Rocking the blogosphereMy wife was watching an Oprah show about this so I looked it upon on good ol’ Wikipedia.
Wow, these people make vegans look like ultra-right-wingers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freegan
Dumpster diving - freegan awesome.
Popularity: 83% [?]
I think I’m going to buy the Apogee Duet as my Firewire audio interface:
I’m going to try to use a 10% off code from GuitarCenter.com even though Apogee doesn’t seem to be on the allowed brands list:
Popularity: 83% [?]
Ah, what audio interface to buy for doing some simple 2 channel recordings into my MacBook Pro?
There’s the Presonus Firebox ($300), which I borrowed from a friend. Sounds pretty good, although the preamp gain (45 dB) is not stellar and no inserts for sticking something like a compressor. It seems to work pretty well in Leopard, although it sometimes disappears and I’ve had to replug it or reboot the computer to get it to show up again. Bus-powered, but you have to plug it in when you first connect it; otherwise it flashes and makes a loud, disturbing clicking sound. No meters; just clip LEDs. Most annoyingly, sometimes when I plug it into my MacBook Pro with OS X 10.5.2, I get a kernel panic:
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.driver.AppleFWAudio(2.4.0fc8)@0x5b445000->0x5b493fff
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireFamily(3.4.0)@0x76d000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireAVC(2.2.1)@0x976000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOAudioFamily(1.6.4b7)@0x986000
com.apple.iokit.IOAudioFamily(1.6.4b7)@0x986000->0x99cfff
dependency: com.apple.kext.OSvKernDSPLib(1.1)@0x973000
Presonus has a higher-end model called the FireStudio Project, which looks nice on paper. Goes for $500. More channels (more than I need). Better preamp gain (60 dB vs. 45 dB for the Firebox) and dynamic range on the A/D converters (114 dB vs. 108 dB for the Firebox). Has inserts and meters and an interesting-sounding software bundle. Unfortunately, it seems to have a lot of problems with Leopard and/or the new Firewire chipset on newer Macs:
Another option is the Apogee Duet ($500). I can’t find reliable-looking specs on the preamps or A/D converters (BSW claims the preamps have 75 dB of gain), but there seems to be a favorable impression of the sound quality (similar to its big brother, the $1900+ Ensemble) and the usability and aesthetics. Haven’t heard any complaints about Leopard or general stability. It looks pretty nice and even has meters with 7 LEDs. No inserts though. And it’s Mac only and Core Audio only. I have a Mac, so that’s not too bad, though it might be nice to have something that works with a PC in case I’m out of the house and jamming with other folks.
Popularity: 61% [?]
A few days ago I tried Logic Express for the first time and here’s what came out of a few minutes of noodling with the drum loops and some of the guitar effect plugins.
Marc messing around with Logic Express
The drums are loops, but the bass and guitar are me.
I’m planning to spend more time with GarageBand and Logic Express…
Popularity: 68% [?]
WordPress 2.3.3 has been released.
$ svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.3 U wp-includes/gettext.php U wp-includes/version.php U wp-includes/pluggable.php C xmlrpc.php U wp-admin/install-helper.php Updated to revision 6736.
This release has security fixes so I suggest you do the same ASAP if you’re a WordPress user.
Popularity: 79% [?]
While cruising freshmeat the other day, I stumbled upon a free multi-track digital audio program called XO Wave.
I played with it. I didn’t care for the UI, which was very un-Mac-like and looked like it might’ve resulted from porting the app from another platform. I also found the latency to be pretty poor (this is with a Santa Rosa MacBook Pro and an M-Audio MobilePre USB audio interface). I tried playing with some of the settings like the size of the playback buffers, but to no avail.
Since I already own Logic Express, I gave up rather quickly on XO Wave and used Logic Express, with much better results.
Popularity: 67% [?]
RSS 2.0 feed