Infamous Plugins are Tiling!

I'm very very excited to say this:

1000 words

Thanks to falktx helping me understand what he told me months ago, the infamous plugins are all now 100% resizable. Which means I can use them comfortably in my beloved i3.

These just may be the first rumblings of an early release... stay tuned.

What a difference a new release makes (or: LTS vs Latest)

I've been sticking with Ubuntu's LTS releases since I got out of school mostly because I don't have the time anymore to do a monolithic upgrade and then fix everything it breaks afterward.  I've actually been championing them, because changing your whole system every 6 months is just asking for trouble. But I've been running 14.04 on this new Mac Book Pro at work and haven't been wowed by the hardware support. I think LTS is perfect for my 6 year old Thinkpad that has had full linux hardware support OOTB for 5 years or so, but with the latest greatest hardware, you need the latest greatest software.

JACK Midi Control from your Android Phone over WiFi

Since my fundraising for my plugin GUIs is more or less bust, I've been thinking more about making music. I can't really stop developing, cause I'm fairly addicted, but I'm trying to ween myself back to just making whatever I want, rather than trying to develop stuff that will change the world. The world doesn't care that much. Anyhow, this blog is no place for bitterness.

But I have been playing with synths a bit more lately and still am really missing my expression controls. Now I could try to use the old touchmidi app I developed, but it only works with my laptop, and I now have a dedicated desktop in the studio to host my synths so I don't have a touchpad to use. I do have several android devices though. They should be great input interfaces. They can display whatever they like on the screen and have a touch interface so you can have arbitrary configurations of buttons, sliders, knobs, whatever. So I decided to figure out how.

Easy(ish) Triple Boot on 2014 Macbook Pro

UPDATE* Feel free to read, but I've since renounced this process and made a new one here.
Nothing is easy. Or perhaps everything is. Regardless, here is how I did it, but first a little backstory:

I got a macbook pro 11,3 from work. I wanted a lenovo, but the boss wants me to do some iOS stuff eventually. Thats fine, cause I can install linux just as easily on whatever. Oh wait.. There are some caveats. Boot Camp seems to be a little picky. Just as well. MIS clowns set up boot camp so I had windows 7 and Yosemite working, but they told me I'm on my own for linux. It seems from the posts I've read about triple booting is that you have to plan it out from the get-go of partitioning, not just add it in as an afterthought. But I also found suggestions about wubi.

Common Synthesizer Envelope Types

The term "infographic" seems like such a marketing buzzword it makes me want to ignore whomever says it. But I'm all for the presentation of information in a logical and clear manner. As I was pondering on how to increase interest in my audio plugins I thought about my ADBSSR envelopes that I love in the cellular automaton synth. I wanted some way to present quickly both how to use them and why they offer advantage over traditional ADSR envelope generators.They do add complexity but there's really no way to add a swell as we horn players do all the time to a patch without it. It even can look exactly like an ADHR when the Breakpoint is set to 1. Anyway I thought a diagram with explanatory text would do the trick. So I made one:

Figure 1: Not an infographic

This isn't an infographic though. I don't really know why I think that word is so stupid. Probably just because I tend to hate on anything trendy and hyped. Anyhow. Now you know how I feel. This image is in the public domain though I would appreciate citation.

FIX IS VERY SWEET!

One of my mission companions would say that a lot. He threatened (jokingly) to fix people. He was Tongan and barely spoke English or Filipino but we had fun and got some good work done.

Regardless of that, my Presonus Firebox had been making a strange whining sound for a while. I started a session a few weeks ago to finally begin a new song but (as usual) didn't get very far before fatherly duty called and the session sat for at least 2 weeks or so. This happens as regularly as I record which is roughly every few weeks. I eventually passed through the studio to grab something out of our food storage in the next room and realized that the firebox was completely dark. "Strange," I thought so I went and tried to restart JACK. The firebox wheezed and whined and eventually the blue LED slowly lit up. "Not good," I thought (I usually think very tersely), but I had to get that food upstairs and get dinner on for the kids.

My First Linux Audio Tutorial Video

I like that title. It makes me think of chunky toys and blocky characters with big eyes. But this is much less cute than my kids playthings: I made a video to introduce my infamous plugins. Here is the video. How I did it is below.

(if you can't see the embeded player here's the link: http://youtu.be/oHCPgh9HRAQ )
EDIT: The second one is done now too. See  http://youtu.be/izyf27eLPPA