Dave’s Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

This is a slightly touched-up version of the song I released a couple days ago, with an additional song cross-faded into it.   Download it now.  My supervisor listened to it and said, “I feel like it’s the end of a blood bath and the credits are rolling.”  My girlfriend said it reminded her of vampires (whatever that means).

Enjoy!

I recently decided to reconnect my Yamaha DJX keyboard to my computer and make some fresh attempts at writing music… for the first time in about 6 years.  At least, with this particular keyboard. I have a couple of other piano songs I recorded with a terrible 10 dollar microphone a few years back, but never had much luck at getting anything recorded with sophisticated computer software.  I decided it was time to work at an old hobby I dropped so long ago and see what can be done with more dedication and experimentation.

I give you the product of about 45 minutes worth of work.  Very little time was needed to lay down the tracks, and a lot more time was spent playing around with knobs and browsing through the large bank of instruments I have at my disposal to find just the right sound.  I’m excited to write more.

So, please enjoy this free download of a very short piece of music I wrote.

The time is 9 a.m. and I am sitting here rocking out to some Nine Inch Nails.  Not just any Nine Inch Nails.  This is an album that I probably invested over $400 dollars in because when it came out I said to myself, “I have to invest in a surround sound amplifier, now!  I just have to.  There’s no two ways about it.  It is my destiny.”  When NIN released their 5.1 dolby digital remix of The Downward Spiral, I started researching audio amplifiers and had one goal:  To find one that could do at least 5.1 surround and be able to fit in my desk.  And I found exactly what I was looking for:  The Panasonic SA-XR50.

This puppy is slim, loud and does 6.1 surround sound.  I’m sure there are others out there which can handle more channels than that, but it was more than what I was looking for and has held up for the last few years with no problems, even with the confined space it sits in.

And I wasn’t about to plug it into a handful of tiny 2 inch wide satellite speakers.  If you’re serious about music and the quality of the audio coming out of your PC, you don’t just spend 99 dollars on a set of tiny speakers plus one crappy sub-woofer.  I have a pair of headphones that are worth more than that.  I even spent more than that just for the center channel speaker.  Really, do yourself a favor and invest in quality audio.  It’s money well spent and your ears will thank you later (so long as you don’t deafen yourself).  Listening to surround sound music is a very satisfying; you almost have to smoke a cigarette afterwards.

In an unrelated note… During the last 5 years or so, I’ve made upgrades to my computer for only one of two reasons:  Either Nine Inch Nails released a new album that contained audio tracks my hardware couldn’t handle, or id Software released Doom III.  And it’s been a while since Doom III came out so you can imagine how old my PCs hardware is.  The case isn’t that old, but the guts inside are.  Still, it doesn’t feel old.  It doesn’t feel like a slow computer… probably because I stopped using Windows and did away with all of that hard drive fragmentation, spyware, antivirus nonsense.  It sounds like a joke but you really do have to put more money into a computer in order to stave off the stress that comes with having to deal with all that crap, and all you end up with is delaying the inevitable system meltdown.  But I digress.

My computer is my primary entertainment device, and even though it’s attached to a 35″ TV with an S-Video cable, I don’t think that counts as “watching TV”.  I hate watching TV.

Okay, this post is going no where, which means I probably woke up too early.  But before I end this, I can think of one other thing that rocks besides surround sound:

Last night I passed through a lot of places that I’ve not been to for quite some time.  First on the list was seeing Bob Dylan at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City with my girlfriend.  It started with a quarter mile walk on a full bladder from the parking lot of Walgreens because it was the closest place we could find to park (who KNOWS where the “Salvation Army” is actually located).  Did everybody drive themselves or bring an extra freaking vehicle with them?  Anybody carpool?   I thought gas was expensive.

The concert went well, but it seemed like they went out of their way to give you the impression that the vocal audio was always bad, but in truth, Bob Dylan is not a great singer these days.  Sure, he’s got the energy and the notes, but it’s like his mouth is full of cotton balls.  I’m sorry if that offends you, but my girlfriend is the most die hard Bob Dylan fan on the damned planet and even she told me in advanced that I wouldn’t understand a thing he’s saying up there on stage.  It was like Eddie Murphy’s impersonation of James Brown.  Still, he had a damn sweet hat on.  And these 35 dollar T-shirts are pretty fucking cool.

