Yeah, I know. Groan. (Other stupid post titles “Bass, How Low Can You Go?” “Bass Fishing with Puffer”.)

A few weeks ago, I wrote a mash note to the soniccouture.com sample libraries that I’d acquired (Hang Drum, Konkrete Drums 2). I also mentioned that there was a deal with Soniccouture on Abstrakt Bass. The fine gentlemen at soniccouture provided me with a review copy. I’ve now had a chance to investigate more this library.

Honestly, it’s taken me a while. And not just because of my recent hardware woes. As I said about Konkrete Drums, this thing is impressively deep. It covers a lot of ground, and it covers it well. One of the things that’s so brilliant about souniccouture’s instruments is that they are just that, instruments. Which is another reason it’s taken me so long to formulate a semi-informed opinion: these are a blast to just play, and it’s hard to just flick through the library without wanting to stop and work on something, or just throw together a “live” setup and “jam” for a while. Plus they load quickly - well, inasmuch as any Kontakt multi-sample instrument can be said to load quickly - and sound great in a mix without a lot of tinkering. And all the pertinent controls are right there on the front.
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Yanks. Always with the hyperbole.

But now that the feasts are winding down, denizens of the U.S. now prepare for their second helping of crass gluttony: discount shopping.

I won’t go into how distasteful I find the whole thing, but suffice to say this year I’m half expecting riots.

Nevertheless, chances are if you’re near a metropolitan area you could brave the evacuation-level traffic to get something like %20 off some already marked-down crap at your local Guitar Center.

Ah Guitar Center. On the off chance you don’t have any first-hand experience with a Guitar Center Superstore, well, picture MusiciansFriend.com and MySpace, but, you know, as a store. Or more specifically, as a supermarket.

Yet, for all it’s petty crimes - bad to laughable advice from staff, devaluing of musical instruments¹, the impact on smaller boutique shops^{see 1} - I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think they get a bad rap.
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The high-end DSP plugin company Waves have been, yes, making waves (groan… I know, it’s too easy) with their newest efforts to crack down on those using cracks (someone stop me!), banpiracy.com. I won’t rehash it all when Peter Kirn over at createdigitalmusic.com has been doing a far better job than I could. But a couple of things to note: a.) as far as anyone can tell banpiracy.com is simply a front for Waves and no other developer/company is copping to being part of this “initiative” - i.e. visiting pro studios under one pretense and checking to see if they’re licenses are up-to-date, then suing them if they’re not. 2.) Waves have a long history of actively and aggressively protecting their wares (…I’ll stop, really, I will…) with OS-hooks, dongles, on-line licenses - the works, all at once. Thirdly, even in the high-end audio software market Waves charge a lot of money. And finally, piracy is a problem, even among pro and semi-pro studios. Don’t even argue otherwise. Anecdotal stories demoing cracks and/or later buying cracked software do not a solid case make. I personally had a very busy, albeit ghetto, urban studio brag to me about how much/many stolen software and sample libraries they had, and if I ever wanted they could hook me up.¹

My views on the quality of Waves actual software are as immaterial as they are uninformed. I’m sure they do what they promise and indeed sprinkle Magic Pixie Dust^TM all over your tracks. I’m sure they make tracks warm, and fat, and, erm, whatever other audio buzz-word you want to use here. They sure do make them louder. I, however, would not know. Well, other than what I’ve read from others who know a lot more about this than I, and it’s hard to argue with a list of users that reads like a (very geeky) who’s who of audio production. As much as it’s a money thing, it’s the whole copy protection issue. Additionally, as pretty and impressive as the Waves plugs may seem, if I was going to drop that kind of coin, there are a lot of other options.

So, let’s look at that proposition.
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Further my recent updates, I’m experimenting with opening up the comment section. So I’m trying out a couple of WordPress plugins that may help battle spam. I’m still not convinced that having open comments is something I want to commit to in the long term, and I like being able to respond to every post, which I’ll probably not do when and if I manged to get Dugg (Digged?) or something. If I do stick to with it, I do not suffer fools gladly, or at least have a hard time pretending that I do, so there’s that.

Who knows, I may just do it captiously. Open Comment Week, and such.

“What can ya doooo?”

Anyway, I’m pretty over beat libraries. It’s pretty hard to work up any real enthusiasm about yet another collection of drum/beat loops. While it’s more than useful to have a heap of ‘em around to grab and mangle a “breakbeat” quickly — dropping in beats=my favorite trick — it not like I have any shortage of drum/beat loops. And even if you use a collection extensively, it you may touch but a fraction of its content.

That said, I’m actually pretty chuffed about this.

A drummer whose name I instantly recognize, who has played on some of my favorite recordings and has worked with some of my favorite artists/engineers from some of my most-formative musical years, period.

I don’t know about anybody else, but to me this seems like quite a coup.

Well done.

Sorry to be such a shill for Cake¹, but I’m genuinely looking forward to listening to this. Even if I only use it sporadically or not at all, it will be instructive and entertaining to listen to. (But my mind works like that.)

^{1Not to over-explain the joke, but when I say “shill” I’m don’t mean to imply that I got any special deal on this. I’ll probably shell out for this like everyone else, though, you know, I’m bought off pretty easily.}

In the inbox this morning: Zebra V2.2 released!

So, while most user have been using the beta for a few weeks (months?), developer Urs has nailed down the last of the bugs and made it official.

Requisite purloined update feature list after the jump:
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Without getting too inside VST geeky, there was a developer who went by the name Arguru, a real rock star in the development/advancement of making music on computers. Chances are, if you are using software sequencers/samplers his work has at least influenced what you are using. Sadly, he died a while ago, unexpectedly, in a car accident.

