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I finally got around to upgrading the studio to use ardour 2.7.1, from the stock version which comes with the Intrepid Ibex release of Ubuntu Studio. It took minimal configuration to get my Behringer BCF2000 control surface working, and it worked amazingly well. Unlike in the past when I had to manually bind controls to their functions in ardour, pretty much everything was automated, so besides forcing udev to create a static link for it (so that I could plug whatever in whenever I wanted to without disturbing the actual location in /dev) everything just *worked* when I brought jack + ardour up for the first time. I’ve been using ardour since the pre-version-number days, and I have to say that this impressed the hell out of me. Paul, you rock.

I have just posted the first set (from the first two hours) of John Mayer’s summer music festival (here affectionately titled “JohnFest”) from 2008 here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=ce102bd7f2d1c5e5ab1eab3e9fa335cabfe111f221f499a8

The technical details … I used my trusty Thinkpad T61 with the Behringer UCA202 to pull sound off the board. As usualy, this means that the quality of the recording is based solely on the job of the mixing engineer. It was cut using mp3cut and normalized using mp3norm, as with most of the Stonewall Tavern recordings. Keep watching for the remaining hours to be posted.

As a kind of public service of some sort, I’ve been recording the Open Mic night at the Stonewall Tavern in Eagleville, CT, which has been hosted by the terrific Blaney Brothers for the past few years. I have been putting the recordings up for anyone who wants them, arranged by date and artist on MediaFire, at http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=ce102bd7f2d1c5e5d5a101cf914073b4c9b7830e214b6b76. Enjoy… (But don’t complain too much about it. It’s all straight board-out to mp3 using this little gem: arecord -f cd -t raw -D hw:1,0 | lame –verbose -x -s 44.1 - “${OUTPUTFILE}”)

(Also, I’ve been fortunate enough to do an actual studio session with the Blaneys. I’ll probably release it at some point, with their permission, of course.)

We’ve been working hard in the studio again, and there’s more to see. Besides the initial launch of the new evoke site (evokeband.com), there’s a new acoustic EP, entitled “Acoustic Autumn“, which has just been finished. Keep an eye out on the evoke site, there’s a good chance the entire album will be put online for listening …

I have compiled an initial 2.6.17 kernel for Ubuntu Dapper Drake, as described on ubuntustudio.com. It has the EVMS patch needed by Ubuntu as well as the realtime patch installed. This version is not usplash patched. Files : kernel-headers-2.6.17-rt7_1_i386.deb, kernel-image-2.6.17-rt7_1_i386.deb

Man, I really don’t like myspace.com very much. Awful design, etc. But, it’s not my bandwidth, so two of my past bands are now up there for anyones’ listening pleasure: evoke and Maranatha. I’m hoping to get something new to post soon, but that means I have to spend less time working and more time playing … If anyone is wondering why I *don’t* have a personal page there, keep in mind that I *hate* myspace. And I don’t like Tom and his bad ColdFusion design. Really. Learn PHP or something, man.

I’m slacking in keeping up this weblog-thing, but in my defense, I have been a bit busy. FreeMED released version 0.8.1 to the world, and I have been working in the studio a lot lately as well, working on both the Heirs of Centack audiobook and musical projects. Hopefully the BCF-2000 that has been ordered will get here soon, to make mixing less of a pain. I’m also halfway through a platform change to use PlanetCCRMA as the new studio platform, since the latencies appear good with the 2.6 patched kernel they’re using. More updates as I have them…

It has been a little while since I have posted anything musical here, so it’s about time to get back on that track. I’ve received two presents … from myself … a Line 6 Bass PODxt Live and a Behringer VX-2496 Vocal Processor. I have to admit, vocals and bass haven’t sounded that good in a long time. For those who don’t know, I have been an ardent bass player for years, and a Bass POD has been on the top of my list for years. I hope to post a few samples of output from that, soon.

I have been starting to consider changing distributions for the studio machine, lulled away from the safe confines of the known to something which seems to be much nicer in terms of user experience.

Unfortunately, it isn’t quite ready in the realm of low-latency audio, so I have been working at packaging up the most important applications, as well as putting together a nice low-latency kernel package for the 2.6.x series of kernels which Ubuntu uses.

We’ll give more progress as this progresses further. The kernel is building as we speak …

Over the last week or two, Jake and I have been working on a few older tracks from some long-gone group, including a few which were never finished or released. So far, three tracks have come out of this collaboration. Hopefully Jake can get his hands on the raw tracks from the original recordings so we can do a little creative editing and remixing which will provide a truer sound compared to the one captured on the last released CD of that group.