Month: June 2005

Afterlife and Bongos

A couple really sketchy tracks laid down tonight with real instruments (mostly) — Afterlife Jam is a dubious attempt to play the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ “Hell” on my ukulele… it’s only got two chords but that was too much for me. I start rambling towards the end. I added a little reverb effect for fun.

Pipes and Bongos is an Apple Loop bongo track with three tracks of me playing a pennywhistle over it in a kind of meandering, random fashion.

I don’t disparage these things cause I don’t like them; if I hated them I wouldn’t put them out in public. I just don’t want anyone to download them expecting anything but me just dorking around. I mentioned to Kev today in instant messenger that maybe I’d lay down a track or two tonight, and I wanted to do so, so I did.

Alternatively, if you’d like to hear an amateur ukulelist who’s put some actual effort and discipline into his work, check out my man Clinton’s burgeoning West Palm Sessions, growing by the day.

Apple On Intel?

Dan Gillmor has a fairly complete collection of links concerning this hot rumor.

The only thing I can think of about this that might suck mightily is if there’s any truth whatsoever to the rumors (as cited by Leander Kahney here) that Intel’s new chips have built in DRM (digital restrictions management), allowing the entertainment industry to control your machine from afar through the hardware and slap you down if you do anything they don’t approve of with your content. (This would be the equivalent of if the TV and movie studios had got the TV manufacturers to make TVs that radioed the police if you tried to hook them up to a VCR.)

If that whole business, which is just an annoyance in iTunes, became the whole raison d’être of the Mac platform, I could see myself running unhappily back to Linux. I wouldn’t like it. But I wouldn’t like Macs anymore if they went too far in that direction. Maybe if Debian/Sarge turned out to be sweet I’d be a Debian boy again.

But then, as I mentioned to Michael, I’m not mostly here on a Mac because of Apple. I’m here because of the cool stuff the community does with the Mac. If the Mac community offers me as much grooviness as it does now, I’ll probably still be around.

UPDATE: it’s true. News all over. Huh. Not so strange. Probably little or nothing to do with DRM. Just fast chips arriving on a reasonable schedule. Sounds like the transition will be no big deal compared to 680×0->PowerPC or OS9->OSX.

And yet it leaves me strangely sad and dissatisfied, for no rational reason, and pining for Linux. Maybe that’s just me still being bitter about getting all into JACK and having it sucked away from me by Tiger. I dunno. I’m just kinda “eh” about macs for the moment.

Cog: Avast Ye Sound Files

Cog is a simple, to-the-point, just-works audio application that plays sound files in formats that are very cool but for which QuickTime support is flaky or lacking.

  • Ogg Vorbis
  • Mp3
  • Flac
  • Musepack
  • Wave/AIFF
  • Monkeys Audio

Very cool.

I had some Ogg files lying around and the only thing I had that would play them easily was VLC, and they sounded like crap in VLC for some reason.

I didn’t have anything that would play some of these other formats.

Rock.

sjs hates software: Mac OS X Tiger

sjs hates software: Mac OS X Tiger: “It Just Works”

I thought I was immune, but I drank the Kool Aid. I entered the Reality Distortion Field. Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” is my Saviour. Resistance is useless. So I upgraded. And everything broke.

Yeah, his thoughts here are pretty much what I thought. Glad I was just doing audio for shits and giggles and not for any professional reason, or I’d have wiped and reinstalled Panther.