Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Wikiloops isn’t only the best site for musical collaborations, it’s also some kind of social media site since someone started some kind of “diary” thread on it (thanks for that, Shamika!). And so I wrote my schedule and plan for today there – it even contains a link to some beautiful music.
And as always, thanks for reading.
Yes – I’ll have to let go, as Shi once sang so beautifully:
After that injury of my heel, I now got clutches:
And although I now can walk almost without feeling pain, my step counter wouldn’t recognize it as steps anymore. So after some 813 days in a row where I walked over 10k steps a day, and a total of over 10 million steps, I’ll have to let that go for the moment, and interrupt my cadence.
I’ll still have to get an MRT, and also visit the orthopedic doc again, and let’s see how long I’ll be handicapped enough to not even dream of getting 10k+ steps together in a day.
Anyhow – more time for music again, as someone suggested already… and as always, thanks for reading.
P.S.: Our cat Bella’s reaction was funny… looks like me, smells like me, but what strange kind of four-legged thing is this? 😉
Today 15 years ago, Richard officially started Wikiloops, a service for musicians to play and collaborate with each other, and I’m so glad he did. I joined in 2018 and soon after also became one of the moderators’ team on that site, trying to help out where I could.
Now Richard wrote a little note about Wikiloops’ 15th anniversary, and he also created an Android app one day prior to that – an iOS app is also ready, but due to delays with Apple, not in their app store yet. Here’s a QR code he published yesterday, which points to Google’s Play Store to get it (and it’s also accessible via the Aurora proxy, but it still needs Google’s play services and a login to run correctly as it seems):
So go ahead and try it – create a cost-free account to try it out either on its web page or via this app.
And congrats again to Wikiloops, and to all of its supporters, without whom it wouldn’t have been possible to go this far and wide. You guys & gals (and all other possible genders who are there) rock!
And as always, thanks for reading.
Yesterday I’ve read an article (in German) by Elias Raatz titled “Der Sound der Rebellion“, and it was about a band from Heidelberg called Irie Révoltés. That band existed until 2017, and it was lead by two brothers with French roots who sang in German and in French, the music being somewhere between Dub, Ska, Reggae, Punk, Rock, and Rap. On their homepage (and in the article) it was announced that they’ll come together again this year for a final concert tour, so in case you’d want some tickets, you’d have to be fast – some places are sold out already. The article closes with the German lyrics of their song “Antifaschist“, which can be translated like:
“I was born like this, and I’ll stay that way until I’ll die, I was born like this, anti fascist forever forever…”
If I remember it correctly, I had heard it not too long ago while visiting an old friend of mine. And that song would make a cool summer hit in difficult times like this; it’s scary how history seems to repeat, isn’t it? The only hope is that people will not forget about that Italian headline of the resistance of over 100 years ago, and that they will still sing and dance to songs like these…
That reminds me of an interview with Eric Idle, who said about today’s America: “I really think they’re serious about wanting to get rid of liberals and lefties. They’re very crazy”. He also said: “I’ve had a green card for about 28 years. I’d be proud to be thrown out because I’d be in very select company. The last English comedian to be thrown out of America for political reasons was Charlie Chaplin.” – definitely an anti fascist as well, if you think about his “The Great Dictator” masterpiece…
So maybe it’s time for us all to be a bit more anti fascistic, and being proud about it, isn’t it?
Anyway, and like always, thanks for reading.
Yesterday I’ve had a brief look at two Linux distributions which come more or less tailor-made and preconfigured for musicians and other creatives, like people who like to make videos, or who render, paint, photograph, and so on.
Both UbuntuStudio and AVLinux are fantastic tools for the job.
UbuntuStudio is now using the KDE Plasma desktop, heavily customised, so it doesn’t look like Windows anymore. I would recommend that one for machines with at least 4GB of main memory, and with a 4 core CPU.
AVLinux is made by Glen McArthur (a farmer if I remember correctly) and is even more quirky, using MX Linux as its base, and on top of that an Enlightenment desktop (see my screenshot above). This one is much more frugal, and the one you see running above was installed on a virtual machine with only 2GB of RAM, and with a dual core CPU. Means that it would run on my wife’s notebook from ca. 2010 🙂
Both come really nicely preconfigured, and as you can see, a bass player like me could start right away plugging his Precision Bass into a virtual Ampeg SVT amplifier, and go and play. Both also come as live images which you can run from an USB stick to see if you like them before installing them onto your hard drives and/or SSDs. Both MXLinux and Ubuntu are based upon Debian of course, which is the granddaddy of many good Linux distributions.
I also looked at the librazik website, which is another distribution meant for musicians, this time from France. But librazik is still based upon Buster, which is Debian oldstable, so I haven’t looked at it.
For Windows users: I recommend having a look at Ventoy, which can hold more than one Linux .iso file, so you can try them all from the same USB stick. And now go and have a look, and start making some music using free and open source tools.
And like always, thanks for reading.
Stuart Adams of Musicradar can explain it far better than me – and so he wrote an article about it some year and a half ago. Here’s the link, so go and have a look.
This is a short howto video I’ve made for my friends over at wikiloops.com, and who might be considering switching from Windows 10 (or even older versions) over to some free Linux setup to make and record music with. Sorry about the bad sound quality; I should have used my studio mic instead of the webcam’s built-in microphone…
Like always, thanks for watching and reading.
Yesterday I found a really old track in my DAW. Some of the plugins I had used on that prepared song were outdated, so I had to reinstall those. Then I leveled it to the usual -16 LUFS and -2dBTP (true peak), exported it, and then uploaded it to the ‘loops. I didn’t play anything on this one (yet), just the bare output of my DAW with the settings as they were (I had separated the voice from Shi’s former mix because at that time she didn’t upload a HD file with her vocals stems only):
Thanks to TN1000 and to Shi for the wonderful music – and thanks to you for listening 🙂 <3
Today, 14 years ago, Wikiloops founder Richard opened the gates, and now at more than 250,000 uploads and tracks later, we can all only thank him for it. Read what he wrote, and/or do this:
Go to my profile, and in it, select the tab “Playlists”. Scroll down a bit past my albums, and select the playlist called “Even more hit singles”. Enjoy, and then submit a few dollars or Euros to keep the thing running, so that we all can provide more like this to you. Thanks!
And thanks to Richard and his family, and to everyone who contributed until now – it’s greatly appreciated!
And: still remember this one? It’s also in that playlist, the music was made by some fellow ‘loopers:
