First time user and have a question about cd content

Hello,

I got my device two days ago and was pleasantly surprised with it.
At first I noticed the flashing behind closed eyes without much visuals. The best visuals sofar I got with Rejuvenate and it was great.
Then I read on this forum about the audiostrobe giving better visuals so I tried the first one in the list and it blew me out of the water giving me visuals from the first ligths on till they went off. Fractals, mandala's also turning in 3d right movement and rotation right of the bat first time with audiostrobe but not with spectrastrobe.
That was crazy. Rejuvenate gave me good visuals too but not as intense and insane as audiostrobe so I still have to find out my favorites.

My question is:
I see that you can buy audiostrobe coded cd's from this website.
Do they work for the Kasina too?
I also see websites offering audiostrobe coded cd's, do they work with Kasina too?
Do I have to convert these audio cd's to MP3 for the Kasina with special programs to keep the light signals in the mp3 file or do they come as mp3 files?

Could you direct me to somewhere where there is a tutorial on how to get cd contents on the Kasina? I would love to order some audiostrobe cd's from your website.

There are some audiostrobe files on the device with the same name as in the shop. Are they the same or are those bought in the shop longer or different?

Thanks for making such a cool product, I am loving it.

Hello Lokiban,
Yes, all AudioStrobe encoded sessions will work great with the Kasina. They will work as onboard mp3 sessions or from an external audio player piped into the AUX jack. A great thing with the Kasina is you can choose the color mapping as well using the ColorSets.

There are many free programs to rip CDs to mp3. Audiograbber or CDEx are good ones to try. To keep the AudioStrobe encoding you must use low compression which means a high bitrate. Encode the mp3 files at 320kps, CBR (constant bitrate). With newer versions using these settings the light signals will be preserved.

The AudioStrobe CDs we sell are designed to produce nice visual experiences with patterns, fractals, geometry etc. These differ from the 'entrainment' type sessions. Kasina contains a mix of session types with the Mind Art category being closest to the CDs. The AS files that are contained on the Kasina are samplers from these discs. So they would be one of the songs from the disc to give you an idea of the style.

Hope this helps. If you need more assistance we are happy to provide more information.

Best,
Scott

I am also interested in bying additional Audiostrobe programms and have a question - are they "just for fun", like looking at a nice firework show, or do they also target particular herz to help you reach different states of mind? In a previous post Scott wrote that the ones included in the Kasina were just "geometry" demo sessions.

thank you Scott for the info,
I just ordered the audio illusions cd and dreams in the mind eye, I am looking forward to that. I love to see the visuals and geometry and audio illusions is amazing by what I experienced on the Kasina.
I also have Neuroprogrammer 3 and hooked it up to the Kasina and it works like a charm. It is great how it is supported and I am looking forward to create my own sessions.

I absolutely love the Kasina. The spectrastrobe meditation meditate brought me to a very deep level of meditation hovering near sleep and sometimes almost nodding off. I finished it off with a nice audiostrobe version audio illusions and when I got to bed my inner vision opened up fantastically looking at a lake in all its beauty and details and not losing sight of it.
If this is what the Kasina does then it is totally amazing and awesome, I enjoy it.

Thank you for making such cool toys for the mind. I tried ten year ago with some crude glasses and big bulb leds which are nothing compared to what I experience now.
I couldn't be more happy.

ps I would love to play existing music on the Kasina with the leds flashing on the rythm of the music. Is this possible? Do you have a tutorial you could link me to?

Lokiban,
It is awesome to hear about how much you are enjoying the Kasina. The technique that you have discovered where you let yourself get very near sleep is an excellent one. Many great visions are to be found at the borderland of sleep.

Yes, flashing the lights along with non-encoded music is facilitated by the ColorOrgan mode. It works best with rhythmic music. The Color Organ is described in the manual starting on page 12. A digital copy is here: http://mindplacesupport.com/files/77...al-Nov2014.pdf Press the control pad button UP to access the ColorOrgan modes.

Raziela,
There really is not that much distinction between 'just for fun' or 'serious' entrainment type sessions. It is common somehow that people try to make these comparisons. You can see many threads about this on the forum.

But think about it. The brain is a very complex organ, oscillating with ever changing frequencies. All sensory input especially psychoactive inputs like those provided by a mind machine have influence on brainwave patterns.

