Archive for July, 2009

New mixing console arrived

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

After my Behringer mixing console died I needed a replacement. I wanted to avoid a fully featured mixing console, as I do not need most of its features. Instead, I was looking for a small firewire breakout box with many (at least 16) line and mic inputs. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any device fulfilling my needs. So I ended again with a fully featured 16 (or 24, if you count the aux return ins) channel mixer with built in USB 2.0 and Firewire interface, the Phonic Helix Board 24 Universal PHHB24U. It is likely that it can be run in Firewire mode using Linux thanks to the FFADO project. It is, however, unlikely that the USB mode will work. I do not care much about the latter one, as I prefer firewire anyway. And BTW: It’s my first firewire device ever. So welcome to the defloration of my notebook:

PHHB24U Front Panel

PHHB24U Front Panel

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Posted in Gadgets, Musical Instruments, Pictures | 2 Comments »

Hibernation of some Open-Air Micromapping

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
"Das Fest" - temporary tags in josm

As the party is over, I have just sent the temporary open air micromapping to hibernation. I did this by prepending the prefix temporary_ to all keys of the temporary objects.

The last time I did this, it happened that a fix bot dropped by and removed the prefix I added with reason. After that, a mapper removed the temporary objects. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to undo a changeset easily. I still hope that the objects now stay untouched until next year :) .

Posted in Openstreetmap | 4 Comments »

ALSA sequencer, RtMidi and large SysEx files

Monday, July 27th, 2009

This weekend I have written some code to deal with MIDI system exclusive data. Primarly I wanted to create a graphical tool to do backups of the memory contents of my synthesizers. There are some tools available for Mac OS X and Windows, but there was none for Linux. So I had written SimpleSysexxer back in 2006, but it has some bugs and its backend code is rather experimental. So I removed all backend code from it and started from scratch.
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Posted in Musical Instruments, Products, Software | 2 Comments »

Open-Air Micromapping resurrected

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
Micromapping of »Das Fest«, an annual open air event in Karlsruhe, Germany

Micromapping of »Das Fest«, an annual open air event in Karlsruhe, Germany

I managed to extract the lost mapping data from an osm file dating back to december of 2008. I intended to resurrect the previously deleted objects to preserve their history rather than uploading them as newly created objects. But it turned out that this cannot be accomplished easily.

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Posted in Openstreetmap, Outdoor | Comments Closed

Open-Air Micromapping reloaded

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
Micromapping »Das Fest«, Karlsruhe, Germany

Micromapping »Das Fest«, Karlsruhe, Germany

The annual open-air festival in Karlsruhe, simply called »Das Fest«, currently gets set up. Last year, I mapped all the facilities, including the names of the various stages, the drink and fast food booths, but also the waste baskets and toilets. Those mappings also made it accidentally into an article of a local news page (see the last map screenshot on that page).
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Posted in Openstreetmap, Outdoor | 2 Comments »

Mayra Andrade @ Zeltival

Monday, July 20th, 2009

Today we’ve been to a concert of Mayra Andrade at this years’s Zeltival. The band consisted of six musicians (Drums, Percussion, Bass, 2 Guitars and Voice), but unfotunately, the Zeltival web presence does not mention the individual musicians.

If you like “world music”, you will like this band. Mayra’s singing is excellent, and the rest of the band features great musicians as well. They played various pieces in several measures, so if you want to learn more about rythmics, this band is an excellent occasion.

Posted in Lifestyle, Music | 2 Comments »

Furniture finishings using linseed oil

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

I will grab the occasion to share some knowledge about creating furniture surfaces using linseed oil. linseed oil is a natural product with many uses. One of them is to use it to create finishings of wooden surfaces.
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Posted in diy | 2 Comments »

Failing where you thought you were best

Monday, July 13th, 2009
Flax

Flax

Did you ever think there are things where noone can beat you? Where you will never fail? Where you exactly know what you are doing? I doubt that you are right, as I learned my lesson these days.

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Posted in diy | Comments Closed

Comment spam plugin activated

Friday, July 10th, 2009

The sheer amount of comment spam I received was just incredible. I hope the WP-SpamFree plugin hopefully will do its job, so I can refrain from switching off the comments completely. Thanks a bunch, Sven, for evaluating various alternatives!

Posted in Software | Comments Closed

Pictures of the black forest – summer edition

Monday, July 6th, 2009
Flagellants

Flagellants

Being at the black forest on a sunny day in July allowed to take some nice pictures. Unfortunately, I got trapped by a habit of myself. I usually keep images on the camera until I did the next backup of my hard drives. This time I left all my crete holiday pics on it, so the camera complained about the lack of disk space after taking a couple of pictures. It was not possible to delete the old pictures, as I renamed the default folder to something like DCIM-Backup, and the camera was not capable to access it. Mea maxissima culpa.

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Posted in Outdoor, Pictures | Comments Closed

Requiem for a Mixing Console

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

That is it: Requiem for a Mixing Console

All credits to Fons for the 32′ Bombarde in Aeolus :) .

(Hint: Firefox 3.5 plays ogg files autonomously)

Posted in Gadgets, History, Music | 1 Comment »

Mixing Console dies

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
BehringerEurorackMx2804

BehringerEurorackMx2804

While writing the last post, my Behringer Eurorack MX 2804, a 28 channel mixing console, died. It’s about 15 years old, and it was about 900 Deutschmarks as I bought it. Compared to the 8 channel Mackies and Yamahas, it offered more than great value for the money. I always loved it for it’s features (and trust me, 28 channels are not too much for a rack mixer), but I disliked it for the weird noise and hum it sometimes produced.

It really is a pity that it dies right now. There is currently no comparable device available on the market. I desperately wait for some Linux compatible firewire device to appear with at least 12 stereo line inputs and some mic inputs, to get my synths and other audio sources connected.

I guess I need to chose an el cheapo device for the interim period. RIP.

Posted in Gadgets, Musical Instruments | Comments Closed

Audio Subsystem Setup in Ubuntu 9.0.4

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
QJackControl in action

QJackControl in action

Most synthesizers, sequencers and similar audio software on Linux use jackd, a realtime audio soundserver. “Why yet another soundserver?”, you may ask. “Aren’t there enough for Linux?”. Sure, there are. But none of them fulfils the needs of the digital musician.

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Posted in Musical Instruments, Software | Comments Closed