Sheet music for my latest song is to the right

Which reminds me of the old joke:

Q: How do you get a guitarist to play more quietly?

A: You put sheet music in front of him.

Of course, the corollary to that is:

Q: How do you get a sax player to play more quietly?

A: You take his sheet music away.

Don’t get me started on drummers…

The first 2.4.3 alpha release ^[?] is now available here.

Two big, very useful, additions in this release:

• the ability to filter search results by URL and/or channel folder(s)
• new API entry points that allow external programs to create new reports or modify existing ones

Get your Awasu goodness while it’s hot and I’ll start slaving away over a hot keyboard working on the next release…

A couple of people have asked how I produced the songs I posted the other day, so here’s a quick run-down.

It all started back in the mid-90’s when I picked up a wonderful piece of equipment put out by Roland, the VS-880. It was a self-contained portable recording studio that went for around a grand and a great way for someone to start learning how to record. And while you can still get this kind of all-in-one box, nowadays most people do everything on a computer.

Fast-forward to today, I recently got myself a new laptop to build a studio around and with 8 GB of memory, 8 CPU’s and a 256 GB solid-state drive, it was definitely not cheap but audio and <foreshadowing> video </foreshadowing> is notoriously hard on computers and this system has been built for the long-haul.

On it, the main things I run are Ableton Live and Reaper and as you can see in the screenshot below, things have changed just a bit in the last 15 years Spread out over two 1920×1080 displays, I have on-screen waveforms, drag-and-drop editing, real-time monitoring of what’s happening on every channel, so compared to how I had to manage with the VS-880’s tiny LED screen, things are obviously much easier. I don’t quite get to grumble to the kids today about how I had to cart my 8-track around everywhere, in the snow, up-hill (in both directions) but it’s not far off…

Ableton is popular with people doing dance and electronic music and I rather suspect I might be blazing a bit of a trail using it for blues but it’s great for what I want to do: prepare songs for live work. All the songs I posted can be performed live, and it’s not just a case of simply playing along to a backing track. Using a MIDI foot controller, I can move around the various parts of a song at will and since I play a WX5 wind synth, I have even more control via that as well. For example, in Dancing In The Rain, I can trigger a thunder-clap or the sound of rainfall at any time by playing a particular note

The WX5 is a MIDI controller i.e. while it can play notes, it doesn’t have sounds built into it and needs to be plugged into a sound generator and the unit of choice is the VL70-m. The sounds it comes with are OK but this guy sells a chip that replaces them with a new set that are simply awesome. There are a bunch of samples on the linked-to page as well as, of course, the songs I posted While many synths work by sampling (i.e. they play back pre-recorded samples of each note as you play them), the VL70-m works by physical modeling, that is, it has been programmed with a mathematical model of a pipe and it figures out what sound would come out if you blow into it. Each different sound in the VL70-m has the pipe configured differently (length, bore diameters, twists, kinks and holes) and it’s quite bizarre to think that by simply contorting a pipe in different ways, it can be made to sound like an electric guitar, a violin or a bass Loads of fun

Reaper is a DAW (digital audio workstation, a recording studio application) and is, in a word, amazing. You may have heard kevotheclone raving about how insanely awesome Awasu is, well, I’m about to do the same for Reaper. It’s produced by a company called Cockos, founded by Justin Frankel, the same dude that brought us Winamp all those years ago, and once described by Rolling Stone as “the world’s most dangerous geek.” If you’ve ever had anything to do with audio production, you’ll know that the main players like Cubase, Pro Tools and Logic are typical, corporate-scale behemoths, laden with features but with a commensurate number of bugs that are maybe fixed in releases that come out once every couple of years, and a price tag in the USD 500-1000 range. Reaper, on the other hand, is an extremely powerful piece of software (with far more in it than what I will ever need), releases are every couple of weeks, betas are pushed out every couple of days and I’m somewhat embarrassed to report that what they are asking for this fabulous piece of gear is less that what we ask for the Pro Edition of Awasu, a measly 60 bucks. The big players would be well justified in feeling somewhat uneasy about what’s happening here since Reaper is fast catching up to them.

Not only that, they have a policy of trusting their users:

We believe that technological enforcement of copy protection is not in the best interest of our customers.
…
We offer a good product at a fair price.

We don’t spend money and effort on marketing, complicated piracy protection, or other things that do not directly improve REAPER and the user experience.

We think the good will generated by playing fair and being responsive to users is more valuable to our business than short-term profits.

If the fact that their product is bloody fantastic isn’t good enough reason to buy it, then surely this is

But it gets better! I wish I could find it again but when I was sniffing around to find out more about Reaper, I stumbled across a long forum post from someone who was raving about its support. He had posted a suggestion for a new feature and was gob-smacked when the developer replied almost immediately and they had a conversation nutting out how it could work. But his gob-smackedness was nothing compared to what he felt when an hour later, he received a build with a prototype of new feature in it

And I thought it was only me who did that kind of thing…

At the risk of disturbing the tumbleweeds bouncing by a quick update on what’s been happening these past few months behind the curtain here…

I’ve been back in the woodshed and also doing some work in my newly-pimped out studio, with some rather pleasing results. Dancing In The Rain is, amazingly, the first song I put together, and it’s come out remarkably well.

If you can’t see the audio clips embedded in this post because you don’t have Flash installed (or Awasu has stripped them out ), you can also hear them here.


A bit more up-beat, Give It To Me.


