DJ Dual Core's Old Mix Tapes

Making: Being Blocked: 2011

2011-12-25T13:53:00.002-06:00

I've been blocked for months. From summer until now I have produced almost no music. I've only posed a few things to my blogs. I barely use Google Plus. My e-mail traffic is even down.

As 2011 grinds to it's confusing conclusion I'm going to share a quick idea about Making and call it a year.

The usual excuse for not creating, making or doing is that we lack the knowledge or skill. If we do not believe we can do it well we tend to not try to do it. But what if that weren't the standard? What if mediocrity were the goal?

My motivation for my guitar mods has never been a "superior instrument" in terms of aesthetics, tone or craftsmanship. It has always been features like range/register, simpler electronics or scale. Thus, a playable (not excellent) instrument with those characteristics is a success. Excellence, if I want to focus on that, can come later.

If one wants to be free the quality of that freedom is paramount, but the tools of achieving it need only work. If I grow my own basil, rather than buying it from a supermarket chain, does it matter whether or not it is exemplary basil, or just that it tastes like fresh basil? If it is really important to me to have excellent, not just fresh, basil I am free to work toward better crops in the future.

A coworker complained recently that mediocrity and low expectations are a real problem in our workplace. He's right. He's also talking about a group of professionals who are supposed to be experts in our fields. Making is typically non-expert, non-professional and often experimental. The standards and motivations are entirely different.

When it comes to Making it is better to just wade in.

Excellent Blog Post About Occupy Cedar Valley

2011-10-15T12:02:00.001-05:00

http://blastedgoat.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/occupy-your-town/

Ohio Linux Fest: Fun Like Sharing Your Penny Farthing

2011-09-12T13:19:00.007-05:00

I find the steam punk phenomenon intriguing. I don't own a penny farthing bicycle, a monocle or one of those unspeakably cool brass laptops. I do feel some affinity with the whole thing. It seems like a natural outgrowth of recent generations' tendency to mine the past for styles. Steam punk goes farther than some other style-related subcultures. Steam punk seeks to change the way participants relate to technology by using it, celebrating it and sharing knowledge.

If you want to criticize steam punk you can start by accusing it of romanticizing historical eras that were brutal and hellish for all but the most privileged, and you'd be right. On the other hand, nobody is trying to bring back Victorian society as a whole. What steam punks are reaching for is the way a privileged Victorian could experience technology and sharing that. For these privileged Victorians, in a way largely lost to us, technology could be unmitigated fun.

As we press farther in to the 21st century technology is connected to a number of our pervasive fears. We are afraid to pay too much for it. We are afraid it will be used against us. We need it to make money for our bosses. We need to get it while it is still cool and get rid of it before it isn't. We are afraid it will fail us in any number of ways.

Flying over the handlebars of a penny farthing was certainly a real fear, but so is being hit by a car on a modern bicycle. There is no equivalent of the economic, social, privacy, political, health and safety fears we now have connected to our use of technology. If anything, the guys in the picture above probably find the relative danger of cycling invigorating.

I just got home from the Ohio Linux Fest 2011. I don't remember seeing anybody dressed overtly steam punk at the fest but I think some of the spirit was present. The Linux community is open and friendly and excited about technology. Nobody waved their laptop or phone in my face wanting me to be impressed. Rather, we passed our phones around the table to be sure we got each other's e-mail addresses right.

I have always been interested in how technology is applied and why it is adopted or abandoned. I found these types of concerns, human concerns, to be very front and center at OLF. It seems to me that in the minds of most of the speakers I heard and people I spoke with these are what makes Linux great, the things people can do with it. What makes Linux special are the things people can do with it because it is libre and open. That is the point, after all. You can do things with free software you can't do with proprietary software.

I went to a database themed session. Databases aren't known, even among geeks, to be fun or exciting. This session, specifically, was about a really slick method for getting data OUT of databases using nothing but web URLs. That's just cool! The technology is called HTSQL. If, in fact, databases can be fun, this is how it works...I'm pretty sure.

Of course, there are things to worry about. The security mindset can take the edge off your fun, but there is also something comforting about knowing at least half the people within 100 ft of you have it, or, more broadly, at least get it. And, oddly, I felt quite comfortable the whole time I was at OLF. I enjoyed my trips to Apple's WWDC conference, the years that I went, but I never felt entirely comfortable, or even marginally at home. I thought I would. I thought being surrounded by thousands of other Mac users, developers and admins would be great. It was OK. I learned a lot. I didn't make a single friend. Most nights I went out alone. I can't help wondering if it isn't the commercial success, money and status but the acceptance of secrecy and corporate arrogance that made WWDC less friendly than a Linux community event. Some Linux people need to be right all the time, just like any group. But Apple...Apple knows it is right all the time and I wonder if that doesn't infect all of us who have associated with Apple over the years.

Besides, arrogance isn't fun. It seemed everybody at OLF was there to have a good time. They wanted to talk. They wanted to talk about how to do stuff, from home brewing to web development, 3D printing to onion routing.

I spent most of my time with three other guys. The only things we all had in common were knowing a little about Linux and taking a lot of pleasure in good beer. That's how it seemed at first, anyway. Over time we found a lot of other things we had in common, from favorite music, books and breweries to interest in various social issues. Only time will tell how long we keep in touch, but we sure had a good time together at OLF.

Fan communities can be vibrant and meaningful but they can also be hollow little cults of personality. What makes any community meaningful is what it does. Another difference between WWDC and a Linux community event is that at WWDC most of us were there to see what we could get from Apple--what Apple would, beneficently, condescend to give us. Looked at this way one hardly wonders why there was something unfriendly and lifeless about it.

OLF was all about participation. I saw speakers in the audience at other sessions over, and over and over. We were all there together, to do things or at least talk about doing things. We were there to give and receive...to share. I hate that word because it can have such a sappy feel to it, but it is exactly what I mean. Share. Cooperate. Collaborate.

Yep. Share--that's what I mean.

Ohio Linux Fest: The Linux Community Is Awesome

2011-09-12T12:38:00.000-05:00

I am just back from Ohio Linux Fest. http://.www.ohiolinux.org

Not only is Linux awesome, the Linux community is awesome!

Of course, Linux attracts a wide variety of nerds, but a disproportionate number of the ones I met at Ohio Linux Fest were truly cool people. The sessions were great. The MULTIPLE brew-pubs walking distance from the con and hotel were great. Basically, I have nothing bad to say.

David Gilmour's About Face vs Pink Floyd's Final Cut

2011-06-13T10:22:00.007-05:00

Yesterday I listened to About Face by David Gilmour and The Final Cut by Pink F loyd, back to back. Both of these are records I listened to extensively in my teens and twenties but not at all in recent years. I expected I would still like them but I did have some doubts. I have heard some Pink Floyd fans complain that Final Cut was either the worst of Roger Waters' navel-gazing or simply beneath the standard for Waters-and-Gilmour era Pink Floyd. My concern with About Face was that, like a lot of The Alarm's output, it wouldn't sound profound to me anymore, but just sentimental and affected.

I needn't have worried.

"Murder," and the other best tracks on About Face, are still great songs. Gilmour is still a great guitarist. It is bookended by the saturated, reverberating "Until We Sleep" and the poignant "Near The End." What is in between isn't consistently that strong but it's a solid record. I have to say, I have never gotten "Cruise."

Aside from a couple of dated backing vocals About Face could be a good rock/singer-songwriter record from any recent decade. At least, that's the case for the 8 tracks currently available on eMusic when I downloaded it a couple of days ago. It seems unlikely that having the other two would change my opinion at this point.

The Final Cut is, not surprisingly, more complex. I didn't know much of the story behind the record until recently. I knew the war themes had to do with Roger Waters' father but I didn't know about the links to Pink Floyd The Wall (the film, and lesser so, The Wall) and the Falklands war. You would think that "Maggie," mentioned repeatedly in the album's lyrics, would have registered with me as Margaret Thatcher, but it didn't.

Conceptually the album is successful in relating the tragedy and cost of war across generations. Waters' alternately whispered and bellowed vocals may have helped ingrain my life-long love for broad dynamics, but long before the end of the album they become predictable. The album's last two tracks, "Not Now John" and "Two Suns In The Sunset," are two of the strongest, as songs, but also feel bolted-on to the end of the track sequence. Being the album's only rocker, "Not Now John" sticks out like a sore thumb, neither thematically nor stylistically of a piece with the preceding eight tracks. Thematically it seems to tie in with "Money," "Welcome To The Machine" and "Have A Cigar." That's good company to be in, but here it is a square peg.

For me, Final Cut works emotionally, musically and thematically. The shortcomings I mention explain why some fans feel it falls short of monster classics like Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here. Because I am so much more familiar with it than The Wall or the Styx concept albums, Final Cut defines the term in my head. It's hard for me to pick tracks out of the cohesive main body of the album as being stronger or weaker because they all flow and work together so closely, conveying a consistent mood of melancholy and tragedy that envelops classes and generations. Like I said, it works.

David Gilmour and Roger Waters both contributed hugely to Pink Floyd's greatness. Listening to these records together reminded me why Pink Floyd needed both of them. It also reminded me why I have always felt more connected to Gilmour. While I stand by my assertion that The Final Cut works, most of the songs don't stand alone well and processing the album as a whole is a bit of a job. Most of the songs on About Face are solid with or without the rest of the record. "Murder," for example, may not be the most probing song ever about the taking of human life and it certainly doesn't have the scope of the entire "Final Cut" but by itself, or on a mix tape, it is much more satisfying than most of the tracks on "Final Cut," pared away from the whole of the album.

Final Cut also under utilizes Gilmour. It is widely held that it is more of a Roger Waters solo record, akin to "Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking," that a "real" Pink Floyd album. I really enjoy Gilmour's guitar playing and feel his voice is at least a match for Waters'. In Floyd, they both often sang in character. Even though "Final Cut" is largely about Waters' feelings about father's death in WWII, most of the vocals seems to still be in character. "About Face" feels like it is Gilmour's own voice. This is neither good nor bad on the whole but it leaves me with a bit more of an emotional connection to "About Face," even though "Final Cut" is a very emotionally provocative record, in a more theatrical way.

Alternative Computer Operating Systems For Normal People

2011-06-09T17:59:00.003-05:00

Why might a normal person (a non-technical, non-nerd, non-IT professional) want to use something other than Windows or Mac?

Gewsense
You want something totally non-corporate.

PC-BSD
You want something off the beaten path but totally reliable.

OpenBSD
You are very, very concerned about security.

Linux Mint
You want most of the convenience of a mainstream OS without the security and licensing problems.

Fedora, Open SuSE
Any of the above, but you need to integrate it into an enterprise network.

The Old Bad Rules For Landing A Mate

2011-06-06T10:35:00.002-05:00

I recently stumbled across references to The Rules, a system that claims to apply "time tested" truths about what men want to helping women get Mr. Right. I won't directly address the book because I have not read it except to say that, on the surface, it seems to promote harmfull ideas that are both old and widely held. Thus, even if The Rules is as bad as it seems it isn't the real problem.

The ideas I object to seem to center around the belief that aloof and manipulative is a more desirable state of being than direct, honest and engaged in one's own life...if you are a woman. Take "playing hard to get" for example. It specifically calls for not communicatimg your feelings and intentions and sometimes contradicting them. It makes sense if one expects their perspective partner to value them more as a conquest than as someone they know and trust intimately. Otherwise it wastes precious time you could be spending together getting to know each other. It may also take some explaining afterward. "I know I didn't say what I meant before but now I want you to take me at my word."

It is my opinion that all of the things we ask of women that push them toward indirectness and manipulation are harmful in multiple ways. This notion, that "playing hard to get" is more attractive than expressing honest interest, may be one of the worst. Not only does it teach everyone to not take women at their word, it also teaches women that there is something wrong with them. If they want to attract a desireable mate they must feign disinterest. They must pretend to be other than they really are because the truth about them, as a person, is not what a desirable mate would want.

I don't want my daughters to feel that way and i'm glad that isn't how my marriage works.

Touchscreen Works Automatically With Fedora 15

2011-05-30T15:44:00.002-05:00

I just installed Fedora 15 Linux on an Asus Eee PC T101MT and the touchscreen works, with no additional package installation or anything. First try. The version of Fedora 15 I installed defaults to GNOME 3. I don't know if that is why this works or if is is some other...something. I recently installed Fedora 14 on the same machine and the touchscreen responded to touch but didn't work correctly. I got similar results with other Linux distributions on this machine.

Hats off to Fedora! I am very happy I can use the touchscreen in Linux on this machine now!

Bad, Bad iPad Authorization Rules

2011-05-24T15:29:00.001-05:00

Does this strike anybody else as a bit heavy handed? Wouldn't declining to sync be enough? Why delete the apps AND data? This is nuts.

All Application Windows Should Support Transparency

2011-04-24T16:36:00.003-05:00

My first experience with window transparency was the Terminal application in Mac OS X. Since then it has turned up elsewhere in various operating systems, much to my pleasure. ...but isn't enough.

I've developed a taste for EMACS. When I first tried it, almost 20 years ago, I found it unusable. It was clearly for programmers, which I wasn't. Now I love it, even though I'm still no hacker.
One of EMACS' many virtues is that on most systems I can run it within a terminal window ("emacs -nw filename") or in a GUI window (click and icon or "emacs filename"). On many systems it is also trivial to make a terminal window transparent.

I'm visual. Ordinarily that's a problem for CLI/terminal work. Terminal emulators with background transparency turn that on its head. Now I can see the web page I'm cribbing bash code from while I type it into EMACS.

Sadly, making other windows transparent is often not trivial. I'm blessed to work on PCs with up to three monitors so putting windows side by side is usually an option and of course most systems I use have proper cut/copy/paste clipboard systems. These things are not substitutes for transparency.

Transparency does "multiple big monitors" one better. Not only can you see the contents of two windows without moving them, you can see the contents of two windows without moving your eyes. This is a godsend for anybody who has ever switched application windows only to forget why. I'm pretty sure that's all of us.
All windows in all applications should have optional transparency. The technology is neither new nor prohibitively processor intensive. If you are a developer, of anything, consider this a feature request.

Bootable Flash Drives--The Real Reason They Are Cool

2011-03-16T16:48:00.006-05:00

With each passing week USB flash drives become a bigger part of my life. At work I rarely burn CDs or DVDs anymore. I digitized a bunch of vinyl LPs for my father-in-law and delivered the files to him on a flash drive. Most recently I bought some broken laptops on eBay. They have no working optical or hard drives but because of USB flash drives I won't be doing any repairs.

I got the laptops for to run music software, specifically, Mixxx, although Ardour and any number of other apps will probably run as well. As soon as I had them un-boxed I popped bootable flash drives with Linux on them and started them up. Now I can just concentrate on the software.

Above: Two "broken" laptops, my IBM ThinkPad X40 and Dell Lattitude D410, running Mixxx on Peppermint Ice Linux and FireFox on Linux Mint 9 XFCE.

For my purposes, these laptops are not broken. For less than the cost of a new netbook I now have two more systems capable of running FLOSS music software on top of Linux. With data persistence turned on in the flash drive configurations I can put audio files on the bootable flash drive or run them from another flash drive in another USB port.

Parallel Between Gnostics and Latter Day Saints

2011-02-28T02:12:00.001-06:00

Many Gnostics of the first and second centuries believed our physical world was created by a demiurge, an imperfect and lesser being than Almighty God whom they also believed in.

It occurs to me that in some ways this parallels the LDS teaching of Exaltation, in which the faithful become equals of Jesus, gods over their own creation within the greater universe of Heavenly Father. If the faithful can become Godlike after death, and that is how Jesus got put in charge of our universe, doesn't that more or less make him the demiurge? Even setting asside whether or not Jesus was perfect before he became a god, he's still running a francise and has to send quarterly reports back to Heavinly Father back at corporate.

In gnosticism the demiurge is a lesser shadow of God. In the LDS man aspires to become the demiurge.

Of course, this breaks down if you push it too far. The demiurge isn't even always good, whereas the LDS hold Jesus in very high esteem. Like most other Christians, they see him as perfect or nearly so. Still, it's pretty interesting any time a divine hierarchy turns up in a famously monotheistic religious tradition.

Another Great Song About Broken Relationship: Bleeding Through "This Time Nothing Is Sacred"

2011-01-26T18:58:00.003-06:00

I've mentioned more than once that my favorite songs tend to be about just a few things; addiction, death and broken relationships. You know, cheery stuff.

Here Bleeding Through give the pain of broken friendship the metalcore treatment and oh my God do they pull it off! This track is positively searing. Check the vocals. Those lyrics totally work with that vocal style. Good stuff!

