my friends' blogs
- Tom Pedroli — Benjamin
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Today at 12.00 hrs my (our) son was born. We named him Benjamin. The Clair the Lune remix was specially written for this child (as a modern lullaby).
All is well and we are all very happy. read more... - Masterbox — Plugins are your best friend and a dangerous enemy
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I've noted a tendency among a lot of DAW users: They're are more interested in graphics and mousing around with parameters on fancy GUI's than actually to listening to, what they do to the audiosignal. Joe Meek's old saying: "If it sounds right, it is right" seems to support such a simple approach to adjusting the parameters on your plugins. But is your choice of settings actually good or just easy? I say: Know your plugins!
Especially dynamic processing such as EQ's and compressors are beeing extensively marketed to be DSP-versions that are hardly distinguishable from legendary analog audio equipment. They're getting closer by the minute (this is not an outcry of "I think analog equipment sounds better") and I use plugins for mastering purposses more and more. As an example the Powercore based CL1B Tube Tech compressor is excellent as is the native SSL bus-compressor from Waves. But I only use them with moderate settings just as I doo with analog compressors and EQ's. The reason is simple: they sound better and more true to their origins.
I've seen sessions with Pultec inspired plugins gaining 10 dB here and there and compressions settings of 10:1 and a low threshold setting on an acoustic Martin D28 recorded in a great room with good microphones. The result was not in ballance with the instruments real sound, and in the mix, it sounded almost artificial. Lifting vocaltracks with a +12 dB high-shelf starting at around 5 kHz will just let you have problems with the highs of all the other sources in the mix. Putting a 5:1 compression and makeup gain on an accordion just isn't musical and it will for sure only boost those clicksounds you don't whish to be hearing.
The best way to improve sound quality is to work with the recording and the acoustics in the recording situation, but after that, you could improve the "musicality" of your mix drastically by setting your processing to more moderate settings and be more true to the sound of the program material. I'm sure that if you were using hardware, you would never use it with such insane settings, simply because they don't sound their best. By using more musically tuned settings, I think you will be surprised, how much you will hear plugins improve your results. read more... - rodney — computing humor
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Quotes of the day:
Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up. ...The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don't you just love that root certificate message?)
Now you're thinking "oh God, another Linux zealot going off about Windows"... until you see who wrote it: Bill Gates. Full story at Gizmodo Note: this is actually an old story about Windows XP. Vista, as we all know by now, is even worse. read more... - rodney — Symbian is Free Software
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- News just in is that Nokia have bought up Symbian, and intend to release it as Free Software (under the Eclipse Public License) as of today. As far as I'm aware Symbian is currently the most widely used Operating System in the world - there were 100 million phones running Symbian in 2006 - so this means that as of this moment Free Software is now more widely used than proprietary software. That's a pretty significant shift in the way of things, especially considering Symbian own 67% of the smartphone market, with Windows Mobile holding only 13%... read more...
- rodney — Real World stuff
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- Oh, forgot to mention in the last post: I've been spending some time recently talking with The Cedars, winners of the MI7 Real World contest. Looks like the plan is for me to produce the session at Real World Studios sometime next month, if all goes well. I'm very much looking forward to it, they are a great band, and I think we could create some damn fine tracks there. Let's see... read more...
- rodney — back from being a hermit
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I haven't been posting much in the past couple of months, mainly because I've been taking time to work on a new book and get some personal business stuff out of the way.
Things are looking interesting though... we've been approached about a new record deal, and asked to play some more festivals at the end of the year / beginning of next year. So the plan is to spend as much time as possible in the studio over the next few months and finally finish off all of the things that have been sitting on the hard drive for ages in a half-finished state.
So someday soon I might even get round to putting some new songs on the music player! :-)
read more... - Live Ullmann — New website
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Check out www.liveullmann.com
read more... - Live Ullmann — New album coming up soon
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- Please have a taste. read more...
- rodney — looking for the mouse
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- Very possibly the best article ever written about blogging, MMOs, and the participatory culture of the Internet: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus read more...
- rodney — April is the cruellest month
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Well, April is nearly over now, and I can't wait to see the back of it. It's been a horrible month. My home office got burgled twice - and the second time while I was still at home! I lost a ton of my gear, computers, phones, passport, credit cards etc.
