A Goretex test for Guy the snake charmer

Solid ride on saturday - probably the last decent trail ride before heading off for the Mawson experience in July. Umina-Pt
clare-Staples Blackwall-Gosford-Umina. Met up with Guy at Staples, and we gave his new Goretex jacket a solid test (rained solidly for a fair bit of the ride). Headed down Thommo's loop to Tunnel track, to Rocky Ponds then the crazy hill down to Woy Woy tip and back to Blackwall. Came across a decent sized snake (python?) - actually Guy almost rode over it - that we think must have had its sleep disturbed by some serious rain and was trying to warm up again. Dropped Guy off at Staples then climbed back into the wet gear for a spin to Gosford and back. Total of 90ks in the end, and five hours on the bike in total. Now to work on doing that (or 70ks at least) loaded for day after day...

Routing stems from Ardour to MIO and back

The only real reason I keep a mac os x box running at all is so I can use one of the Metric Halo 2882 our Dept has. The flexibility of routing, quality of the pre-amps, and the sound of the various pre-amp and desk modelling adds a polish to a mix that I can't get any other way at the moment. Yesterday I set up a useful way of routing stems from Ardour to the MIO and back, and was really pleased with the results. I set up a series of stems (drums, brass and rhythm) on separate busses, then added an insert in each routing through the MIO via the RME optical outs (appearing in the MIO as ADAT ins). The results have to be recorded back into a separate track (you can't render a wav file for export when routing through an outboard processor obviously), but the results are worth it.

The flexibility of Jack and the Ardour system of inserts makes the audio routing in OSX (even if soundflower or rewire are used) look positively ancient (jack is available for OSX though I think). On another note, my new 64Studio box has been running for a week or so, working with audio almost daily and I has yet to register an xrun.

Some media sense in the downloads and economy debate

Charles Arthur in a Guardian blog provides some useful perspective on the ludicrous figures often quoted by the music industry in relation to file sharing and lost income. Also led me to a link to the Guardian datastore which looks really useful.

From Ubuntustudio to 64studio

A couple of months back I decided to upgrade my main desktop and audio machine to the latest version of Ubuntustudio (9.04). Installation from the DVD was a breeze, and rebooted smoothly into the new look. Basic desktop stuff was great, but setting up my audio ran into the first of two main problems. I have two soundcards, the onboard Intel HDA, and an RME card. I like the Intel to be picked up as hw:0, and take the optical out of this into the optical in of the rme card, which I have running jack. That way I can play things from firefox or other standard apps that only look for the first card, and can route it through jack. I couldn't get this sorted at all, and concluded that pulseaudio was part of the problem. Tried various suggestions gleaned from the net to no avail. Solution - take an analog out and feed it to the MIO2882 that I use for recording under osx (I also use it to mix - amazing box with insane onboard DSP).

I managed with this setup for a while, until I came to use ardour to mark some drum stem mixes from class. Good old alt-m to bring up the mixer didn't work (well - I had to type it twice). The killer for me though was the fact that the transport shortcuts no longer worked when the mixer was in the foreground. This is an absolute showstopper for me - anyone using a DAW hits the space bar alot and it needs to happen in whatever context (setting levels in my case) one is working in. Found others with the same problem but no solution, so thought I'd try 64studio instead - surely no regular ardour users could stand the transport drama?! I was also getting regular xruns, but I was running things like google desktop and gnome-do so this was my fault really! Didn't care too much as I don't record on this machine. Time to separate audio from office things anyway, and another box (identical specs) became available.

Tried the stable 2.1 iso, but it kept failing with a stupid config error regarding tetex-bin. Perhaps my DVD had errors, but the installer couldn't move on, so downloaded the beta 3.0 iso and installed. Very smooth installation and jack setup instant. Optical out from hda card all good... alt-m in ardour is good and my transport shortcuts work again - yay! No xruns so far either so I'll be sticking with this solution for a while.

Lesson - once an audio machine is working and stable, I will avoid upgrading until knowing for certain that the things I use regularly are working as expected. No more mixing everyday office and network stuff with serious audio apps as well. I think ubuntustudio is fantastic, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in audio work, but the latest version needs a bit of tweaking. I feel a bit guilty that I'm not helping the ubuntustudio community in a real way (although this sort of testing is useful I guess) but I do a lot of other open source work so horses for courses.

Here's the setup - I use the macbook as a glorified mixer to control the MIO, and use synergy to share the same keyboard and mouse between machines.

Do the test - looking out for cyclists

Have been doing a fair bit of cycling lately, and although I avoid busy roads as much as possible, there are motorists who appear to get eye contact with me, then pull out anyway. This video relates to that: