Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Published the 11th album with collaborations with my friends from Wikiloops, and the front cover looks like this:
As usual, if you click on that image you’ll end up at Flickr where it is hosted – but I’ll put another smaller cover/inlet picture in the widget area where you can also find the other 10 albums.
Thanks to my friends for all the fun I’ve had – and thanks to you for listening and/or downloading. Hope you’ll like it.
Wonderful dreamy track from Andri, so I couldn’t resist to add a few low notes to the crush:
Gracias Andri for all the fun, and thank you to you for listening to us 🙂
Wikiloops user Mike_66 uploaded a wonderful piano template which I downloaded right away. I thought that a double bass would fit, but since I still don’t have one I played a bowed Karoryfer Meatbass sampled double bass on my Akai MPK mini Mk2 keyboard instead, and added a few accents with my fretless:
Thanks to Mike_66 for all the fun, and thanks to you for listening.
Yesterday I’ve tried and downloaded Ubuntu Studio 20.04 LTS “Focal Fossa” (with its standard XFCE desktop), wrote the Live image to a USB stick, and booted my work notebook from it after work.
That’s quite a nice release, and everything I tried worked right out of the proverbial box, even from that “Live” USB stick. There were some packages I’ve never even seen before, like for instance OBS Studio with which you could make training videos or even live stream some computer games to Youtube if you’re into that kind of thing.
Ardour is still in version 5 on it, and the reasons for that are explained in their news section.
Otherwise, it’s what the home page says: a free and open operating system for creative people, very nice, and everything which is difficult when using ‘normal’ distributions like my Debian (on which Ubuntu is based of course), or which would require some extra work like the audio and/or realtime stuff is preconfigured already, so you can simply start making music, or developing your photographs, make movies or drawings, whatever creative people might want to do.
Documentation including some really nice books is/are here.
Very nice, and highly recommended – that one costs nothing, makes things really easy, and brings the fun back into computing.
As always, thanks for reading.
A collaboration with Rastafari and Shi this time:
You can also watch a compressor in my DAW working on my bass while the track plays:
Thanks to my friends again for all the fun, and thanks to you for reading, listening, watching, … 🙂
Got a nice remix first from Marceys and then from FrankieJ onto one of my recent ones:
Thanks Marc & Frank for making it sound so great, thanks to the rest of you for listening. Join us for something like this on Wikiloops, it’s fun and it’s free 🙂
A great remix from Al-Fadista onto the Samba track I’ve played on myself recently:
Merci Alex for all the fun, and thanks to you for listening.
Another remix on the funky track, this time from kimbo. Great man, cheers!
Thanks for listening.
Just got a nice remix on one of my latest tracks from Charli56, and he called/renamed it into “Funky Monday”:
Thanks so much Charli, love it! 🙂
I was thinking of writing something about how I made my add-on on Windows for that track, using the new Ardour 6 on Windows. This is the start window after installation:
It says everything there is to say – Ardour is originally developed on Linux, and that’s where it probably runs best, at least I’m using it without many problems since years. On Windows there’s not much developer staff, so no real support for that (sorry). And yes, it *did* crash on me on Windows already (after deinstalling some Cakewalk DAW from Bandlab which had many pointers grabbed and put onto itself, very bad behaviour), and yes, I know my way around gdb (on Linux) or WinDbg (on Windows), but my time and love for that environment is also a bit restricted so to say…
Anyway, I’ve received some more freebie plugins via the makers of my audio interface which is Focusrite – and this time they partnered with PositiveGrid who then provided some cost-free stuff to download as plugins for Windows and Mac. So I downloaded their Windows VST version, and integrated and used it here for this track. Looks like this:
That is their ’69 Blue Line V2 amp simulation, modeled after an Ampeg SVT again (have another free one from the Guitarix project on Linux). And there’s also a compressor in the signal chain as you see, so for a basic ‘driven’ bass sound this is about all you’d need. I added an Effects send channel with some additional Chorus, Delay, and Reverb plugins from the same maker, but didn’t switch that on in the track you see here which is the one from ‘Funky Monday’ above.
Sounds nice, tho I doubt that I’ll come back to Windows just for this very often – it’s more likely that I’ll do that if I need that nice XLN Audio “Addictive Keys” Studio Grand piano for Zuleikha again.
Steinberg open-sourced their VST specifications, so with more and more VST3 plugins coming out I’m hoping that some day they’ll be platform-agnostic so that we can use them everywhere without things like Wine or WineASIO. Until then, I’ll sometimes maybe return to Windows, let’s see.
As always, thanks for listening, and also for reading.
Got an awesome remix from Peter (Pewi) onto a simple template of mine where I played a one-handed keyboard for chords, and then a simple bass line on top of it. Peter turned it into something magical. Listen:
Thanks so much Peter, it’s an honour if you pick up something as simple as that and make something so beautiful out of it. Thanks to everyone else for listening.