Music
June 3, 2008
enoughalready
June 3, 2008
For some reason people like to spam faking some of our addresses, so we get a bazillion "delivery error" messages. UGH.
Scrubs Theme Remix of Ode to ZB.
Laughing my ass off here.. awesome
The original track is here:
Woohoo!! So awesome!
2 Comments
1) Don't make us use iTunes, for the love of God (sorry, Steve, but you know I'm right). 7digital or whoever else would've been forgivable.
2) Making people PAY for stems is dodgy. It would be one thing if we could buy stems for our own enjoyment of the whole album.. THAT would be worth buying... I understand they probably want to not be paying for the bandwidth--but seriously, use BitTorrent then or something. Nevermind that, if they didn't want to pay for bandwidth, why would they have all the remixes on their site? None of them seem to play for me, so maybe they didn't get enough...
3) The terms of the remix site are pretty terrible. I mean, giving them total ownership of everything that you upload just sucks. It's completely one-sided. Not only do I have to PAY them for stems, but anything I give back to them they get ALL rights to, and I get absolutely NONE? This is a tough sell.
Anyway, it's just disappointing. With just some slight changes this could feel like so much less of an marketing stunt and more like something legit and good.
2 Comments
The Long Stretch and Not The One
(these are very preliminary, 2 hour mixes)
Recordings:
the last 99
the last 99 slow
2 Comments
Here's a song I made last night: Radon.
Umm, what else in the last month? OK so I'm boring..
1) Poor (and often hard to find) documentation-- Yes, some of the newer APIs are decently documented, but dig in and try to use ATSU to render text, and it's a world of pain. Looking through header files that all seem to assume you know what to do. This is tolerable, though, with enough digging you can find what you want.
2) The AudioUnits SDK-- the API for AudioUnits is defined in a header, but not documented. So to use AU, you'd have to either just use the SDK (with EXTENSIVE amounts of code), or reverse engineer it to figure out what calls you need to do to control the plug-ins yourself. Someone obviously spent a lot of time defining an extensible plug-in API, why the fuck don't they document it?! I mean, really, just a "first, call this, then, call that, then, when you're ready to process X, do Y." If this info is somewhere, someone please let me know... (see the next point)
3) The previous two points might to be related to the fact that Apple seems to assume that as a Mac developer, I've been developing for macs continuously since 1984, and have religiously read the developer mailing list since whenever it was created. Apple: for the love of god find some way of getting those mailing list posts linked to/from the relevant documentation pages.
4) There are WAY too many ways to accomplish similar things. The classic example which I bitch about a lot is text rendering--last I checked, there is CoreText (apparently awesome, but 10.5 only), CoreGraphics text functions (seem nice, but lots of limitations including non-functioning text measuring), HITheme rendering (which is nice but doesnt give you much for font style selection), AppKit NSString/NSAttributedString drawing (great, but slow), ATSUI (seems to be the best all around but takes a bit to get to the point where you get what's going on). I understand that there are historical reasons for these APIs, but again, this can be fixed with proper documentation (perhaps a page describing all of the APIs and their benefits and drawbacks).
5) Addition of new APIs in new OS versions. I know Apple wants to sell new OS versions, but from a developers standpoint, it's really difficult to properly support multiple versions of OS X. I'd like to use new OS features if available, but fall back to old versions if not. If there's a clean way to do this, I'd love to hear about it -- on Windows we usually just load the appropriate DLLs if available..
6) Performance on OS X for basic graphics drawing seems terrible. Perhaps if you take advantage of the highly OS X specific stuff, you can get around some of this, but as an example I made two native projects, one for OS X and one for Win32, that create a 640x480 window and try to draw at about 30fps. They fill the background black and draw white lines. On Windows basic double buffering is used, on OS X the system buffers the drawing. The OS X version uses Cocoa and CoreGraphics to draw, and the view is opaque.
The source code which you can build is here (VC6/win and Xcode2.4+ for OS X required).
Results: on the same Core2 hardware: OS X: 11% CPU use. WinXP: 1% CPU use. In fairness to OS X, it was drawing pretty antialiased lines, however when I disabled AA on the OS X build, the CPU use went _UP_ to 20%. Go figure. It's not really the line drawing, either--make it draw just one line the numbers dont change much...
I guess most people don't care about the size of their software, but for us keeping the program size down is also part of keeping the development process fast and efficient. If I have to upload a 30mb installer and everybody has to download one to test...
and Windows...
Well I don't have anything to really bitch about Windows right now, but I'm really disappointed with all of the VC++ builds after VC6. The issues are a plenty, but it makes it hard to upgrade. All dynamic linking uses msvcrt71.dll etc which even MS doesnt distribute anymore, so you end up having to static link. Bleh.
February 14, 2008
14 Comments
Shot this in 45m, then spent an hour or so editing:
It's actually a lot better in high quality form (17MB XVID AVI).
Perhaps if I'd actually written a song ahead of time it would have been better...
2 Comments
The Radiohead NYE special was (predictably?) good. Mmm. My tivo won't erase that for a while.
We migrated to SVN for version control a while back. Definitely liking it, and Tortoise SVN rules. No good free mac SVN clients I've found, though (anybody?). So for now the command line version isn't bad. I can't believed I'd used VSS and/or SourceOffSite for over 8 years. Eep.
I've set up an SVN server for use with audio and REAPER projects, to aide in some collaboration. It's sort of working, although I think most people aren't used to version control.
Someone REALLY needs to make a web site where you can upload projects with media, then other people can make derived versions, and upload them, and you can go through the whole tree of projects etc. Seriously. Either using something like SVN or whatever. Would be awesome to open up that sort of collaboration. I know there are sites out there doing half of this, but I haven't seen it done really well.
Oh and I never posted this link here, our show we played in November:
But now sadly Christophe has fled the country off to a beach somewhere, and we're lonely and drummerless.
What else? Well it'll have to wait til next time.
Recordings:
freeform jam with biderman
5 Comments
Man this is funny shit though (which I first read on At Ease), Lily Allen complaining about Radiohead, "It's arrogant for them to give their music away for free - they've got millions of pounds. It sends a weird message to younger bands who haven't done as well.".
YEAH! THATS MESSED UP! And all those people making open source software shouldn't do that either, because it's unfair to all of the soon-to-be Microsoft's of the world as well!
(As a side note, sorry Craig, I know you like Lily Allen, but think how this could be directed at Prince, too)..
The comments on that At Ease article page are hilarious, though. Some great reading, especially if you are putting of write a tab control wrapper layer...
SWELL allows you to easily adapt Windows code to target Quartz natively. It's not trying to be completely compatibility like WINE or WINELib, but rather is focusing on providing the minimal subset, with maximum efficiency and minimal overhead. I'm actually getting into it, too.
If you are a Windows developer considering porting stuff to OS X, you should check it out. Well, actually wait a few weeks cause we're in the process of making it a LOT better. :) Oh and don't forget to remap XCode's keys to make it behave more like MSVC!
Just watched election night coverage from 2000, and man, Stephen Colbert CALLED IT. Watch this video:
Now I know you could say he was just joking, but holy shit.
REAPER 2.0 woohoo
After over a month in beta, we finally released 2.0 final. Woohoo. Here's the changelog (condensed but shown here so I can reflect on the lengthh of it):
October 10, 2007
wow i just noticed...
Radiohead (my favorite band) is now selling all of their catalogue online in
DRM-free MP3. WOW. This is awesome.
September 22, 2007
I might have to buy some of the B sides I don't have...
The Motorola MPx 220
This phone I've had the longest. It's a great flip phone factor (which makes it
very satisfying to hang up), and while it's technically a smart phone (running
Windows CE of all OSes), it has good phone features (the dialing feels nice,
and it's easy to look up names in the address book using the number pad).
It was a pain to sync with the computer without having to use some shareware
backup software, though. There was no pointing device, the data connection was
a bit slow, the browser basic, but even though the screen was pretty small, you
could play videos using TCPMP.. Also I like how easy it is to charge via the
USB cable too.
The Palm Treo 650
I think I had the biggest complaints with the Treo (in fact, I think it's the
one I'd be the least likely to go back to). From crashing silently and not
answering calls, to the touch screen annoying my face, to it being the largest,
the list can go on. The upsides are the huge software library (mmm the VNC
client was very usable), and incredibly good battery life.
The Nokia E70
This phone (which isn't really offered by any carriers in the US) was great,
and I think I may still use it. It's bluetooth support is by far the best
(I used BT dial up networking + GPRS on a 3 hour train ride last month and
it was outstanding), the phone has great features (WiFi, fast EDGE data,
great keyboard that flips out, a good SSH client that you can leave running
and come back to, even after making/receving calls or running other apps, etc).
The screen is really high resolution, too, but it's a bit small (so you really
have to get very close to read it). I really loved my old Nokia TDMA phones,
but I think Nokia needs to reevaluate some decisions they made on the E70's
firmware. For example, there's a button on the left side of the phone that
opens the voice recorder and starts it recording. It's very easy to hit, and
there's no way to override this function! Ack. Also there's no auto-lock
after a certain amount of time, so you have to be sure to manually lock the
keypad. Oh, and little things like looking up names in the contact list, with
the keyboard closed, is much harder than it needs to be. The MPX220's method
was far superior.
The Apple iPhone
I just got this yesterday (thanks DB), and there's definitely things to like.
I dig the screen. It's about the same resolution of the E70, but oh it's so
much bigger and easier to read. The web browser is fantastic. The phone is
decent. The homebrew software is getting there (VNC client looked nice, but no
keyboard yet? ack). Mmm, real headphone jack, too. Why couldn't they do that
on the E70? And it autolocks too. Hello, Nokia? But alas, no BT DUN (sad).
The touchscreen keyboard, while as good as I've seen for the type, makes me
wish I had the E70's again... Oh well...
So maybe I'll start carrying the iPhone and take the E70 with me on trips (for
when I need BT DUN)...
anyway
four paths to mediocrity
I've just started using my fourth mobile phone this year. They all are lacking, in mostly different ways...
September 22, 2007
3 Comments