(Michael Chinen)

I’ve been doing more GUI based music stuff.  This is partially a response to the fact that I usually don’t enjoy performing tape music live.  Don’t get me wrong, I can enjoy a concert of tape music.  Most of my music is fixed media.  I’m not talking about seeing virtuosity or even expressing emotion.  But I really enjoy when I  see the person who made the music communicate that he actually believes in it during performance.  Some people can do this amazingly well with just a trackpad.  I’ve decided to work more with hacked GUIs because they are tied to the software processand also its like my way of getting back at them for driving me fucking crazy most of the time.

I’ve been working on the website, and I see that I have little of my GUI based music online.  But when it comes down to documenting these things on a mac, I couldn’t find a good free tool that does this.  I am amazed that this doesn’t exist, given the number of media/video/live-coding artists that work on mac.  I looked for this in the past, but just assumed that I wasn’t trying hard enough or I wasn’t using the right search terms (is it a screen recorder or an av capture tool?)  There are shareware programs and such that have crippled versions of their software for free.  But there are some options:

I’ve looked quite a bit by the way.  There is one freeware tool called “Capture Me” which does low frame-rate video capture, but only for a few seconds.  It is meant for single frame capture and actuallyl looks like a good starting point.  Also, it is labeled ‘open source’, but I can’t find the source code anywhere on the developer’s website, sourceforge, or google.  I’ve contacted the developer and will follow up if I get a reply, but he says due to a job change, he probably won’t get back to emails.

There is a tool for recording without audio on mac.  It’s called krut, and its in java.  It’s actually open source.  I’ll post some results on my g4 once I get to try it out.

I’m still thinking about putting together a really shitty, really free, really open source fast-capture audio video screen capture tool, because I need it and I’ve seen the demand.  If anyone is working on this, please get in contact with me.  I’ll help.  Otherwise I’m going to do it very quick and it’ll have bugs, but it’ll get the job done for now.   Fast-food software, if you will.  Maybe it’s a really hard problem that can’t be tackled.