More beats. I always listen to my mixes the day after I make them, because how am I going to know what I’m doing wrong unless I check my work? Often, while actively mixing, something will sound ok, but listening to it later it’ll sound forced or messy. Lives, unexamined and otherwise, relative worth w.r.t. living, etc etc.
Most people do a spooooky halloween special mix, but this isn’t that, really. huh. Maybe I’ll do one today.
Stefny – Flight
Navy b. – S P
Rodrigo Rivera – Despegue programado N2
nemecek – vindaloo jones
Insanek – My last brain (Original Mix)
Ricardo Serapio – Onche
alec troniq – i`m the foolaloof [agaric rmx]
Steve Bug – Swallowed Too Much Bass feat. Paris The Black Fu – Joris Voorn Remix
This one came out pretty well, although there were two stupid mistakes that I covered up with a little post-editing and there a couple transitions that sound sloppy. I’m now hosting files on SoundCloud, which has a really nice interface for listening to tracks and commenting on them.
Tracklist:
unfound43_04_-_minimorph_-_real_place
ldo_benitez_rota_de_nuevo_btb_mix
Tino Boa – Dreisamkeit live
Uniquex_down-draftLabel
Justin Martin, Claude VonStroke – Beat That Bird – Original Mix
Here’s another DJ mix I made recently. I think this one came out quite well, with a minimum of mistakes and much better beat-matching than usual. “Yes Ma’am” is one of my favorite tracks right now. Comments welcome.
Tracklist (about an hour):
david bernabe – alflolol
licuadora system – playing with sticks
monokao – destruccion masiva
DJ Chus, Carlos Manaca, Pablo Ceballos – The Strong Rhythm – D-Unity Remix
NDKj – Main Course – Minicoolboyz Remix
Marc Houle – Dirty Dirty – Original Mix
DJ Baldino – Jumping – Original Mix
Ricky Ambilotti – Construkt – Original Mix
Thega – Hay Dios Mio (Sergio Soroa Remix)
Mark Knight, Funkagenda – Flauta Magica – Original Mix
Do you not like glitchy, thumpy, electronic music? Sorry, can’t help it. The first CD I ever bought that I really, actually wanted for myself was Rave ‘Til Dawn, because I eagerly wanted to own the track “Fuck You.”
People have been sending around this silly video which supposedly proves that Average Folk think the web browser is Google. This is wrong, and a dangerously misleading conclusion.
Firstly, the video itself is an unabashed advertisement for Google. This should be a giant red flag. This is not a “study” or a “survey” or any sort of “research.” It’s a PR stunt. There’s a hipster with big glasses and a fun soundtrack in the background. You don’t see what happened before the questions were asked or how the interviewees were prepped. Based on people’s responses, specifically the guy that says “google” and laughs, the people seem to know the interviewer is from Google.
Secondly, the hipster, who identifies himself as being from Google, is asking people “What is a browser?” Quick, where in Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari does the word “Browser” appear? I’ll give you a few minutes to look. Ubuntu identifies Firefox as “Firefox Web Browser” but I think we can all agree that Linux doesn’t count. On Windows, Firefox is called a browser in a tooltip. Internet Explorer is just “Internet Explorer.”
So imagine you’re an “average” person on the street, and there’s a guy, who may or may not have told you he’s from Google, asking you what a “browser” is. You’ve never seen the word “browser” on your computer before. But you don’t want to just say “I don’t know,” so you think about what the word means. Hm, it must be a thing where you “browse” — that means looking through many options — like browsing the produce aisle. Where do I regularly see options on the internet that I need to look through? Google!
If we wanted to gather real information on what people think about the internet and computers, there are other ways of asking the question. “What program do you use to read the internet?” ((this assumes people know what programs are)) “What is Internet Explorer?” ((Leading, but you’ll get a sense of what people think it is)). An actual researcher could do a much better job judging actual user beliefs.
The question is leading, and the name of the interviewer’s employer is going to skew the results even more. So no matter how ticklishly funny people’s ignorance is, it is worthless to draw any conclusions from the video. Or, to put it another way, any conclusion you may draw from the video, even if it seems to confirm what you already know, is suspect. Thanks to this PR video, Google has given us something new to believe — users are stupid, but they know what Google is. Who’s the fool now? Developers are already linking to the video like some sort of proof of what they already know, and every decision made that’s informed by this new meme is poisoned toward Google’s benefit.
July, 2009: Find out through twitter that Apple released a new version of Final Cut Studio with the softest launch ever, a tiny box in the lower left of the homepage.
Read over the “What’s New” page, and see that, actually, there are lots of decent bugfixes and even some new features!
Wait until some other sucker gets a copy.
Keep waiting as they discover new bugs, problems, and technical headaches introduced by Apple’s “What, me worry?” backwards- and standards-compatibility policy.
Pour over Stu’s inevitable updated post on Final Cut / Quicktime gamma issues. Understand nothing.
Read over John’s inevitable post on the new version of Color, and how it’s still worse for color correction than using a highlighting marker on the monitor.
Read Avid editor bloggers dissing FCP, feel better about not using it yet.
December, 2009: A point release is made that actually works. Purchase it and install on cloned version of hard drive you call “FCS3(?) QUARANTINE”.
Gingerly boot cloned drive and launch FCP.
Oooh new splash screen.
Spend a few minutes reconnecting all your media. Ah well, you’d be suspicious if nothing was offline.
What’d’ya know, not so bad.
Announce to your clients that you support the new version of Final Cut.
Tell them no, not version 6, there’s a new one after that. … It’s been out for, like, 6 months now. … I know you’ve been editing for 2 years, I don’t upgrade in the middle of a project either … No, I can’t online your cut made on version 5 on Panther!
Wait for projects cut on the new version to work through their edit schedule.
Finally switch over to the cloned “Quarantine” drive as your new default boot drive.
July, 2010: do your first online in Final Cut 7 — discover some stupid missing feature or bug.
Sign inevitable petitions to Apple. Geez, when is the new Final Cut coming out??
One thing I’d always wanted to try was DJing, because hey, doesn’t everyone? It’s like being a musician but without all that hard work, skill, and practice. I’d never really pursued the interest, though, because being a DJ, even as a hobbiest, had always been an extremely expensive proposition. Good turntables cost 600$ each, a mixer is another $100 or more, and there’s all the vinyl I’d need to buy. I know myself well enough that I didn’t want to risk dropping close to a grand on a hobby that, in all probability, I’d lose interest in after a month.
In recent years, laptop DJing has gotten more popular, but I still didn’t want to spend 500$ on the software and more on the mp3 music. I could have acquired these by bittorrent or whatever, but I don’t like stealing software and also hate rebooting into windows. Ideally I wanted an open source program that would run on linux, but most of the options I found sucked. My dream of being a superstar DJ appeared forever out of reach.
Then one lazy day of clicking around the internet I discovered Mixxx, an open-source DJing application. Amazingly, it doesn’t suck. After some experimentation, it became clear Mixxx not only didn’t suck, but was actually pretty good. Around the same time, I’d also discovered the wide world of netlabel music. There are artists all over the world who are more than happy to share their tracks for free on the internet. Because I’m not stealing the music, it’s easy to preview tracks and download the ones I like. I quickly built up a catalog of a few hundred decent tracks. I was very close to actually being able to mix music! Visions of neon-haired techno girls danced in my head.
So I have software, I have music, and I haven’t spent any money yet! The Mixxx developers recommend the Hercules DJ MP3 as a good cheap controller, so I snagged one off ebay for 70$. I also have a small older version of this M-Audio MIDI keyboard which I got used for 60$ or so ((I got this when I was playing around with freewheeling, until I realized I don’t play the keyboard)). Lastly, I have an M-Audio Sonica Theater for simultaneous main mix output and headphone preview output ((I also got this from ebay, used. There’s a lot of decent hardware out there that doesn’t really go bad)).
With all of that, my setup was complete: Laptop, sonica multichannel sound card, midi keyboard (for effects), and Hercules DJ MP3
Total cost: ~$150
I got some practice spinning tunes, and quickly discovered all sorts of annoying problems with Mixxx and my setup. The default mixxx theme, for instance, is ugly and doesn’t use screen-space well. I downloaded a cool-looking theme called “Trancer”, but then I wasn’t happy with that so I did what any linux user would do — hacked it and made my own version: My custom Mixxx theme, which fits nicely on my 1280x800 screen
I also wanted to have more control over filters and effects, so I set up a JACK pipeline so I could use my MIDI keyboard to select and tweak effects outside of Mixxx itself. I use the jack-rack program to handle the effects, although I had to hack that too. So when I’m mixing, this is what my desktop looks like: Mixxx on the right, a couple jack-racks on the left, and a little midi notifier at the top left
And while I was playing some music, I discovered some aspects of the Mixxx music library that I didn’t like. Like, I needed some way of knowing which tracks I’d already played so I wouldn’t accidentally play them again. Also, the search bar also didn’t allow for multiple search terms. So I hacked away at the mixxx source code. Now the search box works right and I know if I’ve played a track as well as how many times I’ve ever played it.
The most important patch is the one for mixxx itself. The library is really hobbled without it.
After all this hacking, I finally have a setup that works well. I’m sure a European jet-set lifestyle is not far behind, but although I’ve been mixing for like, close to two months now, I’m still not a superstar DJ. But I did record one session that I consider post-worthy. I call it, “Mixxx session 090710.” Future mix postings will have a full tracklist, but due to a mistake, this one doesn’t. Enjoy!
Last year, I wrote a post about using linux and JACK to delay baseball radio broadcasts by 7 seconds in order to bring it into sync with the TV broadcast. Well, today’s broadcast is on FOX, so that provided all the encouragement I needed to get my setup working again. I have since upgraded my laptop, so I was expecting to spend another seven innings getting JACK to work again.
Luckily it was much easier this year. All I had to do was start JACK like this: pasuspender qjackctl
On modern versions of linux, there’s a system program called “pulseaudio” that normally takes care of all the sound on the system. JACK isn’t compatible with pulseaudio, so it’s necessary to disable pulseaudio while jack is running. Thankfully there’s a little program called “pasuspender” that disables pulseaudio while a specified program is running. So the command above disables pulseaudio while jack is running.
After that, I just had to reproduce the various connections in the screenshot I posted and it all worked. No special kernels, no editing of security files. Phew.
I’ve released a new stable version of PenguinTV, my RSS reader / podcast downloader / media player thing. I really don’t have a lot of time and energy to do proper releases these days, so it hasn’t been tested as well as it should have.
The real reason for doing this release is that there’s a lot of massive code refactoring that I want to do, but I can’t do it without introducing instability. It makes sense to finally release 4.0 before I make a clean break and start screwing around with things.
I’m past the point of trying to push really hard to sell this application to other people, because as long as it works for Char and me that’s all I care about. I spent years making posts, trying to get contributors, etc, but no one seemed really interested in giving it a chance. If someone else finds it useful, good for them.
In creating my online suite, I am attempting a feat which many say cannot be done: creating a system that can run both Avid and Final Cut. Furthermore, I wanted to have Avid and Final Cut hardware installed on the same machine — Mojo DX for Avid and AJA Kona for Final Cut.
This type of hybrid system is not for the faint of heart. Video editing is a high-performance activity, and the editing packages are very picky about what software is installed, which versions, and how the hardware is set up. I was able to get everything running fairly easily, but the question is, is it running well or just limping along?
For instance, when I first set up the system, I thought everything was working just fine. Avid was working handsomely, Final Cut seemed to be working ok, and my disk benchmarks showed that my hard drives were working very quickly. However, I found out that external video playback in Final Cut was very poor. The video image on my external monitor would lag behind the desktop window by several seconds. This evening, I discovered that I couldn’t capture more than 2 minutes of high-quality video (1080i uncompressed) into Avid without throwing up an error. Clearly, the two sides of this black and white cookie were not getting along ((That’s right, I’m making a goddamn Seinfeld reference.)).
Both of these problems stemmed from hardware issues, specifically card slot configuration. The Mac has four slots inside it where one can install hardware cards. Two slots are extra-fast “16x” slots. The others are slower “4x” slots. But even then the two 16x slots are meant for different things. For instance, Slot 1 is for the graphics card. And tonight I found out that the 4x slots aren’t identical either.
Because of all the hardware I have (3 additional cards), there are 6 possible combinations for how I can install them. Trying each combination entails 15-20 minutes of rearranging cables and fastening tiny screws, and then another 15-20 minutes of testing. This is on top of the hours of troubleshooting to discover that, in fact, card slot arrangement was the source of my problems.
At this point I feel like I’ve tried all six. My first arrangement was like this:
16x: Graphics
16x: RAID
4x: Kona
4x: Mojo
Both the Kona and Mojo claim to be 4x devices, so I put them in the 4x slots. I wanted my storage to be as fast as possible, so I put that in the 16x slot.
But, I was getting these problems. Working with my colleagues on twitter, I discovered that the Kona card really wanted to be installed in Slot 2. Once I moved it there, my monitor playback in Final Cut was fixed. So for a couple months, I’ve had the cards arranged like this:
16x: Graphics
16x: Kona
4x: Mojo
4x: RAID
But then, my Avid problems. Well tonight, I found an obscure document that revealed that the Mojo card wants to be in Slot 2 or 4. Of course since I had it in slot 3, I had to move it again:
16x: Graphics
16x: Kona
4x: RAID
4x: Mojo
Now, finally, I think I’ve nailed the right order. Avid is able to capture long clips in high quality, Final Cut plays back correctly, my RAID is still reporting very high read and write speeds, and nothing else has exploded (yet).
Moral of the story: If you can afford to have separate machines for Avid and Final cut, yeah, it’s probably wise to do it that way. I wouldn’t want to pay myself for the hours I’ve put in to fixing these issues. But for those adventurous-types, combining the two is not impossible.
In 2001, I filed a bug for the Evolution email client because one of the email filter actions, “forward to email address,” didn’t work. Today, 8 years later, it got fixed. I don’t even remember exactly what I was trying to do, but I seem to recall others telling me to “just do it with procmail.” I know that if Apple Mail or Outlook was missing this feature there wouldn’t be a bug database to lodge the problem in the first place, but I also suspect that Mail or Outlook wouldn’t have overlooked such an obvious feature in the first place. That’s the open source conundrum for you.
