Think it is too late by now to wish a Happy New Year to you all, right
Today I received my Yamaha N12 and after lots of issues with setting it up, I have to say it simply rocks.
But as Michael did describe his issues on his blog and I think this is a brilliant idea, I’ll do the same.
Though most machines tend to be 64bit these days, software companies still need to fill that gap. It is hard to find 64bit software in relation to audio producing, many companies rejected or a very long time to provide updates. Luckily it seems like times are changing due to the big user demand. Steinberg has a 64bit version of its Cubase 5 Studio per default (another thing I recently bought and which is awesome as well), Toontrack seems to recognize that their VST drum plugins should be 64bit as well and offers a beta version since a few weeks and finally Yamaha has a 64bit driver setup. This is where my troubles started.
Without going too muchintodetail, here’s the soluion and scenario how you can really get the firmware and the drivers installed successfully:
Turn off the N12 and connect the firewire cable to your machine
Install the update available from the yamaha website (Tools for n Version2)
Install the IEEE1394_Firmware Updater v1.07
Press Prev and Click Remote On buttons while turning on the N12
Install the N12 Firmware Updater v1.03 (NOTE THAT THESE ARE DIFFERENT THINGS!)
Be happy. For internet redundany reasons here is a picture provided by a guy(wiseg) on this forum:
That’s it. From now on you can start using it. Being a software engineer myself and getting tired of people not reading the documentation properly sometimes, I have to say, that it took me hours to figure the correct order and items to install.
However, expect some updates of the recordings of my band Tokks Voitto soon.
Time is almost over where each and every TV Channel has its résumé shows. But still it is time to give a best of 2009 related to music. So here are my favorite candidates for best album:
Kreator surprised with a rather classical album, remembering more on the Coma of Souls times. Nevertheless, this album is awesome and I really enjoyed listening to it. I don’t like Miland’s clean vocals, but the rest simply shines over that.
Behemoth stays Behemoth with each and every album, but still it does not get boring. Their latest work is really good stuff, which had wakened me in the train for months each morning. Daimonos is a perfect starter and very clearly shows the message of the album. Fast, hard and brutal. Definitely a win for this year.
Seems like this is a polish year, ay? Vader absolutely surprised me with that album. I was (and guess I still am) a huge fan of the Lithany album. Even though some albums might be better from a technical level, the sound was awesome. And this time, Vader managed to get that sound fitting with their music again. Drums are tight and straight forward, absolutely like it. Also the fact that Devilizer starts rather slowly was more of a help to get into the album. The only thing I did not like on that CD are the bonus tracks containing cover songs by Venom and Metallica. But as they are bonus material, they should not get into account for the measurement. This album definitely made my year 2009.
And I hope that after listening to Vader for almost 13 years, I will finally manage to see them live. I guess everyone in the whole world has seen them but me! So I guess this is going to be my proposition for 2010 then
Happy New Year everyone, I hope you will enjoy the evening and parties…
The opening was announced at 7pm and start of the show at 8pm. When we entered the hall at around 07:50 the stage crew was already preparing everything for Scar Symmetry. So it seemed that we had missed the first band already, which is unfortune.
Behemoth and Devildriver switched places on that show, leaving Devildriver as headliner for the evening.
All in all, it was a nice concert, nothing spectacular, but really good shows. Following some pictures:
Usually I am at rehearsal with my band on Sundays around this time, but as my feet is still hurting (rather embarrassing story), I thought it is time again to write a blog entry. So this one is going to talk about my band Tokks Voitto.
Basically we have two new big news:
Moritz joined the band. He’s a bass player who recently moved to Berlin. So far he has joined two rehearsals and things look promising.
I have started to play as a keyboarder in the band.
Wait? Keyboard? But you were the drummer? Well, correct. You might remember some older blog entry about Akira Jimbo, and how much I am fascinated about him and his idea to enhance the rhythm section by MIDI interfaces and triggers to get more influence on the music itself. This is what we are doing now as well. Due to the fact that we were missing some easy strings occasionally in the songs, we wanted to achieve this, but in a way where we can also play it on stage. The easiest way is to get a keyboarder and let him play the stuff. Admitted, that is the easy way. But musicians evolve and so do their egos. We had ended in a situation where the keyboarder wanted to actually play stuff, which is not, what we are after.
Thus we came up with the idea of using my DTXplorer drumkit and place it to the left of my regular set. I had to move my left China a little bit more up high, but this seems to work out, as I only used it for effects or regular forth playing.
In case you’re interested, here are some pictures:
Furthermore, here’s a video shot and shared via the Ovi service:
Unfortunately I do not have any sounds to share yet. I will try to prepare some for the next blog.
Does it do anything? No currently not. Clicking on new causes it to crash inside some SQL code. But the port has been fun so far and basically is a perfect example of getting stuff to another platform (which I did before more than once, though I seldomly ported something to Windows yet). Usually you need to take care of dependencies and try to get those running first. It even gets more complicated, when you use a different compiler.
Above version is done with the Microsoft compiler, but unfortunately libofx is designed for MinGW in best case. Both have different ways, when it comes to exporting symbols. GCC usually exports everything, while msvc demands specification on this topic. Using static linking helped for now. Never the less, libofx needed some patches and it depends on OpenSP again, which needed to get some care as well. Well, not the lib itself, the included Windows makefiles are for Visual Studio 6 currently and they include some weird configuration like author names as namespaces and such.
What needs to be done next
Get the emerge stuff cleaned up and committed
Get the patches upstream
Get Skrooge actually do something
Thanks to Patrick for his IRC-assistance and Guillaume for his pointers and help so far.
After all these musical entries, time to blog about some development…
Finally managed to have a little bit of time to check on KDE/Windows again. After lots of work done by the people on the project it is now possible to compile it on Windows 7, which gives me the oportunity to start coding.
Here and here you can see rather small commits, but hey it is a start at all, right?
What else to tell… I have a new notebook. Well, new… it’s a few weeks old by now, which with todays technology steps makes it old already…
Some of you (at least the people living in Germany should have) probably heard about the latest proposals by our Federal Minister of Family Affairs. Basically it is about to enable better protection from child pornography in the internet. Just to be 100% clear, I absolutely consent with putting all available efforts in finding those criminals and adjudge them with maximum punishment the law allows to.
But the suggested way is to enable filters for webpages. While this sounds like a perfect solution for a dummy, most of the readers of this blog are no novices when it comes to online technologies. Firstly it is no problem at all to circumvent such systems by simply using proxies. In addition this opens all doors for enabling a fully working censor system in our country.
Consequently this proposal must be avoided by all means. The German Bundestag allows to create online petitions and if enough people sign such a document, the topic has to be further discussed.
Once again a musical entry, one might complain. I have to admit, that I am currently very much into music and playing around with our songs. Potentially I am tempted to join a weekend course or such on producing, as I am far too much a novice to handle my Cubase. And I am afraid that upgrading to a new version won’t help me in this situation
Anyways, it happened that I received MIDI files from our guitar players to play around with our Song4. Of course I was not thrilled to listen to it using the Microsoft GS Wavetable. Consequently I searched the web for free guitar VST instruments and found this one.
Basically Independence Free is a 2GB huge sample collection providing lots of stuff, including guitar instruments. The sortiment offers far more versions, but these are commercial and I was not willing to invest money right now.
Starting with the Intro of our fourth song, I was fairly surprised by it, take a look:
Also open fourths sound really nice
Unfortunately, we are not making slow rock. Lets cause the simulator to stresstest a little bit. If you play faster you loose a lot of quality, here’s one faster part of the song:
As you can hear, it already starts to give you an old-school Atari impression. But that is ok, as it is a free tool. I was more shocked when the following happened:
Guitar Hero players might remember that sound (at least it reminds me of it). It’s not wrong played notes, the sampler simply cannot handle that many notes! Now, as some of you know I have a QuadCore machine and thus I am used to software working fluently, but maybe that sampler does not support multithreading. “Ouch”! It does! The preferences allow you to specify the amount of cores it should use. Additionally the disk I/O is almost zero, so that cannot be a reason either. The only hardware-specific reason I could think of is my soundcard. I am still using an onboard HDA chip, which is of limited functionality, but fullfilled my needs nicely so far.
For those of you, who are keen to know, what this part was actually supposed to be, here’s a synthesized version of DVS Guitar, another free instrument provided by DreamVortex.
So, what’s the result of this? We’re too fast for music production? Hm… I think I can go to bed with this wishful thinking now…
You might wonder, why I tend to write that less. First, it’s quite late for during the week (I know, I’m getting old). Secondly this post is more a dummy for people interested in joining the band.
