OK I'm going to start using this more so REAPER users can see what's happening
with development. The last bit of time has been spent on Mac porting. To do the
mac port we are developing some software called SWELL, which is part of WDL.
SWELL allows you to easily adapt Windows code to target Quartz natively. It's not
trying to be completely compatibility like WINE or WINELib, but rather is focusing
on providing the minimal subset, with maximum efficiency and minimal overhead.
I'm actually getting into it, too.
If you are a Windows developer considering porting stuff to OS X, you should
check it out. Well, actually wait a few weeks cause we're in the process of
making it a LOT better. :) Oh and don't forget to remap XCode's keys to make
it behave more like MSVC!
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Been watching some old Daily Shows (which I might add is fucking great that they put them ALL online! HOLY CRAP! AWESOME!).
Just watched election night coverage from 2000, and man, Stephen Colbert CALLED IT. Watch this video:
Now I know you could say he was just joking, but holy shit.
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Denny insists that I update this, since he checks it often, and I guess since I'm the only person on the planet (other than my wife, at least) not to be on Facebook, it means he has to check it himself, or something. Speaking of which, LEAVE ME ALONE, FACEBOOK! Getting AIM messages from you is ANNOYING AS HELL.
We've started on REAPER v2. It won't be long before 2.0 beta is ready. A ton of good things in there. Really good. Stuff that before, I might have said "this might be kinda nice to have" then after I'm feeling like I can't imagine how
I would have gotten by without it. The list of stuff done since the last public
release is about 20 lines long so far.
I don't really like doing non-public builds of software. On one hand I get to hold
out and surprise users, which is nice to do once in a while. But on the other I feel like I'm running with a MUCH smaller testing pool and as a result I have
to be very careful--which is tough though because some of the things we're doing
are big and awesome. Oh well, we'll sort it out with a "2.0 beta" or something
soon enough.
It's been a month since the last post.. funny how this timing is. What else has happened? Had a vacation.. Dave Wiener and I made this song. I got a 1TB SATA drive (awesome!) to back up the "recordings" folder of my formerly large 1.2TB array to. Dammit why did I end a sentence with to? Dammit I did it again!
Recordings:
freeform jam with newtonbryan
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We've had a crazy month of development--things like Advanced Themes and a multiband compressor have been added, as well as persistent Undo/Redo, and support for multiple redo paths (!!! This is huge in my mind, and once we build an even better UI for it it will be even more ridiculously awesome).. The mac version is
coming along, too... Anyway..
I was able to give a quick (19 minute) presentation to a bunch of people at the TechBreakfast NorCal "Mixing In The Box" seminar. It was a lot of fun and definitely got a pretty good reception, especially considering the audience was mostly Pro Tools users... Here are some videos:
Part 1, Part 2 (YouTube, what gives with the 10 minute limit per file?!)
But with all of this work getting done, I still miss our cat friend...
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For those of you dedicated bored enough to listen to our Recordings, you may have noticed that the guitar sounds we've been getting have improved dramatically.
I attribute this to my newish custom built guitar amp, from Underhill. HOLY CRAP. This thing rocks. It's just so much more fun to play than anything else I've played on. It's similar to a JCM 800 with a bunch of goodies, and something special that comes from the love of being handmade by someone who really cares. Wow! Before this I thought playing using the CrusFX with modelling was adequate! No more (anybody want to buy a CrusFX? OK I should probably keep it even though it hasn't been powered on in ages)....
Here's a little clip with some clean and then some loud in the middle: Song about Flying Cars and Unicorns.
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Martin Walker was nice enough to review REAPER in the UK magazine
Sound On Sound.. I think it's a great review and am very proud to see it. Here's a quote from the end:
...unless you are 100 percent happy with your current MIDI + Audio sequencer, you'd be a fool not to give REAPER a try. Don't be fooled by the tiny 2MB download: this is a powerful application that does a huge amount, is being improved on a daily basis, and already does some things better than most of the competition.
I put this quote and some others on the REAPER Reviews Page. Woo.
Today I saw a Technology Review article on eJamming, which is a service for people to jam together online. I have tried eJamming a few times, and haven't been terribly impressed (and yes I am biassed towards NINJAM for obvious reasons), but I thought I'd just pick apart what bugs me about this article (and likewise the whole situation).
First, the eJamming software decreases the file sizes sent over the network. To do this, the company's engineers developed their own compression and decompression algorithms that shrink the file size, yet still maintain an audio quality higher than MP3, a common compression scheme, says Glueckman.
OK so shrinking the size of data does help latency, but it's not the biggest part. What bugs me here is that A) they appear to be using Speex for their audio side, which is an open format, and doesn't scale to high qualities. Do they really need to claim that they developed their own codec? OK so maybe they did develop their own codec-- why isn't this news? If it's so much better than OGG or MP3 or AAC, how come we haven't heard of this?
Second, each musician is directly connected with the other musicians in a jam session, instead of being routed through a server. This peer-to-peer configuration "results in a lower latency by routing the audio stream directly to your jam mates rather than, on average, doubling that transport latency by directing the audio stream through a remote server," says Bill Redmann, chief technology officer of eJamming.
Wow! Connecting clients to clients! Peer to peer! This is so unique!
But what the article fails to mention here is that while this approach does reduce latency, it also increases the amount of bandwidth requires by each host exponentially. Their stuff is limited to 4 people I believe, but if you have 4 people, each client needs to send its stream to EVERYBODY else, so if they run a 50kbps channel (though it appears they're using a much lower bitrate codec anywa), that'd be 150kbps of upstream for a 4 person jam. Which isn't that bad, but it doesnt scale well and definitely requires some decent broadband.
The following quote, however, is what really bugs me:
The company is promising to reduce the delay experienced over the network to, at most, hundreds of milliseconds (depending on upload speed and geographic distance between musicians)--a delay to which, Glueckman says, most musicians can adjust with practice.
Hundreds of milliseconds?! Are you kidding me? This is unusable. Their patented "delay monitoring of the local signal to sync with the remote" even makes it worse. I tried it with Christophe, who is on the same ISP and less than 10 miles away, and the latency was very noticeable and made it difficult to play anything remotely complex.
Imagine trying to play synchronized with someone at the other end of a football field. ugh.
Granted NINJAM's solutions aren't perfect either, but I find the increased quality and overall experience to be far superior. And the newer voice chat and session modes are damn usable.
OK OK so I didn't mean to turn this into a big eJamming vs NINJAM thing.. I just am irritated with these people being all "look we're soo innovative" and having lofty claims, yet when we use their software it's miserable (and I didn't even go into how badly constructed their application is-- application development isn't an easy thing, and in this case it definitely shows).
I hate Xcode. Too bad I have a ton to get done using it.
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