Luckily all my data was backed up and I'm slowly getting back to normal, but it's taken some time. So if you've been trying to get hold of me and didn't get an answer, now you know why...
read more... - flamingbess — Flaming Bess airplay at UR Rock - N O W - at 20:00
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follow the link and click on UR Rock Stream
http://www.ur-radio.de/portal.php
one hour interview and songs of our new record Waechter des Lichts starting in 25 minutes
read more... - flamingbess — Flaming Bess airplay at UR Radio next Saturday 20:00
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here is link to listen to a one hour special about the new CD incl. Bandinterview
http://www.ur-radio.de/portal.php
Specials Flaming Bess : Wächter des Lichts
don't miss it
read more... - rodney — back in the studio
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Been up in Manchester at the studio last couple of days, and it's been fun so far. Managed to recreate the lost backing track of a fabulous Cassandra Complex song that we've never been able to play live before, so I think we'll be premiering that at the Bath gig on Friday. Also I think we may have finalised work on a cover song that we'll be playing there too. So far everything sounds fantastic... let's see what the gig itself brings...
read more... - rodney — linux starting to hit the mainstream
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Seems like the market for low-cost Linux-based laptops is just a teeny bit bigger than was previously thought:
Since its launch in October 2007, Eee PCs have shipped more than 1 million units, as of the end of March, and Asustek is optimistic that it will reach its goal of shipping 5 million units of the low-cost notebooks in 2008, the sources said.
That's pretty staggering. I think the discussion of "Is Linux ready for the average user?" is pretty much over now. It's still not trivial to install Linux on machines that weren't originally designed for it, but actually using it is not an issue any more in the great majority of cases. read more... - rodney — The Cassandra Complex in Bath
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For any UK members in the South West, we're playing in Bath next Friday...
read more...
- Tom Pedroli — East Sussex UK
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I had to go to the UK for a few days. My wife accompanied me this time as she practicaly runs the day to day business. We stay in a beautifull hotel in Buxted East Sussex (Park Hotel). The nature is great and we made some long walks thanks to the good weather conditions. I've been to the UK several times, always by car because of my unjustified fear of flying.
All business is done and a nice colaboration is beeing set up for the near future. Kind of washes away the bad taste of my earlier business problems with my stealing office manager.
I (and my wife) in particular look forward to meeting Mike (Mich56341) on Saturday. Rene and I remixed his Dancing Pidgeon, and Mike added his vocals on our Follow the Bass.
With Mindmovie, who visited us with his wife in the Netherlands last year, we were one of the first to join the MI7 community.
It promisses to be a very good spent Saturday afternoon filled with music, friendship and talk about life in general.
read more... - rodney — the robots are on the way...
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I think we just took another step closer to SkyNet:
Open source 3D printer copies itself
Seriously though, this is really quite remarkable.
read more... - rodney — Climate target is not radical enough - study
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Nasa scientist warns the world must urgently make huge CO2 reductions
One of the world's leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.
In a startling reappraisal of the threat, James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, calls for a sharp reduction in C02 limits.
More at The Guardian. It's pretty scary.
read more... - rodney — EeePC
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Spent much of the past couple of days playing with my girlfirend's new EeePC 701. It's a wonderful device, a typically solid, well thought out Asus design. And it's so small! Though admittedly that just makes it look exactly the right size when I see it perched on her lap, since she's a teeny speck herself.
The screen is super small too, but very clear, so the fact that it's only 800x480 isn't too big a problem. And you can connect an external monitor and get more screen space that way, which is nice. It's also incredibly light, which is great, since I'm getting increasingly tired of lugging huge laptops around. There's no Hard Drive, instead using a 4GB Solid State Drive, so you can shake it around as much as you want without fear of problems. Very nice in a portable device.The Xandros Linux OS is almost brilliant, though it has a couple of very annoying niggles:
- When you update the installed software, there's a bug that makes the icons for some programs disappear, thus making it near-impossible to run them
- The Xandros software repositiories don't have some very common and necessary Linux programs in them (e.g. GIMP, GnuCash), so installing them means adding new non-Asus repositories, and possibly ending up in dependency hell. Yes, this has happened to me already - I'll probably have to wipe everything I've installed and start again from scratch later this week. Ho hum.
So basically if you want to use it as a real computer, rather than just a Web and media appliance, that means installing another version of Linux. And without a DVD drive, that looks like a bit of a bitch. So I reckon getting an external USB DVD drive is the way to go, then putting Xubuntu on it. Or maybe Mandriva, since the new version of that is specifically tuned for the EeePC.
Would I recommend it? Right now, probably not for most people, unless you spend a lot of time walking, or on trains and planes, and/or are a Linux geek. However once Asus fix the OS bugs, and the whole thing generally gets a little more mature, it'll be a killer A1 purchase.There's a new version coming in a few months, the EeePC 900, with a bigger screen, bigger Solid State Drive, and also available with Windows XP. Might be a useful box for portable music applications, like DJing...
read more... - flamingbess — Flaming Bess goes itunes
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Hey friends -all 5 CD's including our new album Waechter des Lichts are now also available on itunes
http://www.apple.com/de/itunes/store/music.html read more...
