January 11, 2008
Rock Band Downloadable Content (DLC)
So this is a bit off-topic, but I am addicted to Rock Band. One of the things that makes it so great is the huge amount of downloadable content available to expand the game with new songs, and stuff comes out weekly.
However, it's hard to tell what a song is, just from the title sometimes. Turns out you may know it but not realize you know it. I wanted to be able to hear the song before deciding whether it was worth downloading. I suspected that there were plenty of other folks who had a similar itch which needed scratching. So, I did something about it. =)
I've been looking for an excuse to do something "real" with rails, and this was it. In just a week of spare time, I've thrown together this:
It's not yet very pretty, but it does the job, you can preview the original artist tracks for each of the songs available through XBox Marketplace and the PS3 Online Store.
If you notice any issues, please let me know.
April 18, 2005
Nine Inch Nails Garageband Music
This is outside of the usual scope of my posts, but too cool not to talk about.
Trent Reznor released a garageband version of The Hand That Feeds (a single from his new CD) for remixing purposes.
Whoohoo!
(Bump) He's now released Only in a number of formats, including GarageBand and ACID.
May 3, 2004
Cheesetracker 0.9.9
I've got a new CheeseTracker binary built for Mac OS X, using Qt/Mac 3.3. It's looking pretty good, although sometimes it freezes on logout, seems to be some kind of thread-locking issues in CoreAudio.
If you want to give it a try, you can grab it here. I've registered with VersionTracker so I can put it up there as well. Whoo!
January 7, 2004
JACK for OSX
There is now a stable release of JACK for Mac OS X. JACK is an audio system and low-latency audio server that was initially developed on Linux, and aims to be portable, well, everywhere.
Previously, there was an OSX port of JACK using PortAudio, but it was incomplete and you lose a lot of the low-latency advantages of JACK by going through an intermediary.
This is excellent news! A lot of very nice Linux audio apps used only JACK because it's basically the only pro-quality audio implementation there.
November 2, 2003
New Song: The Doorway
Finally wrote a new song.... Actually, finished it up sometime last week, but my microphone was horrible, so I just finished re-recording the lyrics and re-mixing it, it sounds *much* better.
I don't do lyrics much, so this is pretty new to me, let me know what you think.
October 27, 2003
Cheesetracker 0.9.0-rc3
I didn't post this last night, because the binaries were still uploading to my site. ;)
So reduz seems to have worked out all of the kinks in the endianness issues in previous cheesetrackers, and now it's fully functional on OSX with a native Qt/Mac build!
I've got a couple of screenshots if you want to check it out. I've made native builds for both Jaguar and Panther:
The only bug left is the one where an existing preference file causes it to hang indefinitely. Reduz thinks he has a fix for the issue; I'll put new binaries together from the final release. In the meantime, delete ~/.cheesetracker_QT before you start it up.
Whoohoo!
July 23, 2003
Updated Cheesetracker
I've updated the cheesetracker tarball. It's built with Qt 3.2.0, and also has some library path fixes so that it will properly load on systems that don't have libraries that look exactly like mine (ie, there was a bug in the install_name for a couple of the libraries inside the app bundle).
Please give it a shot and let me know if it works any better for you. There are still a couple of known issues:
- You must delete ~/.cheesetracker_QT every time you plan on running it. It doesn't properly read it's configuration files for some reason, and spins out of control.
- Loading IT files doesn't work correctly. It seems to be an endian issue of some kind, but I'm not sure. XM and S3M files work just fine.
July 5, 2003
New Song
I've just finished up a new song, called "Moone". It's got a kind of lazy chip-tune sound, I think it turned out pretty nice. Feedback is welcome, be it bad or good. ;)
June 30, 2003
Cheesetracker Works!
After a night of mad hacking, reduz and I (mostly reduz ;) got cheesetracker working!
It's still rough around the edges, and has problems with IT-loading (maybe endianness?) but it works. You can download it here.
June 29, 2003
Cheesetracker Updated
CheeseTracker has released a new version. For those who have been following my music troubles, I've been looking for a non-sucky tracker on Mac OS X. Now, not only has he rewritten a lot of the code, he's ported it to use Qt!
That means I can build it with Qt/Mac, and have a native, supported tracker!
Happy day!
Update:
It freakin' built out of the box! Check out some screenshots.
reduz and I are working on putting together a sound driver right now. Hopefully we'll have something soon.
May 18, 2003
Clutter gets artwork-setting support!
Apparently Clutter can now add artwork to songs in iTunes... yay!
May 14, 2003
New Song
It appears my writer's block is definitely over, I wrote another song. You can get it from my music page, it's called "Stowe". The Impulse Tracker module is available as well, but it's interesting only for technical reasons, the MP3 has post-processing and effects that aren't available in the IT file.
Comments are always welcome, let me know what you think.
May 4, 2003
New Music
Well, after a weekend of no TV and lots of setting up of software, I finally managed to write a new song. Please let me know what you think, it feels good to be writing something again.