Anyway, for a while he was involved in the discoDSP venture and developed a sampler/host hybrid that is mind-bendingly advanced and incredibly simple. The fabled Highlife. Anyway, after Arguru parted from the company Highlife was released as freeware, frustrating everyone who had paid for the thing, delighting the rest of us cheap bastards.

Well, discoDSP have gone and released the source code under a BSD¹ license.

To quote Ugo over on the *cough* KvR *cough* forums, “Wow, that was unexpected!”

Remember when Netscape decided to open up its source code? No? Well, I’m old. But, unless I’m mistaken, it directly let to Mozilla/Firefox. I imagine this is the same. Only with DSP.

I imagine we’ll quickly see ~nix versions, right? This is big news indeed, correct?

^{1From what I understand, this means you can do what you will with it, commercially or not, as long as you keep a credit to the original copyright holders intact.}

_{Note: I only came to know of Arguru and his work after his passing, other than seeing his name around from time to time. One of those morbid cases of only learning of a person/their work only exactly because of their death. But once I began reading up on the guy and his life I realized how influential he was. Apparently a pretty stellar individual as well.}

Two new VST pluings are now available to anyone who wishes to download. One appears to be a rather polished “sampler” that is more or less official abandonware. The other is a raw chunk of open source programming that may be a diamond in the rough.

The former, Vember Audio’s Shortcircuit, is simple-sample engine, with the emphasis on traditional sampler paradigms, i.e. not build around huge sample libraries, i.e. you drop single sample into it and mangle, modulate and trigger them. Windows only. I don’t know, is there a good MAC VST/AU simple sample playback, like Live’s Simpler or Cakewalk’s DropZone?

B.) The other, VSTLus by programmer John Williamson, is the first iteration of a MIDI utility that runs custom MIDI scripts. So all those hours you’ve spent scoring the web for free VSTi MIDI/MFX plugs and trying to understand/get them to work, can now be spent learning what appears a straightforward scripting language, that will do whatever MIDI tricks you can dream up. It’s all a bit above my head, especially in regard the the plugin’s programming, but I’m definitely keeping an eye on it. Windows only, but since it’s a BSD license here’s to hoping some enterprising MAC/~nix coder can recompile it. I image the scripts are cross-platform, and there’s a rudimentary API, so there’s plenty there for the hardcore. In some ways it reminds me of mucoder’s hypercyclic (my top choice for the Dev Challenge), or, more specifically, a stripped down MFX Development Kit. Personally, I love a good GUI, and the MIDI-hacking I’m most interested in are those that lead me in directions I’d probably not come across on my own, different flavors/degrees of generative and sequencing and modulation scripts. So hypercyclic fills that slot nicely for me. But who knows what can happen with this.

Whew.

I blew through some code today, I tell you what.

Oh I had the pieces I’d been working with, but this morning they began to fall into place. So I built on the momentum and just got it all out of the way. I needed to put it to bed so I could move on with phase two of my site.

Improvents/Revisions You May or May Not Notice:

• Improved font readability.
• Much improved login & registration. (Up there, to your right.)
• Cleaned up a lot of the garbage google ads (does anyone ever click through those?)
• Tagging and related posts
• Uhh… a bunch of other tweaks and stuff my brain is too fried to remember now.

There are already little things I’m catching, and there are few big changes I haven’t quite got a handle on, but since I’m my own beta team, and since it seems to work well enough, have at it. Please let me know if you find anything or have any suggestions.

The final top 3:

1. Elements of Nature
2. hypercyclic
3. The Element of Surprise

In 2006, 3 of the 4 I singled out were the top 3 placers.

This year, I’m batting 3 out of 3!¹

A keen eye for quality and innovation? An influential opinion among the members of KvR? Or am I merely some sort of idiot savant?

I suspect it has something it has something to do with this², but there’s no way to back that argument up without sounding like a complete jackass.

But, obviously, I believe three very worthy digital contraptions were awarded their due. Not the order I would have put them in, but why quibble?

Anyway, some morning-after notes:
Because of my recent adventures in system maintance none of my initial downloads got beyond a 2nd chance. So, yes, I may have overlooked some gems, but apparently I was pretty damn close.

It’s interesting that a SynthEdit plug took the top spot. And the 3rd spot. I would have thought that the cross-platform plugin would have drawn in votes the SE plugs couldn’t get. Then again, hypercyclic’s genius isn’t quickly apparent: it’s a MIDI tool, a smart and unusual MIDI tool and one that benefits from strong host MIDI-routing, but not as gee-wiz apparent as a snyth or DSP.

About the SynthEdit plugs. It’s great that this development environment is out there and lets some real artists do some fine work. We now have access to all sorts of plugins that commercial developers wouldn’t come up with on their own. But its bugs are becoming more and more limiting, for both the developers and the users. Even if te SE developer releases a new version which fixes the dual-core bugs that apparently plague it (I haven’t had my dual-core long enough to encounter this myself) and the “all notes off” bug, that leaves a lot of plugins out there that were created on the old version that need to be recompiled. Nevertheless, this is a real victory for the necessity of VST development platform that is available to the enthusiast as well as the more serious coder.

As rekkerd says “…it is a well deserved win. xoxos has released tons of cool freeware plug-ins over the last few years, more than doing his part in the community.” It’s a cool idea, thoroughly executed, though it’s actual long-term usefulness is still a question. Kudos to Ugo for his exploration of simplicity in the creative process. And cheers to the hypercylic devs for giving me a tool I look forward to exploiting more fully.

^{1Look below the list, in the notes, at the bold text; the bold formatting was inserted at the time of writing.}

^{2The link is to a google lecture on the paradox of choice. Watch it while thinking about your workflow, your plugin folder, all the things about you current setup that you think could be better. Really, it’s enlightening.}