As part of getting my studio Mac in shape for the Logic Pro 8 installation, I’m just now going through and cleaning up a lot of disk space for the needed installations.

After a while of use, the disks, especially the boot disks, tend to collect stuff that’s no longer needed. And it’s important to have at least 10Gb or so available for virtual memory to work without having performance issues.

A really valuable tool for this is Omni’s Omnidisksweeper. There’s a free version, and a paid version. Basically what it does is to sweep through the disk and find all the biggest directories and sub-directories. Then I could go in and look what to delete. The paid version has a ‘delete’ button, but you could get by with just using the Finder and deleting the directories this way.

I found a lot of unnecessary material: usually you find these in the Library, Application Support and Application libraries, and also inside the user directories.

The other thing was to just remove all the Garageband Apple Loops and instruments, and the old Logic preferences. As part of the new install I will just install them again, and I don’t want to have duplicate versions floating around for many reasons.

I also noticed that I have two partitions on my main drive, which is good, as I could install Leopard later when it’s available, and keep Tiger around until I’m happy with the stability and the drivers. So if you have a brand new disk, make it at least a dual partition for this purpose.

I wanted to redo most of the graphics in the podcast series I just announced. I wanted each track to have a unique image, similar to the old tradition of artwork with album covers. Extended postcasts makes it indeed possible to do this now.

Anyway, my graphics talent is close to zero, but I have lots of photos. So what I did was to use KeyNote from Apple. It’s a presentation program, but actually you could define the size to anything, in this case 300×300, as that’s the preferred PNG size for extended podcasts.

After this all I had to do was to drag in the photo, and drag in the small new Something/Everything logo my son did for me tonight. And then type in text, use a fat font with shadowing, and that was it. I did all the ten custom track images in about 40 minutes.

Yes, I know it sounds again like a marketing blurb, but the price for iWork is now $79, so it’s a very good price, and you could get so much artwork done with just KeyNote, so it’s for more than just presentations.

PS: Anyone dare to guess where from that photo is?

PSS: If you already subscribed to the podcast, delete and resubscribe, as it might be that you don’t get the new images in the extended podcast unless you resubscribe. Sorry, but finally the stuff is locked down.

My wife and second kid arrived back from Finland yesterday, so I’ve been somewhat busy with my home life. Hence no big postings. Anyway, some quick notes about this and that about podcasting plans.

I had a definite plan about podcasts as of yesterday, and here comes the Apple .Mac announcements about 10Gb space and 200Gb of monthly data transfer, so my plans about hosting two forthcoming series of podcasts changed. 10Gb is a lot of space. I saw that a 27.30 minute episode of 192kpbs AAC is about 38Mb, so I could host over 260 episodes up on my .mac account of this size, if my calculations are right. Let’s say some meta data and variated sizes, and it’s about 240 episodes or so. That should cover a couple of years, and then I’m sure the size will be upgraded, again.

I could still announce the podcasts on any server, but the storage and actual podcast xml files would be stored over at the .Mac service? Why, because it’s so super-easy to update the podcasting info using GarageBand and iWeb. I’ve tried it out the last three days, and poking in text into XML files compared with doing nice editions in GarageBand and publishing it all via iWeb makes a big difference — at least for someone like me always running out of time.

Now, this requires a .Mac account ($99 year) and GarageBand, $79 unless you have iLife installed as part of a new Mac system purchase. There are third-party solutions to edit podcasts, for sure, but the GarageBand timeline to edit track info, or the simple drag-and-drop images as the main podcast image is so neat. Yes, I sound like an Apple salesperson…

Anyway, I have another Ableton Live Youtube video halfway done, hope to have it finished and published tomorrow, about the joys of clip envelopes. After that I really, really need to go back and do music, again…

I spent most of yesterday converting the PlanetoidPark web site so it’s solely based on WordPress. WordPress is a blogging server solution, open source, but it’s very much now usable for any kind of database back-end web sites.

I’ve been thinking about this for a month, and when I got back from vacation it was one of my todo action items. Why? Because after over two decades of programming, there’s a time and place to stop doing custom solutions and just take something that is done by hundreds of other programmers and extend it yourself, or then help out and give back patches and features to the source base.

With WordPress now I could quickly update any entries and create new ones, and associate images with posts. Also I could add tags, write custom pages, and do all this via a web-interface.

Some notes for anyone else interested in doing this. I changes the permalink (the URL where the postings are found so it’s a direct link with no timestamp using the /%postname%/ construct, for example here’s where all the releases are. This way the web site looks like any other web site, and not directly like a blog site.

I also found this cool audio player widget so I could put promos into each posting using a simple construct. There are other plugins I use, such as the Google Sitemaps widget that automatically makes new sitemaps for search engines each time a new posting is created or updated. I actually expect to find more interesting widgets along the way, or I could write some myself in case I need special solutions.

There are so many ways to customize the CSS via the templates, so there’s no problems with extending and changing the look and feel along the way. There’s also an RSS feed as part of the web site — I do think that’s better long term than mailing lists, as the end users could decide when to read new posts, rather than getting clutter into their mailboxes.

