Happy New Year 2023

To all our family, friends, and readers of this: have a happy new year 2023 everyone. Be well and safe.

Scene from “Dinner for one” starring Freddie Frinton and May Warden, © NDR, Foto: Annemarie Aldag

Like always, thanks for reading.

The Herring King Band – Second Album

Yesterday the second album from the Herring King Band was released:

I had the great honour and pleasure to play my bass on some of the tracks, but all others are so great – if you like to hear Herbie’s story, please head over to the album page on Wikiloops to hear and/or download it 🙂

Thanks to my friends for inviting me, I’m humbled by all of *your* performances!

And thanks to you for reading, and for listening, or even downloading.

P.S.: the band also asked to send out their Christmas greetings – so here you go:

Merry Christmas, on behalf of the Mermaid, all Herrings, and their King 🙂

Sian

Thinking of a friend, and as it seems he composed this a while ago. You can also hear him playing the guitar solo at around the 4 minute mark:

Sian · KölnBigBand · Ebo Wagner

Like always, thanks for listening.

Ardour 7.2 was released

About two hours ago, the Ardour team released their latest and greatest version 7.2. I have it already, and it works very nicely, just like it always does. Here are some screenshots:

Ardour 7.2.0 “Wrong Way Up”
Ardour 7.2 on Linux with a song I’ve had in 7.1 previously
Ardour 7.2 and its mixer view. My Sonarworks plugin is on the monitor bus.
Ardour 7.2 playing back the loaded song. Notice the threads on my CPU while playing back two tracks…

Very nice. I’ll start using it, keeping the 6.9 version because of older tracks, and the 6.5 one because it came with the OS. I also have the Windows version just in case Zuleikha would like to use my XLN Audio grand piano which came as a Windows VST plugin only (and yes, I know how to load these into Linux, but won’t do it).

Oh, and in case you want to hear the song I have in my DAW here (minus my tweaks to it), it’s this one. Please give Shi and Tom a thumbs up in case you like it.

In case that maybe you have no idea what Ardour is, it’s one of the best free and open source digital audio workstations available. Please have a look at its homepage in case that sounds interesting for you.

Like always, thanks for reading.

Some two years ago: Pieces – Oliv’s mix, remastered

Just pointed an interested musician to a song which I accompanied in August of 2020. In retrospect, I should have pointed her to Monsieur OliVBee’s remix which sounded much better than mine, and which I later “remastered” for an album like this:

Pieces – Oliv’s mix, remastered

I recorded this some 11 days after buying my used Christopher DB202T upright bass, here’s a photo of it, also from Wikiloops:

At the time when I recorded this, that instrument had Presto Nylonwould Ultralight strings which are very nice Nylon-based strings – they sound great but aren’t the best for bowing, so I later replaced them with Thomastik Spirocore Weich strings.

Time to pick up that big bass fiddle again, and to play some more tunes… 🙂

Like always, thanks for reading, viewing, and/or listening.

Looking at / listening to Ardour 7.1 on Windows

Today I’ve been looking at & listening to the new Ardour 7.1 free and open source software DAW on Windows 11. Looks and sounds awesome:

Ardour7_on_Windows
Ardour 7.1 on Windows 11, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

The music you see within that program is from Dan and Chris, you can listen to that one on Wikiloops if you’d like to. The program seems to work fine, so next step is to also install it on Linux 🙂

And like always, thanks for viewing, listening, and reading.

What’s New in Ardour 7.0

I had downloaded the new Ardour 7.0 for both Linux and Windows as soon as it was released, but haven’t tried it yet (except that on Windows I installed it parallel to the 6.9 version I already had).

In case you’re interested, here’s what’s new, in about 4 minutes:

What’s New in Ardour 7.0

Maybe I’ll try it with the next song & project I’ll be “working” on 🙂

As always, thanks for watching. And thanks and congrats to the Ardour team of course.

Edit, from later the same day: as soon as I show this, there’s a new version again. See here

Sad news indeed…

Terrible to read about the passing of Don T., one of the bluesiest guys I’ve ever heard on Wikiloops… he was a good friend and once even wrote a song for me. I had the honour and pleasure to play on his latest song in the ‘loops and asked him with a PM whether he would also consider to sing on it, no answers so I was thinking of him. So here you have it with a lead guitar from Carlo instead of Don singing:

This track is embedded with the friendly permission by the creatives on wikiloops.com.