Of course, I’ve been rabbiting on all these years about how I play sax, so here’s a track of me playing a “real” instrument Back around 1875 when I first started studying jazz, I had a pair of Aebersold play-alongs, one with a bunch of Charlie Parker songs in it and the other from Miles Davis. The Parker one was too hard and since the first song in the Miles book was Four, that was the first jazz song I ever tried to learn and so naturally, it’s the first cab off the rank here

But have no fear, in amongst all this noodling around in the studio, I’m still plugging away on the next version of Awasu. By popular request, some big extensions to the API and search engine are in the works and the next release will be in a week or two…

And I was the guy who wrote it

kevotheclone has just put up a wiki page that explains how you can get Microsoft Word to call a running copy of Awasu, extract information out of it and insert the results into your document And the Awasu doesn’t even have to be running on the same computer!

I know a lot of people out there are using Awasu to generate reports based on content coming out of Awasu but this takes things one step further, dynamically pulling the content out as it stands at that moment, rather than when the report was generated. And because the new API that enables this runs over HTTP, it will also work with anything that allows HTTP calls to be made. For example, you could write a web page that extracts the latest information out of an Awasu server running on your intranet, making it instantly available on your web site Or dynamically generate reports on demand, instead of on a schedule, perhaps based on results coming out of Awasu’s search engine or annotated items that you have saved in a workpad.

Yikes

/taka scratches his head and wonders what he has started…

It’s been an insanely busy few months since New Year but I’m finally finishing up my bit in a project I’ve been working on recently (and I’m extraordinarily glad to see the back of it ) and start to transition over to a new thing I’ve got coming up. Much less well paid but it will be immensely enjoyable – ain’t it always the way

Anyway, the email-to-RSS plugin channel has been broken for a while but it’s finally been updated, the testers have taken it for a spin around the block and it seems to be chugging along just fine.

Have fun with it – the source code is included with it – and I’ll see y’all in April. I’ve got a whole bunch of things in my queue to write about…

The 2.4.2 beta release ^[?] is now available here.

It’s been a while since the last beta but a huge amount of work has gone into the main new feature in this release, an API that allows external programs to control Awasu.

Some of the things the API allows you to do is find out about your channels, open them up, run reports and get the results, monitor and update your workpads and of course, hook into Awasu’s search engine.

All of this is important since it enhances Awasu’s already prodigious extensibility and allows third-parties to build even more insanely cool additions to Awasu’s feature set. These are some of the things the Awasu Monster has been able to create without the API and I’ve seen some teasers of what’s to come now that the API has been released :drool: And other people have also suggested further useful additions to the API that will be made available in the next release cycle.

I’m right on it…

The second 2.4.2 alpha release ^[?] is now available here.

The main additions are the ability to get channel summary pages and reports via the HTTP API, as well a web-based interface into Awasu’s search engine. The API is getting pretty extensive now – you could pretty much leave Awasu running in your server room and access it solely via a browser

Good grief, is it 2010 already? It doesn’t seem that long ago us techies were running around like headless chooks, trying to prevent the world from ending and here we are, ten years on, um, laughing our asses off at this kind of thing

Anyway, to kick off the new year, the Awasu Monster has been hard at work putting up some insanely cool stuff on the wiki. Since he lives in California, the first couple of things he whipped up were some extensions to monitor earthquakes

GeoRSS and ShakeMap are both metadata modules, which allow Awasu to extract non-RSS information embedded in a feed, in this case geospatial information published by the United States Geological Survey. If you look at the screenshot to the right, you can see that Awasu has extracted the embedded information and presented it as part of each item (bottom-left) and also shown it in the item pane (top-right) You can also check out his new FAQ entry for details on how to add extra columns to the item pane.

Awasu actually already has support for geocodes, but a different format to the one used by the USGS so kevotheclone has also written an XSLT that converts the GeoRSS elements used by the USGS to the W3C format recognized by Awasu, should you prefer it in that format.

Turning our attention to Awasu’s user tools, we have a tool that converts a web page or feed item to a PDF and one that hooks into Google’s link analysis tools. And this one massively extends the list of places where you can send items to by using a “middleman” service.

But I’ve left the best for last, an XSLT that will automatically translate a feed from one language to another You simply attach it to a channel and all the feed items will automagically start to appear in your Awasu, translated! kevotheclone emailed me a few weeks ago to talk about this one, saying that he had been inspired to write it by an announcement by the developer of another popular feed reader that he was going to add a “translate this” feature to his product. Now, a new version of this product with this feature in it was released yesterday but if you look at the history of kevotheclone’s wiki page, it first went up almost three weeks ago. In other words, not only was kevotheclone able to get this new feature added to Awasu and made available to everyone faster than this other guy was, he was able to do it with no involvement from us

In fact, all of the new features above are user-written extensions that work with a stock version of 2.4.1 (and some of them work with 2.4), using publicly available features of Awasu. Insanely cool, indeed

The next alpha release of 2.4.2 will be released later this week that adds even more features to the burgeoning API and I can’t wait to see what kind of things kevotheclone will conjure up using it…

The first 2.4.2 alpha release ^[?] is now available here.

The change log is a little short but this is because a huge amount of work has gone into laying the ground-work for the insanely awesome new API that will let third-party programs extract information out of your Awasu, even from another computer! The next release should be out in a much shorter time and will add some cool new features on top of what’s there now and in the meantime, <guilt-trip target="you-know-who-you-are">some really amazing plugins will be coming out soon that take advantage of the features offered by the new API</guilt-trip>.