Further my explorations in finishing my audio rig, I’m getting close now. So very close.

I had ditched the Alesis i|o 26 a while ago due to its really poor drivers. This pretty much convinced me that I don’t like firewire audio interfaces. I don’t see the point really when you have a desktop computer and latency is important. In my experience, PCI drivers are more solid. Perhaps on a Mac this is different, but even the heralded RME drivers used way too much CPU when I pushed them at all.

For a while I reverted to my EZbus/Audiophile setup. M-Audio may make absolute crap but they know how to write a driver, or at least a solid PCI card driver. And I didn’t have to worry about the quality of the card’s converters or clock since it was handing those duties off to the EZbus Mixer. But I quickly remembered why I ditched this setup in the first place. Sure, the output amplifiers on the EZbus are really nice, but the pre-amps have little-to-no headroom which makes them pretty useless for any sort of line-in. I’m guessing that the converters and clock are above average at best. And the loop-back latency is huge. Plus there are a few other limitations that I won’t bother to enumerate but make it a less than ideal recording rig, digital lofi or no.

So, after another round of reading specs and gearslutz.com threads, I bought a Lynx L22 card. I contacted the guys at Mercenary Audio, who are fortunately just up I95 about 20 minutes, and they had one in stock.

Let me take a minute to say a few kind words about Mercenary. Obviously, I’m lofi. And kind of thick. On top of which, I don’t have a lot of money to throw around. I’m not entirely their target customer. But they treated me with complete respect, answered all my stupid questions, and helped me understand my purchase. They also showed me around their studio and workshops, which was very inspiring. I can’t recommend them enough. I really look forward to being able to business with them again.

The Lynx was a painless install. More importantly, the difference in the sound was stunning. The same night that I installed it, the friend that I record with came over. I didn’t tell him about the upgrade and just pulled up a song we had been working on. “The bass sounds great,” he said a few bars in. “What did you do to it?”

Seriously, insert your favorite audio snob cliché: “Blanket lifted off the mix…” “…punchy…” “tight bottom end…” et cetera. I just know that a lot of the muddiness that I/we had been struggling with was either cleared up or much easier to sort out. Even running into the EZbus (via SPDIF, so clocked and covereted by the L22) the improvement was stunning.

But the problem was basically, what to use as an interface. The EZbus wasn’t going to cut for the aforementioned reasons, and I don’t have the dosh to splash out on a summing box, outboard converters or an AES mixer. Nothing was really worth my trouble in my price-range after blowing my load on the card itself. Then it occurred to me: just use the Alesis as an small mixer, and save myself a lot of expense and hassle.

So I get all the advantages of the Alesis (multiple in and outs, SPDIF, optical, phono) but I don’t have to worry about its shortcomings. It’s converters, as near as I can tell, aren’t all that bad, but since I’m summing to the Lynx, as well as sending my analog signal to the L22, it is basically souped up patch-bay. And for that it works pretty well.

All I need now is a decent pre-amp.

So my advice to you bedroom producers and project studio jockeys: scrimp and save and get yourself a decent soundcard. It’s worth it.

This blog? You should be so lucky.

My extended absence can be blamed on many things - you know, the work/life/relationship bits I occasionally allude to - but mostly it’s because as of my last post (or thereabouts) I’ve been sans cigarettes. Yeah, I’ve retired my beloved and longtime companion, American Spirits. The fuel for many late nights at my DAW, the thing that keeps me focused while I put together posts here, my blessing and curse. After almost 30-something years it’s finally time to figure out how I can live my life without this glorious crutch.

Of course, I’m great at quitting. I’ve done it many times. (As the old joke goes.) But I really want to become a non-smoker. I’ll really try not to become a complete asshole about it - hell hath no fury like a smoker reformed - but cost, potential ill-health and social stigma have gotten to be too much for me to afford.

It will be a couple of weeks soon, and hopefully I’ll be able to do something other than glower at life and obsess on justifications for something that ultimately makes me feel shitty about myself.

• I’ve said before, I’m not inclined to fault companies for what they didn’t put in their product - I generally know what I’m getting into when I fork over for a license and trust that it will meet my expectations. I’ll even be pretty forgiving for “bugs” and what I see as over-sights/blunders in the execution - to a point of course. And, as I’ve also said, most of the companies we’re talking about in the independent audio software world are benign to very cool. But indulge me in climbing on my rackety and feeble pulpit and address my benefactors over at Native Instruments.