Anyway, in case you are working on a producer, band, or label site, or something similar, and have access to an ISP account with MySql (most of them have it), I really recommend looking into WordPress. Most likely I will turn this web site to a WordPress site, as well, but I need to worry a little bit about avoiding broken links, and do some preplanning before this will happen, but maybe within a month or so. This blog is already using WordPress, so it will be a manner of just changing the rest to this service, and put in symbolic links to avoid possible existing links out there.

I was listening to the special SonicState Freeware AU Plugins Postcast last night, and it was an interesting ten minutes, of many reasons. Mark Tinley did an excellent survey of existing free plugins, and showed various samples of how they sounded. If you have those and let’s say the iLife GarageBand, you could with little means do a lot of music.

Anyway, it was not just the information that was interesting, it was the podcast itself. Mark tweaked his voice left and right with various plugins, and made the whole podcast a weird and interesting audio journey using effects and all kinds of edits. Just listening to that presentation was a reward.

Which leads to my current vacation deep thought thinkings — it happens when you relax that you start to get insights you don’t usually get when the brain is in high gear.

In this age of mixes and music available in the hundreds of releases each week on Internet, you really need to stand out from the massive crowd. Doing an interesting podcast with information, spoken words, and more radio-entertainment centric and personalized would most definitely help in this regard. My bold prediction is that more producers and DJs will start doing personalized podcasts with them speaking about music, music making, music business, and so on.

I will start something similar shortly, as well, stay tuned.

Maybe you already heard, but Reason 4.0 was announced. If you go to the PropellerHeads web site, and click on the top level image blurb, and then click on the image itself, you get more info about the new features in Reason 4.0, including movies showing how it all works.

For me, 3.0 was not exactly what I expected, but 4.0 finally has the things I wanted to see, like a revised/updated sequencer. The ReGroove Mixer is also an interesting approach to make loops sound more human. They also seem to really like arpeggiators, the new Thor synthesizer has it built in, and there’s a new monophonic arpeggiator, RPG-8, that has cool ideas.

Reason is really like this big monolithic synth rack that you control via Rewire, or then write whole compositions using it only. For me, the later part is somewhat problematic, as I like to work in a more traditional DAW, and getting stuck inside Reason sometimes is limiting. But it’s also a very productive environment for quick-and-dirty work, for example writing game music where the clock ticks…

I placed myself on the beta list, so in case I get a chance to test it, I could write more about the first impressions concerning this promising release. Thanks Propellerheads, I think you are back on track.

Ok, here’s another good tool for building web sites, use open source blog software such as WordPress. Here’s an example of a site that refers to music, Shift Industries.

WordPress could also be used to set up a net label, actually something I will try to do tomorrow — just need to find a good name for it (more about that later).

Again, you need a little bit admin and configuration skills to set this up, mostly to configure database access. Otherwise it’s very easy to maintain and administer it, or, you could also get a free account over at wordpress.com, but you will not have a lot of upload space for images and music. Worst case you could always upload content on another system, but then make sure long-term that the links don’t break.

There are of course dedicated web site content management systems such as PostNuke, but I think it’s a little bit overkill for getting the data out. At my own sites I have custom made php scripts that I slowly tinker with. However for this forthcoming net label, I thought just to take it simple and just use wordpress to release material over time.

Here’s another tool that we use quite a lot, especially for the record label work and sharing of information. I was looking for way to find or write a custom database system for all the tiny bits of information that we need to share when working with label releases. But I realized after some hard thinking that I rather spend my few spare hours writing new songs than tinkering with a web-based database application that would require constant rewriting and tinkering.

So I just installed a wiki service on our account. I used usemod, been using it since the early days. You could also look at MediaWiki that Wikipedia is running. The biggest difference is that MediaWiki looks pretty, but requires database access (not hard, but another thing to worry about). While usemod is just creating files inside the directory it is installed under.

In either case, this requires some administration work and maybe a little bit custom programming, unless the ISP you are using already provides a wiki service of some kind. Also, you don’t want the whole world to know about your internal releases and other information, so you need to place this under a password protected login.

Anyway, such a freeform database service has so far worked really well for all the work we do concerning keeping track of lots of tiny bits of info — one of those things anyone running a label will notice takes more time than expected.

Actually, let’s go through some cool software that a studio or label could have use of . To start with, I really, really like Voodoopad, there’s a free version and a commercial one. What Voodoopad is a super-smart notebook application, where you could build links between the pages, similar to wiki links. It’s easy to do quick searches across all the pages, and keep track of all kinds of important information. The application also scales really well concerning adding more and more pages.

You could use Voodoopad for keeping track of all kinds of info, serial numbers, tracks on an album, notes about music releases, web urls, and so on and so on.

This is an MacOSX version, but I would think there’s something similar for the Windows platform, too.

Recently I’ve been testing out Pandora with a strange new angle, using it to put together DJ like sessions. Now, it was not about mixing together tracks, rathering testing out if suggestions of tracks would make a cohesive listening experience using dance music recommendations.

As the DJs will get more and more tracks as part of their laptop archive, it will not be uncommon to get lost in let’s say 10,000 tracks, figuring out how each one sounds like, or what works together with each other.

