Ok, I could not avoid making predictions, here’s the first one. I know it’s dangerous and prone to silly statements — but then one way to predict the future is to create it, or at least influence it.

We are soon at a point where 90% or more of the music created is based on anyone using tools such as GarageBand, FruityLoops, Acid, and similar easy-to-use applications. As such, it’s getting harder and harder to really find interesting music, as this pro-sumer based music typically is copying existing genres and styles, rather than taking off to new directions.

Meanwhile, big record companies are focusing more on very few artists and bands that they cultivate and re-launch in various configurations, as movie stars, TV-personas, game show hosts, and yes, sometimes also as artists playing on stage. This is what they know how to do, and they want the most out from their investments.

Which leads to a small grey area of interesting artists and bands that unfortunately neither have money, interest, or talent, to spend time doing PR, and rather spend their few working hours producing money and performing. No, having a myspace account is not enough.

DJs, radio personalities and other music influencers will have an opportunity to find such talent and present their material in various forms, at DJ shows, podcasts, radio presentations (in the few cases there are decent radio shows outside the FM radio world, maybe with satellite radio). We need more music lowers such as John Peel (was), John Digweed, and similar music-centric talent finders. Actually, as music consumers we should demand this to happen — or vote with our money and listening statistics.

Here’s an interesting way to test out how the Ableton Live warp modes impact the actual sound quality. Load into an audio track a clip with piano music, such as something by Franz Schubert, or any piano music is fine.

Flip between the warp modes. Observe how each mode colorizes the sound. Re-pitch, no granular synthesis, clean, is the best, of course. But it still sounded thin for me. Complex mode is getting there, but it has a small impact compared with the original sound.

Now, think then when you add lots and lots of clips, especially with the modes that colorize the sound clips, and you get this accumulated effect of sound colorization.

I really hope Ableton Live 7.0 has a really good warp mode that avoids a lot of the current colorization of sound. Meanwhile best to Use Logic and similar tools for high-end quality productions, unfortunately. But for wild remix projects, Live is fine, especially if the output will end up as a compressed lossy MP3 file.

Ok, on our quest to find the Nirvana environment of keeping track of material, for example for DJ use, I tried out the latest Albeton Live 6.0 (b15), and the brand new iTunes 7.0.

This new iTunes is nice as it has now an option to make and select multiple iTunes libraries, hit down the option key when starting iTunes via the icon and you will notice the new dialog box for this option. It means that you could finally have multiple iTunes libraries, one for your DJ collection, one for your listening use (such as Schubert music), and so forth.

Also, now in Ableton Live 6.0 you could drag from iTunes files directly into the audio tracks. So I did this, works fine.

Now, some issues with this. You can’t directly get the .asd files (have not tried to place those inside the original location), with the autowarping, it didn’t seem to find any .asd warp changes. So it’s like doing an auto-warp each and every time, and any tuned .asd files are not used. Ack.

Secondly, if you want to use .als clip collections, which I think it’s the way I will use Ableton from now, that’s not doable, either.

Also, you need a lot of screen estate to have  both Ableton Live and iTunes running, at the same time.

That’s really sad, as iTunes has excellent capabilities for sorting and arranging song sets, including playlists and global searches, so that part can’t be used for this kind of workflow operations.

My wife and I visited the local Ikea store in Palo Alto. We ended up getting a wide but narrow white board, with white legs, and a white lamp to it, too, including new white drapes to be placed in front of the window and the desk.

I think new studio this will remind of a dissection board of alien artifacts somewhere in a secret US laboratory…

The nice thing with a long but narrow desk is that I could have various controllers to the left and right, and drag them to the center when needed. This is much better than with wide desks, or specific studio desks — there’s really for me little need to spend a lot of money getting a studio-like desk, as I don’t have piles of external gear. All my effects are running inside the computer, same with the synthesizers.

But I would like to have various smaller MIDI controllers that I could use from time to time placed around on the desk, DJ controllers, other interesting and experimental ones over time, as well.

I just need to take apart this current desk now, and clean up the mess of cables behind, and dump a lot of junk that has been accumulated in this studio…

I think I will call this new studio setup The White Studio.

Hey, progress. I got mixed and cleaned up the earlier 32 minutes I did months ago, so now all needed is to add another 20 minutes of music.

This is the beauty with a computer-focused studio, I could just load in the material into Ableton Live 5.0 where I ended — this with a new computer setup.

It was interesting to re-hear the material, and clean it up. Somehow I manage to keep mental audio notes about what needs to be fixed, and even after many months, those mental notes bubbled up.

Hopefully this is locked down before end September.

Another strange note is that the more busy I am at work, the more creative I tend to become back home. Reminds me of the last wishes of a dead man, or something similar. Maybe that’s how progress is made — when time is precious.

And yes, no drugs used, even had decaffeinated coffee tonight when working…

I stumbled upon mistake the back side of my studio setup, i.e. everything behind the desk.

What a cable mess! I think the power lines are also crossing with audio cables, and all kinds of nasty things are lurking there.

In addition, I want to make the room feel more spacious, so it’s time to open up the Ikea catalogue and plan for purching a new desk, and other new cool stuff to spiffy up this room.

This current setup has been around for over three years — it actually started as a stress-release exersice one summer weekend when I was a tech lead over at Palm, and the overwhelming amount of responsibilities and deadlines just got into my skin. So building a home studio was a good way to release the stress at that time.

Just now I’m not stressed out at all, but the amount of things that has been collected into this home studio setup over the years is just too much. It’s time to clean it all up.

Maybe it helped to look at the BT video with his home setup, too, to get me inspired.

Next in our search for the audio content Nirvana we are looking at AudioFinder. You could read about the specs and so on at the IcedAudio web site.

I suspect there are other similar applications, been a while since I looked for similar appliations, though. The principle is simple, find audio resources, and manipulate them: copy to a known folder, filter, convert, chop, and so on.

It’s a good idea. However, in my specific case, I just feel that it is too much for a basic idea of quickly finding material from alternate browsing environments such as the Finder or Ableton Live.

So I would pay money for maybe 70% of the features I would never use — for example in the case of non-destructive editing with Ableton Live would not at all like to edit the original files. Most of my audio needs are also down to the level of .aiff files (and some occasional WAV file from beatport.com). Similarly, I preview from inside Ableton Live (or Logic), so there’s no need to do previewing outside these programs.

Anyway, I must applaud the software engineer(s) behind AudioFinder, it is a very nice program.

Next we will actually look at the intriguing possibilities of using Spotlight meta data…