So nearly done.
The Album is so very nearly finished. Yes, I'm talking about that album. We have another week and a half or so to go. It's all sounding great, will in part surprise and delight people, hopefully both at the same time, mostly.
It's been a while coming. It's a much better record than the one we could have made and released 2 years ago (don't underestimate how useful a bit of perspective can be in such creative matters). The whole project has taken a few twists and turns along the way, as these things tend to do, but we're finally going the direction we had never quite worked out the details of before now (that doesn't make sense as written there, but it does in my head, honest)
It has a title, which I can't tell you yet. It has a release date, which I can't tell you yet. It has artwork, which I can't show you yet. It has a track listing, which I can't share with you yet. But it all exists, which is a start!
And, oh boy, do I need a holiday!!
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 6:52:42 PM
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Calm After The Storm
OK, that was a bit unexpected and a little odd....
My recent post re: TV over iChat seems to have got some people buzzing. Well, thanks very much! Is very nice, I have to say. I mean, I made the front page of kottke.org and Backup Brain and Jay Shoa and even Root Prompt [of course on all these it's been moved down now] - along with quite a few mentions in link logs of various nice, clever people (you know who you are) - all pretty amazing I reckon. Even got to #29 on Blogdex - yeah, like I understand what any of this means. I do this for about 5 people, you realise that. I know nothing about the blogging universe.
Nice though. That was my 15 minutes then. Was fun. Cheers!
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 12:19:42 AM
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Apple passing the buck
Sorry, I love Apple products, but I've just stumbled across this document written by them re: the hum that comes out of the 'Mirror Door' G4 audio outputs.
Er...no....Apple, you've got a badly designed bit of kit there. Having to stick balancing transformers across the outputs? Oh, come on, I know about that, and you're moving the problem slightly out of the machine, but it's STILL your problem. I hope you've solved this issue on the G5....
I write this as someone that doesn't use the built in audio outputs of my G4 of that type and hasn't tried a G5 yet (and doesn't intend to for quite a while), but even so.
BAD APPLE.
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 11:38:40 PM
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I didn't go to university....
....and here's a good reason why - an IM conversation with someone who's about to embark on her finals next week.....
her: ok, I just made two haribo gummi bears 69. I so need to get these exams over and done with, hahahahahahaha
me: hahaha, oh dear!
her: they can't have sex, cos one falls off the other, they don't balance very well, hahahahaah
me: i knew a girl like that once....
her: if a red gummi bear does it with another red one does that make him gay? if he does it with a yellow one, does that make him straight....
her: hahahahahaha
you don't wanna know about the rest.
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 5:45:07 PM
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Sending Live Television Via iChat
I thought the following was well known and therefore something no-one ever bothered mentioning,
however recently I've been told it isn't that obvious at all, so I thought it would be worth writing it up
for everyone (including Mr Dolan and Mr Coates, if that's OK) to enjoy....
The recent versions of iChat have, of course, brought with them the capability to use a video source (for most people, that would mean an iSight, or a USB webcam using a hack to get it to work in iChat - see my old post about that, or even perhaps a firewire-output home video camera they already own) for video chatting/conferencing. However, if you just so happen to be someone that has purchased an analogue video -> DV (firewire) converter box in the past, such as the Formac Studio, you might be suprised to learn that when it's plugged in it is presented to the Mac (and specifically the iChat application) as a perfectly valid firewire input device. In other, shorter, easier, words: you can use your converter box to stream live video from something - oooh, let's just say your Sky Digibox for example - to someone else using iChat anywhere else in the world. If you happened to have one of the outputs of your Sky box (it has two) connected up to the inputs of your converter box, you might see how this could work.
Free TV! Well, kind of....
Firstly, not ALL analogue->DV boxes seem to work for this, I think it depends on the type of hardware (specifically the chipset used to do the actual digital encoding) you have access to. My box seems to contain a Panasonic chipset, which the Mac OS is perfectly happy to communicate with.
Bandwidth: as with any video over IP situation this is an issue, and as most of us in the UK still have to battle with asyncronous broadband (aka, you can't send data as quickly as you can receive it) you have to limit the bandwidth (and so the quality) of the video pictures you're sending to another. Don't expect full screen smooth video using this setup, the other person is likely to get a small, but usable, window size worth of moving video that can be a bit jerky at times; but it's perfectly watchable if you just sit the window in the corner of the screen and don't concentrate on it too hard :)
If you're sending video one way using this system (perhaps, say, to your other half who - despite simply supporting the wrong football team - would like to watch their last game of the season but cannot get Sky TV where she happens to be right now) you'll likely to be using the "One-Way Video Chat" function in iChat - the warning here is that you can then HEAR THEM at their keyboard typing away (or eating crisps even) - if they have a microphone setup or in their ibook/powerbook of course - but they can't hear you (as they'll hopefully be listening to the audio that goes along with the video you're streaming to them). It's something to remember, and mention to them...one sided audio chats are weird.
