COS/MUS 325 Fact Sheet, Spring 1999

• Professors:
  Kenneth Steiglitz, ken@cs, office: 421 Computer Science
  Paul Lansky, paul@silvertone, office: 316 Woolworth Ctr
• Assistant:
  Colby Leider colby@silvertone
• Class Mailing List:
  cos325@cs
• Web Page: All course material will be available in a course web page, http://www.CS.Princeton.EDU/courses/archive/spr99/cs325/
• Course Hours: Tues/Thurs 1:30-3:00, 105 Computer Science
• Lab Hours:: Tues at 12:30, Wed and Thurs at 3. The labs will take place in the Equad's Meca SGI cluster (room E417, Equad). There may also be tutorial, programming and listening sessions.

Equipment you need for this course:

• Headphones with stereo miniplug. e.g. the kind you use for Sony Walkman, portable CD players etc. If you want to use fancier headphones which usually have a 1/4 inch plug you can get an adapter for this at Radio Shack. These headphones will plug into the back of the Indy computers in the cluster 2. In the Indigo cluster there is a special gadget to use.
• Audio Cassette: get some good quality audio cassette to record your work. You will need this right away. (Please don't recycle an old cassette. They are cheap and don't take well to multiple recordings). You may also want to get a DAT (digital audio tape) for higher quality recording and another for storage. You can get these from the Music Department at 126 Alexander Road.
• Computer accounts: You will need a standard university unix account.
• Course Material: All course material, problems, reading assignments, labs, software, examples, etc. Will be placed in the course Web page. Little or no paper will be handed out in class. You can print anything out, of course. The course text is A Digital Signal Processing Primer, by Ken Steiglitz.
• Assignments:There are a variety of tasks and problems for the course. Some are to be done with pencil and paper and others to be done in sound. Each week there will be a mixture of both.
• Project:There will be several projects over the course of the semester
• Grading:Based on homework, projects and class participation.

Getting Started on the SGI computer

• You will need to add /usr/sbin and /usr/bin/X11 to the searchpath in your .cshrc file. To access the material for the course utter the following command once from a unix shell
  
  source /u/paul/m325/setup.icons
  and add the following line to your .cshrc file.
  
  source /u/paul/m325/setup.cos325
  
• All of the software for the course, including some source code, will be stored in /u/paul/m325. Feel free to grep around. You can check out the home page for the meca cluster. (I think a lot of it is out of date, but may still be useful). There are a bunch of tutorials on the machine itself. Go to the Find menu and look around.
  
  
• Soundfile space: Soundfiles take a lot of space. On minute of sound at CD rate takes about 10 meg of space. We will have a special disk for the course, (to be announced).Each of the machines in the Meca cluster, however, has a fairly large system disk, so I recommend doing your work in the /tmp directory of the machine you are using, and when you are done transferring anything you want to save to either /var/scratch or the class disk. If you want to do some work which requires a lot of mixing you will get much better results if you are not dragging soundfiles around over the network. You can also backup your soundfiles digitally to a DAT tape. There is a DAT drive attached to one or two of the machines. Use the program datmanto do the transfer.
  
  
• Recording your sounds to and from tape One machine in cluster 2 will have a cassette deck attached to it. To record sounds onto a cassette simply play the soundfile and record as you normally would. To record from a cassette get the audio control panel and set the input to line. Then you can use soundeditor, capture, or recordaiff to record the soundfile. There are man pages for all of these programs If you would like to transfer files from a CD. Go to one of the machines which has a CDRom drive, and use cdman Since some of the work for each week's assignment will be in audio form you shoulds record it all onto cassette.
  
  
• Read this information on basic tools
  
  
• To work with sound directly, you will have to use one of the Meca computers. But, there will be some work you can do remotely, and for this purpose you can use any of the sesamest machines.