On the other, sometimes open source software can be really fucking frustrating. Okay. Strike that. Pretty much all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me preempt the first thirty replies by saying "okay, yeah, MySQL and Apache are awesome. You win. Firefox is the shit. Group hug!" But you know what? While I may use Apache and MySQL every day, it's only by accident. I don't go out and say "gee, I wonder what my Apache server is up to" because I'm not a fucking web developer. I'm a musician.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to my point. PureData is pure awesome; it is probably the most robust open source project strictly for musicians, and it does about 80% of what Max/MSP does, for free. (Free as in "I could give a fuck what kind of free you're talking about.") But these guys that built it, smart as they are, are living in the wonderful land that exists between the audio driver and the user interface, and the extremities are completely ignored. If I was going to give a class on how to make a program as unfriendly as humanely possible, I'd use Pd as a shining example. If the second semester was on how to make sure that the back end functions as poorly as the front, I'd still use Pd. The only reason I know how to use the damn thing is because I already knew how to use Max, and even then...

One example: boot up Pd on a MacBook Pro, using the internal sound. Run something that makes noise. Now plug in headphones. Yeah, you're gonna have to go ahead and kill Pd and restart it.

I could come up with 20 such examples in as many seconds, but I won't belabor the point, and I'm busy rebooting because Pd killed the audio driver when I had the temerity to load a patch. I saw a guy at Ground Kontrol a couple months ago, typical dreadlocked, neck-bearded, forehead pierced latte-tard PDX native, and he had a pink (natch) t-shirt on that said "MY FREE SOFTWARE RUNS YOUR COMPANY." No, that's not exactly true, is it? My imagination and Adam's DSP chops run our company. Your free software makes running my company fucking frustrating because you half-ass your way through it, only working on what can hold your gnat-sized attention span for as long as it takes you to earn enough money to go to Burning Man. Pull up your pants.

EDIT: After reading through some of the comments, I think what I actually meant to say in that last sentence was "hey, you kids, get off my lawn!"

Can I get a witness? I've been saying since the iPad was first rumored that TouchOSC and its ilk are the "killer apps" for such a device, and tonight I was led in to the light. People, I'm gonna need an a-men for this bitch.

TouchOSC is, of course, what it is, and everyone knows what it is: essentially a JazzMutant Lemur clone for iStuff. And the Launchpad and APC-40 are, obviously, what they are: controllers for Ableton Live. Let's accept those as immutable facts.

Now we come to the tricky part: TouchOSC can conceivably control Ableton Live, but you've got a lot of hoops to jump through, and it'll never quite be as sexy as an ACP-40, really. Or will it? I took the above screenshot from my iPad running TouchOSC with something called LiveControl. This is a free package consisting of a Python script which interfaces with Live in the same way as a Launchpad or APC-40, a template for TouchOSC (iPhone or iPad), and a listener application that takes the place of Pd or OSCulator.

With this entire package running (it took a couple minutes to configure properly, but wasn't anything drastic) I've got a full clip launching panel with clip names, natch. I've also got full channel control, device control, a sequencer, and an X/Y pad. Now, to be clear, it's a little bit hinky in operation. Sometimes the names don't update immediately when you load a new song, and the sequencer in particular, while crafty, feels a touch jank-esque, but on the whole, this rig is the motherfucking bomb.

Or, to look at it another way: total cost is $509 and you not only get a full APC-40, but you can also check your email and look at porn, two things the APC-40 is singularly unsuited for. Launchpad: sold. It is totally obviated by this bad boy.

LiveControl page.
TouchOSC page.

Anyhow, I don't know how I missed this shit. It must have got lost in the deluge of iPad nonsense leading up to, and immediately following, the Launch. Thanks to DJ Twitch for hipping me to this scene.

I have a challenge for you today. Watch this video (you only have to get through the first chorus; I'm not that cruel) and then see if you can go the whole rest of the day without singing the refrain.

Better yet, every time you come in to contact with someone else during the course of the day, sing the refrain and see if the other person claps - clapsclaps. Unless they're of that age that seems to get their entire musical database from Guitar Hero, they'll pick it up, guaranteed. And then they will, in turn, spread it to others.

I'm left wondering if we had the ability to chart this, what it would look like. The few hundred people that read this on Monday morning go and get at least a couple other people humming this song all day. And then those people get a couple people each, and so on. I wonder how big a start it would take for me to be walking down the aisle of our local grocery store and hear someone else that isn't connected to me in any way, shape, or form singing it.

Music is a powerful thing.

Unrelated to the topic: am I the only one bugged by the fact that the drums in the intro are totally off by a quarter note? Or the fact that Darryl Hall isn't actually singing, so he's kickin' the straight-up 80s lip sync? Or that John Oates has the most awesome mustache in the history of mustaches? His mustache is so awesome, he could get away with wearing a pink sport coat. That's how awesome.

As you can see, DronestationX, the iPad iteration of Dronestation, is coming along nicely. I decided to make the UI a PNG-free zone; it is entirely done with CoreGraphics drawing commands, even the logo. This proved to be a somewhat nonsensical decision on my part, but (a) it will result in an incredibly small binary, which makes me happy, and (b) it was a valuable learning experience. This will make porting difficult if I decide to do an Android or WinTablet version, of course, but making things easy on myself has never been one of my strong suits.

Anyhow, give me a week or two and it should be ready for app store submission. I've cropped part of that image, as the UI isn't finished yet. When I've got it totally done, you'll get the whole thing. It is orientation-agnostic, which is causing some annoyance but isn't a deal breaker.

Also too, I swapped out my Stereo Memory Man w/ Hazarai for an Eventide TimeFactor. No offense to ElectroHarmonix, as they're making some pretty cool shit these days, but this TimeFactor is an order of magnitude more better. I know that I've got an H8000 and all, and all these programs are in the new H8000 OS, but it's really not the same at all. The pedal is much more immediate, and it's much, much easier to tweak a preset while you're playing on this than on the H8000. I'll put up a full review next week, once I've spent some quality time with it, but for now, as @jamescigler pointed out on Twitter, any Digital Solution For Streamlining My Workflow is a good option.

And finally, it seems Goldbaby has a new product out. I _just_ whacked the download button, so I can't say WTF about it at all, but given Hugo's track record, I'd just go ahead and assume it's awesome. 'Tis here.

Also too (God, I love that phrase), I'm only a couple mixes away from being done on the Micronaut EP; naturally, I'll have full information on that when it is completed.

And finally, I made fairly good progress on DronestationX over the weekend, so the three AI readers that have iPads will have something new to play with pretty shortly. I'm doing the UI entirely procedurally; it is a PNG-free zone (except for the little icon thing, which necessarily has to be a PNG, according to Apple Canon.) This is kind of interesting, but let me state for the record that giving things rounded corners increases the difficulty of making a procedural UI by an order of magnitude. I'll have a screenshot soon; my major goal with this was not to shoehorn a picture of an analog instrument on to the iPad, but rather to revel in the paradigm of the device. I'm writing this synth specifically for that paradigm, in order to take advantage of the form-factor, rather than trying to work around it.

(And that will streamline the fuck out of your workflow.)

Anyhow, this is an open thread. The subject, if I may be so bold, is blatant self-promotion. We haven't done this in a while. This is the opportunity to promote your music, or that of someone you respect that others might not know about. The only rule is that you can't just throw a link. Sell that shit!

1. The music industry may be all high and mighty and proud of itself for being "cool" and such, but the entire balls-to-backbone conglomeration of manufacturers, record labels, musicians, and retailers ain't a drop in the bucket to the TV and movie industries. I'll grant that AES is a pretty small show by show standards, but the entirety of AES would fit in Sony's NAB booth, with room left over.

2. The little "edgy" companies trend to a certain type of person in their booths, with "edgy" haircuts, "edgy" clothes, and "edgy" tattoos. The big giant companies like Canon and Sony have professional polished attractive booth-folk who could easily hold down an anchor job on any medium-sized city's nightly news. Virtually everyone else in the entire entertainment industry is a bearded MAWG with a beer belly, as far as I can tell. If NAB was anything to judge by, Polo and the companies that make ass packs are in no danger of going out of business any time soon.