Steely Dan Pretzel Logic Review

2011-01-17T13:52:00.003-06:00

A couple of months ago I picked up a used (boarder-line thrashed, actually) vinyl copy of Steely Dan's 1974 album Pretzel Logic. It isn't one of the Steely Dan titles that was on eMusic last time I checked and I'm trying to cut down on the money I give Apple Inc., so when I saw the vinyl copy for just a few bucks I grabbed it. The clerk in the shop mentioned this is a title that never says in the bins very long.

Now I know why. Pretzel Logic is somewhere in between Aja and a Steely Can greatest hits compilation in quality. It's that good! The only "hit" here, based on charts and recurring radio play, is "Ricky Don't Loose That Number." Yet, most of the album's eleven tracks are of that quality. Listening to Pretzel Logic for the first time felt like hearing a secret Best Of that had been restricted to songs I had never heard (except "Ricky Don't Loose That Number" and "East St. Louis Toodle-oo").

Aside from being blown away that these songs had escaped me until now I was also struck by how short they are. Out of eleven tracks only two crack 4:00. A whopping six are under 3:00. It is true that the band's longest songs, where jazz influenced solos take center stage, mostly appear on later records. This record takes the pretzel for short songs however, even over their first two studio albums.

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the core of Steely Dan, are remarkable songwriters. Here on Pretzel Logic, where the songs don't leave room for much soloing, they can only show off their other outstanding talents, top notch arranging and first rate songwriting. It still sounds like Steely Dan. Their sound is unmistakable. It's a compact, highly efficient Steely Dan.

Also, engineering legend Roger Nichols makes sure we hear exactly what we are supposed to hear. Even through the crackles and pops on my copy I can always here the song through the sound. It sounds great, of course. All Steely Dan records sound great, but this one is all about the songs.

My Previous Review of The Clash, Sandinista

2010-12-31T16:25:00.003-06:00

It is almost two years ago that I posted about my personal history with Sandinista, by The Clash. This continues to be one of the most read articles on this blog, rivaling the most read pieces on my other blog.

I just re-read what I wrote and I still stand by it. Sandinista changed the way I listen to music and may be The Clash's masterwork. "Masterwork" is a tough call in this case. What do you compare it to? It is a unique Clash album and a unique rock album.

If you have not read it yet, here is the link again.

http://oldmixtapes.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-rebuttal-to-amg-review-of-sandinista.html

The Best Reasons To Leave Facebook Are The Ones That Make It Hard

2010-12-14T12:45:00.002-06:00

I recently deleted most of the pictures, "likes" and a lot of other content out of my Facebook account. As much as I would like to I have not yet closed my account. Far from representing a lingering affection for the system, the reasons I have not closed my account point to some of Facebook's biggest problems.

I quit actively using Facebook after feeling my control over my own account slipping away. This April, 2010 article from the EFF lays out the narrative of the system's deteriorating privacy protections. By the time you get to the bottom of the page there are multiple categories of data you may have had control over when you opened your account that you no longer do.

The problem is Facebook's success. That's not sour grapes or jealousy. It's the fact that my kids, my sister's whole family, dozens of people I work with, musicians I know...not only use Facebook but rely on it for communication. Until I started pulling out it was my main channel of communication with some people.

There is a personal cost to abandoning a system that is so heavily used by so many. This is why Facebook can get away with selling off people's privacy to advertisers. Most people are not willing to risk loosing contact with loved ones based on a threat that is, for most people, pretty nebulous.

I have gone out of my way to inform friends and family that standard e-mail is a very reliable way to contact me and that I can also be reached on Identi.ca. I also have my Identi.ca posts forwarded to Twitter and Facebook.

If more of us do this it will hurt each of us less.

New Track: No Sense Of History No Sense Of Place

2010-12-05T15:26:00.002-06:00

New track, No Sense of History No Sense of Place, up on SoundCloud.

No Sense Of History No Sense Of Place by DJ Dual Core

Notes On Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Linux Mint Debian Edition

2010-12-03T14:49:00.010-06:00

If you follow Linux Mint, or goings on in the the Debian GNU/Linux extended family you know there are two big stories regarding Mint in the last six months. They are the releases of Mint 10 and Mint Debian Edition.

Mint 10 contains the sorts of improvements one would expect from a distribution that tracks Ubuntu Linux's twice yearly release cycle. I've only used it a little but it looks great and I had no trouble installing it. Debian Edition (LMDE) is another matter. It is a significant conceptual departure for Mint and thus, ultimately more interesting.

If you look at one of the more recent Linux family tree illustrations out there you will see Debian, Ubuntu and Mint are already closely related. To make a long story short, Linux Mint is an Ubuntu Linux derivative and Ubuntu Linux is a Debian GNU/Linux derivative. In this sense making a version of Mint based directly on Debian rather than Ubuntu doesn't sound like a big deal. It's all in the family, right?

I would argue that it being a family affair is what allows it to work. It doesn't make it less of big deal. Although Ubuntu is a Debian derivative it very much has a life of its own and differs from Debian considerably.

Along with Slackware, Debian GNU/Linux dates back to the summer of 1993. They are two of the oldest (if not the two oldest) continuously developed Linux distributions. Debian GNU/Linux continues to show the roots of Linux as a coder/hacker/developer/CS student platform. Although "normal" people may be able to use a Debian system the way one gets, installs and configures Debian assumes considerable computer knowledge. Debian is more closely tied to the GNU Project and software freedom in general than Ubuntu, although some purists still feel Debian fall short.

Until recently Debian was upgraded and updated piece by piece, when the new pieces were ready, whenever that was. Although there were always version numbers on installation media, all updates were provided on a "rolling" or "feature" basis, independent of any calendar or schedule. Recently this has changed somewhat with major versions scheduled every two years with continuous rolling updates in between.

Ubuntu releases new versions every six months. In fact, the unpredictable and sometimes slow nature of Debian updates/upgrades are part of what spurred the creation of Ubuntu[1][2]. Ubuntu's creators were focused on getting their version of Linux into as many hands as possible. Along with minimizing the mystery surrounding updates and upgrades they sought to provide a version of Linux that was easy for non-technical people to install and use. When Debian is called the "universal operating system" it refers to extremely broad hardware support and breadth of application. Ubuntu talks about extending the benefits of free software to communities and individuals world wide. Note the repeated use of words like "everyone," "world wide" and "global" all over ubuntu.com. Also note that Ubuntu web pages and promotional materials often include graphics of multi-racial groups of people. On many Linux web sites you will find illustrated mascots but few, if any, photos of people.

Of course, it worked. Since its inception in 2004 Ubuntu has become by far the most popular Linux distribution, world wide. For one measure of how popular Ubuntu is today (as opposed to this writing) visit http://distrowatch.com/ and look at the page hit rankings.

Linux Mint set out to take part of what worked for Ubuntu and extend it. You could say that Linux Mint's seminal goal was to out-Ubuntu Ubuntu. Specifically, Mint seeks to be easier to install and use than Ubuntu. Mint uses a customized version of Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer and has it's own package manager, default software set, approach to updates and patches and various customizations to the GNOME desktop (among others). For example, it installs Abode Flash Player by default. Pre-installing non-free software has not won Mint any fans among free software purists but it is very convenient for people who want to use web sites that rely on Flash. The same goes for users who benefit from the non-free drivers bundled with Mint. According to Mint's FAQ the project prefers free and open software but they will use closed software to provide a better product in the absence of a free software option.

Mint is about two years younger than Ubuntu[1]. Like Ubuntu they seem to have succeeded at what they set out to do. In a little over four years they have moved into the top tier of GNU/Linux distributions (see distrowatch.com, again).

Among the top distributions (Fedora/Red Hat, SuSE/OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Mint, Debian) they are the youngest (after Ubuntu) and only Mint and Debian are "community distributions." In this case "community" means they are not a free software product of a profit making company. The other top distributions have huge developer communities and the controlling interest of a substantial for-profit company. Mint and Debian are wholly supported by their community of developers and users.

Mint is the only distribution in the top tier to so exclusively target the desktop. There is no dedicated server edition of Linux Mint as their is with Ubuntu, nor is there a strong heritage of server application as there is with Debian. There isn't anything stopping you from running Mint as a server but it clearly isn't the distribution's focus.

With things going so well for them why would Mint's developers want to do something weird like release a version built from a different base? Answers are provided in the LMDE announcement. They include the move, for LMDE only (not for any other version of Linux Mint), to Debian-style rolling updates. Thus, an LMDE user would never need to reinstall the OS on their system (apart from catastrophic failure). As updates to LMDE are released the user installs them, or doesn't. The need to ever upgrade to a discretely new version of the OS is eliminated.

If you read the announcement you saw that the developers are careful to say LMDE is not as stable or elegant ("elegant" is a favorite word among the Minty) as the main release, although they expect rapid progress in these areas. Also unlike every other supported version of Mint, LMDE is not compatible with Ubuntu and its software repositories. Stability and compatibility are going to be deal breakers for a lot of people, even if they need to reinstall to get every major upgrade.

These are the least interesting facets of LMDE, in my opinion. They certainly are significant, but what I found most interesting in the LMDE announcement was this phrase, and those that echoed it, "...promises to be faster, more responsive and on which we’re less reliant on upstream components."

In other words, LMDE is an experiment in shedding the baggage that comes with being an Ubuntu derivative. I'm not talking about the social baggage, although Ubuntu's success has certainly generated some haters. I'm talking about the technical baggage. The Mint team has proven they can tune, prune, polish and package with the world's best, besides writing good original code. Why should they continue to work with Ubuntu's revisions of Debian code when they can go a whole step back, upstream, closer to the source? By using Debian code in stead of Ubuntu code as the basis for a distribution Mint can cut out a whole generation of modifications (including, some would argue, some significant bloat) that may or may not be helpful to them.

If you are going to customize a hot-rod coupe for yourself should you buy a hot-rod coupe and make further changes to it or should you buy a standard coupe and make all of the modifications yourself?

There is no global right answer to that question but if you can do all of the fab and mod yourself there are any number of reasons you may want to. I think Linux Mint is in the process of outgrowing being an Ubuntu derivative. Sometime soon they may find they don't need Ubuntu compatibility at all.

New Heavy and Polyrhythmic Track On SoundCloud

2010-12-02T08:29:00.002-06:00

If you give this new track a listen you may hear something I have not really used before, a cross-rhythm. There are parts of the song where a 4/4 drum loop joins the main 9/8 drum loop. The measures are the same length making it a cross-rhythm, which is a specific subset of polyrhythm. Polyrhythms are not rare, but what your ear (and brain) does with it is interesting, especially if you have never given it much thought before.

Deny Them Access To Your Soul by DJ Dual Core

Psystar Died Its Expected Death At The Hands Of Apple

2010-12-01T09:12:00.003-06:00

The only surprise was that it took a little longer than expected.

Way back in the early months of this blog I predicted Psystar would be sued out of existence by Apple for making Mac clones. Over the last year it became clear this was exactly what was happening. The process Apple started a few months after Psystar announced their clone products had the desired effect this past summer when Psystar's web presence disappeared.

It wouldn't have kept them alive, but you would think they would have been motivated to play nice with the OSx86 community, who made their clone venture possible. I guess not.

This is sad all around. Nobody wins.

Using LMMS and VeSTige to Run Windows VSTs on Linux

2010-11-28T19:05:00.004-06:00

In the August 2010 issue of "Recording" (http://www.recordingmag.com) Darrell Burgan writes that he can now run almost all of his Windows production software in Linux using Wine. He hold this (rather than the availability of really great Linux audio software like Ardour and LMMS) as evidence that Linux is a viable audio production platform. When I first read the article I scoffed a little. In August I was having so much fun learning Ardour on Linux that I barely thought about Windows and Mac software I couldn't currently use.

Going into this fall I started thinking about preparing a new set for live performance. Since I have yet to find suitable Linux performance software that meant firing up Ableton Live on my netbook. This in turn lead to installing Wine and Ableton Live on my Linux Mint production system. Two 19" monitors wins over one 10" monitor when it comes to production, no contest.

Live via Wine worked, but only just. Some audio configuration settings didn't get saved correctly. One of them caused a persistent buzz in my left monitor until I corrected it--every time I launched Live. Interface elements including plug-in windows and Session View clip status did not refresh correctly. It also crashed a lot.

This experience did not raise Wine's stature much in my estimation. I know other people have had great success with it but at this point I really wasn't interested in persisting. I didn't uninstall Wine but I did uninstall Live and a proprietary synth I had installed but couldn't use. The synth probably would have run using Wine but it's license manager consistently failed with a DLL error I failed to fix. This served as a huge reminder of the resources burned up by licensing and DRM for proprietary software.

And now, the good news.

VeSTige is a tool that relies on Wine to allow Linux applications to use VST (and VSTi) plug-ins written for Windows. Some Linux audio and music apps can use VeSTige if configured to do so and some employ it by default. I decided to give it a try.

The copy of LMMS (Linux Multimedia Studio) I have installed on my production system was already configured to use VeSTige. As of today (Nov. 28, 2010) the Linux Mint repositories have LMMS VST support in a different package than the main app so I must have selected it at some point. Anyway, VeSTige shows up as an instrument. You assign it to a track and then browse to the VST (in either DLL or EXE form) you wish to use. From there on out LMMS treats your Windows VST very much like one of its built-in instruments.

Ya, and it works.

In the screen shot above you can see the standard LMMS instrument window (VeSTige is the instrument) and the Angelina synth's larger custom GUI window behind it, both in front of LMMS's default editor and mixer windows. Just to be clear, Angelina is a product of Big Tick Audio and is only available as a Windows VST. I had never used it before today and I coaxed some lovely sounds out of it...on Linux!

The VSTs themselves don't need to be in a specific location, or even together, for that matter. So long as you know where they are (and there are no permissions problems or additional dependencies, like the aforementioned license manager) all you have to do is point VeSTige to them and go. I created a folder in my home directory for them named "VST"...no sense taxing my memory.

I don't know enough about Wine or VeSTige to say why VSTs would work nearly trouble-free on my system while I had nothing but trouble with Ableton Live, but there it is. The Wine website (www.winehq.org) lists several versions of Live that people have successfully (except for exporting audio) run in various versions of Wine. Obviously, your mileage may vary. I'm just stoked that I now have more synth and effect options on Linux.

Thank you Wine, VeSTige and LMMS!

Activity on SoundCloud

2010-11-21T19:00:00.002-06:00

I guess I'm mostly talking to other musicians here, but if you have not yet checked out SoundCloud, please do. It is an on-line community that makes it very easy to share and find music. Most of the users are musicians, DJs, producers or represent independent record labels. People post their new material, comment on other people's posts, etc.

After quite a dry spell I have posted four new tracks on SoundCloud in recent months. You can see everything I have uploaded to SoundCloud here.

So, You're Scared by DJ Dual Core

A Few Of The Voices I Talk To Myself With When I'm Alone by DJ Dual Core

Neriema Daikon Brothers VS Predator by DJ Dual Core

Aliens Spoiled My Date by DJ Dual Core

More MIDI Controllers

2010-10-26T11:44:00.002-05:00

I don't like to think of myself as demanding. After my debut live performance as
DJ Dual Core at the Des Moines Social Club I concluded that the two
MIDI controllers I had used weren't sufficient. No big surprise; I'm new to performing electronic music live. Adjustments were expected.

I had used an Emu XBoard 25 and a Korg MicroKontrol. I used the keys to launch clips. The knobs and sliders controlled the mixer and a few effect parameters. I ran out of everything. Even with all of those keys I had a few samples I triggered with the mouse. I didn't come close to having the control of the mixer and effects I wanted.

I have added an Evolution UC33E and a Behringer BCN44 to my rig...sort of. I can still only connect two controllers at a time to my performance netbook. I just eBayed an 8-port MIDI interface, so hopefully later this week I'll be running all four at once.

I still don't have enough.

The live (both live and Live, as in Ableton) set I am currently working with has less than a dozen samples in it, currently. This will grow, but it won't approach the many dozens in my other set. Thus, launching clips isn't the problem. I'm running fewer channels in the mixer. Mixer control isn't the problem either.

The problem is that there are not enough knobs and sliders to give me the control over my effects that I want, even with the 33 contributed by the UC33E. It is used up by Audio Damage's Kombinant and two instances of Ableton Live's Simple Delay and channel volume.

Maybe excess of a kind is what my music is actually about. In that way, perhaps this problem is fitting.

