Over the train tracks and into the woods

Today I took another one of these short Sunday walks, and I also took my camera again, this time with my 25mm/1.4 Summilux as the only lens on it. So here are some impressions from my walk:

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Train tracks near Mörfelden-Walldorf, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Train tracks and jet starting from Frankfurt Intl. Airport, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020

You see that jet? The airport is only about 7km direct line from our place. Oh, and my last walk was in the wood you see under that plane.

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Freight train, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Stairs to the road, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020

These stairs lead from the road down South into the wood. As you can see, they’re not that heavily used – which is exactly what I was hoping for…

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This is the way, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Fallen trees keep the cyclists away, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Petals at the motorway, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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The beauty in small things, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Shelter, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Serial lover, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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S-Bahn, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Freight train, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020

Do you also feel that urge to travel when you see trains, even freight trains? Maybe I’m a hobo after all, like those who sing the Blues about it… just wanna jump a freight train and go… (romanticising a life which is very hard in reality, I know)

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Abstand halten, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020

Saw this on a nearby bus stop, so for today this is the last photo of my walk.

If you click the photos you’ll see them on Flickr where I also added geo tags, so you can browse Flickr’s maps to see where that all is.

As always, thanks for viewing and for reading.

We moved

No, not in real life. But I just moved this domain you’re reading – lonien.de – from a small self-administered vserver to a new managed hosting, run by these guys & girls from Hamburg (although physically, we moved from Aachen to Frankfurt):

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webgo

We have almost the same specs as on our previous machine, but this one’s administered by professionals, so that I can concentrate a bit more onto other things and hobbies.

So far, a very pleasant experience, I’d recommend this one if you need some web space and don’t want to do it all alone…

As always, thanks for reading.

Roll away

Here’s another fine take on John’s (Fanne’s) wonderful Celtic song – it’s almost like a reply onto the one from Brian, wonderfully composed and performed by Shi:

I’ve had so much fun with this one, thank you very much my dear friends – and thanks to you for listening to it 🙂

How to make a “systemwide” Sonarworks on Linux – the easy way

I’ve been contemplating on trying Sonarworks since a while, and after WhiteDrum55 and kimbo both acknowledged its usefulness in a thread in a Wikiloops forum, and after I learned that Sonarworks even offer some kind of beta version of their plugin on Linux, I downloaded and tried that. I was sold after 20 seconds, and decided to buy it after an hour or two.

So what does Sonarworks do, you might ask. Well basically it equals out the frequency curves of your headphones (and speakers in the ‘Studio’ version). Looks like this for some headphone models we have:

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These are, from top to bottom, the curves (in blue) before correction, the corrective ones (in green), and the resulting ones (in purple) for the Sennheiser HD598 (my main “open” cans), the AKG K141-2 (Zuleikha’s), and the Sennheiser HD569 (my closed ones).

So that software makes them basically sound almost alike, definitely more neutral. Which is invaluable for recording and mixing.

After playing around with it a while in my DAW I thought how nice it would be to have these corrections systemwide, and in fact for Windows and for MacOS, Sonarworks offers a program they call “Systemwide” which does exactly that. But for Linux they don’t – so I’ve made one. 🙂

(Credits have to go to user sysrqer in this Linuxmusicians forum entry who’s describing how to do it in just a few words – so I’ll mostly add some screenshots to make it a bit more clear here)

You’ll need a few programs called ‘claudia’, ‘carla’, and ‘cadence’ for this, which come with the KXStudio repositories – so these are available for Debian and its many derivatives like for instance Ubuntu Studio. There are ways to do this on other distributions, but not with these tools, and therefore not that easy – so that’s out of the scope of this article.

