Author Archives: Sandy Milne

About Sandy Milne

I am a Sound Designer working in an audio post production studio in Melbourne. I also dabble a bit in programming and am currently working on a couple of projects in Java, Objective-C and PHP. I also make music, DJ and try to get to the beach for a surf as much as possible y aprendo espanol..

Sound Design work of late

Due to a holiday in the UK, a bunch of assignments for my Uni course, some iOS, java and ksp programming plus some short films I’ve been a bit busy lately. This is good although it was probably not the time to try to cut down of my coffee consumption.
Anyway caffeine addiction aside, I thought I would post a couple of the jobs I have been working on lately at Risk Sound.

Midnight Snack:

This I did a while back with the lovely crew from Active Motion but have just uploaded to my vimeo site so though I would repost it.

Bank of Melbourne TVC:

Santos World Tour:

 

 

 

 

Aussie Lingo Audio Companion – (Australian Slang Dictionary with Audio)

I am about to release a new version of Aussie Lingo Audio Companion – (Australian Slang Dictionary with Audio) in the next couple of days. This update will slightly update the iPhone interface to make it more user friendly, add a suggest button to be able to suggest new lingo straight from the main screen of the iPad and iPhone version, update with 15 or so new bits of lingo and add a button which will open the new Facebook page….

Which brings me to the great segue of…. the new face book page!
https://www.facebook.com/AussieLingoAudioCompanion

If your wandering around Facebook and need something to “like” it’s just sitting there… waiting…

Thanks to everyone who has already liked it. Once again if you want to check out the details or some audio samples head to or use the menu above!

How to create an NSDictionary from a plist file

In a new iPhone app I am currently developing I needed to be able to import the data from a plist file (apple’s XML formatted file) stored within the app bundle and display it in my app. Luckily there is a very handy class method in the NSDictionary class which enables you to create a Dictionary (basically an array with key values) from a file.
NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:file];

As I wanted to be able to iterate through all the values in the plist, I created a main dictionary named “database” then within that an array which stored another dictionary that holds my key based data.

This is the code I used to open the plist file and iterate though all the values it contains:

NSString *file = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"list_of_dogs" ofType:@"plist"];
        NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:file];
        
        NSArray *dogArray = [[NSArray alloc] initWithArray:[dict objectForKey:@"database"]];
        
        
        for (NSDictionary *sectionDict in dogArray){
          
            //loop through the data from the plist
            
            
           NSLog(@"Dog Name = %@ ",[sectionDict objectForKey:@"dog_name"]);   
           NSLog(@"Dog Type = %@ ",[sectionDict objectForKey:@"dog_type"]);  


         
            
            
        }

This is the XML format of the plist file I created:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>database</key>
	<array>
		<dict>
			<key>dog_name</key>
			<string>Jasper</string>
			<key>dog_type</key>
			<string>Great Dane</string>
			
		</dict>
		<dict>
			<key>dog_name</key>
			<string>Samd</string>
			<key>dog_type</key>
			<string>Jack Russell</string>
			
		</dict>
	</array>
</dict>
</plist>

Any questions? hit me up in the comments

Mental to Close MIFF

Just a quick post to announce that the film I worked on briefly “Mental” starring Toni Collette and directed by PJ Hogan will be closing the 2012 Melbourne international film festival.
Congratulations to all the team at Soundfirm whose blood, sweat and tears went into making it an fantastic film.

It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re in Melbourne on the 18th of August make sure you check it out

http://www.soundfirm.com/film-commercials/mental-to-close-miff-2012/

You can buy tickets here:
MIFF

Audio Conform Calculator iPhone app now free

In celebration of my new Australian Slang app “Aussie Lingo Audio Companion” I have decided to offer my other app Audio Conform Calculator as a free download from the iTunes app store.

Audio Conform Calculator is a simple iPhone App for sound engineers in which you can specify the source and destination frame rates of the video you are conforming and it will provide you with the percentage and ratio value that the corresponding audio needs to be time expanded or compressed to keep it in sync with the video.

When converting/conforming between video between different frame rates such as FILM, which is 24 frames per second, to PAL, which is 25 frames per second, audio needs to be conformed so that it maintains its sync with the video.

You can download it using the link below:

http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/audio-conform-calculator/id517492265?mt=8

Aussie Lingo Audio Companion Launched

After a few months of development, recording, editing and mixing Aussie Lingo Audio companion is now available in the iTunes app store!

Aussie Lingo Audio Companion contains over 400 fun, uniquely Australian, slang words and phrases each with an explanation of their meaning and a professionally recorded and produced audio example of their usage.

The audio will not only help you understand the lingo’s meaning but also provides a clear example of how us Aussies pronounce words and the Aussie twang we are known for.

Whether you’re traveling or moving to Australia and want to sound more like local or just want to have fun exploring the colourful lingo we use, Aussie Lingo Audio Companion has you covered mate.

Aussie Lingo Audio Companion also enables you to:
Mark lingo as a favorite for easy recall,
Search for lingo to find the prefect bit of lingo for the job,
Submit your own lingo suggestions directly via the app

Aussie Lingo Audio Companion is also universal so works on both the iPad and iPhone

If you would like to hear some examples of the lingo and audio please visit the Aussie Lingo Audio Companion page

http://www.sandymilne.com/iphone-apps/aussie-lingo-audio-companion

TVC Sound Design

As I write this I am starting to realise that it’s a good thing that my sound design skills are more creative than my blog post titling skills….

I thought I would post a couple more TVC spots that I have created over the past couple of years while working at Risk Sound.

This first spot for Keno was done a couple of months ago. The voice over was recoded over ISDN with a studio in Sydney and the location dialog needed a bit of cleaning up with my new favorite audio restoration tool iZotope Rx 2. It’s pretty amazing what you can do with this plugin especially with the spectral repair where you can actually visualise sound and their harmonics then attenuate or remove them.

This second TVC I actually did a couple of years ago but I rediscovered it while doing some digital housecleaning on my drive at work. This spot was a bit of fun and enabled me to indulge my inner sci-fi geek. For the “kids-thought-a-screen” sound my tool of choice was audio ease’s speaker phone which is fantastic for creating speaker, telephone and announcements effects.

 

Dj Deltoid mix tapes

This post is a bit of a blast from the past but while cleaning out my music computer I found a few of my old mix tapes (mix mp3s?) I had created while DJing around melboune a few years ago:

This first mix titled “Edible Audio” was put together for a Dj competitions and recorded live on Technics 1200s and a rane Dj Mixer. It’s a mix of hip hop and beats that I had collected on vinyl over the years

1. dj_deltoid_edible_audio_mix.mp3     

This Rumpy Pumpy Ghetto mix is a mix I recorded live again and contains some of my favorite ghetto and booty tec records. Being live, it’s a little messy in parts but none the less a good fun booty shaking mix

2. dj_deltoid-rumpy_pumpy_ghetto_mix.mp3     

This last mix MMMBass was a collection of my favorite dubstep and grime tracks of the time.
One again recorded live it’s a little messy in parts but makes up for it in low frequency rumble.

3. dj_deltoid_MMMBASS_dubstep_mix.mp3     

Enjoy

Tunnel Connections with SSH

SSH is one of my favorite networking tools as it is straight forward to use, comes pre-installed on OSX and most Linux distros and provides a great way of securely accessing network services from remote locations.

Because my home server doesn’t have a static IP address I have been using the free service by no-ip.org which updates it’s DNS records when your IP address changes. I then set up my router to forward port 222 (ssh is normally 22 but setting a non standard port means you don’t get as many bots trying to guess your login details) to port 22 of my server on my home LAN.

Once you have setup ssh and have forwarded port 22 from your router to your ssh server you can use the command below in terminal to forward connections:

 ssh -L 5901:127.0.0.1:5900 username@servername.no-ip.org -p 222 -N 

-L sets up local forwarding

5901 is the local port you will connect to that will be forwarded to the remote system

127.0.0.1 is the remote system that the port will be forward to. 127.0.0.1 is the localhost, or system running the ssh server, but you can use another system on your network such as 192.168.55.3 if you want.

5900 is the remote port that the connection will be forwarded to (5900 is VNC in this case)

username@servername.no-ip.org is your username followed by Internet address of your server

-p 222 specifies a non standard SSH port

-N means that only the tunnel will be created not a remote shell.

In OSX you can then press Command-K in finder and type vnc://127.0.0.1:5901 to view the screen of the remote computer with all traffic between you local and remote system encrypted via ssh.

I recommended using a private public key and not passwords when settings this up for even more security.

Some more Radio Commercials

I thought I would follow my previous post Radio Commercials with another similar themed and very creatively named….. “More Radio Commercials” post

ThiscommercialforConnexwasafinalistin the London International Awards acoupleofyearsback.

1. Connex-Radio-Commercial.mp3     

This was one of a set of commercials in which I spent the day traveling with the police and interviewing them about their experiences dealing with road accidents.

2. TAC-Radio-Commercial.mp3     

This commercial was one of a small campaign to promote the Puma Love Run. The actors were recorded in the booth (although I made them run around a little) and after a bit sound design and some reverb, care of my favorite convolution reverb plug-in Altiverb, it came to life.

3. PUM0002_T.mp3