National Music Museum, Multi-String Courses, Sympathetic Strings

2010-10-17T18:03:00.004-05:00

I'm sitting in a room with dozens of stringed instruments dating from the 16th to 19th centuries. They include instruments by Antonio Stradivari (yes, that "Strad," as in "Stradivarius")[1] and other great European luthiers of of previous centuries. I'm typing this on my phone in the Rawlins Gallery of the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota.

The whole museum is amazing. From harmonicas to pipe organs and the most complete gamelon outside Indonesia the depth of the collection defies easy description. Among 20th century instruments the evolution of the six-string guitar is especially well documented.

Here in the Rawlins Gallery, and other rooms featuring older stringed instruments, I have seen how musical expectations have changed. For example, many of the older fretted instruments feature multiple-string courses, something that is still done but is non-standard beyond mandolin's and 12 string guitars. Right here in the Rawlins Gallery there are three 17th century guitars, all of them are five course, ten string instruments. There is also a similarly strung 16th century cittern.

Multi-string courses are very inconvenient for luthier and musician alike. For every additional tuner the luthier has to carefully place there is an additional string the musician needs to keep in tune and replace. In the case of adding a string to an existing course the musician doesn't even gain any range, just volume and body.

Another thing that is exceptional, at least in the western hemisphere, is sympathetic strings. With a few notable exceptions like the Linda Manzer's Pikasso Guitar (made for Pat Metheny) and a few other sitar inspired things, sympathetic strings are almost unknown in current mainstream instruments.

Why would perfectly good ideas like multi-string courses and sympathetic strings, ideas that have long histories and work really well, so fall out of favor? I already gave one reason. They are inconvenient. Still, I think they have possibilities. Applied correctly I think they could both add something significant to a custom instrument.

Fun: The Real Reason I Produce Electronic Music

2010-10-14T15:41:00.005-05:00

I've been on vacation all week and have spent a lot of time working on music. I just added a spoken word sample to a song I've been working on. I played back the section I added the sample to and it sounded so good I grinned from ear to ear.

Even if I am working on something that is very serious, thematically, the work that goes into creating the music is still fun. I also know that for a lot of people music in general is a very serious pursuit and not to be taken lightly, for fear that it won't be taken seriously. I take music seriously and I hope to be taken seriously as a musician, but if that gets in the way of the fun I don't know if I'll find the time or energy to do it.

I guess I'm blessed to have found something I enjoy so much. For whatever reason spending time slicing sounds into tiny fractions of a second and rearranging them to create a new sound is just a blast for me. When I turn those sounds into something I want to hear again I feel like I'm getting away with something or that I'm looking the first human to set eyes on a unique geological formation.

I'm not suggesting that other people should feel awe when they hear my music. I'm just saying that this is how much I enjoy making it.

New Track: A Few Of The Voices I Talk To Myself With When I'm Alone

2010-09-29T12:38:00.002-05:00

A Few Of The Voices I Talk To Myself With When I'm Alone by DJ Dual Core

FBI's Extensive Spying On Iowa City Peace Activists in 2008

2010-09-21T17:59:00.002-05:00

This means the FBI probably has recent pictures of my mother, to go with the ones they took of her during the Vietnam era. Actually, they have pictures of me from back then, too. She sometimes pushed me in a stroller at the protests.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/09/20-3

"The FBI's surveillance of a protest group in Iowa City prior to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., two years ago was far more extensive than initially reported, newly obtained FBI documents show."

Screenshot of Fine Editing in Ardour

2010-09-19T11:14:00.003-05:00

This is the project I'm working on today. To understand what I'm doing look at the rulers at the top of Ardour's edit window.

High precision? No problem.

2010-09-11T22:31:00.000-05:00

So, You're Scared by DJ Dual Core

My Daughter Likes "We Didn't Start The Fire" By Billy Joel And I Don't

2010-09-09T16:45:00.002-05:00

Shortly before returning to college for the fall one of my daughters was telling me how she enjoyed the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start The Fire." She was having fun listening for historical references she didn't get and then looking them up on-line. If you are familiar with the song you know that is all the verses are, lists of historical figures and events.

We chatted pleasantly about her Joel inspired trips to Wikipedia until she said something I couldn't let pass.

"Plus," she said, "it's a good song."

I'm not one of those alternative/avant-garde/experimental people who hates pop music or is ashamed of liking it. Billy Joel is one of the best rock/pop songwriters, singers and pianists of the entire rock era. He's also recorded some severe crap. Knowing he's capable of greatness makes it hard for me to hear second rate song like "We Didn't Start The Fire." Such things are beneath him.

"You only think that because you haven't heard the good stuff," I told my daughter. "Come over here," I said, leading her to the computer with our family's central music library on it.

I played her three Billy Joel songs. She had heard one or two of them before but I asked her to really listen. The songs were "Laura," the B-side of "Pressure" and from The Nylon Curtain; "You May Be Right," the opening track of his more rock oriented Glass Houses album, and "The Longest Time," his do-wop single from An Innocent Man.

I would have played her the live version of "Summer, Highland Falls" from Songs In The Attic but I couldn't find it.

All of these songs bury "...Fire" and all for different reasons.

"The Longest Time" buries it musically. It features harmonies that are both beautiful and fun. It also shows off Joel's voice which is, by most any standard, very, very good.

"You May Be Right" out rocks "...Fire," which plays at being a rock song but lacks emotional energy. "You May Be Right" has power and dynamics. It is one of the best rockers in the Joel catalog in part because it totally fits the lyrics, which depict a relationship filled with desire, conflict, confusion and ambivalence. Joel sings this story right from his gut and the whole band is there to back him up. It all works.

"Laura," is probably my favorite Billy Joel song. I can't think of a better song about a dysfunctional friendship. That, and he says "fucking," which is way more effective coming from him than from somebody who's records are plastered with Tipper stickers. Here Joel delivers an impassioned song that isn't arranged as a straight ahead rocker. The production frames the distress that takes over Joel's voice. Joel probably doesn't see it this way, but to me this humble B-side is his masterwork. It tears at my heart every time I hear it.

"So, now do you see why I'm not impressed?"

My daughter said "Yes, I get it...but I still like the song."

Last Night's Show At Syncopate 2.4, Des Moines Social Club

2010-07-24T14:55:00.004-05:00

I played Des Moines Social Club last night along with HipGnoBlur (HipGnosis and Mindblur, tag team) and Beat Resonance. It was the first "real" live performance of DJ Dual Core material. I learned a lot.

My main performance tools were a netbook and two MIDI controllers. The controllers are both MIDI keyboards with additional knobs, sliders and buttons that send CC messages to software on the computer. I used the musical keys to start sounds and the other controls to adjust volumes, sends and other settings. While this was billed as "live" performance you could argue that it was a variation on DJing (micro-DJing?) since I was working almost exclusively with preexisting recordings, albeit very short ones. My entire set was at 212 bpm.

I was worried about running out of material. I had something like 44 samples set up in Ableton Live (I have not figured out what FOSS software to perform with), many of which were as short as one bar. Not knowing how many might not work in front of a crowd I just wasn't sure that was enough. Sometime last week I decided to add guitar to one part of the set to help flesh things out. This turned out to be much more trouble than it was worth. It turns out I can't concentrate on a guitar and a computer at the same time. I guess I'm not Aaron "Drumcorps" Spectre.

The shift from producing to performing was even larger than I realized it would be. Some of my sounds, including ones that were lovingly crafted for this purpose, seemed to just fall dead at DMSC last night. Others that I thought would make a brief appearance then make way for something else worked REALLY well and I hated to move away from them.

Here is what I learned, in a nutshell:

1) If I'm playing electronic music solo, leave my guitar at home.
2) Hardcore/gabber sounds do NOT need to be used sparingly--play and distort liberally!
3) Glitchy edited sounds need a strong groove if they are played alone or otherwise exposed. "Breathing room" is for recordings.
4) More effects: Two delays and two distortions, each with one or two parameters available for manipulation is the bear minimum.

I'm calling this set a success. A number of people seemed to really enjoy it and a lot of what I set out to do worked great. Things I would do differently based on audience reaction don't compromise my vision for my music at all. They are just shifts in emphasis that will help me make a better connection.

The Real Problem With The Tea Party, And Practically Everybody Else

2010-07-14T22:18:00.002-05:00

I was listening to a news story about the Tea Party movement while I was driving home from work today. The speakers sounded a little more reasonable than I expected but there was also something new that put me off. I'm used to listening to people I disagree with but today I picked up on something different.

It wasn't really new or different. It just seemed that way because I wasn't listening for it. It's actually a very old phenomenon. Many people believe that what makes a government good is that it represents their views and interests.

I know that sounds benign. In fact it is a key piece in how direct and representative Democracy are supposed to work. I put it to you that it is bad, a harmful idea and an impulse that should be resisted...and not just because it supports the state.

Again, take The Tea Party as an example. The Tea Party claims to be about small government, low taxes and respect for The Constitution. This is not their will simply for their own lives or even their own communities. It is their will for the United States. They seek to improve this nation of hundreds of millions of souls by injecting their will into its laws.

Obviously this describes practically everybody involved in American politics at every level. It just happened to be The Tea Party that made me think of it in those terms. This arrogance, this idea that others should live as you will, this is as much what is wrong with the modern crypto-fascist "democracy" as crony capitalism. This is the fire that drives the identity politics that distract us from noticing that we are not free.

Live Show July 23 at Des Moines Social Club

2010-07-11T09:45:00.003-05:00

July 23 I'm playing Des Moines Social Club's monthly Syncopate event. I've been to a couple of these and they are great. The atmosphere is creative and positive; the people are nice and the bar has Court Avenue beer on tap.

I'll be playing live, not DJing. I'm still tweaking the collection of samples I'll be working with. I've recently added more spoken word material to the set and I'm very happy with where it is going. Thematically it is close to "When This Ship Goes Down It Will Not Matter That You Hated Me" but more expansive.

I hope to see you at Des Moines Social Club, 1408 Locust St., Des Moines, IA on the 23rd.

Ardour Session File Issue Fixed-Open Source Keeps No Secrets

2010-06-13T08:10:00.006-05:00

Yesterday I established that what was breaking my Ardour session files was giving a send the same name as an existing bus. As bugs/unwanted features go that one is pretty easy to work around.

Assuming it was a bug and not something the developers thought was a good idea I thought I should file a bug report with Ardour's issue tracker at http://tracker.ardour.org/. Before doing so I decided to do the responsible thing and make sure nobody else had already reported it. I logged in, clicked "View Issues" and searched on "bus name." Click the link below to see what I found.

http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=2474

Not only was my problem a known bug but it was confirmed fixed in a newer version on May 1, 2010, about six weeks ago. Technically, the reported bug was that sends could not share a name. Apparently they could not share a name with another send or a bus.

Finding the closed bug report makes me happy for a couple of different reasons. First, how cool is it that the open development process has fixed this problem before I figured out what it was? Pretty cool.

Second, if this were a proprietary product how would I have known whether or not it was fixed? The short answer is that I probably wouldn't. I could have posted to a support forum and hoped that somebody with access to the development team read my post, found the answer and responded. Spend a few minutes on the forums at Apple, File Maker or any other closed company. This is the exception, not the rule. The support people who help out in the forums usually can't say more than "it will be fixed in an upcoming release" and that's on a good day. Patches may come out with a list of fixed bugs but there is no way of knowing how complete the list is.

So, when Ardour 2.8.8 shows up in the Ubuntu repositories I'll upgrade. Until then I will append numbers to my send names. In the mean time I will enjoy the fact that I'm using software that keeps no secrets.

Ardour Session Files Are XML and This Is A Good Thing

2010-06-06T12:43:00.002-05:00

I have been blogging less for a couple of simple reasons. Three of my kids have moved home for the summer. That's reason enough, but given that and a few other things I have decided to use my discretionary time to make music rather than writing about making music, which I will eventually get back to. If you read my other blog (hackyourguitar.blogspot.com) you know I also finally got the electronics in my 8-string extended range instrument working correctly, so it's not like I've just been sitting around watching reruns of Friends.

Anyway, I just had an interesting experience with Ardour I thought I should comment on. This morning I went to open the project I worked on last night and was greeted with an error message. This happens in ever other DAW I have ever used and how big a pain it is varies from case to case. Usually in Ableton Live the error would say a plug-in or audio file was missing, which wasn't always true. In Logic it could be anything. Sometimes the session/project would still open (with something missing or not working) and sometimes it wouldn't.

It this case Ardour complained that I had duplicate send outputs. Specifically, "Fold/out 1" (an output of the bus my fold-over distortion effect was on) already existed and could not be set up a second time. Ardour would not open the session until this was resolved.

I started by getting frustrated. How was I supposed to fix the session if I couldn't open it? The main session file and most recent snapshot both generated the same error and I did not want to go all the way back to Thursday when I had done so much good work on Friday and Saturday.

Hint: Don't just make occasional snapshots. Make frequent snapshots.

What I ended up doing was backing up the most recent snapshot (which I made as I shut down for the night last night) and opened it in a text editor. As it turns out Ardour session files are standard XML files. You don't need any specific knowledge of XML to appreciate why this is valuable. Just know this; XML is logically organized and all the data in an XML file is labeled. That means most anybody has a fighting chance of making sense of the files contents.

I searched the session file for "Fold." This found blocks of settings for each send pointing to the bus named Fold and a larger one for the bus itself. Recreating that bus and the plug-in settings seemed fair price for getting the rest of my recent work back so I deleted the section of the session file defining the Fold bus and it's settings.

Please keep in mind that I backed up the session file before I did this. I'm a little reckless but I'm not. . .ummm...whatever a person who does this without backing up would be called.

When I tried again to open the session I got a similar error regarding one of my other effects buses. That is bad, of course, because I still couldn't open my session but clearly I had successfully removed the offending settings related to Fold. I wasn't home but there was a very good chance I was on the right track.

I was on the right track. A few minutes and a few more deletions later I was in Ardour working on my session, less a few effects.

I know editing a session file with a text editor isn't something most musicians WANT to do, but the point is that with Ardour you can.

Ardour, like the Linux kernel, has no secrets. Sometimes this doesn't matter but when things go wrong it matters very much.

Ardour And Sample Rate-Quick Note-Linux Audio

2010-04-27T09:00:00.007-05:00

In my AV Linux review of [data] I said this about Ardour.

My only other complaint about Ardour is that it does not cope well with imported audio that is of a different sample rate than the official rate of the session.

This agrees with the Importing Audio section of Ardour's FLOSS manual.

If the sample rate of the file you have chosen does not match the sample rate of the current session, Ardour colours the mismatched sample rate in red. If you try to import the file, Ardour will also warn you of the mismatched rate and ask you to confirm if you want to embed it anyway. If you do choose to embed the file in question, it will not play back at the sample rate it was recorded with, but rather at the sample rate of the current Ardour session. This will cause the sound to play at the wrong speed and pitch.

Well, that appears to not always be true and may have been a problem with that specific set-up. Today I tried it again and it worked fine. The screen shot below shows the results of what I did.

The sample rate for the session/project is 48kHz. The bottom two tracks are bounces/exports of the tracks above, one bounced out at 48kHz and one at 44.1kHz. When I imported them back in Ardour did flag the 44.1kHz file's sample rate in red but it does, in fact, play correctly.

Spectrum analysis of the two regions show that they are almost identical. The 48kHz region is slightly brighter, with most of the difference in the top octave of human hearing. This is consistent with more high frequency information being preserved in the encoding of the higher sample rate file (as it should be) but both of them playing correctly after being imported back in. This, of course, is a good thing but contradicts the FLOSS manual.

As a further test I did a third export at 88.2kHz.

Again the sample rate was flagged in red. Again the file played at the correct pitch at speed but was very loud and clipped.

Like other free/open source software Ardour has a community surrounding it. I have started reading two of the Ardour mailing lists and other internet venues where the community lives and interacts. I will keep you posted as I learn more about this wonderful application.

Time Stretching In Ardour-Linux Audio

2010-04-26T10:41:00.005-05:00

Forcing a recording of one speed to play at another speed without changing pitch is a basic feature of audio software these days. Ableton Live calls it "warping" but the more general term is "stretching" or "time stretching."

In Ardour there is a dedicated mouse tool for it. The button button is the one selected in this screen shot.

Then (how could this be any easier?) you grab one end or the other of the region (AKA, clip) you want to stretch and drag it to the desired length.

You will then be asked which algorithm you would like it to use for stretch. As with the stretching systems in other DAWs Ardour offers algorithms optimised for non-pitched percussion, pitched instruments, etc. If you choose one and are not happy with the results un-do and try a different one.

