There’s something special about user-friendly installers; this one is not.

Where do I start? Just having eight+ DVDs that I need to feed in takes time — at some point I think it would be cheaper for even the company to include a small mini-drive or just provide online incremental downloads of the content. As it took so long I tried to do this a little bit at a time, put the computer to sleep and continued next evening. Well, that didn’t work. After two false starts I just ended up doing incremental installations of each part in Komplete 5 (Guitar Rig, FM8 and so on…) As sometimes the DVD got stuck in the computer of some odd reason I had at least something in place.

Now, the installer should know that I had something already installed. Not. If I forgot to un-check an earlier installed component it just happily installed it again. As I don’t know what’s really going on inside the mind of an installer software brain I rather let it do it all over in case it wanted to wipe out something before installing. So that took time.

I would also expect that an installer would remember locations where I had selected download directories for the material. Nope. Now, I think the Vise X kit they use is an old Carbon-based installer; you could see that from the spinning ball that is black&white. But it would be good for Native Instruments to spend some resources to fix the installer. There were cases where I had to start over where I took out a DVD and the installer dialog telling me to insert the other one got stuck in a loop — I think the Vise X stuff is showing its age.

If that was not all; when trying to run Native Instrument’s Service Center application to activate the separate components — that’s didn’t work at all, no activation. I followed some notes that I found via googling about issues with having old or two NI Service Centers installed; removed all entries and plists, but even after that no go. So I just sent an email to their support center.

I do think that installers give the first impression for a software company. If the installation is miserable, you don’t get a good feeling what will happen next. It’s easy to save money on just getting something running, but a complex installation such as Komplete 5 with lots of components and content requires a really user-friendly installer. The only reason I kept my sanity was that I know what’s going on behind the scenes, but after all kinds of improvisations I just had to give up. Imagine a composer with a deadline, looking at a dead Kompakt 3, the clock is  ticking and she or he can’t get anything done with an expensive investment.

I’m sure this all will be sorted out tomorrow (suspect they will send me separate activation keys for each component and I found yet another lurking bug with Komplete 5 upgrades and installations.)

Yes, I don’t need to change guitar strings every week, fortunately for the environment and my wallet. I don’t sweat that much when I play, or then I seldom play in places where there are megawatts of lights on stage.

Now for the sake of batteries, again to save the environment I know roughly the maximal lifetime of a battery in active electronics and I take out 30% of that time range (as well as keep spare batteries with me in case of emergencies). So by keeping track of the dates I know roughly when to switch in new batteries. Save the planet.

As for any other Google calendar usage, in addition to gigs and similar things I also keep track of how many times I have been on stage, jamming, playing with a band, at least 15 minutes. So far the count this year is up to 138 events which is good as I really wanted to get back into the live playing comfort zone.

You could add any information you want, entries are cheap. As the online calendars work from any computer online you could always go in and check for stuff. And the data is also backed up!

I looked at the big brother, SFXMachine Pro, but then again the RT is fine for me, as I have so many effect plug-ins already in addition to all the goodies in Logic Pro 8.

You could try out the simulator here to see what SFXMachine Pro could do.

Another part that I liked was the FM and Modular Synth sections. They are really generators, always on as an effect, producing various plastic synth sounds. I could control the volume via automation as well as other parameters, so it’s useful for strange electronic drones — already used in a track I did last night similar to Todd Rundgren’s “I Think You Know” with those bubbly synths here and there. And yes, I added a couple of arpeggiators, too, to make it more realistic in getting that early-seventies synthscape sound.

I think I know the subtractive model and its programming aspect inside out, but it gets boring to change filter sweeps and ADSR parameters each time. Having something like this that gives totally new sounds is an interesting approach.

I will download the demo and put it through its paces and if it’s there, I will purchase the synth for some future projects (one is called Beatless, an inside joke in our family about beat-less music.) Or then it could be used for more psychedelic stuff.

Anyway, can’t say no for 78 guitar amp simulations, 24 guitar cab models, 22 bass amp models, 22 bass cab simulations, 6 vintage mic preamp models and 80+ stompbox effect models. Or, as my wife stated, that’s really all you need from now, no need to get more plugins for the guitar and bass. We will see.

I think I also remembered that the Line 6 representative over at AES two weeks’ ago stated that  there will be a free upgrade path to their new PodFarm software. Even if so, I don’t mind paying a little bit to upgrade when PodFarm is available — suspect that will neither be that expensive as companies want people to upgrade if possible. If so this is even a bigger good deal than I expected.

I’ve been recording a lot of my guitar tracks using my PodXT, but it seems I got more and more involved in using Logic’s amp simulations for both bass and guitar as there’s more flexibility to change the sound, especially when double-tracking guitar parts. What I do when I’m in a hurry is to record on rhythm guitar region, copy it to another track, then change the delay parameters (-5 and +5), as well as pan the tracks left and right. Then you immediately have a nice guitar spread sound. If I change the amp models I could make the tones different, too.

Now, when I’m not in a hurry I do two different rhythm tracks, as that is more interesting, but takes more time as you need to learn the first track internally so you could follow along with the other rhythm lead without clobbing or otherwise sounding not in sync. A lot of guitar tracking has to do with not playing over each other — and even if it is the same guitar player, you still need to learn what you played half an hour earlier…

PS: Podfarm has two different signal paths! Nice, so I could do combo sounds on one track, it’s another option to make a fatter guitar sounds using two different amp setups at the same time. Not that copying to another track and selecting a separate amp is the same thing, plus I could do panning and other separate effects inside Logic.

PSS: Yep, the upgrade to PodFarm will be free for any GearBox owners.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.