May 3, 2003
Updated Package Dependencies
With drm's help, I've cleaned up some of the package dependencies for KDE, and it looks like everything is set now. The bindist has been updated with 3.1.1 for those who do an apt-get update, so you no longer need to build KDE 3.1.1.
KOffice and KDevelop still aren't working right yet, I'm not sure when I'll have a chance to look at it, but pogma thinks he may have some libtool fixes that will affect it.
On a personal note, I finally bit the bullet and spent all of yesterday and half of today putting Windows 98se (ugh) back on my PC so I can run Impulse Tracker. Here's to hoping it won't be necessary for much longer.
March 17, 2003
Oh please please please!
For the love of God, don't languish in SourceForge-never-completed-land! This project is totally the answer to my code bounty.
January 26, 2003
Wanted: A Tracker That Doesn't Suck
So I e-mailed my buddy Coplan (the guy behind SceneSpot) about a thought I had.
I'm finally annoyed enough to do something about this. I really want to write some music again, but I've got so much I need to do before I can. I'd love to have a modern tracker for Linux or preferably MacOSX. Here's what I wrote:
I've got something either for you to put in Static Line, or for your demo group, if you want something to work on... =)
The thing that keeps me from tracking right now is inertia. I had to base my Windows box a while ago and I pretty much lost everything I had been working on. I've got no samples, I've got none of my half-finished songs, I've got nothing but what I've already released and made downloadable. Nothing sucks the muse out of you more than having all your tools die. Every time I even feel the slightest desire to track, I can feel the heavy weight of a week of putting a #$*&@# machine back together and trying to get enough samples together to do something interesting. And even when I'm done, it'll still be a Windows box, which I have no desire to run. It's only a means to an end, and as time goes on, just the fact that all the tools I'm familiar with are on Windows just makes it harder to even want to boot the thing up.
I'm looking for a truly portable tracker that will run on Linux and MacOSX. The state of tracking on either platform is horrendous. The closest thing to a real tracker is Cheesetracker, with SoundTracker not too far behind, but both of them are buggy and incomplete, and are not terribly portable. I've got cheesetracker building on MacOSX, but it dies a horrible death as soon as you try to load a module. There's issues in the code, but it looks like the author doesn't have much desire to work on it.
I'm willing to chip in money to someone willing to put together a decent tracker that's portable across Linux and MacOSX that isn't abandonware or out-of-date. Hell, I'm willing to put $300 up if it means I can do what I used to do in MacOSX. I bet there are others who feel the same way, and would be willing to put money into a fund for someone to do it.
Think that's doable?
So what do you think? Any of you reading this willing to take me up on my offer? It may very well be enough to make some updates to cheesetracker. I'm serious about the money. Inertia is a powerful force. It's worth $300 to me to not need to learn a whole new set of tools, especially when tracking is much more suited to the way I write than the standard audio tools out there, which are much more geared towards linear editing, or sequencing fixed-sized chunks of audio.
My newest MP3 is dated April 14th of 2002 (my birthday, incidentally). Help me get that date updated. =)
December 30, 2002
Back in the USS... uhh, I mean, Raleigh
Made it back home fine. I must say, even though they've scaled down from what they started with, Midwest Express is still a pretty nice airline to fly. Doesn't hurt that I get a direct flight from Milwaukee to Raleigh, either. I really hate dealing with hopping around to get where I'm going.
Got some good loot for Christmas. The best was a huge suprise -- Dad got me a pair of Etymotic ER-4P headphones. These are in-ear, very hi-fi headphones that block out pretty much all ambient noise. Until you've heard a pair, it's really hard to describe just how incredible the sound is. I'm going back and listening to some of my favorite recordings, and hearing things I had no idea were there! It's really amazing. Go look for some reviews on the net, and you'll see that pretty much everyone agrees. They're hard to beat. I've been listening to music pretty much continuously since the ride home. =)
Speaking of music, over at the Very Big Blog, I see that Duran Duran has gotten back together and is recording another album. I had started out long ago listening to them just because they were the pop band of the hour, but I have since come back to them and started listening to their newer stuff, as well as the older, and while they started out working in the (fairly cheesy) pop circuit, there's really a lot of music to their music. As time goes on they've really grown, and I find now that I listen to them fairly regularly. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of it, they've always been pretty on-again, off-again, it's good to see they're doing something again.
Also picked up some more stuff that Mike Patton was involved in, this time a band called Secret Chiefs 3. I haven't decided yet whether I like it, but it is interesting, as always.
In porting news, I got KMUD ported on the plane up to Wisconsin, and have got OpenNMS pretty much working now on OSX again, with the new 1.4.1 developer preview JDK from Apple. I plan on doing some catching up KDE-wise to figure out what I've missed, but it appears they haven't released a new 3.1 rc to packagers yet, so I've got a little play room.