3. There are approximately 23 * 10³⁰ ways to hold a camera off the ground.

4. The ratio of companies that provide production music to companies that need production music appears to be about 1:1. The very essence of the concept of symbiosis, I think. Probably a good racket for a musician to be in, if you can stand to be so utterly and completely banal, and without an iota of pride.

5. I'm a fairly savvy person when it comes to this sort of thing, but there were companies at this show with huge elaborate multi-million-dollar booths, and I'd have no fucking idea whatsoever what it is they did. All I know is that they want to streamline my workflow. I saw that phrase in various permutations a lot. I'm sure it's a nice concept and all, but I think asking someone from the broadcast industry for help in streamlining your workflow is like asking Gary Busey for tips on quitting blow. It's just not something they know anything about. I mean, there is an entire sub-industry dedicated completely to turning [video codec A] in to [video codec B]. The NAB organizers conveniently placed all this sub-industry's booths next to the booths full of guys that that are marketing new video codecs. I imagine they have a lot to talk about.

6. I especially disliked the Panasonic 3D televisions, which gave me a more-or-less instant blinding headache. The BoothDude (although calling the Panasonic extravaganza a "booth" is a gross understatement) said this happens to about 1 in 20 people, for some reason they can't discern. I told him they should probably think about discerning it. The Sony 3D products looked fine to me, and their glasses caused much less attenuation. (The same glasses you got when you went and saw Avatar.) Sony had a 3D 50-foot jumbotron showing the Masters, and it was, quite simply, the most unbelievable video playback I've ever witnessed. Absolutely stunning.

Anyhow, it was an eye-opening experience, and I'm definitely going to allow more time next year so I can do more than just sprint by everything. Thanks to synthetic for talking me in to going and to TASCAM for the badge.

Also too, I'm going to the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) convention in Vegas tomorrow. You should get a nice update on Thursday with some hyper digital hyper expensive eye candy, at least as it relates to our world. Obviously, there aren't any Euro module makers there, or cute boutique synths and guitar pedals, but the heavies come out to play, and I plan to spend some quality time in the booths of Nagra, Eventide, Lexicon, et al. while pointedly avoiding the black hole of suck that is Avid Land.

That's it for now. I may have a screenshot of DronestationX later in the day; we'll see if I get it in a state where I'm happy with it. This is an open thread. First commenter picks the subject!

1. Bandcamp full EP. I'm going to put this up for any amount, from $0.00 to whatever floats your boat. The Bandcamp release may have value-added content as well, but at the very least it will have everything that Bandcamp allows in the way of artwork and liner notes.

2. Tunecore full spread. I'll also put the EP in Tunecore to all the services. Pricing will, of course, vary.

3. Video. Two of the songs have videos, and these will go in my accounts in Vimeo and YouTube as added promotional materials.

4. PR. I'm going to have press done by one of the services that does such things; naturally I'll post about that experience here. We've done this in the past with various Positron releases, to mixed results. If anyone has any insight in to the various services that do this, I'd love to hear about it.

So that's the current plan, anyhow. The Bandcamp release will be available as soon as I'm done, essentially, so a few days. I'll also put everything in Soundcloud as non-download, but I'll use the Bandcamp widget for playback here, for obvious reasons.

One of those lots is assembling an EP of Micronaut material. In the past, I've put together these assemblages and put them in TuneCore or sold them via the Posi store. However, this time I'm considering making the leap in to Free territory. On the one hand, the gear I use to make music is expensive and difficult to maintain, and it would be nice to see a direct (rather than indirect, in the case of Audio Damage) payback for the acquisition of same. On the other hand, without steady touring and merch sales, there's very little income to be made from direct music sales at this level, given my ability to promote any release and its limited potential audience due to its quirky nature. Any income I realize from direct music sales these days falls within the noise of my normal income generation efforts, and is thus arguably not worth the trouble.

It would be a different case if I decided to do a proper Sister Machine Gun record. A couple of phone calls would secure the full financial backing necessary to realize such a thing, but (a) I don't have the time to properly exploit that occurance, and (b) I don't have the desire or creative impulse necessary to pull it off in the first place. That's outside the scope of this conversation in any event.

