i'm back, with some great news !

i'm back, with some great news !

Mare Unknown   2:58 AM

Hi all !

I's been a while, i know, but i have some really, really good excuses for that :-)

in order of importance :


On October 11th our daughter Mare was born !
Mom and daughter are doing great and her 2 brothers treat her like a princess :-)

Secondly i have been studying really hard to get my CCNA certification, and on September 30th i finally got it !
It was a lot harder than i expected and it took a lot of time, but i'm really glad i did it.

Oh, and in between we also managed to 'upgrade' our house (+1 bedroom)
How's that for an excuse ?



Now i'm back on the linux/audio track and making some great progress with arps, synths and controllers.
More on that soon !

Grtz
Thijs

move from Garageband to Linux : can it be done ? - Part2

move from Garageband to Linux : can it be done ? - Part2

synth Unknown   4:59 AM

- read part 1 first -

Hi all,

To make it a bit easier to understand what exactly we are trying to accomplish i would like to tell you first what our current setup(s) looks like :

1) the setups
As you probably know we have been using Hydrogen live for a while now and that worked out quite well so far.  The Hydrogen setup consists out of a midi drum controller, an old laptop-in-a-box (LT1 on the drawing) and some extra wiring to be able to use the Left and Right output as 2 individual channels :

Read more »

move from Garageband to Linux : can it be done ? - Part1

move from Garageband to Linux : can it be done ? - Part1

synth Unknown   5:30 AM

We (my cousin and I) are currently working on a rather interesting experiment : the goal is to move my cousins setup from Garageband (on OSX) to Linux.

First some background on the current setup(s) and where we want to end up:
Currently I'm running AmSynth + Calf Monosynth on my Ubuntu laptop and Stijn (my cousin) is running Garageband on his Macbook 13".  We both have a midi keyboard hooked up to our laptop and  use the built-in sound card.
An important detail : we are using these laptops live on stage so whatever we run it needs to be rock solid and easy to set up.

The idea to switch to Linux is not new, in fact I already dual-booted Stijn's Macbook some time ago, but it was more of an experiment because it wasn't clear what we really wanted to do with these laptops.  Since that time we started using the laptops for some songs we play with the band so now we have a better understanding of 'who-will-do-what' and also what sounds we need.

Being guitarist with 0 piano playing skills we use an _absolute_ maximum of 3 fingers to play the keyboard, so you can probably guess that we mainly use the laptops for a couple of monophonic electro/dance riffs and also some more old-school sounds like Hammond or piano as backing to create a richer sound.
Sounds pretty simple, but in fact that covers almost the complete spectrum of existing synth types : soundfont player, modular analog synth emulators, sound modeling synths ...

This should be interesting to see how/if we will move from Garageband to Linux.

To be continued ...

- read Part 2 here -

Hydrogen drumkit creator script V2

Hydrogen drumkit creator script V2

script Unknown   2:06 PM

An improved version of the original script is ready.

What's new:
- some small bugfixes
- more options
- espeak sample generator

Read more »

Hydrogen GM espeak test kit : the drumkit that can speak

Hydrogen GM espeak test kit : the drumkit that can speak

midi Unknown   4:41 AM

A couple of days ago Emanuel Rumpf (one of the H2 users) pointed me to the fact that it is really important to follow the GM midi mapping when you create a new drumkit, and right he is!
Since we are in the middle of the Hydrogen spring drumkit contest I updated the info in the H2 manual right away, but while doing that i noticed that there is something very weird going on with Hydrogen's 'GM kit' : is't not GM compliant  :-(

While figuring out the correct mapping i decided to create a GM compliant drumkit template, and added something extra ;-)

Read more »

Hydrogen drumkit creator script

Hydrogen drumkit creator script

python script Unknown   4:12 AM

Some time ago we (the Hydrogen team) launched the first edition of the 'Hydrogen Spring Drumkit Contest'.
The goal of this contest is to encourage the Hydrogen users to contribute new drumkits.

The goal of the 'Hydrogen drumkit creator' script is to make it easier to make these drumkits.


Read more »

Simple guitar A/B switch

Simple guitar A/B switch

stomp box Unknown   2:10 PM

A couple of weeks ago my brother, my cousin and I attended the annual Muzikanten dag (musicians day) event in the AB in Brussels.  On that day you can participate in numerous music workshops, demo's, training sessions ... you name it.
I really enjoyed the day and my cousin got inspired by the 'wall of sound' workshop by the Belgian band The sore losers.  They had some really good tips on how to create your guitar sound, and one of the key elements in their setup was a simple A/B switch.  They use the A/B switch to switch between 2 amps.  This is a very simple -but clever- way to get a punchy solo sound : hit a button, second amp switches on > instant boost.
The trick is to set the second amp relatively 'clean' so you don't loose the 'punch' of your sound.

A couple of days later my cousin asked me if i could build such a switch, and this is the result :

Read more »

Hydrogen 0.9.6 feature freeze

Hydrogen 0.9.6 feature freeze

linux Unknown   2:02 AM

yep !  it's that time  :-)
see this post

Hydrogen GUI update

Hydrogen GUI update

manual Unknown   1:01 PM

I'm currently working on some updates for the Hydrogen manual, and i also made some mock-ups of the Hydrogen GUI.  More specifically the pattern editor control buttons (the part just above the pattern editor)
Currently this is a mix of buttons, 'LCD' displays and dropdowns.  This inconsistency has been bugging me for some time now and i decided to have a go at it.
First priority : replace the different elements with simple, intuitive buttons. Simple.

The buttons are all bitmaps so it is quite time consuming to get a good looking 'icon' on them.

Below is a first attempt (top=new, bottom=current) :

It's far from perfect, but it's a start !

Amsynth jacksession support

Amsynth jacksession support

linux Unknown   12:16 AM

Beginning of the week i filed 2 bug reports for Amsynth.  Today one of them was fixed. And the other one, well, was no bug :-S BUT it did help the developer of Amsynth (Nick Dowell) to figure out how jack_session works in QjackCtl and fix an other minor bug :-)
It is always nice to get some feedback on a bug you file, and its even better if the bug actually gets fixed.
I love Amsynth

Startup manager

Startup manager

zenity Unknown   12:10 AM

A couple of days ago i decided to cleanup the audio startup scripts i created so far and put them all together into 1 'master' startup script.
Since i have a number of different startup scripts for various configurations (internal sound card, firewire soundcard, network setup, softsynths ...) I wanted to make it flexible and easy to extend + avoid using the terminal to start it up. For this last bit i used zenity and this is the result :

I created a launcher on my desktop so i can easily access it, and although i'm not 100% happy with it yet it definitely helps me when i want to switch between different setups or when i want to try something new.

PPA for Hydrogen !

PPA for Hydrogen !

ubuntu Unknown   2:24 PM

Today i mailed a couple of times with the owner of the KXStudio PPA, Filipe.
Since there are no Ubuntu installers available for Hydrogen 0.9.5 i wanted to see if i could link to his PPA instead.
He was actually very enthusiastic and told me that he would be more than happy to collaborate!

On his main PPA there are Hydrogen 0.9.5 versions for Ubuntu Lucid, Natty and Maverick and he even has a 'latest' PPA where he regularly uploads snapshot builds (alpha versions).  This is great news for anyone that wants to test the latest version of Hydrogen but doesn't know how to (or doesn't want to) build Hydrogen from source.  Now you can simply install it like any other application :-)
I hope this way we will get more testers and more feedback.

Thanks Filipe !