Anyway, I just wanted to check in with you all and let you know that I’m going to be OUT for the rest of the weekend.  I’m heading up to the ABATE biker rally at Lake Perry.  Maybe I’ll see you out there.  I’ll be campin’ somewhere.  Hope nobody’s computer crashes or I’ll have to cut into all the fun I’m having. 

Coming Soon…

For the Ubuntu people out there, I have a Virtual Box vs. VMware Server software review in the works. But I want to take some extra time to get the details worked out.

I was taking a break by visiting a favorite site of mine, www.ted.com and I came across a rather (in my opinion) profound video about classical music.  It is an entertaining 20 minutes out of your day that will perhaps leave you thinking about more than just music, but also living a generous and passionate life.

I just finished working for 13 days in a row, with the last of those days being the same as a concert I was lucky to attend.  Sigur Rós is a band from Iceland that plays a lot of mellow tunes.  I couldn’t believe how friendly the crowd at this show was. Very kind, very soft spoken.  I actually bumped into two people who I hadn’t seen since I graduated from high school in 2001 (though I expected one, thanks to that crazy Facebook news ticker). The show started with a fantastic opening act: One of the background trombone players (Helgi Jonsson) was given the opportunity to come out and play several songs on his guitar as well as one of the organs on stage.  If you didn’t know any better, you would have almost sworn that it was actually Thom Yorke of Radiohead in a wig.  The guys voice and playing was incredible.

The number of musicians on stage peeked near the end of the main ticket, with something close to 3 keyboard/xylophone players, 4 violinist, 5 brass, probably 3 guitarist (including the lead vocalist)…. I might be off a little on the numbers, but it was a spectacular show!  Part of me regrets leaving at the next to last song, but it was pouring rain, my girlfriend had very little sleep the previous night and she had another nearly sleepless night around the corner.  Time was of the essence.

Here is the song they started their set off with.  It is called “Svefn g englar”, which means “Sleepwalkers” in English.  Enjoy!

I was looking around and also discovered they have a movie out, called Heima.  Here’s one of the trailers for it.  The climax in the song near the end gave me chills.

I might as well take the opportunity to first and foremost thank my favorite musician for being nothing less than awesome by doing this.  “The Slip”, a 10 track album, was released on May 5th on nin.com for free.  This probably pisses Metallica off to no end (but I have to say it, and please excuse my french, but f*ck Lars Ulrich and his RIAA bandwagon). I could legally host the entire thing here for you to download if I wanted (since this was released via the CC license), but you can download the whole thing yourself in either 320 Kbps MP3, FLAC loss-less, Apple loss-less and even 24-bit/96 Khz WAVE format from www.nin.com, completely for free.

If you’re looking for a quick sample of what this CD is like, check out this favorite track of mine:

Nine Inch Nails - Head Down (MP3 format)

I have a confession to make. I have been using Ubuntu Linux for over a year now. No, wait.. let me correct that. I started with a 3rd party distro of Ubuntu called Ubuntu Ultimate Edition, which at that time had included many different “power applications” pre-installed with it, most of which I had no immediate use for (several apps in the Programming menu come to mind…). There was a particular application in the Sound & Video category that I gave a short look but never really bothered to give it a GOOD look. That program was Amarok.

Forgive me, Linux community, for I have sinned! [dramatic pause... sound of thunder in the distance] But please, do not fret or pity me, my friend. For I have been saved. Behold! My new great Icon:

Ok, dogma jokes aside: If you have Ubuntu, or pretty much ANY distribution of Linux, INSTALL THIS APP! Would you like to have a few thousand Internet radio stations in HUNDREDS of different genres at your finger tips? Well that’s just ONE feature of many that make up Amarok. Here are some others that really stand out:

• Synchronizing, retrieving, playing, or uploading music to the following digital music players: iPod, iriver iFP, Creative NOMAD, Creative ZEN, MTP, Rio Karma and USB devices with VFAT (generic MP3 players) support.
• Creating and editing play-lists, including smart and dynamic playlists. The dynamic play-lists can use such information as the “score” given to a song by an Amarok script, and the playcount which is stored with the song.
• Playing media files in various formats including but not limited to (depending on the setup) FLAC, Ogg, MP3, AAC, WAV, Windows Media Audio, Apple Lossless, WavPack, TTA and Musepack. Amarok does not play digital music files embedded with DRM.
• Last.fm support, including submitting played tracks (including those played on some digital music players) to Last.fm, retrieving similar artists, and playing Last.fm streams.
• Version 2 (in the works right now) will support iTunes Online Music Store, as well as support Windows and Mac OS.
• Thousands of free Internet radio stations, presorted in over 285+ musical (and spoken word) genres. WOW!

I feel sorry for you Windows and Mac users. You have been forsaken….for now. You’ll have to wait a little bit longer for your musical savior to enlighten you, when version 2 is released. Unfortunately, it’s only in its first alpha phase, so it will be several months before a final release (or even a stable beta) can be expected. But keep your eyes peeled. This is a wonderful application!

To install Amarok in Ubuntu

Click Applications>Add/Remove. Then search for “Amarok”, check off the box next to the search result “Amarok”, and then click the Apply button. You’re done! Install takes just a few minutes (depending on your Internet connection and download capabilities).

The program is pretty easy to get used to. Unfortunately, I’m not in much of a position to give an full review of the program. Being as I myself just “rediscovered my music” with this app, I don’t have much more to say about it other than the MASSIVE collection of radio stations already included with its play-list collection is absolutely jaw dropping. There must have been over 40 stations listed in the Oldies genre alone! Now that’s insane. Even for the Internet.

Ok. Nuff said. Download, Install, Enjoy!

To install Amarok in Other Linux Distros, you can check out one of the links below.

Kubuntu	openSUSE	Fedora
Gentoo	Arch	Ark Linux
Debian	Mandriva Linux	PCLinuxOS
	Other (FreeBSD, Yoper, etc.)

If you like Nine Inch Nails, click this link before reading any further (so you can listen to the album right now while you read a little about it from me).

I’ve been on a pretty good streak writing blogs about Ubuntu Linux lately, but now Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails went and released a new album by surprise. And I say surprise because not even one track of it was being pirated on the Internet before its official release date. Hey, I don’t know about you but I’m impressed by that. In most cases, new CD’s are pirated weeks in advanced by some Joe Shmoe delivery guy with a box cutter and audio ripping software, the files ending up in bittorrent swarms and spoiling the album later on. Perhaps not necessarily spoiling album sales per say, but spoiling it nonetheless.

Nine Inch Nails recently left Interscope Records; Trent Reznor choosing to avoid the red tape of signing any more contracts with another label went solo. Since that time, www.nin.com has added a new remix section to the website, where you can download multi-track versions of NIN songs and remix them to your hearts content, and then upload your mixes to share with the world online. This brand new 36 Instrumental release, entitled Ghosts I-IV, is being distributed under the Creative Commons License, or what some might call “Copyleft.” In short, you are free to copy and distribute the music, remix the music and publish, but only for non-commercial purposes. Because sharing is caring.

I could go on about all the cool little things Reznor had done to piss off his ex-record label (like dropping USB keys containing unreleased tracks into bathrooms at venues where Nine Inch Nails performed live; see: viral marketing). But I’d rather like to say more about the uniqueness in the way Trent chose to distribute and sell this latest album. For comparison, I’d like to criticize Radiohead’s In Rainbows.

In Rainbows was released on the Internet… or at least the first 10 tracks of it, as the physical CD release of it contained an additional 8 more and didn’t come out till a later date. In Rainbows was released for download, at a price of “Whatever you think it’s worth,” letting the fan choose their own price tag for the download. I remember downloading In Rainbows for nothing, and I’m glad I did. I like Radiohead (really!), but had I known in advanced that the Internet release wasn’t actually the whole thing, or that the download was in 160 Kbps MP3 format (mediocre quality), I’d probably wouldn’t have wasted my time waiting for their servers to come back online after the flood of downloads caused them to crash.

Trent Reznor, in the unique position of being a well known musician and also not being slave to a contract, decided to do his first truly solo release just a little differently. And I like the way it was done:

• Free: Download the first 9 tracks
• $5: Download all tracks in either Lossless FLAC, Apple Lossless or 320 Kbps MP3
• $10: Download all tracks as above, and get 2 CD digipack with booklet (shipping in April)
• Element of Surprise!

Now that’s a deal! And a rather clever business model.

There were some more expensive deluxe packages available, including a classy $300 package (above) with Trent Reznor’s handwritten signature (limited to 2500 units). So there’s something for everybody.  You might not like industrial rock music (or whatever they’re labeling the genre these days), but you shouldn’t have any problem appreciating this business model. It’s genius!