This is where Pandora’s suggestion system could be a meta-level solution that might show up in future DJ browsing systems.

So far I’m both hopeful and not delighted. One problem with Pandora’s marking of similar tracks is that it’s not deeply granular with underground dance music. For example, for a channel where I tried to make it play Berlin style techno, Tiesto tracks show up from time to time.

But I’m hopeful about this kind of browsing technology, with better and better classification of tracks — if possible where the end user could adjust the tags for each track — this might work just fine. So if someone is interested in another music software project, here was the idea.

It’s actually good modern DAWs have a lot of functionality — never a dull moment. Anyway, I’m usually falling into the trap of reading the manuals inside out, and trying to learn it all in one big session. It seldom works.

It’s better to learn one thing at a time, one feature a day or so. For example, you could go through Logic’s feature set, for example the key bindings, and use control-P for a day until your brain is programmed to realize that: “Hey it’s nice that I could switch on the left side between control strip mode and normal mode.”.

Or with Ableton Live, use command-option-B for a while until your brain gets the message that this is for opening and closing the browser view.

It is true that you need to start from somewhere, but just get things up and running with simple projects, and then learn the complexity one thing at a time.

Ok, I opened up the box with Massive tonight, and installed the 1.1 upgrade at the same time that was just released.

First impressions. This software synth is indeed massive. Some patches pumped out air from my reference monitors so I smelled the dust, huh. It’s also massive concerning CPU use. With my G5 2GHz dual CPU system I could get six Massive synths running, then it was done. I could even modify one patch and get the system to its knees. Looking at the CPU meters the synth is single-threaded so it pegged one CPU while the other was not doing anything.

Anyway, sound wise, if you are looking for that concurrent Electro sound with biting/strong lead and bass sounds, this might be the one. Only drawback is that I suspect many electro house producers are busy using Massive just now, so the sound will be present in many releases. But the sound is very much like a big analog synth, just moved to the computer side. I need to get the latest Vanguard, I’m behind with the upgrades there, too, to compare.

Quick check concerning the programming side, it’s somewhat more confusing than the Zebra 2 interface (which is very, very elegant, imho), but you could get the job done with this synth, just need to read the manual carefully. The presets have six default knobs by which you could also quickly tailor some special sounds from the patches.

The patch interface was first confusing — its the Kore interface — but then when you got the hang of it, it was easy to use. The problem was that some of the categories didn’t have any samples, so I looked at the empy list of patches for a short time, until I understood what was going on.

Yes, it’s a fun, strong synth. I think they did a clever job of pushing the sounds towards the ‘massive’ side as that seems to be the sound many producers want to key in just now.

As for this synth indeed being resource-hungry, I need to install it on my MacBookPro to see if there’s a difference. But there’s always the option of freezing tracks, or dumping audio tracks from Logic into Live and do more processing with pure audio tracks (something I do a lot of the times, anyway.)

Here are a couple of other interesting ideas of using the built-in AUHighpass and AULowpass AU plugins that are part of the default MacOSX installation.

I was using them one night to test out the frequency ranges of my near-field monitors, it was interesting to hear how low and high the monitors could reproduce frequencies — this by filtering upwards or downwards audio material.

Then I wanted to also find out if my hearing has decreased, a constant worry when dealing with music business. Fortunately, I could still hear up to 18.5KHz, after all these years, so I’m happy.

You could also sweep down to various frequency ranges and see how much energy is present, or isolate problematic frequency areas. There’s also a band pass filter — AUBandPass — that you could use for this purpose.

These filters don’t take much CPU cycles. The only issue I’ve had with them so far is latency delays, but by placing the same filter on all the tracks it seems to handle the compensation automatically.

Let’s talk about other software I’m using in my studio (MacOSX). The main note taking tool, database system, I’m using is Voodoopad. It’s really neat, it’s like a small wiki and note taking system. It makes cross-linked pages, you could do searches across all the pages, and the final document is one single self-contained file. The Lite version is even free.

I’ve tried all kinds of solutions to keep track of ISRC numbers, BMI registrations, project numbers, and so on, Excel spreadsheets, MySQL databases with web interfaces… The problem with most of these is that the maintenance takes time, cycles I rather would like to use to work on a mastering project, or writing music. Voodoopad is this nice open-ended scratch pad, or database, or list taking system.

For web page handling and uploading I’m using Transmit the ftp server and BBEdit text editor. Yes, I’m old-fashioned, have a set of php functions I’m maintaining. Most musicians have their own promotion web sites nowadays, so it’s good to have good tools for updating the web site.

I’m also usually running Quicksilver for quickly switching between applications. After a while you forgot how you could live without this app switching system. Sometimes I exit this application when doing studio work, just to be sure, then few apps run in my system — don’t want that crash happening in the middle of a big inspirational session 4am!

The rest is all the iLife applications, iWork and so on. I also use LameBrain for LAME MP3 encoding and xACT for the few times I use FLAC (Apple lossless is Ok for my own use). Otherwise I use QuickTime Pro and iTunes for all the audio encoding/decoding needs.