There's an issue, sometimes, with the audio staying (actually, not 'staying', I mean 'ever being') in perfect sync with the video, but I do think that's problem with my particular setup, and am working on how to fix that and will explain the solution here if possible.
Important note: This is only likely to work with boxes that don't need software running on your Mac to control them (or decode the data they are sending, to be more accurate), or at least boxes that have the option not to use software (my box just does conversion all in hardware with no software needed). Why? Well, I tried this with an Eye TV 400 Freeview-type box (which is very good by the way) but, because it doesn't squirt 'raw DV' into the firewire port, it needs the supplied EyeTV software running on your Mac - at all times - to turn the data sent by the hardware box into watchable pictures. And - you can see where this is going I bet - you can't access the data from your hardware box in iChat as it throws up a "your video camera is being used by another application" error, which is kind of true enough, I guess!
Of course, it's probably not legal as such to rebroadcast someone else's TV output over IP like this, hence that's why I'm not saying I've actually ever done this at all. Oh no. It's all just a theory. Honest.
*cough*
Addendum:
Apparently, the lastest update of iChat now works well, video-wise, with the latest version (5.5) of AIM for Windows which means that this little trick might well be useful if you want to send a TV-type video stream live to a PC-owning friend as well as the better-informed, more attractive, more fun-loving Mac-owning people in your life.
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 4:39:56 PM
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I shouldn't be excited about the Nintendo DS, but I am....
I think it looks like lots of fun, "read all about it" etc.
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 1:50:14 PM
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Old Digidesign cards more useful than they might suggest?
This is really just a bit of a brain dump but it all might turn out to be useful if
someone should happen to Google this subject some time in the future.
Look away now if you're likely to get bored when I ramble on about Pro Tools hardware 'n' shit...
Now, I have a few old bits of Digidesign hardware lying about, more specifically - for this post - some old D24s and DSP Farm PCI cards. I should explain for someone that's read this far and doesn't know - the PCI cards (the bits you install inside your machine) are the expensive bits when it comes to all things Pro Tools TDM. Hence, I was always hoping to find a use for them one day, despite the fact that these old cards are WAY out of date and aren't supported by any recent Digi software... or even recent Macs at all. Yet, I've learnt today that they're not quite as old, useless and worthless as perhaps Digidesign suggest in some of their documentation (not suggesting this is a deliberate ploy by them or anything...)
[Quick explanation: the TDM flavour of Pro Tools is the one where you have to buy cards that plug into your machine to give you more 'power' to run audio processing plugins (such as EQ, reverb, compressors etc) as opposed to letting your machine handle all the work. The cards you buy for TDM operation contain sets of 'DSP' chips (which are like little computers in their own right) which take most of the strain off the main processor in your machine. Different types of Digidesign DSP cards contain different numbers of DSP chips, and so bring differing amounts of 'power' to your system. The DSP Farm cards I talk about here contain 4 DSPs per card, the Mix System cards contain 6 each, and other newer cards in the Pro Tools HD range contain an ever-higher number of chips (9 and upwards) per card. The various non-TDM (LE) Pro Tools systems, the Mbox, the Digi002 and the like, rely totally on the power and speed of your machine to function - if your machine isn't fast enough you may not be able to do all you want to when it comes to audio processing. With TDM systems, however, if you run out of 'juice' the theory is that you can purchase another card containing more DSP chips and carry on working...]
I would deep link to all sorts of documents on the Digidesign website, if they actually HAD any deep links to get at (I've moaned about that before I seem to remember), but as I can't here's a good bit to read:
(From Support/Compatibility/Pro Tools|24/Mac OS 9 - edited for clarity)
"Other Digidesign PCI Card Options - Pro Tools|24 for the Mac OS
DSP Farm*: DSP Farms with serial numbers lower than FG10501 may be used for Plug-In operation but do not support connection of an Audio Interface.
*Incompatibility with older DSP Farms and The Blue & White G3 and G4. A rev "QC" or later of the AMCC chip is required for Blue & White G3 and G4 compatibility. This rev number appears on the AMCC chip following number "5933". Older versions can cause your computer to hang while booting or when launching Pro Tools or DigiTest. QC or higher chip is required for compatibility with the PCI 2.1 spec. Ways to identify these boards are below:
DSP Farm - S/N's Below: FF09226 - Manufactured Before: 7/9/97 - Board Rev Before: Rev H"
I beg to differ here. A bit.
