Good - it's working already

Just checking through my Extreme Tracking referrer logs (yeah, so for bloggers to do that is so 2 years ago, but just BITE ME, ok?) and I notice a couple of people have already arrived here after searching for information about Sound Designer II and how to run it on newer Mac systems (Magma-expanded or otherwise)

Glad it wasn't all in vain then - you know, that ramble I did about it.

(yeah, so I'm giving it back, haha, as if)

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 11:59:07 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Kevin Smith: Always Worth Reading

Very entertaining and perhaps even enlightening diary from Kevin Smith on the making (and finishing) of his Jersey Girl movie.

Makes great films, writes funny words. "Damn his eyes!" etc.

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 6:12:16 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Rolling Stones Remixes (inc. Fatboy Slim Remix) is Number 1 in the USA

On the singles sales chart, anyway. That's the thing about the US charts, there's so many to choose from, you hope to do well in at least one of them.

Anyway, so Reuters has this to say about it and Billboard itself puts it like this [scroll down quite a way].

Ok, so it's not our first US number 1 - after all it's someone else's record with our mixes of it on the CD but, never-the-less, it'll do me just fine.

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 5:10:12 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Out And About

Been catching the last of summer with The Girl down here in lovely Brighton. It's been fab and everything. One of the lovelist things about my home town is the fact that it's actually quite small (in land-mass terms) and so it doesn't take much of a journey to remove yourself from the cityness and all that surrounds it, and go wandering in the green fields and hills of the ajoining countryside.

We spent a lovely afternoon yesterday on Devil's Dyke [tried to find it on Multimap but it just showed a long road disappearing into the wilderness!], which is just on the edge of the South Downs. It's a lovely journey just to get there. You board a specially laid on open-top bus, costs a couple of quid for a return, takes 25 minutes through the centre of town and you end up on top of a very big hill (which we even climbed up!) to be greeted with a spectacular view, which looks a bit like this:

(ok, so they are not great pictures in the technical sense, but that's not important right now)

We sat in the pub at the top of the hill from which those pictures were taken and had a nice pub sunday lunch (the roast potatoes were a bit dry though, thinking about it) with all the families taking their little ones out for the afternoon. And it all felt very grown up.

It is nice around here.

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 11:14:19 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Excellent new comedy database from the BBC launched

At: BBC - Comedy - Guide.

It's excellent. And huge.

MESSAGE ENDS

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 5:54:42 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Running Sound Designer II on a Powerbook with Magma PCI Expansion

To my untrained brain (oh, rhyming so early in the day, ouch) there are a few different sorts of blog posts. One type is the 'keeping my friends and family up to date with my whereabouts' one. Simple enough. Then there's the 'my opinion on that is this' blog type. Lots of those around. A third might be described as 'it's a bunch of stuff about how to do something, which might be handy for someone else one day if they are Googling (tm) about said subject matter'

The following is mainly of the latter type.

For reasons best known to themselves Digidesign chose not to keep up maintenance and even bother with decent upgrades of one their best bits of software ever, namely Sound Designer II (there are rumours that a disgruntled [ex]employee ran off with the original source code at some point, but I have no idea if there's any truth to that)

As I've mentioned on this page before, Digi's Pro Tools system* is about as good as it gets for multitrack audio editing. However, it's a fiddle and just general Hard Work to use it for normal 2 track stereo editing (which I do a lot of i.e. when editing music for radio) - their Sound Designer software (which dates back to the late 80s, and even originally ran on an Atari ST setup, of which I still have a working system hidden in the back of a cupboard somewhere) is brilliant - and I use that word in the very real sense of being Really Bloody Good - for that task.

So, bearing all that in mind, for the last few years I've had an old Macintosh in the studio (a Computer Warehouse 604e-based clone from the mid-90s, upgraded with a 400Mhz G3 L2-cache card) just for running Sound Designer II. It's fine and all that, but a bit of a pain to have to keep swapping over to that machine as I usually work on the newer faster machines (for example the Powerbook I'm writing this post on now) for everything except stereo editing.

"Wouldn't it be nice", I said [talking to myself again], "if I could run Sound Designer on the laptop? Then I could base almost all of my audio work around one setup."

And now I can! (The crux of this post will be along shortly)

I should point out, that like all Digidesign software**, you need to have some form of Digidesign hardware to be able to run their software at all. Beit PCI cards and external audio interfaces for Pro Tools TDM/H-TDM or a Firewire device such as the Digi002[Rack] or even a USB jobby, namely their MBox, for the LE (= cutdown but still very usable) version of Pro Tools. And there's the Digi001 which is PCI-based but only runs Pro Tools LE. Well, Sound Designer requires - for the purposes of this description anyway - an Audiomedia card (either a "II" for NuBus systems, or a "III", also called the "Toolbox", for PCI/PPC setups).

