XO Wave Free

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.

Musical weekend

This past weekend was quite a musical one for me. On Saturday, I went to a surprise birthday party for my old friend Nick that I played in a couple of bands with. The party was attended by several musicians who have played with each other in various configurations over the years and so naturally the guitars came out and many tunes were played. And I got to see a bunch of folks that I have not seen in too long. Great fun.

On Sunday, I braved driving through the rain to jam with Vlad, a colleague that I know from my time at Yahoo. It was so much fun that I lost track of the time and stayed long enough for my wife to freak out. Realizing this on the drive home and then realizing that my cell phone battery was dead, I went through the frustrating experience of getting change and then trying three separate banks of pay phones, none of which were in operating condition, before giving up and driving home. I guess these days even 8-year-olds are probably carrying around cell phones so the phone companies don’t bother with maintaining pay phones anymore.

When I got home, I located my Logic Express CD with the serial number and fired it up on my MacBook Pro for the first time. There are some pretty nifty loops in there (including drum, guitar, bass, harmonica, and others) so that should be fun, although I was fairly overwhelmed by the user interface. I wonder if there is a good book out there that explains Logic Express, or if I should check out the alternatives like Cubase.

FLAC to MP3 conversion done

It took several days of crunching on my Pentium 4 box, but now all our FLAC files (recently ripped from our CD collection) have been transcoded to MP3.

$ ./flac2mp3.pl | tee flac2mp3.out
...
325 artists, 579 albums and 7806 tracks processed
$ du -sh mp3/
42G     mp3/

Now I’m doing an rsync of all of the mp3 files to another hard drive so we have a backup and then I’m going to hook up Nicole’s laptop to one of the drives and get them into iTunes so we can sync all our music to our iPods.

Released Export2Excel 1.0.1 for Yahoo! Music Jukebox

I released a new version of my Export2Excel plugin for the Yahoo! Music Jukebox.

Here are the changes:

Screenshots

YMEExcelPlugin_UI  

YMEExcelPlugin_Worksheet

Release notes

1.0.1