Nothing would make me happier than writing a long, involved article on this topic that makes me sound really smart but it really is this simple. I got what I wanted on the first try so I don't even have any trial and error to report.

I have just one comment: Because I have the grid set to "No Grid" I get EXACTLY what I ask for, not just in terms of placing regions but also stretching them. Ardour does not automatically pull the region to the next quantization point or beat if the grid is set to "No Grid". If you want help making things even with beats and bars set the grid to "Magnetic."

Markers: Another Reason Ardour Rocks-Linux Music Production

2010-04-20T19:14:00.004-05:00

Have I mentioned that Ardour rocks? I have? Good. I don't want anybody to miss that.

Ardour rocks.

Other DAWs and wave editors let you place and name arbitrary markers but I never found it particularly useful. I occasionally marked sections in the arrangement view in Live but that's about it.

I was initially put off by the lack of beat and bar lines in Ardour. After however many years of Ableton Live quantizing my every move according to tempo it felt a bit like driving too fast without a seatbelt. Then I started using markers.

I actually played with markers first when I was sorting out how Ardour handles splitting regions. Not surprisingly there is more than one way to do it. The one I settled on was
1) Select a track
2) Drag a location marker to where I wanted to split
3) Press "s" on the keyboard

Elegant, no? It reminds me a little of how DSP Quattro (a Mac-only program I must admit I miss a little bit) separates the edit point from the play head and gives you independent markers for each one but there are just the two of them and they have dedicated functions. Ardour is much more flexible.

What is cool about this is that the marker can represent any arbitrary point in the composition and it telegraphs that point across all visible tracks in the time-line. The point it telegraphs could be a fraction of a beat, as it is in my screen shots above, or it could be a transient in one track that has some meaning in another track.

The various types of markers available in the arrangement window can be used to tell Ardour several different things. Besides edit points they also can define "ranges" and "chunks," two of ardours sonic organizational units. They also define loop and punch points, CD track boundaries (Ardour can make CD replication masters right from the arrangement window), meter and tempo changes and what should and should not be bounced.

All of this information goes in a neat, configurable field above the tracks. Most markers can be named and renamed. The exception is ones that communicate a specific value such as meter.

Ardour makes sense. I advise you to take it for a test drive. I think you'll like it.

More Ardour Screen Captures

2010-04-18T19:21:00.002-05:00

Explanation Of My Problems With 64Studio

2010-04-18T16:42:00.002-05:00

Well, I guess 64Studio is one of the Linux music production distros I won't be writing a real review for. It turns out that the problem is my reliance on virtualization. This is too bad as I suspect 64Studio is probably quite good.

64Studio isn't just another .deb Linux with a few multimedia packages bolted on. It runs a real-time version of the Linux Kernel. This is a great idea for a music production system as it directly addresses the problem of latency in digital recording and monitoring.

The problem is that 64Studio's real-time kernel doesn't like to have its access to hardware mediated[1][2]. Now that I think about it, I can hardly blame it. If your purpose in existing is to execute certain tasks before all others without fail (that's a heavily simplified view of real-time computing, but you get the idea) having other software threatening to make you wait your turn isn't acceptable. That's exactly what virtualization software does to allow one or more virtual machines to use the same computer hardware as the host OS.

I had 64Studio going in VMWare Fusion for a short time but now that I'm using VirtualBox it won't even install. I'm curious what sweet little lies Fusion whispered in 64Studio's ear to make it think it had sole and unfettered access, but now that I understand the problem I'm satisfied that I'm just not the target user for that system.

Stay tuned. I'm getting settled in with Linux as my main OS. I'll have more to say about Linux and music production shortly.

Ardour Is A Very Good DAW And I'm Excited

2010-04-16T10:24:00.000-05:00

Have you ever bought a piece of software and had a slightly uneasy feeling, not exactly buyer's remorse but just and irritating doubt that it was worth what you paid.

I'm experiencing the opposite of that...or it is the inverse? Anyway, I'm feeling pretty damn good about learning Ardour. It is both libre and gratis so I wouldn't be out anything but my time anyway, but Ardour is a really good DAW! You can put inserts and sends exactly where you want them, route anything to anywhere and it supports every conceivable audio file format.

I read that Ardour's developers aimed not at GarageBand or the lower levels of Sony Acid but at Nuendo and ProTools as the feature set and functionality bar they intended to clear. Those happen to be DAWs I am not familiar with but they are solidly (with the exception of ProTools M-Powered) professional products. Ardour certainly feels like a professional application.

I'm still just scratching the surface but I think I see where this is going.

I'll be posting more about Ardour shortly.

Screen Cap of Ardour running on Puredyne Linux

2010-04-14T16:55:00.002-05:00

Here is just a small bit of evidence that I am still working.

Escaping My Unhealthy Relationship With Apple

2010-04-11T12:27:00.004-05:00

Yesterday was the last straw. A day after my Psystar Open Pro quit booting I spent several hours trying in vain to revive it. The end result is that it now boots directly into a nice Linux distribution, which is good and I probably lost a lot of data, which is obviously not so good.

Apple fans are all thinking to themselves that I got what I deserved for buying a hackintosh. Not so fast--why did I buy a hackintosh in the first place and why is it so hard to get a hackintosh to work? Please see below.

This machine is my main music production workstation with Ableton Live, my favorite Audio Damage plugins and lots of other musical goodies installed on it. I was quite motivated at first to get Mac OS X Leopard working again. Sadly, frustratingly, ultimately infuriatingly, no amount of work with Psystar's rescue disk (in concert with an authentic, Apple manufactured Leopard DVD) got me so far as the OS X installer. In short, Psystar's custom boot loader doesn't work right, even on their own machines.

So, I installed Windows 7 from a DVD I legally purchased through the university where I work. I thought I would install Macdrive and use my existing Ableton Live projects in Windows. Apparently I'm a sucker. My Windows DVD is upgrade-only and, of course, Windows did not detect a qualifying previous copy of Windows. It installed fine (supporting the theory that OS X was not broken by a hardware problem) but I couldn't activate it without buying a $300 "full" Windows license. $300 for the privilege of using software that I already purchased and isn't my first choice anyway? No thanks!

openSUSE 11.2 wouldn't install either. Interestingly, it failed at a different point in the install process every time I tried it. What did I do to deserve that?

Anyway, Puredyne, one of the Linux distros I've been writing about in my Linux music production series, installed without incident. The only problem is that I have yet to get it to extend its desktop to my second monitor (so far it will only mirror the displays). Compared to not booting or trying to extort $300 for protection I find that acceptable, at least for now.

Puredyne sees all six of my hard drives but I have not yet found the most precious of my data. The HFS+ support seems to work pretty well but it is possible that I installed on the wrong drive and overwrote a member of the RAID set where my sample library and Live projects were stored. If so, that one is on me.

I would have had an up-to-date and complete backup, just like on my Mac at work, but Time Machine NEVER worked on my OpenPro. So, my backups are probably weeks old.

The upshot is this. I'm done with Apple, their secrecy and their pathological need to control their customers. I would not have been in this bind if I had been using free software to start with. It's Apple's secrecy, premium pricing and lock-in strategies that drove me into the arms of Psystar, after which I found myself relying on unsupported, undocumented technology. I'll get my second monitor working with Puredyne because X.org and all the rest of the software in question is open and documented. I'm probably not much more than a forum post away from having it fixed.

So, Apple, I'm not going to say "It's not you. It's me," because it isn't me. It's you. You have the best interface and industrial design in the computer industry but it just isn't worth it anymore.

21 Linux Music and Audio Production Resources

2010-03-19T09:20:00.001-05:00

The series I'm writing about music production on Linux (and other alternative OSs) is mostly reviews, focused on what I can get to work in relatively short order. What software is available, updates, new releases and what those products are intended to do is covered elsewhere. Here are some links that cover those topics and other more general Linux music and audio matters. Some are frequently updated with fresh information. Some are lists of links of varying freshness.

Linux Audio Blog
http://linuxaudioblog.com/

ALSA Applications (alsa-project .org)
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Applications

Wikipedia: List of Linux Audio Software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_audio_software

SourceForge "linux audio" Search
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=linux+audio

SourceForge "linux music" Search
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=linux+music&search=Search

SourceForge "linux midi" Search
http://sourceforge.net/search/?words=linux+music&type_of_search=soft&pmode=0&words=linux+midi&search=Search

SourceForge "bsd music" Search
http://sourceforge.net/search/?words=linux+midi&type_of_search=soft&pmode=0&words=bsd+music&search=Search

Linux Music Production .com
http://www.linuxmusicproduction.com/

Linux Sound .org
http://www.linux-sound.org/

Sound & MIDI Software For Linux
http://sound.condorow.net/

Hitsquad Shareware Music Machine: Linux
http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/linux/

Linux Audio Developers
http://lad.linuxaudio.org/

Linux Audio Users Guide
http://lau.linuxaudio.org/

How to Build a [Linux] Recording Studio for Less Than $1000
http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/39751

Dave Phillips's Blog at Linux Journal (music & audio content circa 2007)
http://www.linuxjournal.com/blog/800764

29 Music-making Apps for Linux (audiojungle.net)
http://blog.audiojungle.net/resources/29-music-making-apps-for-linux/

Music-Linux Blog ("Linux music and other such stuff")
http://music-linux.blogspot.com/

Linux Rock Star Blog (most content from 2006, 2007)
http://linuxrockstar.blogspot.com/

42 of the Best Free Linux Audio Software (sic)
http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20080622143124178/Audio.html

Linux Journal: Audio/Video
http://www.linuxjournal.com/taxonomy/term/28

Top 10 Linux Distributions for Audio Production (Softpedia, 2007)
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=linux+audio

Linux Audio Bundles and Distributions (Linux Audio .org)
http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/apps/categories/linux_audio_bundles_distributions

Linux Music Production Sidebar: PC-BSD

2010-03-10T19:25:00.021-06:00

With some encouragement from a nerdy friend or two I have expanded my non-Windows, non-Mac music production tests to include a few non-Linux systems. First up in this alternative-to-the-alternative category, PC-BSD. Because BSD is not familiar to most musicians I'm going to provide some background and context. If you are only interested in my experiences with the music software I tested on this system just skip ahead to Music Apps.

Know Your *NIXes

BSD is short for Berkeley Software Distribution. It refers to a family of free[1][2][3] UNIX-like operating systems derived from a BSD 1.0 which was developed at UC Berkeley in the late 1970's. While it may appear to be a less popular, yet close, relative of Linux it's pedigree is quite different. Also, I'm not talking about 30+ year old technology. Modern BSDs are derived from BSD 1.0 the way Windows 7 is derived from the DOS 1.x that shipped with your (or, more likely, your parents') IBM PCjr.

Currently the two most popular BSD's are FreeBSD and OpenBSD*. OpenBSD is a no-compromise, high security distribution that lends itself to servers and networking, although it can be configured as a graphical workstation. FreeBSD is somewhat more general purpose with a focus on good performance standard PCs.

PC-BSD is a FreeBSD derivative aimed at end users. It emphasizes ease of installation and use. My copy is version 7.2, which is slightly old. 8.0 is current for both the FreeBSD and PC-BSD, but this 7.2 install was a breeze to setup and quite stable so I decided not to rock the boat.

PC-BSD really is easy to setup, like a well packaged Linux distribution or better. Where it begins to beat even the friendliest Linux distros is in ease of installing and updating software, ie. package management. If you are familiar with Linux you probably know that the two big Linux families are divided by software package format, RPM (RHEL, SuSE[1][2], CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, Yellow Dog, OEL, etc.) and Debian's dpkg/APT/.deb system (Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, Mint, Xandros, etc.). PC-BSD has its own package system, PBI.

PBI files are single-file self-installing programs for PC-BSD. You download the PBI for the program you want from a website (www.pbidir.com, for example), double click it, click "OK" a couple of times and start using your new software. Provided you got the right version of the PBI there are no trips to the command line, package management app or even an archive/unzip tool. It just works.
Music Apps

My initial install of PC-BSD didn't have much for audio or music bundled in, just a couple of media players. I paid a quick visit to pbidir.com, downloaded the PC-BSD 7.x PBIs for Audacity, Ardour and Hydrogen and I was on my way. Seriously, the big Linux distros need to look at the PBI system. This was easier than falling off a bike...and I know a little bit about falling off bikes.
Audacity, Ardour and Hydrogen all work great. They launch correctly, are responsive, stable, and sound good. I didn't have to mess with any system-level audio settings or drivers to get audio out or explicitly tell them what audio system to use (JACK vs. OSS, for example).
And now for the bad news.

No plugins. No effects. Anywhere.

So I thought, OK, I'll process stuff elsewhere then work with it here in PC-BSD. Nope. VMWare shared folders are not fully supported on BSD and did not work at all for me in this VM. This is monumentally frustrating. Everything I had worked but I didn't have what I needed.

This is where PC-BSD turned back into an ordinary BSD. The PBI system is great, as far as it goes. Now I had to run Ports from the command line and try to get some effects that way.

And back to the good news. The Ports system contains a lot of audio software, including effects. Since there isn't any money do be made re-packaging free software from a semi-obscure open format to a truly obscure (but more convenient) one none of us should be surprised that the list of multimedia and audio PBIs is a lot shorter than the list of such apps in the ports tree. This is the way it goes with free software managed by volunteers. I have one more thing to add to my list of hobbies; "learn to package PBIs."

Ports works. The apps work. PC-BSD and the PBI system make the initial steps very easy. I look forward to doing more work on BSD in the future.

I would also like to put out a call to computer musicians who are interested in free software to make time to contribute to free software projects. You don't need to be a programmer/hacker to build packages. You mostly need some time and the ability to read and follow documentation. That time is what frees us, little by little, from Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Digidesign.

* These are both dwarfed in popularity by Mac OS X, the guts of which is a BSD descendant, Darwin[1][2]. Since nobody (and I do mean, nobody) uses OS X because it is a BSD, I'm not counting it and most free software aficionados don't either. Whether building OS X on free software makes Apple more or less evil is a topic of some debate. Some, not a lot. You'll probably find most people who care about such things leaning to the "more evil" side.

Linux Music Production Comraro Part III: LMMS 0.4.5 on Ubuntu Studio

2010-03-03T11:15:00.013-06:00

As I have written more than once, even small steps outside the mainstream way of doing ANYTHING are punished. If you want things to be easy and predictable you best go with the flow. Shop at the mall. Play a standard version of a popular instrument. Use Windows.*

But what fun would that be? Eh?

The good news is that there are people out there who want to help freaks like us get things done. Bagvapp/Bagside.com (http://bagside.com/bagvapp/) offers disk image downloads of many free and/or open OS's preconfigured as VMs. This is an enormous time saver and ~~Bagside is where I got the nicely working copy of UbuntuStudio I'm writing about in this blogg~~ I may have gotten this copy of Ubuntu Studio there but the truth is, I can't remember and I can't tell by the date on the VM. I downloaded so many ISOs that week... Anyway, the ISOs I did get from Bagside rock and they have my undying gratitude!

I decided it was also time for me to try LMMS, Linux MultiMedia Studio (not to be confused with XMMS[1][2]). This cross platform DAW (like Linux Sampler it doesn't just run on Linux) emphasizes a friendly interface and ease of use. Reading the website and doc you will see multiple references to FL Studio, an app I have never used. At first look LMMS primarily reminded me of Apple's GarageBand. Maybe it is the inviting, green, smiling logo mascot or the coarse granularity of the default Song-Editor view, but even when I was having trouble making something happen I felt like I was being lead by the hand.

I was not able to drag and drop audio files into an LMMS arrangement as I can Ableton Live in Mac OS but shared folders were working correctly between Ubuntu Studio, VMWare Fusion and Mac OS so browsing to a couple of beat loops and importing them was still trivial. You can see them in the screen capture in the track labeled "Sample track." Below that you can see tracks representing a couple different types of sequences I was able to create.

Prior to any sequencing, I had a problem to solve. Although LMMS was playing back my samples they were very distorted, and not in a particularly good way. I have gotten a similar effect applying a bitcrusher to drums in the past so I assume it had something to do with sample rate or bit depth mismatch, but I can't prove it. I was able to fix the problem by setting LMMS to use OSS (Open Sound System, as opposed to the JACK, ALSA or SDL sound frameworks). I also spent some time getting Linux, VMWare and Mac OS agree on an audio output but that's par for the course if you have more than one sound device installed.

The other tracks I created use virtual instruments. Beginning to use them I began to realize that the developers of LMMS are really onto something. While editing settings in Triple Oscillator and later, using the Piano-Roll Editor I could see that LMMS is a "real" DAW. Don't be fooled by the smiling green guy or the sub-1.0 version number. LMMS is a capable app and it ships with capable virtual instruments.