Now, Powerbooks don't have PCI card slots. Which makes running SDII on a Powerbook a little tricky. Unless you add some PCI slots of course! So, that's what I have just done.

I purchased a Magna 2 Slot PCI Expansion Box from the nice people at Amplicon - who just happen to be based up the road from me in Brighton.

It's a brilliantly designed bit of kit. You plug it into the PCMCIA/PC Card slot. And it just works!. It gives me my favourite editing system on a computer that couldn't run it before. It makes my life easier. The tea it makes is a bit crap though. Haha.

I was pleasantly suprised at the size of the unit too. It fits nicely underneath the Powerbook and, as a service to you - my dear reader - I even took a picture to demonstrate this. Shame about the way the cables protrude out of the left-hand side, but hey it has to be connected somehow I guess....

For reference purposes, for those trying this at home (oh, look out, here comes the important bit!) the software setup that is working for me right now consists of:

Sound Designer II 2.83
Digi INIT 5.1.1
DAE 5.1.1
(note: you have to boot into Mac OS 9 for the Digi extensions to load properly, so a machine capable of dual booting is required!)

Earlier versions of DAE and the Digi INIT don't work well, if at all, on Mac OS 9.2.2 (which this machine has installed, as it does run OS X too, and 9.2.2 is the required version to be able to do Classicy stuff)

OK, so that took at long time to get to the science bit, but I wanted to spell it all out in slightly too much detail to assist people doing a search about this setup (and as someone who did that very search before buying the Magma, and not being too successful, I'm just trying to redress that balance a bit)

You can wake up now, it's over.

*unfortunately, the Digidesign website doesn't have good URLs for getting to specific pages about specific products, so you always have to go through the index page to find things. So that's why I've used some links to non-Digidesign sites for product details here.

**apart from the Pro Tools Free edition for Windows 98 and Mac OS 8/9.

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 12:45:41 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Typical. Now there's a 40Gb iPod too. Grrrrr!

I only just got around to buying a 30Gb iPod and now they've gone and released a 40Gb model. Considering one of the main reasons I put off getting one for so long was because the capacity isn't quite high enough for me (when I get around to doing it, I'll easily be able to fill my one up) this is a bit of a bummer, as they say.

Then again, the other reason I wasn't sure about getting an iPod at all was because of the price (they are overpriced, and they really don't have to be) and until that's resolved the 30Gb will be the model I stay with.

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 11:46:24 AM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

CSS options: easier than a book?

Stumbled across this Quick CSS Tool just now. A good way of remembering what values are valid for what CSS selectors, because I'm always forgetting all the options and usually end up having to have a CSS book or two open on the desk as I'm playing with style sheet stuff...I will use this site from now on I think.

(Yes, you may have noticed I've gone all black-on-white again, after a spell in white-on-black land...oh, and the logo? Well, why not? Eh?)

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 10:31:28 AM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

We Are (Still) Not Alone

In my formative years (what was I forming, I wonder? I hesitate to even think about that...) Close Encounters Of The Third Kind was a big film for me. It came out in 1977, so I was just the right age to be getting into 'proper' films and also be taken in by the whole 'is there something out there?' scenario. Yes, I was only 7 at the time, but I think it was a PG rated film and, anyway, my mum had friends who worked at my local Odeon, so I often could get in to things easily :). I do remember seeing it at home in the early 80s when the first wave of pirated VHS films started to be passed around, oh how things haven't changed that much!

Currently watching it again for the first time in many years on Sky. I'd forgotten a/ how creepy it is (even now) and b/ how funny it is. In fact, I'm not sure I ever noticed the funny bits before (just had the scene where they remove the big globe from it's stand to check the map coordinates etc, you'll know the bit I mean if you have seen it!)

I would suspect ET is seen as the bigger of Spielberg's 70s/80s alien films, - and with all the hype and marketing around ET that's not surpising I suppose (Atari VCS ET game, anyone?) but I'll suggest that CEOTTK is a much better film. I realise it is regarded as a classic (see the IMBD entry for example) but I imagine it doesn't rate as highly on many people's "favourite films of all time" list as perhaps it would if it was viewed again.

If you get the chance, do give it another viewing. Or, of course, if you've never actually seen it at all (you know who you are!) rent it out, turn the lights down low, turn the volume way up and give it a go.

Despite how the world has moved on since the paranoia of the late 70s re: Little Green Men (it has moved on hasn't it?) it's still a fasinating "what if" movie...

