pour l'amour de la musique

My newest obsession has to be Ampache. Shortly after I upgraded my hosting plan to "unlimited" I decided to use the storage to back-up my digital life (in case of fire/flood/toddler toilette experiments/etc). Since then, I have uploaded approx. 40 GB of media, most of which is home videos and music. I must admit I don't have a very impressive music library compared to many-a-cohort. Still, I always wondered if I could easily manage this lot with a web utility so I didn't always have to carry my external hard-drive around or copy my library whenever I get a new computer. I also like the idea of having it centralized since I'm not too good at keeping up on redundancy with media coming into possession using one of two laptops, home and work desktops, friends, and so on.

Introducing Ampache. Ampache has a lot of functionality that I am not able to exploit, designed for a server that you have total control over, which is not the case with my shared hosting service. However, I have successfully uploaded the PHP based installer, created a database, and configured it...and I'm not that smart so it has to be easy! The only problem that I haven't yet solved is increasing the maximum time my server will allow an Ampache PHP script to run. The default is set to 30 s, which is really not enough to catalog my entire library. My current work-around is to break the library up into many catalogs.

Nevertheless, I am happy with the user interface which allows me to either download a playlist .m3u file which then lets a media player (I use VLC) to stream from the web-server, or there is also a local flashplayer (xspf). I would prefer to use the xspf player since it is one click playback and has a nice interface which displays album art, however, lots of my music is in .ogg format which won't play. So I'm working on converting to .mp3s.

Soft Studio Solved?

Whilst the misses was away (Vegas Wedding - 4 days) I made it a goal to upgrade my system: 1. Upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on new HD 2. Reconfigure my software studio. I had just purchased a WD Caviar Blue 160 GB HD (ultra quiet!) and installed Ubuntu 9.10. Eventually I will get smart and make a remaster of my system so I don't have to reconfigure everything when doing something like this, but it is rare that I have to move to a new HD. Still, I had to start rebuilding my software suite. I can manage this to 95% completion in about 2 hours which I banged out early one morning.

I accomplished a network upgrade to 10.04 (lucid) in about an hour, however I had to troubleshoot a few bugs, two of which were related. The login screen lagged a very long time and my USB drive would not automount on boot like it used to. Searching the web, I found a fix and after deactivating the floppy drive (I don't even have one) in the BIOS settings this was corrected.

After installing my standard (and more) suite of software, I made my "Studio" menu and fired up JACK, Qsynth, and Qtractor to test things out. Unfortunately, I was unable to record midi from my keyboard! After racking my brain a bit, I decided to uninstall Qtractor and build it from source. Although this is always a non-trivial task (although getting easier), it fixed the problem. I also installed LinuxSampler, and the front-end GUIs Qsampler, and Jsampler (see earlier post 3.10) from the CVS repos.

I had hoped that the LinuxSampler engine would eventually be my "go-to" for running multiple samples on different channels simultaneously. However, I cannot figure out why the GIG files (or any samples for that matter) sound lousy, bad, terrible, fuzzy, etc (keywords!). Really annoyed after having built Gigedit, LinuxSampler, and Qsampler from source. I decided to play with Qsynth (.sf2 soundfont sample handler GUI for FluidSynth).

After some digging and tinkering I believe I have a solution. Use Qsynth with Qtractor and Hydrogen (on top of JACK of course) to build all my MIDI files in real-time with a MIDI keyboard and then record into Ardour. The breakthrough was figuring out how to play multiple samples (.sf2) from Qsynth simultaneously. Here is how:

Qsynth loads audio "engines" and you can set up several at once. However, you only need one!
In setup I select alsa_seq as the midi driver, and jack as the audio driver. Then under "Soundfonts" tab select each of the soundfonts (.sf2) files you want to have available for your Qtractor piece. Then edit each entries "offset" so they are different (0, 1, 2, etc). This sets the "stack" with different banks. Save and leave "setup." Then select "Channels" from the main Qsynth interface. Right-click the channel of interest and select "edit." Then you can select different "banks" and assign different soundfont samples to different channels! Now give your neglected 2 year-old a high five!

Xewton Music Studio for iPod Touch

Xewton Music Studio (XMS) is an amazingly powerful MIDI sequencer with a complete set of instrument samples for the Apple iPod Touch or iPhone. Despite several limitations, this app is quite powerful, very intuitive and loads of fun to use. It is well worth the current $15 list price. I am currently working on my first nOe album using this software almost exclusively for composition. It exports compositions as .wav files and has built in server capabilities which enables you to access the files from you desktop/laptop with a web-browser and download them.

Introduction

The goal of this blog is mainly to keep myself on track with my life goals. Included in these are various projects which I will document here. May it also serve to provide some form of expression and the freedom to rant and rave as I see fit.

At the time of this writing, I am 28 years old, married to a lovely, caring, intelligent, passionate, driven woman named Elia who has given me 3 boys, the eldest Lucas (22 mos.) and the twins Ethan and Gavin.

I am currently in a state of slippage, redirection, and melancholly, quite possibly losing my mind, or at least changing it frequently. I am writing my Ph.D. dissertation on my work in physical organic chemistry. Although I have no working title, it's contents will enlighten the reader on the subject of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), specifically my work on the synthesis of a [4.4.4]Starphene as well as DFT calculations of large substituted acenes and a correlation of their HOMO-LUMO energy gap with their apparent photo-oxidative resistance (air-stability).

I used to be a musician; unafraid of expression, writing frequently, practicing often. I would like to restart the process: write, practice, record, learn.

I have a bit of a fancy for beer. I know, a bit 'cliche' whilst still in graduate school but I assure you I never completely went "off the deep end" by growing a full beard, touring breweries whenever possible just for free samples and turning my nose up at the award winning Pabst Blue Ribbon (their mommy put the blue ribbon ON THE CAN!)....okay I did that. Still, I have been lucky enough to acquire some great materials for homebrewing and better still, found some people who've shared my interest along the way. Again, I would love to "relax, have a homebrew" very soon. Did I mention the twins were born 3 months ago?

I used to ride a motorcycle. I've had my license since I was 18 and rode every year. My Dad pulled my first bike out of the dump, made it run (and pass inspection), slapped me on the back and said "don't kill yourself." It was a 1971 125 cc Honda Rebel and frankly I'm surprised I lived to tell about it. I remember cruising down the highway (litteraly down-hill) topping out at 80 mph just to push it (sorry Mom) and it was rattling so hard I thought the handlebars might come loose. I slowly upgraded from there: 1979 450cc Kawasaki rebuild; 1985 500cc Honda Magna V30; 2002 750cc Honda Shadow VT750. Last July my father-in-law lost his life on his Kawasaki. It's almost June this year and I've just registered mine and got it out of storage, it needs a chain and sprockets, I'm not sure if it will get them. I've got a lot of babies to look after.

So summer is here, I'm plugging away at my dissertation, looking for a job (hopefully a well-suited post-doc) and trying to find projects that will help maintain my sanity. I've been thinking for a while about trying a linux os at home and using it as a digital audio workstation. Why? Well it's a two-fer. I'll get to bang my head against the wall learning something that's not chemistry for a change. Linux is hard enough to get started in but I really want to compound it with the world of DAWs, sequencers, digital effects, samples, synths, VST plugins, etc. I sang bass in a college chamber choire. I played sax in the pep-band and guitar in the jazz band in high-school. I've been writing "singer-songwriter" crap for about 15 years (although a bit dried up for the past 5). I don't know much about any of that, but I don't know anything about digital composition and recording. Thus, this is the start of my blog.