The bundled instruments (and effects) are LADSPA plugins but LMMS also supports VSTs and VSTis. Big deal, right? VST is a pervasive standard that has spread to Linux. Everybody supports VSTs. No, get this; LMMS supports VSTs written for other platforms. I have not tested this but the whole idea is just unspeakably cool!

The bundled instruments open in very small windows. At first glance they look like simple little bits of software that, you hope, do one or two tthings well. After a couple of minutes I realized that Triple Oscillator has more in common with Rob Papen's Blue of U-He's Zebra than some tossed off plugin that can only do a few sounds. The small amount of screen real-estate it takes up is quite deceptive.

The Piano-Roll Editor, on the other hand, is exactly what it looks like. It seems to be a 50/50 mix of the Logic 7 era Matrix Editor and the MIDI editor in Ableton Live. There is something quite comforting about grabbing a music tool and having it behave exactly as expected. LMMS's Piano-Roll Editor works. Enough said.

The two remaining track types are not found in other DAWs I have used. One is dedicated to automation. In LMMS the automation for any given parameter gets its own track. Other than that it appears to work much as it does in other software.

The other track type is Beat and Bassline. These are virtual instrument tracks optimized for creating and arranging large-grained patterns quickly. As you can see in the second large screen shot these tracks have a special editor that displays one bar of the track and 16-step sequencer by default (this can be changed for longer patterns). The resulting clip/pattern/region can be copied and pasted or re-edited in the Piano Roll editor if more fine-grained changes are called for.

The one place where I feel like LMMS falls down is audio editing. Basically, you can't do...ummm...how shall I put this. . .any. It may arrive later but when I look at how good some parts of this 0.4.5 release are, my guess is that the developers don't consider audio editing a priority. I can hardly blame them. They have nailed virtual instruments and have a great interface, considering it is a sub-1.0 product. Maybe they have decided to leave audio editing to the Ardours and Audacities of the world.

To be fair, Ableton Live doesn't include a real audio editor either, but at least you can split audio clips into smaller pieces for finer arranging. LMMS lets you move audio segments around in the arrangement, truncate them and that's about it. If you want more than that you either need to do it in another app or load your samples into sample-based instrument plugins.

Once I got my sound devices sorted out LMMS worked great for me in this Ubuntu Studio VM. Audacity does not work which I find very disappointing. Hear is a wrap up of apps in this distro that I did and did not get to work. These are apps. I am not listing plugins--too many to test.

Works

Ardour

LMMS

Hydrogen

BEAST

Freebirth

GNU Denemo

MuseScore

Doesn't Work

Audacity

JACKBeat

JACK Timemachine

Mixxx

SuperLooper

Partially work or not tested by me

FreqTweak (no test)

Aeolis (no test)

Creox c (no test)

Genpo (no test)

PureData (no test)

Qsynth/Fluidsynth (partially tested, probably mostly works)

Seq24 (partially tested, probably mostly works)

Terminator X (partially works, some features crash, once took down whole system)

MusE (no audio output but probably would have worked if I spent more time with JACK)

* Actually, using Windows won't make everything go smoothly but when it doesn't people will assume it is the computer's fault, not yours.

I Love Tempo Synced Effects With Their Own Step Sequencers

2010-02-27T16:35:00.005-06:00

What I am about to say makes me sound like a pathetic fanboy but I don't care. Audio Damage make some of the best effects plugins money can buy and they consistently under-charge for them. There. I said it. I'm the fan of a software company.

Here is just one example of how hard this company's plugins rock. The screen shot below is of BigSeq2. The original BigSeq was a really great sequenced gate and filter, in the "trance gate"* style. It gave you independent control of filter and gating for each step in a 16-step sequencer. BigSeq2 takes that concept and runs right off into the deep end. It is a full-blown multi-effect unit where each effect (gate, filter, fuzz and warp distortion, delay, pitch shift, bit reduction distortion) has it's own 32-step sequencer.

Until you have had this type of granular (and rhythmic) control over your effects you probably can't wrap your brain around it. Simply put, this means you can pick in choose with great precision what slices of your sound (typically organized as even divisions of a bar) are affected by each effect.

The step sequencers for each effect are labeled "gate sequencer," which is also correct. The sequencer allows or denies the input signal from reaching the effect on a step-by-step basis. Effectively, the gating makes the delay section of BigSeq2 into a 32-tap delay. The sliders provide ~~level~~ send-level (or other select parameters) control over each tap and a scaling control ("step size") specifies the size of the steps relative to one bar of music in your DAW; they don not always need be 32nd notes and they do not need to collectively correspond to one bar.

Step sequencing effects is like programming a drum machine with an internal sequencer. The difference is that in stead of triggering a drum sound each event either sends or does not send audio to a given effect.

This is just one example of a step sequenced effect and only one example of how awesome Audio Damage's plugins are.

*I love this type of effect but I don't like the name "trance gate."

New Remix of "The Problem With Power..."

2010-02-27T15:14:00.002-06:00

http://soundcloud.com/dj-dual-core/the-problem-with-power-feat-kid-q-these-effects-have-no-affect-on-my-affect-mix

List O' VMs For Ever Expanding Linux Music Production Comparo

2010-02-17T20:25:00.001-06:00

Death-rattle Of The Big Label System: "Tommy Boy" Silverman vs. TuneCore's Jeff Price

2010-02-09T10:24:00.006-06:00

I suppose we can argue about what counts as an act or artist "breaking through" is, but I'm not sure that matters. Below is a link to a blog featuring TuneCore founder Jeff Price's side of a dispute with Tommy Silverman, music industry veteran and founder of Tommy Boy.

How people use Nielsen to hurt musicians

Read it for yourself. I have just a couple of comments, some of which I have written about here before.

1) Bad music is a necessary precursor of good music. If we want more good music we need more people making more bad music. If easy, inexpensive distribution encourages musicians to produce we should all get behind it.

2) In the future a "big hit," if we continue to think in those terms, will be tens of thousands of sales, not millions, but more people will have "big hits."

DJ Dual Core's Law: Given a critical mass of bad musicians one or more good musicians will be created.

Its corollary: Given a critical mass of MP3 files, one or more will not suck.

Linux Music Production Distro Note: 64Studio Problems

2010-02-08T19:36:00.004-06:00

If you read yesterday's post you know I was very happy with the VMWare Fusion OS integration I got with AV Linux. It's cousin, 64 Studio...not so much. I can't get VMWare Tools installed because GCC and my kernel headers are MIA.

Just run apt-get to install said headers, you say? Nice idea, but it's a non-standard kernel. WTF is the package called?

Run uname -r and get your kernel's name, you say? Ya, tried that too. I put the output of uname -r in apt-get and received the equivalent of "the number you have dialed doesn't exist and you suck!"

If I can't share files back and forth this is a non-starter and you need VMWare Tools for guest/host folder sharing. I need a better reason than "this distro may contain cool software" to fight with stuff like this all night.

If you can help e-mail djdualcore at google's e-mail service .com. In the absence of a breakthrough on this I'm moving on to the next distro. It's 2010 and if your Linux distribution isn't virtualization friendly you're screwing yourself and any potential users you might like to have. Seriously.

AV Linux: Linux Music Production Comparo Part II

2010-02-05T20:12:00.021-06:00

The Audacity of Editing

Recently I set out to finish up some editing in my familiar Mac OS environment. When I went to open the files I found I had saved my work as Audacity .AUP files while also somehow breaking my copy of Audacity 1.3.11 beta. Whatever I did also kept newer Audacity betas (and nightly builds) from running. In stead of just being aggravated I decided to do my Audacity work in AV Linux, where I (hopefully) hadn't broken Audacity yet.

My copy of AV Linux has the 2.6.32 Linux kernel (slightly newer than described at [1] at the time of this writing), with real-time mods and physical address extension (RAM support beyond the usual 3.5 or 4GB limit of a 32 bit OS). The default window manager is Compiz running in the LXDE desktop environment. The default file manager is PCManFM, which I'm not wild about but certainly works and is relatively quick and responsive. The default web browser is the very nice (and totally free, as in speech) GNU Iceweasel, which may have the best name of any desktop application, ever. Since this release of AV Linux, Iceweasel has been renamed GNU Icecat. I'm sad to see the name go but the browser still works a treat, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

Like the other music and multimedia GNU-Linux distributions I have touched, AV Linux bundles the increasingly fine cross-platform audio recording and editing app, Audacity, in this case 1.3.10-beta (Unicode), ever so slightly older than I had been using in Mac O S. I had planned to update it to the latest beta but it worked great so I left well enough alone. It opened my Mac OS-created AUPs quickly, played them without error and let me get right to my editing.

Blazing Speed? Check!

Speaking of "quickly," AV Linux screams. I only gave it 512MB of RAM in VMWare Fusion but performance is right snappy. I don't know if it's the real-time kernel extensions, the light-weight desktop environment or that I spend entirely too much time using Windows, but I am impressed.

Plug-Ins

Another very cool thing about working in this environment is the plug-ins. The default install of AV Linux comes with hundreds of effect and instrument plug-ins. While working in Audacity I was floored by the number of EQs I had at my disposal.

Most of these plug-ins conform to the LADSPA standard although Audacity for Linux also supports Nyquist and VAMP effects. What is really important about this isn't simply that these effects are available in Audacity for Linux. What is important is that LADSPA is a viable open standard. I launched Rosegarden, one of AV Linux's pre-installed DAWs, and there they are, the plug-ins I saw in Audacity accompanied by a bunch of DSSI instruments. DSSI is an extension to the LADSPA standard for instrument plug-ins.

Open standards = good. Remember that.

Ardour and the JACK of Hearts

Another DAW that is relatively common and also found in AV Linux is the cross platform (Linux, Mac OS, FreeBSD) Ardour. Firing up Ardour in AV Linux forced me to get a little more familiar with JACK. The JACK Audio Connection Kit is a system and a standard for routing audio and MIDI between software and devices. JACK is available for other operating systems but it is most closely associated with GNU/Linux. Getting an application to talk to a sound card is one thing. Getting multiple apps, plug-ins and devices all on the same page is another.

I don't know if it h as something to do with being virtualized or what, but I had major JACK problems with Ardour the first couple of times I launched it. For some reason Ardour and JACK would disconnect (with an error message saying Ardour was failing to keep up with JACK), stopping my work dead in its tracks. Sometimes I could get them to reconnect by restarting the JACK server from its floating control panel and/or asking Ardour to reconnect with JACK from Ardour's JACK menu. Other times I had to restart Ardour W ITHOUT SAVING MY WORK. This is not cool. Under some circumstances Ardour will not let you save your your session because it does not have valid routing information (for which it relies on JACK) to save with it. No. Not cool at all.

My only other complaint about Ardour is that it does not cope well with imported audio that is of a different sample rate than the official rate of the session. Logic 7 (the only version of Logic I have used) was the same way, but it is 2010 and Logic 7 dates back to. . .ummm, long before 2010. Since then I have been spoiled by Ableton Live's free-wheeling attitude toward audio where sample rate, bit depth, speed, pitch and everything else is wide open and free for all. In this regard Ardour is for experienced, serious users who A) know what sample rate is and B) don't mind taking a minute or two to convert a file before adding it to a session.

Delayed Gratification

On the up side, while working with Ardour I met an fell fast in love with Delayorama [1][2], a decptively simple LADSPA delay plug-in by Steve Harris. Right away it started letting me do the sorts of high-feedback things I get in trouble for with other delays. The delayed signal also came back with more interesting texture than I was expecting, really adding something to the source material. I haven't really learned how to use it yet and I'm already getting interesting results. I'll be coming back to this little beauty!

Notes On VMWare Fusion

I would like to make a few comments about about the role of VMWare Fusion in these tests. Desktop and server virtualization are an ever increasing part of my day job in IT at a mid-sized university and I can say honestly that Parallels Desktop for Mac [1][2] and VMWare Fusion[1][2] are both good products but when it comes to OS integration, especially with Linux, Fusion is better. Historically both products have developed the tightest host-guest integration, slickest automated install features and easiest "tools" installations for Windows[1][2]. So, I was very pleased to find that VMWare's Unity [1][2] feature, which hides the guest OS desktop and has all guest and host windows share the host desktop GUI, works great with AV Linux. This and Fusion's very smooth shared folder system made accessing the same files from both OSs a breeze. Thank you to the VMWare and GNU/Linux people who made this happen!

More On Ardour

The more I use Ardour the more I like it. The automation works in a reasonably intuitive way. The relationship between the editing window and the main mixer is logical. Tool bars can be easily made to float and returned. Meter, tempo, CD track markers and various other things can be set in a master track area above the editing lanes/tracks in the editing window. Regions can be non-destructively layered (think Photoshop). Ardour even has built in spectral analysis! If I didn't need to keep reconnecting it with JACK I'd be truly thrilled.

Not Ready For Prime Time...Yet

I subscribed to the Linuxsampler-Devel mailing list some time ago. Mostly I've been watching for messages related to the Mac OS port of Linux Sampler. I've never had much luck with it, but the whole Linux Sampler project (Linux Sampler, QSampler, libgig, etc.) is mostly less than 1.0 and primarily suitable for hackers. Sadly, my luck with it on AV Linux wasn't much better than last time I tried it on Mac OS. I was not able to create a new instrument and it shut down on me a couple of times. I am sure that given some time I could get it going, but I don't have that time right now. The goals of this project extend to matching and exceeding the feature sets of commercial samplers like Gigastudio, Kontakt and ESX. There are bound to be bumps along that road.

My poor luck continued with Qtractor, a DAW that would not launch, and a couple of sound modules/virtual keyboards/synths that received MIDI data from my Korg microKontrol (seemingly, a good sign) but produced no sound.

Rosegarden

Things started to look up when I returned to Rosegarden, for a closer look. Where Ardour is all about audio, Rosegarden also wants to handle your MIDI and musical notation. Shortly after launch I had recorded MIDI events in from my keyboard and played them back out through an organ plug-in. Not bad!

Rosegarden allows you to do your MIDI event editing in a musical score editor, a matrix editor or event list. Internally Rosegarden only allows you to record, play, move and split audio segments but will link to an external waveform editor for more involved manipulation of audio files. Importing audio files is more of a problem than with Ardour. Rosegarden supports WAVE, FLAC, MP3 and OGG, but I was unable to import any files successfully. As of this writing the online documentation is not clear about whether or not files to be imported needed to match the current JACK sample rate or when imported files would be converted to Rosegarden's preferred internal format of 32bit WAVE.

Conclusions, Such as They Are

AV Linux probably deserves a more thorough going-over than I have given it but at the same time I would have people understand that this is precisely the problem. People only have so much time to learn new tools and if the learning curve is too steep those tools will not be adopted. How much time should I be expected to put into learning the ins and outs (literally) of JACK and the other technologies underlying these apps and plug-ins?

As an IT professional I know I can probably learn a lot about why some apps failed to launch by consulting log files but I do that at work. When I come home I want to make music.

Linux Music Production Distribution Comparison Part One

2010-01-30T22:11:00.010-06:00

Linux Audio

I first used Linux in the late 1990's, probably 1997. Back then (after the first Linux Expo and before Red Hat's headline-making IPO) it was a very good day when I installed Linux on a PC and the sound card worked at all. A Linux system to produce music on was out of the question, at least for me. Thankfully, things have changed.

Hardware Support

The variety of Linux distributions and the breadth of their hardware support have both mushroomed. This radically improves the odds of being able to put your hand on a distro suitable for your system and purposes that doesn't leave you hunting for driver and utility packages after install. Even live CDs of many distributions can be counted on to boot with working network and sound on many PCs.

It is still true that many Linux distros will have devices and apps fail on some systems. Take it from an IT professional; Windows isn't any better. Out of the box Windows has only a portion of the drivers it may need for any given system. Users are shielded from this because we so often use pre-installed systems with Windows and drivers pre-configured by the PC manufacturer. As anyone who has ever done their own Windows upgrade or installed a second video card will tell you, once you deviate from the manufacturer's carefully controlled hardware-software combination all bets are off.

Virtualization

Virtualization also solves a lot of problems. By mediating between the operating system, drivers and hardware virtualization software (Parallels Desktop, Virtual Box, Virtual PC, various VMWare products) allows two important things to happen that are otherwise impossible. It lets more than one operating system run on a computer at the same time. It also allows software to use pieces of hardware it does not have drivers for nor direct control of.

What these tools offer musicians is freedom to use apps and virtual instruments made for any OS on the same computer. It also means you can try out Linux and other free software without disturbing your current setup.

What's the big deal? Is there music production software for Linux? Oh hell ya!

Distribution Comparison

I am very excited by how virtualizaton lowers the barriers to adoption of free software [1][2], especially free music and audio software. In just a few short days I found, downloaded and installed several multi-media oriented Linux

distributions containing free music and audio software. Not averybody has the free disk space to do this but many people have the resources to set up one or two at a time. Creating a virtual machine is much less risky and less of a committment than setting up a dedicated physical computer or configuring your current PC to dual or multi-boot.

Since I waded back into electronic music a few years ago I have been doing almost all of my

production on Mac OS X. Every now and then I am reminded that, while perhaps not as evil as

Microsoft in it's worst moments, Apple is a secretive, DRM-using, exclusive agreement-

making, litigious behemoth of a company that would sell its own customers into slavery if it

that would increase the profit margin on the iPod Nano. Being thus reminded this week I've been thinking about Linux.

The Distributions

I downloaded:

Ubuntu Studio (9.1)

64Studio GNU/Linux (3.0 beta 3)

Musix Gnu+Linux (2.0)

Puredyne (9.10 Carrot And Coriander)

AVLinux (3.0 R1)

To my surprise there isn't a single RPM-based distribution in the lot. These distros are all Debian GNU/Linux derivatives. I've always been partial to SuSE Linux [1][2] but is seems Ubuntu is the current choice to fork your multi-media distro off of. Three of these distros credit Ubuntu (a Debian derivative itself) as their sole parent. One credits Ubuntu and Debian. One, Musix, claims only Debian as a parent.

As I put these through their paces I will write about it here. I don't expect the lineup to change, but if it does I will write about why. For example, one distribution listed above has already failed my rather elementary "Play an Audio File in Audacity" test. Unless things change, my discussion of that distro will be very, very brief.

I Miss Liner Notes

2010-01-17T11:18:00.003-06:00

I rarely buy CDs anymore. For me it is much more economical and practical to simply download a digital recording, rather than purchasing a digital recording etched on a metal and plastic wafer and enclosed it yet more plastic. I also rarely buy vinyl these days, unless I come across some interesting used records someplace.

This means I almost never get my hands on liner notes for any recording I buy. Obviously this isn't a big enough deal to make me go back to buying CDs by default, but I do miss them. I love looking for the names of session musicians and songwriters I know from other bands and recordings. If different tracks have different producers it can be very interesting to listen for their fingerprints. Sometimes there will be interesting tidbits about where and when something was recorded that shed light on why the album turned out the way it did.

Clearly these concerns are mostly the purview of musicians, collectors and other subsets of music junkies. But sometimes there are things in liner notes that anybody would find interesting. I'll get to a couple examples of that in a moment.

Since we junkies have other ways to get our questions answered the absence of liner notes from digital downloads isn't that great of a loss. It's really just an inconvenience. For example, I was able to find out that a lot of the heavy lifting on Herbie Hancock's 1980's albums was not done by Hancock but under-sung genius Bill Lasswell. I didn't need liner notes for that. Between Google and Wikipedia any music junkie with a little determination can find out most of what they want to know. To bring up Bill Lasswell again, his album Hashisheen was making me crazy because some of the voices doing the spoken word parts were very familiar but I couldn't place them. Even without liner notes I found multiple web sites listing all of the speakers.

The 1985 Shriekback album, Oil And Gold, contains complete lyrics for the album. This is not uncommon for the time, or for today. The twist is that they are written in a phonetic alphabet. The web site linked from the album name above says the alphabet is called INTERFŌN but I have not been able to confirm this. Anyway, it's a gas to read, even if you aren't interested in languages, especially if you aren't British, since the band is.

This next example I can't verify this at all (not for lack of trying; I don't own the album and an embarrassing amount of time with Google has yielded nothing) which may disprove my earlier point about the loss of liner notes being a mere inconvenience. I'll tell it from memory anyway, just in case I'm right.

In 1988 Monty Python released a compilation of sketches and songs as the album The Final Ripoff (aptly named as it was mostly previously released but not labeled as such). The liner notes corrected and contradicted themselves, alternately stating that some material was or was not remastered or edited by whoever (probably André Jacquemin, but like I said, I'm doing this from memory). Like other Python humor this is funny for different reasons depending on who you are and what you know, but I think the idea of self-contradictory credits are inherently funny. I mean, why do we every assume they are accurate? Do we trust the people who write copy and do layout for album packaging? Do we trust the people who provide them with information?

Digital distribution for DJ Dual Core music goes through TuneCore. When you upload the songs and other album information for a release to TuneCore there is a space to include liner notes. It comes with a caveat that none of the outlets they distribute to (iTunes, Amazon MP3, Real Rhapsody, eMusic) regularly provide liner notes "yet."

MIDI Controller Layout Pen Sketch

2010-01-10T14:24:00.002-06:00

Horace is an Asus netbook. Everything to Horace's left is a Korg MicroKontrol. Everything to Horace's right is an Emu XBoard 25 I won on eBay but don't yet have posession of.

The Problem With Power Isn't Potency It's Domination (Feat. Kid Q) by DJ Dual Core

2010-01-07T19:58:00.001-06:00

The Problem With Power Isn't Potency It's Domination (Feat. Kid Q) by DJ Dual Core

Browsing The Cut-Out Bin At The ITunes Music Store

2010-01-06T19:43:00.005-06:00

Over the years record store cut-out bins and comic shop $.25 boxes have been pretty good to me.

Oh, that's right--you're under 30. You don't know about cut-out bins. Hell, you probably don't know about record stores. Let me explain.

Back before the turn of the century, when the only way to buy music was to buy it carved into one or more pieces of plastic, most people bought their music at "record stores." These were like head shops but instead of bongs and rolling papers they were full of CDs, records and, for a few years in the 80's, cassette tapes. For a few years in the 1970's they also had 8-track tapes but most people who remember this don't like to talk about it. It's embarrassing. Actually, record stores were a lot like head shops. In fact, some of them were head shops, the old Co-Op Records in Iowa City, for example. Bongs on the left, 12" vinyl to the right.

Imagine that the 36" of shelf space Hot Topic devotes to music were expanded to fill the whole store. That's what record stores were like. Some of them, believe it or not, were independently owned and run by people who gave a fuck about music. Only a few, mind you, but those few were pretty damn cool.

Cut-outs were records, tapes or CD's that had a notch or hole cut in their packaging. Record companies or distributors would do this with releases they made too many of to show that these items were only to be sold at a discount. There was no floor under the price of an album once it was cut-out. If it was a turkey and the label pressed millions of them they could end up selling for next to nothing.

For music junkies like myself cut-out bins were magical places where the back catalog of semi-successful artists came my way for $2.99 an album, sometimes less. "This Bin Only-Any 5 Cassettes-$7.95." At those prices you could afford to buy some crap. Just a few good songs in the bunch and you've still beat the system.

So, what happens to commercially marginal digital downloads? This, apparently.

A co-worker gave me an iTunes gift card and I stumbled upon this album while looking for nice, fast psy-trance. You read right: 160 tracks, $11.99.

My guess is the artists see 0 or near 0 from these sales. That was the case with cut-outs too. Record companies have been screwing artists as long as there have been record companies, so this isn't news, but you divide the ITMS payout of a $12 sale 160 ways and the cents per song really do approach zero.

To my knowledge the iTunes Music Store does not sell pipe cleaners, screens, papers, hit-pipes or those goofy bongs made from melted Coke bottles. They also do not sell 8-tracks, thank God. Even so, the cut out bin appears to be alive and well in a new, digital form.

Sample-Level Editing in Audacity

2009-12-29T18:59:00.004-06:00

As my second-favorite philosopher, George Newman, said (shortly before dumping a Jack Russel Tarrier in the punch bowl) "You've just gotta' grab life by the lips and yank as hard as you can."

So, tell me. What is the point of being able to do sample-level editing if you don't, actually, do any sample-level editing? None! None, I tell you!

These few milliseconds used to make a clicking sound. Then it became more of a squeak. But that's not the noise I want. Don't I deserve to have EXACTLY the noise I want?

Ernie The Keebler Elf Has Dueling Scars

2009-12-27T08:46:00.002-06:00

You may think it's all fun and baking over open coals in Keebler elf land, but a closer examination shows that Ernie, at least, has a seriously hard past. This SOB has multiple dueling scars on each cheek. He may not like to talk about it but clearly, he's seen some heavy shit...and I'm not talking about the chocolate morsels he's holding.

Developting A Live Performance Set...In Live

2009-12-25T18:02:00.002-06:00

Electronic Music, Punk Rock, DIY, Hacking, Etc.

2009-12-25T11:11:00.005-06:00

Over at my other blog, Hack Your Guitar, I just posted about what I see as the conceptual relationship between punk rock and guitar mods. What I didn't get into, because Hack Your Guitar is very much a guitar-centric blog, is that electronic music has joined the party.

Here is what I see as the bigger picture, for DIY, punk rock and electronic music.

Punk is famous for its "Here's three chords. Now form a band," attitude. That quote, worded various ways and attributed to multiple sources, is used both to criticize and laud punk. The important thing is that it chipped away at the class distinction between the audience and the musicians. As Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group has said, punk brought back an idea that had been lost since the early days of rock and roll; this was the idea that an absolute beginner could and should get on stage and perform.

The link to electronic music is that computers and software capable of making electronic music are now as plentiful and inexpensive as shitty guitars and just as easy to use. The barriers to making electronic music are now as low as the barriers to forming a garage band. Since 2004 every new Macintosh has shipped with an entry-level DAW , the aptly named GarageBand . Free software for editing, sequencing and synthesis is available for current and older computers via download and disks included with music magazines including Computer Music, Future Music and MusicTech .[1]

Predictably, this has lead to complaints, on web forums and elsewhere, that enormous amounts of bad electronic music are being posted on the web, sent as demos to record companies, etc. That is to say, it has become easier to make and distribute bad music. This is absolutely true. As I wrote about for tastyfresh.com [2] a few short years ago, loop based production in particular has radically lowered the barriers to producing bad electronic music, but I think that is a good thing.

What I said in the TF article was...

If a future BT wets their inexperienced toes in the warm waters of Sony Acid all the junk they initially produce is worth it. God knows I've created some entirely unlistenable things over the years. As Iggy Pop said about hearing Lou Reed for the first time "He can't sing. I can't sing. Let's sing!"

Yep, there's me linking punk rock and electronic music again.

You see, I believe bad music is necessary for the creation of good music. I don't mean that in the "dark is necessary for light" sense. I mean that good musicians invariably begin as bad musicians.

I'll take that a step further. Given a critical mass of bad musicians one or more good musicians will eventually emerge. For this to happen we need a critical mass of bad musicians. Thus, bad music is a good thing.

Among the things punk rock and cheap music software have done for this, our Planet Earth, is that they have encouraged countless talentless twits to try their hand at making music. I would that every talentless twit do so. It's how things move forward.

Do not simply consume, create. Be the media. Be the music. Do.

[1] Those three magazines are all English but they are distributed in North America. Some US news stands carry both the UK and US editions of Future Music, which are rather different. In my experience the UK edition is thicker and has more on the included disk.

[2] To my surprise two of my articles are still in the top 5 most hit at http://www.tastyfresh.com/articles.html as of Dec. 15, 2009.

Kevin Becka Off Base With "5 Worst Audio Trends..."

2009-12-23T18:41:00.006-06:00

Kevin Becka of Mix recently blogged about the "5 Worst Audio Trends of the Noughties." He is absolutely right that there are problems associated with these things but he seems to miss the real problem on almost all of them. The problems, according to Becka, are...

The End of Hi-Fidelity
Illegal Downloading
Pitch Correction Abuse
The Death of Dynamics
Staying Inside The Box

First, he looses points for numbers 1 and 4 just because he fell into the "death of..." trap. Aside from that I have to refer to his explanations of why these things made the list and what caused the problems.

The "end" of high fidelity as a musical/audio value is, predictably, is blamed on MP3s and digital distribution. Yes, MP3 is a lossy compression format and doesn't sound all that great, especially at lower bit rates, but its popularity hasn't stopped people from buying 180g vinyl of both new music and re-issues. Besides that, not all digital distribution suffers from the quality problems associated with MP3s. Many legal download sites offer .wav files and or very high bit rate compressed files that sound at least as good as a CD. Hi-fi isn't dead or over. Looking at the big picture, the worst I can say is that it has finally been put into perspective. Do I need esoteric sound stage analysis for my car stereo? No. Neither do you. Want it at home so you can get the full effect of your 180g vinyl? Go for it. It's your money.

Pitch correction abuse: This is subjective. Becka says it gives poor or lazy vocalists a bye and makes talent optional when making a record. Seriously? Talent has always been optional.

He's right on the money concerning the loudness wars, but there is reason to think they may be almost over. The push back from engineers, artists and listeners is getting pretty strong.

Finally, Becka complains about in-the-box production. He cites the virtues of the analog technology used to make so many great records over the years. Yeah, so what? The world is rich in production methods and different ones are best for different projects. I'm not making Beatles records. Neither is anybody else. Do what works. Whether or not it happens inside or outside a computer is very much beside the point.

MicroAcoustic Project Screen Shot 2

2009-12-21T19:28:00.002-06:00

It has a name now, The Problem With Power Isn't Potency It's Domination.

1st Screen Shot Of Microacoustic Music Project

2009-12-20T12:10:00.003-06:00

New Track In The Works: Two Thugs and a Room Full Of Candles

2009-12-13T10:09:00.002-06:00

XKCD Comic About Volvo--Sort Of

2009-12-05T15:41:00.003-06:00

http://xkcd.com/671/

...and the Bush Administration wasn't supportive enough of superconductivity research.

Jim O'Rourke: Fantastic Noise Composition-Film Music

2009-12-05T09:42:00.002-06:00

I don't really have an opinion about the film, but I think the music is fantastic. This, in my opinion, really shows what noise can be.

Apple Settles With Psystar, Hell Freezes Over

2009-12-01T08:56:00.001-06:00

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141608/Apple_Psystar_strike_deal_in_copyright_case?taxonomyId=163&pageNumber=1

End Of An Era For DJs and Turntablists: Technics To Quit Turntable Production

2009-11-28T14:38:00.005-06:00

I learned today while catching up on Richard Devines's tweets that Technics' parent company, Panasonic, has announced the end of production of Technics turntables.

For those of you who know how historical this is, go get a drink. Catch your breath. For everybody else, here is the short version.

The Technics SL-1200 series of turntables have been the standard for dance music, hip hop and many other DJs since the 1970's. The 1200's (and their predecessor, the SL-1100 used by DJ Kool Herc) helped define DJing and turntablism in the way the Big Four electric guitars (Telecaster, Stratocaster, Les Paul, SG) have helped define rock music. They aren't a required tool, but they set the initial boundaries around their role in the music and continue to be the chosen tool of many, many professionals.

Until today I never thought about what it would mean for digital technology to take out an analog icon like the SL-1200. That is what killed it, by the way. Analog turntable sales are way down and digital DJ tools continue to proliferate and make converts.

The old standard has fallen. eBay and Google searches for "Technics turntable" and "sl-1200" will go through the roof in coming months, as will the going price for used decks. Vinyl will continue it's move into being a niche product.

I've never felt strongly about analog or digital technology being superior and I have always believed that key analog technologies will stay in use for a long, long time. This event is historic, however. This is the equivalent of learning that Ford would no longer be selling trucks.

If the economy stayed in the tank long enough that could happen. Can you imagine searching eBay for "f-150," not just because you wanted one, but because there would be no more new ones and you knew the price would only ever go up from now on?

For vinyl DJs that is where we are.

Postcolonial Death Match Up at ITunes

2009-11-26T17:06:00.001-06:00

PCDM is now live at ITMS.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/postcolonial-death-match-ep/id340471283

I have only confirmed this for the US site. If it is not up in ITMS for Canada, Japan and UK/EU, it should be soon.

Snip Snip Slice Slice Live-In-Studio Real-Time Remix by DJ Dual Core

2009-11-25T20:57:00.001-06:00

Snip Snip Slice Slice Live-In-Studio Real-Time Remix by DJ Dual Core

Postcolonial Death Match is Live at Amazon and eMusic

2009-11-23T16:21:00.003-06:00

Postcolonial Death Match is up on Amazon and eMusic.

Postcolonial Death Match Preview Clips

2009-11-20T18:14:00.001-06:00

I posted clips from all 11 album tracks as a set on Soundcloud. Take a listen!