Just for an experiment - dear reader(s) - I installed the following cards in a newish
Mac G4 DP 1.25 Mirror Door (Wind Tunnel) with 512Mb RAM blah blah blah:
Slot 2: D24 card, serial: DN02xxx rev: - AMCC: -
Slot 3: DSP Farm, serial: FF02xxx rev: F AMCC: Q
Slot 4: DSP Farm, serial: FF04xxx rev: E AMCC: Q
Slot 5: DSP Farm, serial: FG16xxx rev: B AMCC: QC (upgraded to QC? Seems to be a bit of an odd card!)
And connected up a somewhat-worse-for-wear 882/16 interface to the D24 card.
Now, from all what Digi had said I expected this not to work at all, I mean I've been wanting to try this out for ages, but thought it just sounded like a waste of time. Following their advice meant I had installed my other DSP Farm card (a Rev G I think) in the other Pro Tools rig upstairs, which is based on a 13-Slot Magma expansion chassis, containing a MIX core, a MIX Farm, the Rev G DSP Farm, a couple of Samplecell Pluses and an Audiomedia III, but steered away from getting these older cards (as above) involved in the mix (sorry!).
Of course, Digi dropped 'support' for all these old cards a while ago (Pro Tools 6.1 TDM is the last version that they say will work - with their definition of 'compatible' cards one would assume - so you CAN move up to OSX if you want, but you HAVE to stay on Jaguar forever to do that. Pro Tools TDM 6.1 does NOT work on Panther, and I DO believe them on that one as I have tried it out on the Mix+ System - so I doubt many people will) but my mission was to see if I could use this new G4 with these old cards and get a useable Pro Tools 5.x (probably 5.1.x) system going.
[short pause]
Oh that was easy then!
A clean install of Pro Tools 5.1 on the OS9 partition of the G4, and we are GO!
DigiTest (the version supplied with the 5.1.x setup) insists the setup is broken, lots of errors about TDM clocks not being there and other cauliflower-brain type stuff, but IT DOES WORK. And it works well. For a 5.1 system. And a 5.1 system on a D24, which - as far as I know - still has issues with DSP allocation/management, in the sense that on Mix systems and above if you want to activate a new TDM plug-in but the system needs to rearrange what plug-ins live on which DSP chips to do it, Pro Tools will do that for you (if somewhat slowly). This is in contrast to a D24 setup like this one, for which I think they never got around the fact it couldn't be shuffled around like that when the session was open, so you have to quit and relaunch etc. Not a perfect system, but I'm not asking for the moon on this one, I have to say.
I'm not really going to test their statement re: boards lower than FG10501 can't be used for I/O, I'm hardly desperate to string a rackful of 888/24s off the back of this system anyway, to be honest.
How you'd find all the older 5.1-friendly plug-ins these days (I think the last Waves that worked on the DSP Farm era of DSP chips was 3.2 or something? I'd have to check that) might well be an issue should you want to buy up a load of old DSP Farms etc off eBay (where I bought a couple of these from in fact, quite a while ago now), but have a think about hard disk authorisations and how they work, and it is possible, I have a picture and everything:
A nice little mix going on, all running on really old 'incompatible on a G4' DSP Farms, and of course the gag is with this is because it's being run on a fast new G4 you have plenty of power left to start sticking in RTAS plugs if that makes life easier! (As the sharper-eyed reader might spot, this session had been running on an Mbox on this G4 before today, mostly on RTAS plug ins, and was working fine).
Yes, so the one compromise I've made for the D24 setup is to use the 16bitOptimisedMixer plug instead of the 24bit one, every bit of DSP left free might help, but the 24bit version DOES work fine, it just takes up a bit more DSP everytime it needs to add something to the mix matrix (read your Pro Tools manual about that, if that doesn't make sense to you!)
I'm almost tempted to see what happens if I get the Magma expansion chassis involved (the big 13 slot one, not the 2 slot PC Card Slot one I've written about before) but perhaps now is not the time or the place.
The rant about how the early Pro Tools hardware (specifically the convertors in units such as the 888/16) was so slagged off in the past and yet I actually prefer it in many ways to some of the newer stuff will have to wait until another time as well... (book your seats now etc)
[why is it that you 'explain' something, but if you give an 'explanation' of something it means the 'i' after the first 'a' is dropped? what sort of logic is that? and why do Digi have their compatibility documents under a directory called '/compato'? eh? EH?]
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 6:36:16 PM
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It's always good to have a reference point.
Now, if I should have to start thinking about artwork for any forthcoming releases of mine (I'll say no more) I'll remember to check this page out for examples of what NOT to do. Scary, but funny.
[via Beats, Bits and B-Sides of a Swiss-DJ]
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 12:03:39 AM
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I want to live in New York....
....so I can play PacManHattan
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 7:11:59 PM
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