Greetings Native Instruments Co.,

Congratulations on all the great products you’ve been releasing lately. I hope you’ve been having a lot of success with them. However, I want to specifically address your upgrade policy on your Kontakt line of products.

I’ve been using Kontakt since literally the day it arrived at a local Mega Lo Guitar Mart and upgraded to version 2 because of all the fine work you put into improving and expanding the product. It’s been great. I even purchased the tutorial DVD to more fully utilize it’s deeper features; to what extent this is actually the case is sorta besides the point. Suffice to say, I’ve acquired (legally it should be said) a lot of soundware that does fully utilize Kontakt’s deeper features.

The latest version Kontakt 3 looks pretty swell also. Looks like you improved a lot of the features. Perhaps not a whole version upgrade. But, you know, it’s your product you can give it what number you want really; who am I to judge the work that went into it? I look forward to trying it out.

My problem is this: Why do I have to buy the whole library that comes with it? Honestly, I don’t really use the 2 NI Kontakt libraries I have as it is. And while I’m sure you’ve done some stunning work on improving the included library, and the reports seem pretty favorable, I don’t see this being a whole lot different. I’ve got a lot of these sounds well covered, and the last thing my sample drive needs is more redundancy.

I’m guessing it’s because you want to keep it a boxed product, no? That even with your very well implemented registration management, and your high profile, a boxed product is more like a “physical thing” - shelf space and all that - and thus somehow less prone to being ripped off or dismissed as not worth the investment. Okay, I may well be grasping, but, seriously, couldn’t you offer an “engine”-only download update for users? Well, I know you *could*, but for some reason you don’t. No offense to the many sound designers and editors who put together your library. But I just don’t need it. And it seems a waste for me to buy a whole lot of packaging and content for what probably comes to about 20MB of program and plugin files.

And, yes, I know it’s only around $130.00 street. It’s not really the price so much as it is the waste of it all. Offering it for under 90 bucks from you website seems a reasonable amount to pay considering what you’re charging for the boxed upgrade.

I’ll just give in and get it I suppose. I’ll get sick of manually exporting MIDI files, or trying to built multis will finally drive me batty and I’ll get the packaging then go ahead then download the latest build. Either that or you’ll release Kontakt 4 and just upgrade to that. Or, considering how I’ve wound up with a lot of your products, just before the next version is released you’ll blow out the remaining stock of 3 and I’ll just pay what it would theoretically cost me for a download now. And then start the cycle again…

Do you see the folly?

Cheers,

Your Customer,
Digital Lo-Fi

Of all my posts over the last year, by far the most viewed has been my post on the open-source-ing of the DiscoDSP Highlife sampler. People love the open source. The project is not without its controversy - for a lot reasons I don’t understand and have no opinion about - but is still something I think is a good move for the alternative audio software world.

Since that post both the commercial version and the source code have been updated. Not in tandem; it appears there is a fork in the project, and the commercial version exists independently of the open-source version, i.e. features and improvements in the new commercial version do not necessarily appear in the source code. But the source code now has an official update with some new features. And I like to believe that somewhere a developer or neophyte is tinkering away and will release something none of us saw coming.

I’ve mentioned it before, Rayzoon Jamstix is a great value for the Windows-based project studio. It has another update that adds a boat-load of new features and fixes. I’m not using it much these days because I’m not doing much composing or creating, but when I start writing again I’m hoping to get some good use out of this.

And here’s a new old one: Beatburner, possibly one of the best names for an audio production tool, is now Free. As in lunch, erm… beer… erm… well, free software.

I haven’t had the time to install and give it a whirl, but that the developer turned what was, he says, a commercial “meh” into a hotly downloaded piece of software that will be powering thousands of users’ digital lofi tracks for the next few years is a Great Thing. And he’s supporting the swarm all on his own time and dime. There’s a new torrent which should ease some of the burden, and I’ve badgered him into putting up a PayPal donate. Give the guy a few bucks if you’ve downloaded it, or are planning to. He said something like 20,000 (!) downloads; if everyone gave one or two (insert currency here) he’d have made a nice little return on his investment.

And, as always, to stay up-to-date on all things computer audio related, soundware and software, rekkerd.org is a great blog. And his “short links” roundups are always interesting.

I’ll finish up my series of posts celebrating cross-platform plugins with an elder statesman of the cross-platform plugin world, SonicCharge’s absolutely awesome µTonic (or microTonic).