Latest tracks by DJ Dual Core

http://soundcloud.com/dj-dual-core/sets

Downloads will be available at iTunes, Amazon, eMusic and other stores soon. I don't know yet whether or not there will be physical CDs.

CD Mastering Scheduled for Postcolonial Death Match

2009-11-07T09:54:00.002-06:00

On Thursday, Nov. 11 I will be taking my final mixes for Postcolonial Death Match to Catamount Recording for mastering by Travis Huisman. Catamount is one of the premiere recording studios in the midwest and has been used by artists including Greg Brown, Stone Sour, House Of Large Sizes, Robert James Waller, Living Sacrifice, Johnson Co. Landmark, The Nadas, Blue Band and Callie Weiss.

Windows XP, Finally, A Version Of Windows We Will Miss

2009-10-31T11:56:00.004-05:00

Windows XP is no longer "the previous version of Windows." With Windows 7 shipping, it is now two versions old. That is when it is time for most operating systems and major applications to be put out to pasture. The beginning of the end of Windows XP is fundamentally different from the waning of other software, especially other versions of Windows.

In 1999, when I started my current IT job, I would grumble "Every time I work on a Windows 3.1 PC I hope it will be the last." Shortly after Windows 2000 became common I started saying the same thing about Windows 95. As XP became the standard I grumbled similar things about Windows 98.

Now Windows 7 is shipping. All of the people who don't like Windows Vista are cursing it all the louder as they throw their arms around the latest and greatest Windows. Funny, nobody seems to be cursing Widnows XP--not even me.

Looking back at the Windows XP era it is amazing what a long, solid run the OS has had. Released eight years and six days ago (October 25, 2001) this OS has aged with remarkable grace, especially considering the severe failures of its predecessors[1][2][3][4]. Even though service packs [1][2] and other updates have made radical changes to the guts and some features of Windows XP, sitting down to use or service and XP machine feels very much like it did eight years ago.

Windows XP mostly works pretty well. That may sound like faint praise but its about as good as it gets for an IT professional talking about Windows. Unlike Windows ME you can stop an XP box from crashing. Unlike Windows 98 it has half a clue about security. Unlike Vista you can run it on a pre-2007 PC without throttling all of it's best graphics features. Unlike Windows 2000 you can do something about it being ugly.

Whether or not Windows Vista deserves all of the hate it has received is debatable. What is not up for discussion is that it's direct predecessor is unique in that the only people who truly hate it are those who hate Windows altogether. But many of us can't be Microsoft free and have been forced by circumstances to make peace with Redmond. We, the pragmatic and the fighters in the trenches, need to look back at the last eight years and try to grasp what went right. We can only hope that the people sending the software forth from Redmond are asking themselves the same question.

Massive Album Prep This Weekend

2009-10-25T21:49:00.004-05:00

Last week I decided I had enough music that didn't suck arranged and mixed to put out an EP. I thought five or six songs from the last year were ready to fly and that "Postcolonial Death Match" was the right name. The only question was whether or not it was worth it to pay for professional mastering.

I happen to live just a few miles from Catamount Recording, probably one of the best commercial studios in the midwest. It seems a shame not to take advantage of that. This isn't New York or London, so I'm not talking about mountains of money but recording engineers need to eat too.

Before making any decisions I started digging through the files on my computer to see what other songs I might have forgotten about. It turns out I had several nearly finished songs right there on the computer. Over a little more than a day this weekend I was able to finish arranging and mixing three unique songs and two remixes.

What it boils down to is that I have more than enough non-sucking material for Postcolonial Death Match to be a full-length album and it's good enough to easily justify professional mastering. My work is cut out for me. The next month or two should be exciting.

Veteran of WWII Speaks Out for Marriage Equality

2009-10-24T14:39:00.003-05:00

This man has the moral authority to say things I can not.

Thank you to Karen for posting this.

New Track "I Get Stranger Things Than You Free With My Breakfast Cereal"

2009-10-19T21:42:00.001-05:00

I Get Stranger Things Than You Free With My Breakfast Cereal by DJ Dual Core

The Comprehensive List of Things That Are Overrated

2009-10-18T16:21:00.001-05:00

The Comprehensive List of Things That Are Overrated

By DJ Dual Core

In no particular order:

owning your own home
small towns
electronic publication
political parties
high proof beer
capitalism
"classic" guitars
English
color photography
computer monitors over 19"
being thin
color printing
high fidelity audio
high volumes
clear skin
computers
hair
being right
cars
vintage audio equipment
being missed
airport security
4-axis joysticks
reduced fat salad dressing
four wheel drive
imported things
virtuosity
robots
tradition
digital modeling
parenthood
mineral water
being good
democracy
ear buds
A 440
boats
low profile tires
being remembered
TV's over 32"
facial hair
low taxes
wireless things
power
carbonated water
temperance
vinyl LP's
horsepower
aftertouch
low humidity
flavored water
surge protection
random access
pure spring water
testosterone
automatic document compression
knowing the code
low car payments
making people laugh
MySpace
copyrights
purified water
catchy slogans
sunscreen
universal remotes
natural things
size mattering
chocolate
buying in bulk
the ability to cite references extemporaneously
disk de-fragmentation
the newest version
the great outdoors
patents
Texas
reason
Reason
logic
Logic
salt
the tempered scale
over-sized rims
ideas that fit on a bumper-sticker
tennis
smart phones
pledges
the ability to identify constellations
differences between free and open source software licenses
inexpensive printers
being well liked
Washington D.C.
lite beer
leasing
The 21st Century

Testosterone: Work In Progress Screen Capture

2009-10-03T13:59:00.001-05:00

V.C. Andrews, Teen-girl-lit and The Meaning Of Horror

2009-10-02T17:14:00.001-05:00

I am not doing a good job of keeping this blog focused on music and technology.

In the current issue of The Believer, Sara Gran and Megan Abbott write about V. C. Andrews, author of Flowers In The Attic and most of its sequels. In Dark Family: V. C. Andrews And The Secret Life Of Girls, Gran and Abbott ask why Andrews' books were (and are) so rarely reviewed, surveyed or analyzed given their commercial success. Two of the reasons they give are that the books are most popular and associated with early teen girls and that "For all their teen-girl fantasy elements, the books are also gritty, raw, and extremely dirty."

The second reason would not stand if it were not for the first. The reverse is also true. "Raw," "gritty" and "dirty" aren't problematic in a crime novel marketed to adult men. It's only a problem if the book is in the hands of someone who's innocence you are concerned about. Or, more to the point, someone who's innocence you have idealized.

Gran and Abbot's analysis of the books brought back a memory.

I remember being an adolescent boy and seeing my female classmates reading V. C. Andrews. I still have never read any of her books so then, as now, I only knew them by reputation. Child abuse, neglect, incest, imprisonment in the home...pretty nasty stuff, even for a boy who liked his science fiction to have a body count.

The girls who were reading Andrews seemed to take pride in it. The air of mystery around the books added to the mystique junior high boys see in junior high girls. What did they know that we did not and how in the world could it make this type of horror palatable? Why could they "take it" when we didn't even like to look at the covers of these books? And what in the world made it OK for them to read it? Wasn't it kind of like pornography if it had weird sex in it?

The only insight I have is that these girls did know something we did not. They knew that this type of horror, horror within a family and between those who should love one another, was entirely real. Some of them had probably experienced some for themselves.

Here they had it in a manageable form--a book that could be closed--and a woman's voice. The boys were scared to read it, even more so than Are You There God It's Me Margaret, so they embraced the horror and enjoyed our fear.

For once the tables were turned. The 90% of us who were heterosexual were lusting after them more than ever and they could have cared less about us. This perverse series of books made it all the more maddening for us and, I assume, sweeter for them.

Soon, after our voices changed and we got cars, we boys would go back to silencing our female classmates and start trying to get them to go to slasher movies with is. By then everyone of us, male or female, who was going to read Flowers In The Attic had. None of us were innocent anymore and the boys, now fancying ourselves as men, had the upper hand again.

I hope the girls enjoyed those books while they could.

Refresher Course On Anarchism

2009-09-26T10:21:00.005-05:00

I recently posted a number of things in Facebook having to do with anarchism. Predictably, I had a lot of splainin to do for the benefit of people who thought I was advocating social disorder, violence and chaos.

I've written about anarchism on this blog before so I'm not going to go into a ton of detail here, but I do want to say a few things and provide a few links for those who have not read my older posts on the subject.

I am an anarchist because:

1) Human social organization should be voluntary.
2) Jesus teaches that humans should not control one another through force, fraud, or coercion.
3) Jesus teaches that one should control one's self.
4) All legitimate power and authority is God's and God's alone.
5) Governments do not prevent violence, coercion, theft or the destruction of property. They institutionalize and perpetuate these things in prisons, wars, corruption, cronyism and the like.
6) Freedom is good.

That said, I do not advocate the immediate elimination of government. True freedom needs to be grown into. The immediate elimination of government from a society that has relied on it for generations results in despotism under the hand of whoever maintained power in the absence of the previous government. Exhibit #1--Afganistan. Exhibit #2--Haiti.

Rather, we should be working toward individually living the sort of love, grace and personal responsibility that requires no government and forming communities that support this. Perhaps our children's children can be free.

Here are some links.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism
Anarchist in the Spanish civil war: http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/spaindx.html
http://www.jesusradicals.com/anarchism/
George Henry Evans, Abolition, Anarchism: http://uncletaz.com/liberty/evans_origins.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_schools_of_thought
An extensive FAQ about anarchism http://www.infoshop.org/faq/index.html

Microsoft Campaign Encourages Windows 7 Themed House Parties

2009-09-24T16:25:00.003-05:00

I believed it. Then I didn't believe it. Then I did some research. Now I do not believe. I know.

Microsoft, one of the most humorless and generally least-fun companies in the history of computing (second, perhaps, to Novell before they bought SuSE) is sponsoring an event on houseparty.com and providing--get this--training materials on how to throw your own Windows 7 launch party.

Any of you who work in IT may have noticed that Microsoft seems slightly less evil of late. Windows 7 appears to be an unquestionable improvement over Vista, Internet Explorer is safer to use than in the recent past and it's been years since they have made unilateral changes to the global DNS network.

Microsoft could give up evil entirely, devote the whole corporation to using their considerable powers exclusively for good...and this would still be a dumb idea.

My eMusic Ratings

2009-09-14T20:25:00.001-05:00

New Track: Dub Dub Dub: Finished Mix

2009-09-12T20:34:00.001-05:00

Dub Dub Dub by DJ Dual Core

Ratio of Effects Returns to Audio Tracks

2009-09-11T19:59:00.003-05:00

This probably says something about me as a musician but I really don't know what it is. Perhaps I believe, on some level, that effects and instruments are variations on a theme, not truly distinct kinds of musical tools.

The Role of "Bad Music" and My Latest Hate Mail

2009-09-02T10:51:00.005-05:00

Anybody who has anything to say, and does so publicly, will get hate mail. In my case it's hate blog comments, but it works the same way. I just got one inspired by my review of the Locash Cowboys set opening for Cross Canadian Ragweed. It made me think.

I think I understand how hate mail works. A person is angered by something but they can't do anything about it--another person's opinion, for example. They also can't picture discussing the matter with whomever set them off.

This is why the nexus of music and politics generates so much hate mail. Just ask The Dixie Chicks.

Writers of hate mail have one thing exactly right. The reason the angry person can't picture discussing the matter is that there truly is nothing to discuss. Music and politics (and religion) have so much to do with identity that rational thought and forthright conversation can slip away very quickly.

Emotion takes over. End of conversation.

None of that is news. What was thought provoking about the hate mail I just got was not the ad hominem abuse or that the sender may not have read much of my review, or didn't spell check. Those things are all pretty standard. Most people don't put a lot of thought into their hate mail. They get mad, rip through writing the message and shoot it off before they cool down enough to think better of it.

What struck me was the pointlessness. Here is a person who is probably only a casual fan of this band, but identifies with them. I criticized the band and because they identify with the band they felt criticized. Fair enough. Somebody bashes a band I like I may have some feelings about that.

Still, if some act I dig is doing something lame that I didn't notice, I want to know...although not for the reasons you might expect.

The ultimate pointlessness, the real reason this person was wasting his or her breath, is that I wasn't talking to them. I wasn't talking to the fans. I was talking to artists. My problem is with artists who disrespect their audience. If the audience still enjoys the show, fine. Good for them.

It isn't about being right or what you like. It's about making more and better music and, as Henry Rollins says, what you give your audience.

Dub Dub Dub (1st Draft) by DJ Dual Core

2009-08-31T08:10:00.001-05:00

Dub Dub Dub (1st Draft) by DJ Dual Core

The Audacity Audio Editor: Two Things You Didn't Know

2009-08-29T12:33:00.004-05:00

I've been using Audacity, the free (GPL 2) audio editor, on and off for years. I always liked the interface and feature set but I ended up running unstable versions a couple of times and switched to other apps rather than downgrade. Recently I upgraded to a beta of Audacity 1.3.8 for Mac and I'm loving it! In spite of being betaware this version has been rock solid so far. I sometimes get an error message when I initially open the app but I dismiss it and the app runs fine. For a beta release I find that perfectly acceptable.

Since I started using it again I have learned a few things about Audacity. In the picture above you see what I found when I kept on zooming in on a clip I was editing. The dots on the wave form represent the volume of the individual samples making up the digital recording. I checked Audacity's manual to see if these really did represent discrete samples, or if they were just arbitrary GUI elements. They represent samples. How cool is that for free software?

My other big revelation regarding Audacity has to do with it's multi-track abilities. Audacity has supported multiple (in audio "multiple" means "more than two" or "more than stereo") independent tracks as long as I have known about it but I never put it to use. By default Audacity opens a blank stereo file with right and left linked as a single track. This is also how stereo files open by default in Audacity. In this scenario the right and left chanels are edited together.

The usefullness of editing the two sides of a stereo file is obvious. It turns out Audacity makes this a two-click process. There is a menu item labeled "Split stereo track" that turns a stereo track into two panable, independently editable mono tracks.

To the left you see where I have done this with a commercial loop (from Peace Love Productions). Then I copied bits of the original look out to newly created tracks. This is something normally associated with a DAW, not an editor, but Audacity provides everything you need to work with an arbitrary number of audio tracks. The audio on the various tracks doesn't even need to be the same bit depth.

Cartoon About Cartoon Mice: Lore Sjöberg

2009-08-21T08:24:00.003-05:00

Lore Sjöberg has been kicking very funny ass on the web since the mid 1990's when he and David Nielsen were the primary writers at Brunching Shuttlecocks.

If you have not read his book, The Book Of Ratings, you really should. In it he passes judgment on everything in our world that isn't worth judging and it is funnier than you can even imagine.

Also, don't miss his animation. Finally, I encourage you to root around until you find his Buddhist video game comic. I'm not linking to it because I think it will be even funnier if you have to look for it.

Useless Trivia: Lore is seven days younger than me.

More On Proposed Iowa Farm To Market Bicycle Ban

2009-08-15T15:31:00.003-05:00

A commenter over at Guitar Ted Productions posted this link.

http://www.sysplan.dot.state.ia.us/farm2Market.html

The proposed law would ban bicycles from all roads designated as "farm to market" roads. The PDFs linked on the above page show all roads classified thus in a given Iowa county. Check out yours, or the county of a friends and ask yourself if banning bicycles from that many roads is a good idea.

Now might just be a good time to join the Iowa Bicycle Coalition.

Cross Canadian Ragweed, LoCash Cowboys Concert Review

2009-08-14T20:31:00.003-05:00

Last night my wife, father-in-law and I went to the Cross Canadian Ragweed concert at the Missouri State Fair, on the advice of my sister-in-law.

Rock and roll and country music have been commingling for decades. Whether it is The Eagles from the rock world or Alabama from the country world acts have had feet on both sides of the fence going all the way back to Elvis Presley and Johny Cash's days at Sun Records. Until last night, however, I didn't realize country audiences had embraced post grunge guitar ala Lostprophets and Chevelle. Both bands we heard last night featured guitar that would have limited them to hard rock radio not that many years ago.

Cross Canadian Ragweed

It was an evening of contrasts. I'll start with the bad news.

The opening act was LoCash Cowbodys. To be fair, they are decent technical musicians. Too bad they have no respect for their audience.

This band brought to the stage everything I have against pop country radio. The banter between songs sounded scripted. They pitched buying a $.99 ring tone of one of their singles, with on buyer picked at random to "party" with the band backstage.

The subject matter of the songs was entirely predictable. Partying, home town, proud to be "redneck" and "country." Apparently, it's OK with country audiences if you sound like Fall Out Boy so long as you pat them on the head for being country audiences. This went as far as the chorus of one song spelling out "C-O-U-N-T-R-Y."

If the audience needs to be reminded what kind of music they are listening to something is wrong. I'm not saying LoCash Cowboys should be more country and less rock. I'm saying the music must be lacking if the band has to stroke the audience's collective ego to keep them engaged.

The low points were a sappy ballad about family ties and the closing number. They introduced the ballad by telling us how special the song was to them and to think about either our children or our parents. You know, if the song doesn't stir those thoughts without prompting the audience... Man, what's the point?

Last but not least, in terms of offensiveness anyway, there was the closing song.

I'm all for country bands covering The Beastie Boys. I'm all for genre hopping in general. But the way LoCash Cowboys delivered their closing cover of (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party) was insulting.

For one thing, the irony of playing Fight For Your Right just minutes after prompting us to think warm thoughts about our children (or parents) was almost too much for me. What was even worse (much, much worse) was the band dedicating the song to our soldiers and veterans. Before starting the song itself they lead the crowd in chanting "they fight! for your right! to party!"

I was sitting next to a Vietnam veteran, my father-in-law, for all of this. Like the rest of their early Rick Rubin productions, this Beasties song is about youthful dissipation (porn and skipping school, in this case). I'm pretty sure while he was risking his life and watching others die in Vietnam my father-in-law wasn't thinking "boy, I hope my fellow Americans will always be free to buy Penthouse because of what I'm doing today!"

I wanted to puke.

And now, the good news!

Cross Canadian Ragweed was the headliner and the act recommended to us by my sister in law. Before leaving Iowa I listened to enough 30 second song previews on iTunes to know they might have enough in common with the alt country I've been listening to for me to find the show interesting. Big understatement!

When I saw the Fender 6x10 bass cabinet with the garden gnome sitting on top I had a good feeling. When heard the first round of guitar feedback I knew something interesting was about to happen. What I experienced was a band that played with an understated confidence in their music, the explosive blast and whip crack of which was irresistible for anybody moved by any brand of rock and roll.

Grady Cross and Cody Canada

Cross Canadian Ragweed is a bass, guitar and drums four-piece from Oklahoma and Texas. They are part of the "red dirt" scene, a distinct alt-country community in Oklahoma and Texas that embraces a wide range of style and instrumentation. Ragweed's music is driven by furious guitar, propulsive bass and a style of double-kick drumming associated with hard rock. The guy in the cowboy hat in front of me who had been singing along with LoCash Cowboys 30 minutes before may or may not have thought he was still at a country show. Within a couple of minutes of Cross Canadian Ragweed mounting the stage I realized I was at a really, really good rock concert.

Ragweed's lead singer, Cody Canada, never pandered to his audience. He made us come to him. This show was all about the music. Even when, late in the set, there was some audience participation (something I usually hate, and which LoCash Cowboys abused to no end) it was based not on the band directing the audience but the fact that the audience already knew the songs and were going to sing along anyway.

Bassist Jeremy Plato switched between three different instruments, a stock looking Fender Jazz 4-string and two six string instruments I never identified a make or model on. One fretted and one fretless. He had multiple solos during the set. His musical vocabulary is surprisingly broad. The solos were a pleasure to listen to and he provided important variety and dynamics that helped keep the assault of Canada's lead guitar from being overwhelming.

The truth is that I didn't catch a lot of Ragweed's lyrics. I look forward to digging into them. The bit of reasearch I have done on the band so far is very promising. My initial gut impression that they are coming from the same emotional place as Drive By Truckers is still holding. If you read my recent post on DBT you know I think this is a very good thing.

Calvin Harris performance: Sexism and Music

2009-08-12T15:17:00.003-05:00

Computer Music magazine, one of a number of good British electronic music publications, recently blogged this about a Calvin Harris performance.

Calvin Harris had something more that technological innovation on his mind when he performed. . .using what can most accurately be described as a workstation keyboard made out of young model types.

So, bikini clad MIDI trigger-women: harmless fun, or synth sexism? And to ask a slightly less facetious question, why aren’t more women tweaking the knobs themselves? [http://www.computermusic.co.uk/page/computermusic?entry=calvin_harris_synth_pervert]

The CM post included a YouTube link for the performance. I have not watched it and probably won't. What I find interesting is not that some performer may have done something tasteless (and possibly very expensive, if they are all models) but that somebody at CM has their head OUT of the sand and sees that sexism persists and thrives in modern music.

Look at the adds in the music magazines or check who the humans are behind most any list of electronic acts. Electronic music, which ought to be progressive and inclusive, is totally dominated by white men. Again the world is deprived of the music women have to offer.

New Remix of DJ Dual Core Track "Three"

2009-08-09T18:15:00.005-05:00

I decided to do one final reworking of "Three," from Where Old Mix Tapes Go To Die. This is the "Noise Version." The inverse of the "Piano Version," this mix emphasizes and adds to the noise from the original and has much of the piano removed.

Three (Noise Version) by DJ Dual Core

Just in case you are curious where this stuff comes from, here is a screen shot from Logic Express, where most of the heavy lifting for all three versions of this song were done. This shows all of my mixer channels. One difference from when I was actually working on the song is that channels 10 and 11 had samples piped in from Ableton Live via ReWire. In the original version of "Three" the spoken word samples came in via ReWire as well.

Yes, I am still using Logic Express 7. Increasingly I do most of my work in Live so I have not seen the need to upgrade.

John Hughes Remembrance

2009-08-07T08:12:00.005-05:00

Film writer, producer and director, John Hughes, passed away yesterday at the age of 59. Among people of my age, Hughes is most famous for a handful of films he made in the 1980's. With Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast club and a few others he pioneered a new kind of teen movie featuring superior acting, emotionally charged themes and pop music soundtracks that made the careers of featured artists. However, what my high school classmates and I call "John Hughes movies" represent a small portion of his work. He has credits on dozens of other successful pictures, including some of the most enduring comedies of the last 30 years.

See Dr. Tony Shore's remembrance of Hughes here. (http://obvious.typepad.com/obviouspop/2009/08/the-best-of-john-hughes-in-loving-memory.html)

Software Developers: Quit Recreating The Physical World-We Already Have That

2009-08-01T10:33:00.005-05:00

As an IT professional and electronic musician I see a lot of new computer products and innovations from day to day. I've come to believe that as a society we, collectively, have the wrong idea about what digital technology is good for.

I know that is a sweeping statement, but it is exactly what I mean. We have the big picture all wrong.

Example 1: Musical Instrument and Effect Modeling

If you read about amp sim DAW plugins (or modeled synthesizers or effects) the discussion always comes around to how closely the software duplicates the sound of the original. This makes sense as many of us wish we owned amplifiers that we can't (rare Fenders) or just aren't willing to pay for (overpriced Marshalls [1][2]). Having a piece of software approximate what you can't physically possess is attractive.

There are two problems with this. First, it is always going to be an approximation. Digital technology, by its very nature, can not reproduce the behavior of physical electronics exactly. Even if you put the computer inside an amplifier cabinet and program it to compensate for the differences between the cone in its cabinet and the cone in cabinet being modeled it will not be the same. It can't. Digital modeling will always have quantization errors, no matter how small. Besides, human programmers can not take into account the infinite (literally) number of variables impacting the sound of physical electric/electronic circuits.

That is the pragmatic problem. The goal is unattainable. Sure, some useful software is produced as a result (everyone needs more distortion plugins, right? I know I do.) but it will never do what it purports to do. No matter how good the plugin sounds, it will never put a 1960's Fender Bassman at my disposal.

The philosophical problem, to me, is much greater. Is this a good use of our efforts? Should the best minds in software development, in audio or any other field, be making digital replicas of things that already exist?

No. We should be making things we never had before. We should be making things that could only exist in the digital realm.

Example 2: Second Life and the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse

I had the pleasure of attending an Avatar Orchestra Metaverse rehearsal a number of months ago. AOM only performs in the on-line virtual world, Second Life. I am only an occasional user of Second Life. Although it superficially resembles a 3D game in that you control and are represented by a charactor, called an avatar, it is fundamentally different. There are no set game objectives. Therefore you need to have a reason enter Second Life or, like real life, you will find yourself bored.

A meeting heald in Second Life.

The AOM rehearsal invitation from Humming Pera gave me a reason to be there. Then, it blew my mind.

A 2008 AOM Performance

Most music in Second Life is simply piped in. Most bands and DJs who "perform" in SL are either playing recordings or capturing live performances and streaming the results into SL over an Internet connection. AOM is committed to playing music in SL.

At the rehearsal I was introduced to some of the instruments AOM use. These instruments exist as software objects and only in SL. They are built with SL's scripting language, LSL. In this way, they have created instruments that can be played, in real time, by Second Life avatars. The ones I tried out at the rehearsal had heads up displays (AKA "HUDs") that have the effect of overlaying the instrument's controls over my avatar's field of vision, again like a video game, but created by users of the system, not a game designer.

An example of an SL HUD. This one is for a social networking add-on for SL called MetaLIFE.

These instruments that are used by AOM have never existed before. Even when they use familiar metaphors for their interfaces, an image of a piano keyboard for example, they are still fundamentally different from anything that exists in the physical world. Best of all, there is no need for them to emulate physical instruments.

Second Life contains many recreations of physical places and objects. This is fun and makes the environment less overwhelming and foreign. But these things are not at all what makes SL special.

Marshall McLuhan wrote about the relationship of communications media to time and space. Books, for example, overcome time. The text of a book can be preserved for hundreds of years, every letter in tact. Telephony is much more ephemeral but is very good overcoming the problems of space. A voice can be heard, literally, on the other side of the world via telephone.

Looked at as a communication technology, the manipulable 3D environment of SL overcomes, bypasses and even negates space in ways no other medium, including e-mail, video chat and the World Wide Web, can. The sense of place within SL differs radically from the physical world. The "islands" that make up the SL world occupy places in a digital map but for all practical purposes they are equidistant from each other in that location on the map has no bearing on how long it will take to travel to a given island.

In SL objects can not only be seen by users the world over at the same time, effectively overcoming space on the macro level, like telephony. But these same virtual objects can also change their size arbitrarily at the will of a user or programatically. Thus, SL also overcomes space in the virtualized local environment.

For example, I have conceived of a collaborative step-sequencer that that could be programmed and played by a group of people. In the physical world this has the problem of requiring its interface to accommodate an arbitrary number of users. In SL it can be scaled to the room and the number of users on the fly. I once saw a picnic table in SL that always had an empty chair around it. When an avatar sat in that chair the table automatically enlarged and a new, empty chair was created. Try that on your physical patio!

My Second Life Avatar, DualCore Rhode

Likewise the (virtual) physical abilities of an avatar are unrelated to the physical abilities of the human controlling it. Again, SL overcomes the problems of immediate space. In SL all objects are controlled by computer keyboards and mice. Rather, they are controlled by the standard software commands from keyboards and mice. For people with non-standard bodies this means they can do everything others do in SL assuming they have access to appropriate alternative input devices (AKA, assistive technology). To SL and the objects built there, it doesn't matter at all.

This is what computers, the Internet and other modern digital technology are really good for. If you want to spend time in the physical world, do. But don't recreate it. We already have a real world. I quite like it. I spend most of my time there. When I leave, I want to see something different. More importantly, I want to do something different.

Build something new.

Efforts To Ban Bicycles From Some Iowa Roads

2009-07-29T22:43:00.002-05:00

Thank you to Guitar Ted for writing about this. If we can't share the roads we are all screwed.

http://g-tedproductions.blogspot.com/2009/07/there-aint-enough-room-on-these-roads.html

It's true. There is an effort to ban bicycles from "farm-to-market" roads in Iowa.

This is wrong, for so many different reasons.

Drive-By Truckers: My New Favorite Band I Shouldn't Even Like

2009-07-15T17:52:00.009-05:00

I first discovered Drive-By Truckers [1][2] when my wife bought an Austin City Limits compilation containing a live version of "Outfit." In some ways "Outfit" is not unlike other father/son songs like "Father to Son" by The Alarm[1][2][3] or "Independence Day" by Bruce Springsteen. But "Outfit" grabbed me right away and now, some time later, it hasn't let go and I've become a certifiable fan of Drive-By Truckers.

Drive-By Truckers: Not Getting By On Their Looks

Like "Independence Day" "Outfit" takes only one point of view but it still paints a surprisingly complete image of the environment the father/son relationship is working itself out in. The father speaks with great regret, a recurring theme in DBT and father/son songs. Yet, while other father/son songs focus on staying or leaving "Outfit" keeps coming back to something more nuanced, yet powerful.

"Outfit" is about the relationship between one's identity and one's decisions. Rather than the more predictable "get out of this mill town before it does to you what it did to me" or "I'm getting out of this mill town before it does to me what it did to you, asshole" the father implores his son to take sole control of who he is. "Don't let them take who you are," the father says, but he wraps it in instructions about who to be, not where to go.

That's just good songwriting. I know, you're saying "Just!? Whadayamean 'just?' Good songwriting is rare and precious!"

Of course it is. I say "just" not because I think good songwriting is trivial but because I'm comparing Drive-By Truckers to Bruce Springsteen, a master songwriter. In second generation rock and roll there is Springsteen, Indigo Girls, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Sarah McLachlan, Elvis Costello and, trailing far behind, us mortals.

What makes "Outfit," and much of the rest of the DBT catalog, even more special is that the great songcraft is delivered by a red hot band.

Formed in 1995, Drive-By Truckers is a (usually) six-piece band from Georgia and Alabama. Members have come and gone but the band has maintained a triple-lead guitar arrangement, reminiscent of Molly Hatchet. Whether they are more of an alt-country or southern rock band is an interesting question but ultimately beside the point. They employ broad dynamics and driving beat in the manner of the best rock bands and deliver coherent lyrics with the attitude and twang associated with top-shelf country. I don't know about other parts of North America, but I'll eat my hat if I ever hear DBT on country radio here in Iowa. The stations around here seem to be set on playing endless musical settings of Normal Rockwell paintings. Sadly, DBT's songs about AIDS and murdering judges probably won't make the cut.

Growing up north of the Mason-Dixon Line I've learned to be suspicious of anything rising up from The South. The thing is, DBT has a winning mix hard to come by up here. Only in the best blues, singer songwriter and highly conscious hop-hop can you find northern artists who can deliver this kind of gut level (yet believable) pathos, in or out of character. When you do find it the music tends to be lacking--not bad, mind you, but not like this.

I strongly encourage any and all to check out Drive-By Truckers, especially their albums Decoration Day and The Dirty South.

Cedar Falls Historical "Four-Legged," Grafted, Arched Tree Severely Damaged in Storm

2009-07-10T10:42:00.003-05:00

The very special tree at the corner of 18th and Treemont in Cedar Falls may or may not make it after last night's storm.

http://www.wcfcourier.com/articles/2009/07/10/news/local/doc4a5717af5ad2c9138527852.img

NECC 2009 Conference, Washington DC

2009-06-30T09:29:00.004-05:00

The only other "big" national conferences I've been to are WWDC 2005-2007 in San Francisco.

NECC is altogether different. Larger and more diverse than WWDC, I've found NECC pretty overwhelming. The exhibit hall alone has booths from hundreds of vendors, large and small, all courting people with tech purchasing power in educational institutions.

This is a far cry from the "Apple wants you to know X. You now know X. You may go now," approach of WWDC. Not that I didn't enjoy WWDC. I did. A week at WWDC is worth a month of any 3rd party training I've ever done, but it's all Apple all the time.

There are a lot of K-12 teachers here, and a lot of educational technology faculty from colleges and universities. I was just chatting with a computer science professor I know from home who was here to present about effective ways to teach math using spreadsheets. We share a certain cynicism about technology and how others in education approach it.

To us the new cool thing is much less interesting than what can be done with whatever is available. Machines, in and of themselves, are not particularly interesting. What we can do with them can be mind blowing, but BIGGER, BETTER, FASTER, MORE and the latest buzz word ("cloud," "virtualization," "21st century classroom/learner/teacher,") won't get you there.

It's what you do with it.

By the way, Washington DC is way scarrier than San Francisco, where WWDC is always held. SF has plenty of poverty, homelessness and drugs visible on the streets but DC is fucked up. In addition to the offense to human dignity that is poverty and homelessness in our nation's capitol, the streets don't make sense. I can almost never see the sun and, believe it or not, drinks are even more expenisve than in downtown SF. I paid $15 for a shot of Patron tequila last night.