So in Cadence, you’ll use LADISH to automatically load a studio after your login, like this (I called mine ‘Sonarworks’):

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In the “Engine Settings” for Jack, you’ll have to mark a checkbox to “Ignore self connect requests to external ports only”, like this:

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Then, under “Tools”, you use ‘Claudia’ to set it all up:

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In ‘Claudia’ you have to set up that Studio (here ‘Sonarworks’), and add Carla to it, like this:

Screenshot from 2020-05-09 11-14-11

In ‘Carla’, you’ll add the Sonarworks Reference 4 plugin which comes as a VST plugin for Linux (with an .so file type):

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And in the “Patchbay” tab of ‘Carla’, you’ll do the cabling like this:

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Make sure that you don’t have a second set of cabling running from the PulseAudio Jack Sink directly to the System playback inputs, and also check after a reboot, or after loading/unloading programs like Ardour.

And boom – you’re set:

Screenshot from 2020-05-09 11-57-53

With the wrench symbol in the plugin loaded into Carla, you can start the graphical interface of Sonarworks – so that is how my screen looks after I log into my system.

This isn’t all perfect yet, and the plugin itself has some relatively high demand on CPU (about 10% on my older Core i5 processor), but that will surely improve over time. Hearing music (and now also videos and other sources) like they should sound is invaluable to me, and well worth the price. Did my first new mixes for Wikiloops already using this, and I couldn’t be happier.

As always, thanks for reading.

News from Lizy

This is from yesterday after work (between about 1700 to 1900 CEST), and what I wrote in Wikiloops about the song is this:

“Fell in love with this beautiful piece from Phil and from SilverOne at first hearing, so I decided to add a bit of a bottom end with my fretless to it. Also doubled the main melody. Thanks for this cool jam my friends, that was fun! smile Hope you like it…”

So thanks to Filo974 and to SilverOne for the incredible music, and thanks to you for listening. Hope you liked it as much as I did when playing onto it.

As always, thanks for reading, and for listening. Come and join us at Wikiloops to make some more nice music.

Some impressions from an early Sunday morning walk, end of April, 2020

I woke up early this morning, and seeing the nice and beautiful sunlight being still at a low angle, I grabbed my camera with a 20mm fixed focal length lens on it, and went for a walk.

I mostly followed our small creek which flows through the North of our small village, we call that creek “Gundbach”. So here are some of the photos I took along the way:

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Gundbach, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Gundbach, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Gundbachwiesen, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Gundbach, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Gundbach, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Neue Brücke, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020

I crossed the creek via this newly built bridge to take a slightly alternative route back, not through the wood but more through the village:

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Sportplatz, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Feuerwehr, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020

After passing the football fields and the local voluntary firefighters’ building, I went around one of our Kindergärten which has very nice and artful graffitis on its back walls:

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Graffiti, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Graffiti, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
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Graffiti, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020

And like in the sports arenas, the staff is missing their kids – here they say so:

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Wir vermissen Euch alle sehr!, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020

And one of the last photos I took on my walk was one of a really beautiful tree in front of the local cemetery:

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Friedhof, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020

I hope you liked that short virtual walk together with me. As always, thank you for reading, and for viewing.

A little something that we need…

I was just congratulating another fellow Wikiloops musician for another one of his nice template tracks when I saw this little box beside his track:

And when clicking that blue hyperlink in it, it took me to the Wikiloops Knowledge base where this is explained in a bit more detailed way:

So yes, besides really contributing to the project as a whole (and as such, to us all), this what’s asked here is cost-free and still means a lot to some of us – so please if you like something, give the musicians kind of a nod, and a thumbs up. Kindness doesn’t cost you anything else than that 🙂

And if you can, then please support Wikiloops. It’s all which some of us have in these times of being locked to our homes…

Thank you 🙂

Yes, you may

Richard just made this nice poster for us all to share with you:

So that should explain it, hm? So head over to Wikiloops and become a member to download some music or to even join us in creating some, which would be awesome.

Very much looking forward to hearing *you* in there!

And stay safe and healthy 🙂 As always, thanks for viewing and for reading.