not effected), move the slider labeled “dry” to the left and the slider labeled “FX chain 1” to the right. Put some effects into chain 2 and play with them, and play with the levels of the dry signal and the FX chains. But whatever you do, don't let your meat loaf. The “master” slider of course controls the volumes of sums of the dry signal and the two FX chains.

Click off the turntable button and let the file play without being controlled by the MsPinky vinyl. Experiment with the “pitch,” “cue point” and “scrubber” sliders and see what they do. Note the way the tape-deck controls work (pretty much like you'd expect them to, even if the colors are a bit suspicious). We hope you now have a good feel for the way the “FX & Levels” section works.

Try adding more audio files to group 1 (from the File menu, Open Sound file > group 1, or drag & drop from the Finder). Notice that every sound file has it's own “FX & Levels” settings: just highlight the file's name to see it's settings. This means that each sound file has it's own effects chains and playing status. Meaning that within the same group, you could have one sound file playing without the turntable and another playing with the turntable, each with their own effects and levels settings! Oh goody.

2.7 Waveform Display
When you open an audio file in BinkyToy for the first time ever, you will not be able to view the file’s waveform. If you desire to see a waveform display for the file, click on the “Waveform” tab in the file control view. A popup window will appear informing you that the waveform data is being calculated. This could take a little while so please be patient. Note that any files that were playing before you clicked on “waveform”, including the file for which waveform data is being calculated, will continue to play normally (even with the vinyl tracking) while the waveform data is being computed.

Once the waveform data has been computed, it is stored in a file in the same folder as the audio file to which it corresponds. The name of the waveform data’s file will be the same as the audio file (minus any .wave, .aiff, .aif, or .mp3 extension) with the extension “.wvf”. Note that there are actually two waveform displays for each file. There is a small display located directly below the tabbed views in the file control view which shows a condensed view of the entire file. There is a larger display under the “waveform” tab. The larger display can be zoomed in and out to show different amounts of waveform data. The zoom factor is selected from the “options” popup menu. You can also turn auto-scrolling off or on. The auto-scrolling feature causes the zoomed-in larger waveform display to follow the playback point of the file as it plays.

The waveform displays also function as cueing controls for the file. Double-clicking at any point on the waveform displays will cause the file to re-cue to that point. Single-clicking within 5 pixels of the playback indicator mark will bring up a second indicator line which follows the mouse movement. When you release the mouse, the file will be re-cued to the point where the mouse was released.

One more thing before we conclude this quick tour: you also have the second group and its associated Output settings as well. What this means is that the same things you can do in group 1 you can obviously do in group 2, but with everything in group 2 going to a separate output and controllable like a second turntable on your mixer if you have your setup configured that way. And with the two outputs, you have an opportunity to throw additional effects on whatever is coming out of group 1 and group 2 on their way out. And by the way, you can put effects on audio coming into BinkyToy as well. It's all very flexible, and again dependent on the amount of computational power your computer can muster.

Now you're probably wondering how come we're ending the tour without going into what that “vinyl response” or the “scratch modulation” tabs are all about. Well, that's a more advanced topic and we'll start the next section right there. But we said we'd get you scratching in the tour, and we done that, didn't we? Now scratch away, if you got to. But if you want still more, just read it little further. It all starts right over here...