Anyhow, to return to the subject, another fact to consider is that the income from commercial licensing of Micronaut songs far outstrips the money generated from direct sales of same, by several orders of magnitude.

Taking all this in to consideration, I'm fairly convinced that I should just throw my old-school distaste of the concept of "free music" out the window and put the whole package up for download, cover art and all. What I'm wondering and opening up for comment are the following points:

1. If you've done this, what were your goals other than the obvious "increase my reputation" type things, and did you realize them?

2. What sort of PR would one do? All the normal shit that one would do with a normal release? I don't see why not, and I have a bully pulpit here to utilize, obviously, but I'm interested to hear about success in this realm other than the normal avenues, if such is to be had.

3. Obviously, it would be wise to use Tunecore to submit to the streaming subscription services, but would it make sense to also put it in iTunes? If I was a customer and bought something on a whim in iTunes, only to find out it was freely available elsewhere, I'd be a little pissed off. Would I be pissed at the artist or at Apple? Hard to say.

4. Extras are easy in a situation like this. Are "remix packs" or whatever worth the effort expended in making them? (This would more directly concern the AI audience, obviously.)

So, anyhow, the UPS guy stumbled to my door at 9:30AM; I was the first of several hundred iPad deliveries he had to make that day, according to him, and he was less than amused by the whole thing. The packaging is typical Apple: 50% "oh, that's nice" and 50% "how the hell do I get this fucking thing open?" Sync it just like an iPhone or iPod Touch, and you're off to the races. It put all my app purchases from the iPhone right in there, and they all worked out of the chute, no problems at all.

The Good: This thing is so obviously the Future of casual computing it's not even funny. It has a nice heft to it, typical construction of Apple's higher-end gear. Same bezel size and overall coloration as my MacBook Pro. All the buttons feel nice and firm, a little tougher to the touch than the ones in the iPod Touch. As a computer (i.e. Mail, Safari, Contacts, all the usual jank) it feels much slower than my MacBook Pro, but faster than the average Netbook. Definitely faster than the iPhone or the iPod Touch. I think they might have juked the animation speeds on app opening and such a bit in order to make it seem faster, but it has the desired effect.

The keyboard is easy to type on, once you adjust your style to match its mechanical abilities. The on-board speaker, which is actually stereo, sounds not terrible. Somewhere between the iPhone's built-in and the MacBook Pro in terms of overall range and quality. It is what it is. The battery life is exceptional, but it's brand new, so like all Apple products, I don't expect that to last.

The Bad: Obviously, I'll have to spend some time with it to really come up with bad things, just like I'd have to spend some time with it to come up with truly good things. My initial impressions are thus: the screen gets greasy really easy. Gotta keep a microfiber cloth handy. It weighs about the same as a normal sized hardback book (think "Difference Engine") but since its weight is concentrated in the middle, and it has kind of sharp edges, it isn't incredibly comfortable to hold. We'll see how that works out.

The Apps: I haven't had time to check out more than a few music apps, and I just did a cursory examination of those. The Korg iElectribe is just as awesome as you think it is. It is basically an ER-1 (w/ Toobz), lock, stock, and barrel. This will be fun as fuck. No sync, so limited usefulness, but nonetheless. I also gave TouchOSC iPad a quick whirl; it works exactly as you'd expect, only bigger. I fooled with Bleep! a little bit, but I found the big one even less penetrable than the little one. I'd like to like that app, but it just doesn't do it for me.

So, once I have something more interesting to say than what everyone else is saying, or everyone else plans to say, I'll put it up, but this will be the limit of my iPad posting. My initial verdict is that this little cocksucker is perfect in every way. It's exactly as advertised, and just feels right. Many people have aped the Apple Party Line that the iPad is for content consumers, not content creators. While that is true, the same could be said for many of the things we, as musicians, co-opt in to our daily work environment. Hell, using computers to make pop music would have been laughable in 1980, yet here we are.

If anyone has any specific questions about it that only I can answer, I'll be happy to field them.