I bought this back shortly after it was released, or at least when it was reviewed and demo’d in Computer Music. I made the decision like 15 minutes after installing the demo. It is really that fabulous. It is both simple - the presets are by and large brilliant - and really, really deep. To this day I’m constantly surprised by the sonic interest it adds to my music and the sounds I can get out of it - and I use it a lot.

I’m bringing this up for few reasons:

• It fits in perfectly with my cross-OS celebration, natch.
• A few months ago SonicCharge updated all the code for today’s top-o-the-line Macs (and a built a new Vista installer, though the program itself worked fine).
• In conjunction with said update they also released a new folder full of patches.
• To give away a little freebie pack of patches for use with µTonic.
• To make you suffer through a lot of back story.

All of this after the jump.
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I’ll go ahead and do that thing that a blogger is never supposed to do and apologize for my absence.

I’d like to say the lack of posting on my behalf is because I’ve been too busy with web development work - which is partially true. Or that it’s because I’m trying to get some goddamn music finished up so I can release a few albums I’ve been working on for a few years - also true, more or less. But really, the long and short, mostly I’ve been pretty uninspired to do any writing on the site.

Even with my erratic posting schedule, keeping up a blog takes a tremendous amount of time, especially when you’re as long-winded as I am. Add on top of that, that I’m at heart a terrible slacker. It’s a wonder I’ve kept this up as long as I have.

Yeah, there have been some cool software/soundware releases in my absence, but I haven’t incorporated or upgraded anything in my studio: I’m waiting for some clients to, you know, actually pay - “The check’s in the mail” may be a hoary cliché, but for a freelancer it’s actually something you hear on regular basis. So I can’t really talk about new toys. Nevertheless, I’m working on my studio and DAW and I’ve made a few changes to my setup, and I’ll get to all of that eventually. There have also been some tempest/teapot controversies, minor shake-ups, and technology developments. I’m not sure where I’ll pick up on all of that, but it’s not like there’s been a shortage of things to write about.

In any case, for those few of you who still have me in your RSS reader, or to those who’ve stumbled across me and keep checking back, I will get back to it. I’m not promising Bigger, Harder, Faster, Stronger, but it would be nice if got back to 2 or 3 posts a week.

Considering I’m a Windows user, and (primarily) a Sonar user, I find these days I’m more interested in software that is available to all platforms, or at least both Mac and Windows.

I’m not going bother with the whole reasoning behind my platform choice (yawn) other than to say at this point it is mostly inertia. Well that and a financial (hardware and software) consideration. While I have never used a Mac for audio “production”, I’ve logged many, many hours on Macs, mostly with my web work. And really there’s things I like and hate about either platform; six of one. And as the differences between the architecture become more negligible it seems ever more futile to compare them.

I respect developers that can support either OS. To me, it speaks to a certain purity of code. Of course, I know not much at all about software coding, and even less about DSP coding. But for some reason I trust a developer who is not dependent on one or the other platform to do their magic. Certainly, I enjoy the benefits of getting a lot of pretty fun software toys that a Mac user has to jump through some hoops to employ; but most of the time these days, Windows-only signals to me that what I’m getting probably isn’t that spectacular or offering me something that I don’t already have. Whereas, something that is coded for either OS pretty much signals that the developer(s) know their shit, and their DSP is independent of the OS libraries. (Does that make sense?)

So in this vein I’m going to be posting about a few new developments, and some old favorites, that further bridge the divide between one brand of geeks and another

Well, not really. This is one of those years when I abstain as much as possible from Christmas. I don’t do this every year, but more than occasionally. As I’ve said, no kids, a family that is understanding or feels similarly. My girlfriend is with her family, and we did our small Xmas before she went away (believe me, I know how good I have it with her) so I can have a day as uneventful as I’d like. I won’t go into a tirade or anything, but suffice to say, while I understand the need for family and communal celebration, the religion/consumerism aspect bring forth the curmudgeon in me.

Also, my good friend just called to tell me that his beloved pet had suddenly and unexpected shuffled off this mortal coil. Sad news.
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I just noticed that the google banner ad at the bottom of page is spitting up a Rayzoon ad. Since that space is dictated by the whims of google it is completely coincidental. (And unprofitable I’ll add.) But, no. Rayzoon did not pay me to mention their product.

But while I was staring at my navel, just thought I’d say it in case. While I can be bought off with shiny trinkets and baubles, I will never endorse something I wouldn’t actually use, or praise a product to appease some hypothetical advertiser.

That said, I’m open to reviewing your product online or accepting your advertising dollars. Just know what you’re getting into…

he says thereby ensuring no advertising dollars/review product.

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.