Condolences to Don’s family, he truly was a wonderful guy! Rest in peace my friend…

A new PC build – just in time

Thanks to a friend who sent me a present lately (you know who you are), I decided to build a new PC for myself. I had built one for my wife earlier this year, and after waiting for the first reports about newer stuff like the new AMD Ryzen processor family I thought that that’s *not* the direction I wanted to go – these newer ones consume power just like Intel processors, and I wanted something a bit less power thirsty. ARM is the future (see Apple), but for normal PC builds we don’t have anything usable yet, so I decided to take more or less the same parts of the build for my wife, but in a smaller case. Here’s what I chose:

Parts for my PC build in October 2022

Here’s a parts list in case you’re interested:

So that would be my first Mini-ITX build, and I was really looking forward to it when the first of these parts arrived last Tuesday:

7e6_a044818-pc-parts-oct-4th-2022
PC parts for a new build, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

The case (and mainboard) arrived a day later:

7e6_a054819-pc-parts-oct-5th-2022
PC case for a new build, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

And last Friday, I had the new machine up and running beside the old one:

7e6_a074825-new-pc
My finished and running new PC, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

Of course, building a machine and setting it up to use it are separate steps. First I thought about what I’d need or want, and after copying over my Windows 10 partition it offered me to upgrade that to Win11 more or less right away. I thought: “Why not?”, since I use that only for the Olympus (now “OM System”) raw image converter. In the end I decided for a clean installation tho – you need a Microsoft account even for the Pro version of Windows I had, so it made no difference, and I wanted to start with a more clean plate. So soon enough I was done with that, and greeted by that newer operating system:

Finished my Win11 installation on late Saturday
Ooops – not quite done yet…

First impressions of it are positive – in my opinion it got the looks almost like Apple does, and for its internals they borrowed many good ideas from both the BSD and also the Linux side of things. Even their Edge browser which I tried only briefly seemed to show me less ads and other annoying stuff than (Google’s) Chrome would. But ok, this ain’t the OS for surfing, not for me anyway, so on to more pleasant things…

After looking at many options like Arch, the new beta of Fedora Workstation and so on, I decided against a triple boot this time. I wanted to keep things easy and just set up for my personal use (music, photography, blogging, and so on), so except for Windows which didn’t get that much space I took about three quarter of the space on the new SSD for Debian, so here you go:

Debian 11 “Bullseye”, but with a newer kernel

What you see is Debian stable (which is currently nicknamed “Bullseye”). In the upper right hand corner you see the processor temperature and fan speeds reported by a Gnome desktop extension called “Freon”, and under that you see that I have installed a kernel 5.18 from the Debian bullseye-backports repository, otherwise you wouldn’t see those fan speeds, and the Intel WiFi chip which is integrated into the mainboard wants a newer kernel as well – I knew that already from Mitchie’s machine where wireless and Bluetooth started working with Ubuntu 21.10 (instead of their older 20.04 LTS).

So this morning I was about ready, and short after lunch I was greeted by TEE-KWA’s pretty cover picture on Wikiloops:

Wikiloops’ album of the day on my new machine

Of course I also installed and tried Ardour, my Digital Audio Workstation of choice, and within it, the headphone correction by Sonarworks:

Ardour with gimproviser’s wonderful song “Cloudy
Sonarworks correction for my Sennheiser HD560S headphones in the monitoring section of Ardour

So, regarding music and photography and blogging, this more or less completes my build.

Which was, coming back to the headline of this article, just in time. I wanted to give my old machine to my brother, but alas, it gave up its ghost just after I was finished building this one. Broken heart syndrome on a CPU? Hm, that would be something new even for old timer PC doctors like me… anyway, I tried lots of things today, but it seems we’re out of luck with that one. So yeah, phew, that *was* just in time! To really ‘nail it down’ to a single not working component, I’d need to have a bench and spare parts like Jay so I could change each part and see what/who the culprit is… still sorting out if my brother – who lives in a much bigger city than we do – maybe has neighbours who are hobby PC builders with enough parts for that.

So for me, and thanks to my friend, it’s this new one from now. So cool… and by the way, 8 cores and 16 threads are way more than enough for what I do… still these machines are waiting for us most of the time, not vice versa 🙂

And like always, thanks for reading.

Three hours with Paul Davis of Ardour

I reported about yesterday’s interview event, and in case you haven’t seen it, here are three hours of talks and interesting news about the upcoming version 7.0 of Ardour. Starts at 30:11 according to unfa, one of the hosts.

Enjoy…