Let's think about it this way. 'Entrainment' sessions at the most basic level are like a metronome. A stripped down steady beat. Not necessarily fun to listen to or very interesting at all. However, the point of a metronome is to set a time that you can play music around. A synchronization pulse. It helps to learn how to express yourself on the instrument to play along with the metronome. At the highest levels you can 'improvise' freely around the metronome and may not even need the pulse anymore. I hope you can see how this applies to meditation.

'Entertainment' type sessions which some people seem to like to think of them, are songs in themselves. They are much more complex and interesting than a metronome pulse. They contain structure and emotional layers, the best ones induce a very important emotion, 'awe'. These sessions are generally more compelling and easily enjoyed right out of the box. Contrast this with the metronome where you need to make your own 'music' for it to be interesting.

No one would argue that 'songs' don't affect the mind and mood states. In fact, many strong memories and experiences are anchored by them.

So, in my mind, the distinction is simplistic and superficial at best.

Hope this discussion is of interest.

Scott

Hello Scott,

I see there are lots of AudioStrobe cd's availlable for the AVS devices but no SpectraStrobe cd's/music.
If Spectrastrobe is more advanced then AudioStrobe wouldn't people create content for that?
Are the only SpectraStrobe files the only ones you get with the Kasina device?

I created with NP3 an alpha session at 8.5 hz. The visuals I am getting are better then the very deep meditation. I missed that pure alpha meditation in the SpectraStrobe meditations session and played a bit with different color flashes and settings which work great and I am getting the hang of it.
Meditation with the Kasina is dead easy. I have to do nothing just sit there and listen and watch and I must say that isochronic tones alone are nice but with the visuals it is a sure thing you enter meditative states fast and easy.
I love this device, my creativity is shooting into outer space and ideas upon ideas enter my mind. Now to only get the skills to fiddle with the lights and create some content myself. Sound and Vision, the ultimate experience.

Thank you Scott, what you say makes sense.

I have the same question with Lokiban actually, there are no extra Spectrastrobe sessions to purchase / download other than the free tracks on soundcloud (@lokiban have a look: https://soundcloud.com/mindplace). My wish as a customer and just a thought for mindplace to consider would be extra Spectrastrobe content in mp3 download format (takes ages for physical products to reach Europe, they might get stuck in customs and it is a waste of resources, whereas the digital download takes seconds) and focus on more intense visuals - mandalas, color and shape variety, anything to make your mind trip - the "awesome song" as you describe it above. Reading other comments in the forum I think that other meditation and mind machine beginners might be expecting that. Spectrastrobe is supposed to be so much more advanced than Audiostrobe and yet in my humble opinion I feel that the audiostrobe sessions "audio illusions" and "dreams in the minds eye" are visually more impressive than "a starlit night" or "patternity", but of course this is how I might personally perceive it.

Why buy them if you can get them free?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Andy

Why buy them if you can get them free?

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Other than some sessions I found on soundcloud and the sessions sub-forum, there is not a lot of extra content - especially sessions that focus on stunning visuals rather than entrainment - is there?

I haven't counted them, but there has to be dozens (if not hundreds) of sessions between the 2 locations.

I just cleaned up the Sessions forum so there are only sessions in there. There's 42 posts, each with one or more sessions. Have you had a chance to try them all?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Andy

Why buy them if you can get them free?

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Nice!
Thanks for the link, I didn't know it existed.
Thank you to Raziela for your link, I downloaded them and testing them.

@Raziela
I think if you go for the images then the AudioStrobe shines and undeniable gives you outright from the start images (my experience). SpectraStrobe sessions are more subtle and not as much images as the AudioStrobe sessions. If those ganzfeld glasses come availlable in my country (Netherlands) I will get them and I think they will be good with SpectraStrobe.

Above all I use the Kasina for meditation. It makes it so easy for me to get into meditative states fast. With that I don't need the images, I only need the light on-of in sync with the isotones. When I bought the Kasina (mainly for its support in Neuroprogrammer 3) I even didn't know it could create images, that was a nice surprise when I watched my first AudioStrobe session and saw it with my own eyes.

Hello, Raziela--we've been working towards creating additional SpectraStrobe content, from a variety of composers, with the intention of selling them at a modest price as downloadable MP3's. One of the reasons we built our current MindPlace.com site on Amazon's platform is that they assured us that this feature would become available 'soon'. But they never came through on that feature. Instead, they are shutting Amazon webstores down as of next July. We'll be creating a new mindplace.com website well before then, and will add the downloads at that time. We don't lack interesting and useful audio content, but creating the SpectraStrobe signals is a tedious process, and is a bit of a bottleneck at present.

Lokiban, as Scott mentioned we love to hear experiences like yours... thanks so much for sharing them! The state at the edge of sleep can truly be magical, and part of our intention with some of our sessions is to keep you there for an extended period. That space is called hypnagogia, and there is a fine book on the subject by Mavromatis. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia.

Robert

To give a bit a background. AudioStrobe as a technology is over a decade old. It is really rather simple meaning that it uses 1 high frequency tone track to produce the light signal. Originally the left and right channels in AudioStrobe as interpreted by the decoder panned signals between the left and right eyes. The glasses only had 1 color LED, usually red.

The Proteus expanded AudioStrobe to interpret the left and right signals to control 2 colors. In the factory glasses this was green and red.

Thus AudioStrobe did not really consider color but focused on geometry through quick speed changes and other phase change methods.

The Kasina expanded AudioStrobe content to nearly full color with the random ColorSets and also ColorSet implementations of both left/right and 2 color methods of AudioStrobe decoding. You are also able to choose the pair of colors for the mapping. Note this was an innovation introduced in the Procyon as well, with color pairs assignable in the editor.

So, AudioStrobe has much more content because it is many years older. Also, software like NP3 and MWS have had AS creation since their introduction although I have never seen visually interesting AudioStrobe content created by others using this software. If someone can point me to some then that would be appreciated.

With NP3 it is difficult to make the many segments that are needed for interesting AS as their is no zoom, among other reasons. With MWS you can create interesting content but the best comes from custom waveforms and intricate node structures. See my discussion above about 'entrainment' structures as compared with 'entrainment' structures and my subsequent conclusion of the superficiality of the categorization although the creation of the former is much more simplified than the latter.

Note that the MindExplorer SW from TC Softworks (by a Kasina engineer) can produce interesting AS content using a color organ type approach that is very configurable. http://www.tc-softworks.com/en/mindexplorersw.htm The LUX plugins by a forum member can create good AudioStrobe (or SpectraStrobe) content too but you must have audio DAW experience. http://www.lux-vst.com/

The AudioStrobe content that we sell was created on high end audio tools (Capybara Kyma) by Robert and others. The music is licensed and the artists receive royalties. MindPlace manufactured the CDs and once they go out of stock, no new runs will be made. The files will be sold as digital files and also the process of converting to SpectraStrobe (especially for Eye Open) is under way.

Ok, so SpectraStrobe is brand new for the Kasina. Thus about 2 years old. We had to create the tools and techniques for encoding files. It is an ongoing learning and design process with tools being refined.

SpectraStrobe is much more complex having 6 channels compared to 2 in AudioStrobe. Color is a fully integrated part of the design process as is left and right independent signals.

My focus in creating SS content for the Kasina was presenting colors for closed eyes and interesting modulations. Experimental techniques to say the least. Maybe not all were successful but that is how any new technology is. I pushed the envelope to the best of my ability at that time and stuck with Mind Art categories mainly. Other Kasina session authors fulfilled their tasks with stimulation sessions with enveloping audio.

Alright, long post, so hang in there.

Closed eye color needed red to be reduced for a better color mixture. This is even though we added more blue and green LEDs. Thus closed eye color mix sessions are overall not perceived to be as bright. Red is by far the brightest color in closed eyes. So, trying to deliver a wide range of colors requires that red be tamed and the overall composite brightness to be reduced.

AudioStrobe sessions never bothered with this as they didn't care about color. You can see that in the random ColorSets that some colors work much better than others in closed eyes with creating patterns. Red and all LEDs (whitish) creating the crispest patterns.

Now we are moving into world of eye open glasses which was always the intention. SpectraStrobe rules in this arena as all the colors of the rainbow are available without compromise.

There are other technical considerations that SpectraStrobe requires to produce really crisp geometric patterns. I have been working with the Procyon recently with eye open glasses, and my god it is amazing. The technology of the Procyon is totally different. You have direct digital control of the waveforms across 3 channels.

However, I am learning a lot of tricks again from this that are reproducible in SpectraStrobe to some degree. More on this will be detailed later.

Still, our focus at the moment is eye open sessions (which work well in closed eye too). Thus, new sessions are in the works. But once again we have to make it up as we go.

Best,
Scott

Hello all, thank you for the wonderful and extensive feedback.


@Robert, thank you very much for the interesting info. Setting up your own download portal where you don't have to pay fees to third parties sounds like a good idea, and I am sure the community will love and support it. Please ask the authors to add extended descriptions of the sessions and implement community features such as reviews and discussions. Last but not least, please offer paypal as a payment method.
I thought creating Spectrastrobe sessions is not a piece of cake, so this is why for example at the moment I am not considering creating my own sessions with expensive software - I am still a beginner.
Thank you for the interesting info on hypnagogia. I am still not sure what it is referring to - e.g normally before I fall asleep I see some senseless images and I am aware of that, and sometimes if you engage in a discussion with me at that point I will give senseless answers back because I hear the question, but at the same time see non-lucid dream like images and can't place the question in its actual waking life context. If this is what hypnagogia is, Patternity and Sumberge Vol 2 took me there, but not every time. I do not know how to make use / influence this state like I would in a lucid dream. Hope the Kasina will get me there.

@Scott, I am sure mindplace and other authors will be able to create amazing visuals with Spectrastrobe and I appreciate that it is a new technology and you as the creators are still learning from it. And to be completely honest, I think that the audiostrobes in the Kasina contain samples from different tracks and this is why they are so diverse - and probably a lot of red color. But do you mean that Spectrastrobe sessions will deliver more colors if one uses open eye glasses? Anyway I really appreciate your efforts and experimentation and can't wait to see how this will develop.

@Lokiban: I do not think Spectrastrobe as a technology is more sublte, I think the particular sessions are. Please download Skytripstrobe from the sessions folder - it was so bright and diverse, I was almost tempted to decrease the brightness :icon_wink:

With the DeepVision glasses and your eyes open you can see a lot more colors. They are more vivid. Especially blues, greens, yellows, purples. The colors can be very bright too. You get a lot of phosphenes as well.

Thank you Scott for the explanation of the differences between AudioStrobe and SpectraStrobe and it was my hunch that AudioStrobe was around much longer so there is more content for it.
Indeed I notice the nice and smooth colors of SpectraStrobe and after contacting my vendor they are getting the ganzfeld glasses so I am happy to get them as they arrive.
What I notice with SpectraStrobe I get notions of moving, sometimes outright images but not like AudioStrobe the mandelas and fractals but complete imagenary scenes, sometimes I move through the scene, sometime the scene moves before me.
The color experience on my eyes with SpectraStrobe is better but more subtle.
I love the Everglades under meditation, such a great experience.

On another level, After a week using the Kasina to meditate twice daily I got a doubt n my mind that it was making me 'lazy' in my meditation skills.
Today I thought I do meditation without the Kasina to see if I have gotten lazy or notice any differences.
Wow! My meditation skills have risen to new hights. I could not believe the difference with before I got the Kasina and it was such a pleasure that I would not get out of the meditation feeling extremely well and with a smile on my face for an hour.
The Kasina is awesome, truly awesome!
I now have no fear whatsoever that I will get 'lazy' in my carefully build up meditation skills because the Kasina is in fact helping me.
Knowing this I couldn't be more happy with the Kasina and for those wanting to learn to meditate get a Kasina and treat yourself. This is how the modern human in the West uses technology to get to states of mind very easy :)
I did try binaurals and Isochronic tones before but our vision is the most important sense we have. It takes priority above all others and the Kasina brings me there in no time because of it.
In fact I stopped the sound meditations years ago because I thought it didn't do much for me but now I am noticing it.
And then to think that I found out about the Kasina while doing a meditation and I got this idea which I followed up on after my meditation and it made me go on the Internet and find the mind-machine website.

Thank you all for your advice and links to soundfiles, I love it.

Today the shop in The Netherlands finally has the deepvision ganzfield glasses and I immediately ordered them.
I am excited to see them in action.

The difference I mostly notice between SpectraStrobe and AudioStrobe is that in AudioStrobe I see a lot of fractals, mandalas and geometry whereas SpectraStrobe gives me visions of places, scenery in moving kind of fashion which is great.
I think the difference is between nearfield vision and deep vision, I can do both now and both are nice although I notice I get better with the visuals with use of the Kasina over time.