A while back, I raved about Reaper, a really cool piece of software for recording and mixing music. Yesterday, it was their 7th birthday and they’ve certainly come a long way.

This is the early v0.0 version….

…and this is where they’re at today, seven years later, using White Tie’s stunning Imperial theme.

Good things take time to create, and it must be amazing feeling for the Reaper team to look back and think about how far they’ve come. Awasu has been around for a little longer – we started in 2002 – and our before screenshot looks pretty good as well

 

I’m currently stress-testing The Beast and it’s coming along well – it’s quite cool watching Awasu madly creating channels and running reports, all via automated scripts running on another machine. Awasu Server is just the next stage of a larger plan for the product, so stay tuned…

Even though things have been quiet here in the weblog, that doesn’t mean we’ve gone into hibernation or abandoned the project. Indeed, it’s been the exact opposite – I’ve been busy building customized versions of Awasu and various extensions for some of our corporate clients (as well as my many other side-projects ).

One thing that we get asked for on a semi-regular basis is if there is a server version of Awasu. Corporate users who use Awasu to gather information on a large scale often run it on heavy-duty servers, and would prefer a version that runs as a system service, stripped of all the fancy GUI fluff, that focuses solely on the job at hand: retrieving and processing information.

While we’ve had an unofficial version for quite a few years now, I’ve been busy in the Awasu cave these past few months hacking away refactoring and upgrading the code base to make Awasu Server a real product. It’s in the final throes of testing now and will be released to the testers in a few weeks, so if you’re interested in beta testing The Beast, drop us a line and we’ll sort something out.

I’ve always preferred writing server code – dealing with pesky users is a such a hassle – and stripped of all the GUI issues, Awasu Server really runs like a dream

Yes, yes, it’s been very quiet here lately but as always, it’s because I’ve been insanely busy.

As some of you know, I’ve taken an interest in sound engineering and have been busy teaching myself how to record and mix. Some of my early attempts are here but this week, my first real CD is coming out.

Nok “La Fiesta” is an old friend of mine (I used to play in her band, many years ago) and she’s been playing at The Bear Bar for the past few months. During March, we recorded a couple of sessions and I’ve been locked away in the dungeons these past few weeks, madly mixing everything, and this Thursday, it all comes to a head and we’re having the launch party If you’re in town, come on down and join the party, otherwise you can listen to the tracks here and if you like them, buy them here (it’s the price of a cup of coffee! how could you say no?!).

Videos of the sessions are also up here, and you know the musicians are cringing because I had to leave in all the mistakes that I took out for the CD

Dutch Tilders, the father of the blues in Melbourne, passed away yesterday

Some videos of him playing are here. They’re from quite a few years ago but I recently saw an interview with him on the community TV channel where he played a few songs and they had an amazing depth and subtlety that reflected his decades playing the blues, not just your standard bumpa-bumpa 12-bar.

The link above also has a great story about him

[Dutch] had finished his set and had killed it as usual & we were having a talk side of stage. The DJ from the venue butted in with something about how him & Dutch were “really talented beacuse they were both in the music business” or words to that effect. Dutch just glared at the idiot and said “I’ve spent years learning my craft… you play fuckin’ records. Piss off!”

I’m definitely getting more irascible in my old age but the Dutchman undoubtedly set the gold standard

Translations for Awasu 3.0 are now available which let it run in both German and Russian

If you want to use either of these, you should also re-download Awasu (version 3.0b) since there were a few code changes required.

Many thanks to Kai Klintworth for the German translation (who has been translating Awasu since 2.3! ) and Pavel Klevakin for the Russian.

Wiley is so The Man

The latest general release is now available here and as always, it’s the bestest, most awesomest release since the last one!

If you haven’t been keeping up with the betas, you can find out what’s new in the feature list, tour and online help.

By amazing co-incidence , today is also our eighth birthday and as I said in our traditional retrospective:

Awasu has always been about extensibility, allowing it to be customized to process the information that you’re interested in, in a way that meets your requirements.

I know that the Awasu Monster has a swag of plugins, reports and other extensions abut to be published that will showcase some of Awasu’s extensibility and I’ll be working on a few myself in the coming year.

Until then, I’m off to the pub…

The first 3.0 release candidate ^[?] is now available here.

This is a release candidate so, barring any reports of it causing your PC to spontaneously burst into flames, this will also be the final 3.0 release. In particular, it comes as an installer EXE so all you people still running 2.4, you too can now join in the fun (but be be safe out there and back everything up first! ).

Happy Australia Day!

The 2.4.4 beta release ^[?] is now available here.

This is the final release before the next general release and since most of the hard work has already been done, it shouldn’t be long before the release candidate gets shoved out the door.

Happy New Year to y’all!

The second 2.4.4 alpha release ^[?] is now available here.

Bug fixes and minor changes in this release, which will be the last before the push to the next general release. It took quite a bit longer than I wanted to get this one out the door, because of a pesky bug in synchronization It took forever to figure out what was going on since it only happened if a certain option was turned on (that I, of course, never have turned on ), exacerbated by the fact that it was also a heisenbug i.e. a bug that’s less likely to manifest itself the longer you look for it Then I had to come up with a fix that didn’t bring the machine to its knees while Awasu was synchronizing. Sigh… But it’s all good now and it looks like sync is working well, which is good since it’s an important and valuable feature

I swear, the monks robes are a-beckonin’ me…