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 8:03:18 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Water Water Everywhere

I'm quite into science and I'm quite into health stuff (I don't mean being healthy as such - oops - more the technical and medical side of it) so have always been interested about statements such as "food x is made of x% percent water" (cucumber seems to be the most popular one for that)

Found this just now [scroll down a bit], hidden in a page about dehydration (I wasn't looking for that specifically, long story!)

So, now I have the numbers to back up the old-wives-tales about such things...

(and, so, a baked potato is 75% water? how come the vast majority of the world has some sort of lubricant i.e. most likely to be butter, on them. Strange!)

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 11:50:59 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Remixing The Rolling Stones

As probably 5 people have noticed by now we did a remix of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy For The Devil" a little while back. It was released this week on CD. There are other versions and tracklistings released over the next few weeks (no, I don't understand that either). The whole thing was an interesting experience, for many reasons....

Firstly, it's one of Norman's favourite ever tracks so, understandably, he was rather excited about the prospect of working on it and a little nervous about it, all at the same time (this is very resonable, as we've learnt before that working on something that means that much to you is rather nerve-racking at times).

Secondly, from my point of view, I'm not a particularly big fan of The Stones. I have nothing against them at all, but have always been more of a Beatles bloke. Gosh, I must be old when I start to admit I take a side on the Stones Vs Beatles debate. Anyway....

So, he was all stoked about it, and I was just 'eh, another mix to do then...' really. So an interesting difference in perspective when working, which is slightly unusual for us.

Now, The Stones are big business, that's easy to see. And there are some powerful and slightly mysterious powers at work behind the scenes of it all. And, it would seem, any project involving them has a lot more red tape and politics to get through than, say, your average remix of some relatively new artist that just wants a Fatboy Slim mix to help them along...

An example: at one point we were going to have to accept the fact that a security guard (yes, really) would be sitting in the studio with us during our work on the track for, well, 'security reasons' (i.e. the PTB were worried about the individual parts of the track - you know, the vocals, the guitar, the backing vocals etc etc - would leak out and all of a sudden there'd be a load of bootleg mixes flying about). This, I don't think, we would have ever actually accepted as a condition of the remix. As it turns out, we were babysat to a certain degree but it was fine. Still, a strange potential situation even if it never actually happened.

From my perspective, I had to do an awful lot of work on the track to get it even to a stage where we could add new stuff to it. The original Stones version is in the region of 7 minutes long and was recorded all totally live, without any sort of click track (i.e. a regular rhythmic pattern the drummer plays along with to keep the rest of the band going at some approximation of a set speed) so I had to do an extremely large amount of editing (in Pro Tools, natch) of, for example, the main piano track to bring it into line with the machines we were running along-side the original parts. Without this work though, it would have been almost impossible for us to actually 'remix' it as such. IIRC the piano ended up in over 200 seperate pieces (some only a single note long!) to make it 'conform' (that is to say, make the beginning of a musical bar that the pianist played match up with our computer-generated bar sequence). Once that was done, all the other parts we decided to use (namely, Mick Jagger's lead vocal, the guitar solo bits, and the infamous "Woo-Woo"s) had to be brought into line with the aforementioned newly-edited piano part. Took a long long time, made my eyes and brain hurt on many occasions, but was worth it. Couldn't have been done without Pro Tools though - it really is the best audio editing system (for multitrack use, for regular stereo it sucks) ever devised!

Anyhoo, once all that was done we got to work on actually doing the remix itself. It intentionally isn't a great leap away from the original (look to the Neptunes version for that experience!!) but it's tidier and it can now be played in a club because it actually has drums on it now! (the original didn't, as such, which made it hard to play out, as Norman has testified)

There's a whole further story about me having to do a surround sound (5.1) mix of it though, and if I mention it's the first time I've ever tried that you might guess it's not the shortest story ever told! (And don't get me started on the SACD aspect of it!)

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 9:49:39 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Funny, if a little flawed....

Was pointed at this little film about Macs ("crash different") (requires Flash 6/is 2Mb/has swearing/use headphones to hear it properly) by Tom when on AIM.

It is very funny. It is flawed. I really wanted to take it to pieces (Autoplay CDs? Easy to stop. Files hard to undelete, and "every" file on a PC is recoverable? er....no) but decided not to. Life's too short and all that.

Strange, because much of what he referred to sounded like PC horrible-ness to me, but still I guess I'm baised.

Have to agree about the shutting down can be difficult sometimes though....

(p.s. I am alive, been busy, will try to post lots of stuff soon!)

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 9:13:47 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []