The hardware collection is slowly growing (still in the process of acquiring all the basics though). The most recent addition was a 61-keys USB MIDI keyboard. I always wanted to have a velocity-sensitive keyboard since I was a young kid. Back in the days those things were awfully expensive and now they are very reasonably priced! (Next obstacle: actually learn to play the damn thing. )

Anyway, almost everything in the set-up works fine. I could play back my compositions — but the ‘jackrec’ utility was inserting static after 10 or 15 seconds (always at about the same time, but it depended on the buffer size that I used).

This prevented me from getting a whole piece olayed back and recorded into a file. Kind of a bummer, that being the most essential part of the process…

Before debugging it myself, I tried compiling a more recent version which “just works” perfectly. So that was cool.

Having updated LinuxSampler recently as well, today I have been testing out the complete set-up of “new” audio software to get to grips with the “mastering process” to get Rosegarden compositions into a portable format like WAV and MP3.

My Rosegarden app is running on a real-time kernel and it uses MIDI (over network transport with JACK) to talk to my LinuxSampler running on another machine (also a real-time kernel)… Latency isn’t that bad at all. (But I do have the machines on a seperate switch so they don’t have to deal with all the other network traffic.)

I free-styled a short little piece with, at times, a hideously out-of-tune accompaniment (I didn’t care to re-do it or to tweak it). I did care about the even more hideous percussion track — which I have muted in the final file below.

The Reverb and EQ-ing is done real-time with ‘jack-rack’, but that is something that I really need to do later in the process. Not only would it reduce load and latency; doing it later would allow me access to some non-realtime LADSPA plugins (with Audacity).

BTW, speaking of Audacity, one of the most cool features is, when zoomed in at a high level, you can use a draw tool to polish away clicks and pops.

The original recording of the “mastered” file had one distinct click that I could get rid of in such a way.

Check it out — it’s free “music”! (Yeh, you get what you pay for )

I had to use ‘midimon’ to find the correct values and changed the defines in nekobee_synth.h.

After doing this, I found that the Volume knob was not responding correctly (it was not updating while I twisted it, nor did the sound change). I had to mess around in another file as well…

If you also want to be able to use the X-Session Pro mixer controller as a musical instrument: here is the patch.

I was pleasantly surprised to notice that Rosegarden nicely records those tweaks as well, so if I play back my composition, the knobs in the interface turn, too. Nice

One word of warning though: this patch locks the controls to the X-Session Pro. In the event of other hardware and having changed these mappings again, all your old compositions in your favourite MIDI sequencer shall no longer play back like it sounded before. Keep this in mind…

As a young kid I bought almost all the Art Of Noise’s music. Likewise, Rakim (of Eric B and Rakim fame) has been an inspiration as well…

And I only just now discovered they once did a collaboration together… Sweet!

This was probably the best concert I’ve seen in my whole damn life.

Ab-so-fucking-lutely awesome.

I was just reading Bruce Schneier’s CRYPTO-GRAM and he linked to this suprisingly good track (direct link to MP3) by MC Frontalot, called Secrets From The Future (direct link to the lyrics).

To quote the chorus:

You can’t hide secrets from the future with math.
You can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh
at the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed
to enforce cryptographs in the past.

I dig it — I really, really dig it.

This song makes me want to own a car again … so that I can play this song on repeat — really, really frigging loud.

Everlast, Rap, Rock, War, Middle-East

See, my girlfriend found the new site set up by Everlast (to spread the word about his new album, Love War and The Ghost of Whitey Ford, I assume) called “Martyr Inc.“. (A pretty nice design job it is, I must say.)

I just love page 3 in the Book of Life, which I can relate to as we still had obligatory military service here in the Netherlands and that P.E. song was an inspiration to me to ‘rebel’ at that time.

Anyways I thought I’d spread the link here as well, as I know some of the few readers I have are into the same music.

(Oh yeah, and a happy new year and all that.)

I still cannot make out whether it is a sample from the actual Transformers-series, or if he is saying something else…

Quote Of The Week, QOTW

I remember him being on some talk show on the BBC this year — alive and kicking so I was rather surprised to read about this.

His music has been an inspiration to many musicians — I know there’s numerous songs sampling him or the music by his band. I bet that will most likely continue. And that’s cool.

Update: Last night (16th today), it happened again — so I changed a few lines and also thought heck let’s make this one public (which is something I usually don’t do with this stuff, most of this stuff is strictly for my own eyes only heh). Anyway, it’s in Dutch, but as you can see I added an English translation, although that doesn’t mean you have to read it.

Here goes:

Also, some less subtle lines ‘came to me’ (more of a song though, and in English) — I may post it when it’s complete. That said, I’ve been playing with some other lyrics for over 12 years (!) so I’m not even sure if it’ll ever complete. It’s a ‘good’ thing the world only gets worse so at least the topics will stay relevant for quite some time I think…

And that day was today and, as I’m typing this, I’m listening to the track Ghetto Manifesto which I incidentally already heard on Paris’s Hard Truth Soldiers Vol. 1 (its another version though).

Anyway, the CD’s cool. I had already checked out Pick A Bigger Weapon and already dug The Coup’s style: its disco-y, funky dynamic sounds and the political content — I love it. They have done a track together with dead prez called Get Up which is pretty good too.

This album, incidentally, was pretty controversial because the original design of their CD showed the WTC blown up — just like happened in that same year. (Woah, for a second there I thought the image was yanked, but its still on the Wikipedia article, under the heading ‘Alternate Covers‘.)

If you dig this stuff, buy it. Maybe — artists like this will even get some air-play on public radio-stations…

Music, The Coup, Political, Rap, Hip-Hop

But damn, my browser does not support Flash (well not the latest version anyways) and I can’t see it — but I’ll bet there must be some way to get to that stream-URL the moment it goes live. (I’m not putting too much money on it, though..)

Well, at least they got a new album out as well, an acoustic one, `Bare Stripped Naked‘ — gotta check it out.

Bands, Dutch, Bettie Serveert

Quote Of The Week, QOTW

Anyways, one I couldn’t really find was the LA Dream Teams’ In The House for quite a while.

Today, I did though — right here.

Enjoy.

Music, Old-School, Electro, LA Dream Team

WEB2DNA will take you website, analyze it, crunch it to little bits and spit it out as a graphic representation of a human DNA.

The brightness of the lines is determined by the importance of the tags in terms of structure.
[..]
Basically a semantically rich site will appear brighter than one with messy old-style code.

Using this website as input, I got this one (clicking on it will load the unscaled image):

Cool stuff because there’s bound to be a few related websites, if you know what I mean: there could be a twin-sister or -brother site of this one.

Interesting…

Web2DNA, Analysis, Rendering

And they’re doing it with a lot of yee-hah too. Ah, the smell of money can do wonders…

Maybe… Just maybe, they will realise they lost a lot of money by the stance they took, of ‘piracy is bad for the music biz‘ whereas, in reality that piracy could’ve resulted in more album sales….

Music Industry, DRM, P2P

Quote Of The Week, QOTW

Quote Of The Week, QOTW

Although no writings survived — stories have: one of these is that when Alexander the Great saw the man going through a pile of (human) bones, Diogenes explained to Alexander what he was doing:

QOTW, Quote Of The Week

Really can’t wait until their first CD is out — the tracks available in the MySpace player sound pretty promising.

Music, Rap, Hiphop, Everlast

Interesting quote:

Describe how your very pronounced political perspectives have affected you from a business standpoint.

There were more issues with putting out Sonic Jihad than Sleeping with the Enemy. Sleeping with the Enemy was my second album and it featured “Bush Killa” and “Coffee, Donuts and Death” which were pretty incendiary at the time. I mean, “Bush Killa” called for the assassination of President Bush’s father while he was in office. It was a record that had a lot of anger and spoke directly in response to conditions that existed in our community, and the neglect and lack of attention that was paid to us except during the election year. The record kicked up a firestorm of protest and people like Charlton Heston, Tipper Gore and that whole contingent of people were already speaking out about Ice-T’s “Cop Killer,” so Warner Music for the most part shut me down. I ended up putting that record out on my own and it damn near went gold.

Paris, Music, Hiphop, Rap, Politics, Media

This autographed card depicting a scene from the film Blade Runner might even be worth the hassle (no bids at all at the time of this writing either!):

There’s other potentially interesting Rutger Hauer-stuff on auction as well (click here for a list)…

It’s for a good cause too!

Rutger Hauer, eBay