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kb

Tammo Hinrichs: farbrausch's musician and synthesiser programmer

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kb (Tammo Hinrichs) wrote the music and the software synthesiser for farbrausch's 64K intro fr-08 (2000). The synthesiser, known as V2 (ViruZ II), is the one farbrausch says it used for all its intros, .kkrieger and debris. kb released V2 as a free plug-in for other musicians in 2004 and put its code in the public domain in 2012.

When fr-08: .the .product starts, the music begins before there is anything to see. The screen shows a progress bar while the intro builds its textures and models, and the soundtrack plays over the wait, generated note by note as it goes. That was deliberate. Its coder Chaos explained that the music played during the loading “to show that kb’s synthesiser does not need any precalculation (actually it is incapable of playing samples of any kind)”. kb, Tammo Hinrichs, wrote both the synthesiser and the music. It could not play a single recorded sound: everything in the soundtrack is calculated while the intro runs.

Fast facts

  • Handles: kb (on Pouët, kb_); kebby.
  • From: Hamburg, Germany.
  • Group: farbrausch.
  • Known for: the music and synthesiser of fr-08; the V2 synthesiser (in its source, “Farb-Rausch ViruZ II”), used in farbrausch’s intros, .kkrieger and debris..
  • Discipline: synthesiser code and music.

fr-08

The fr-08 readme lists kb as “Audio programming, music, additional demo code”, and he signed it off. A 64K intro has no room for recorded sound, so a synthesiser inside the program has to make the music from short descriptions of instruments and notes. Visitors to the intro’s page on the scene site Pouët singled out the sound. In April 2001 kb himself was less satisfied: “the music was done quite in a hurry without letting me getting used to the synth and its possibilities, and our general mood at the end was something like ‘ok, let’s shock the scene a bit, we’ve enough time to do a GOOD intro thereafter’.”

V2

The synthesiser became known as V2. The main source file is headed “Farb-Rausch ViruZ II”, and by 2001 viewers on fr-08’s Pouët page were already calling it “viruz 2”. kb dates the V2 code from 2000 to 2008, and farbrausch’s 2012 source release describes V2 as “used for all our intros, kkrieger and debris”. The group’s other intro tool of 2001–2003, RG2, carries its own copy of the ViruzII code. On .kkrieger in 2004 wayfinder wrote the music and sound effects, played by kb’s synthesiser; on debris. in 2007 kb is credited with the synthesiser and Ronny with the soundtrack.

V2 is a synthesiser that plays many parts at once, controlled like any MIDI instrument; its core converts “MIDI notes to waveform data”, as kb put it. It also has a speech synthesiser: text typed into the editor is turned into phonemes, and the voice can be made to sing in time with the notes. A finished song is recorded out of the plug-in as a .v2m file, which V2’s player feeds back through the synthesiser to play it. kb warned that the file might look “somewhat bigger than you expected - it’s optimized to be compressed afterwards”, by an executable packer such as ryg’s kkrunchy.

Releasing V2

kb did not keep V2 to the group. He released the “farbrausch consumer consulting V2 synthesizer system” as free plug-ins for other musicians: a VST instrument, a machine for the Buzz music program and a Winamp plug-in for playing the songs. Pouët dates the release to The Ultimate Meeting in December 2004, with UI code and the Buzz plug-in by paniq. Its readme asked musicians to go easy on the preset sounds, because “they’ve all been used in various farbrausch productions and most of them are kinds of ‘trademark sounds’ that are recognizable way too easily.” Version 1.5 of libv2, “Farbrausch Consumer Consulting’s famous tiny synthesizer and music player for YOU”, followed in 2008 for programmers who wanted to play V2 music in their own programs. kb explained that he had opened up so much of it partly because he was “kinda fed up with all the pleas for support and improvements”, and that there were “other things in my life than constantly maintaining this 7.5 year old code base”.

In April 2012 farbrausch put V2’s source on GitHub with the rest of its tools, and kb placed the code in the public domain. He was frank about its state: “Yes, this source code is a total mess. Good luck getting it to compile.” The release lists him as a contributor to V2, RG2, Altona and Werkkzeug4, and to the data for the intros flybye and welcome to.

Later work

kb’s GitHub profile describes farbrausch as something he does after work (“Farbrausch zum Feierabend”). He has kept writing tools for the scene, including Capturinha, a program for recording the screen and sound on Windows “mostly made for demoscene productions”.

Sources

See also

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