kontrawize

Live Earth Concert, this weekend, around the globe

The Live Earth Concert is on this weekend (7th July); the whole event runs for 24 hours via concerts in cities around the globe. It's purpose is to raise awareness of the need for commitment and change to save the environment.

I mentioned previously that Terra Naomi is playing at the London concert at Wembley. That made me interested to go, but the London concert was listed as already sold out.

However, serendipitiously, the "What Car?" web site had a contest where you could win tickets, so I entered; there was nothing to lose. In fact, I won two tickets, so huge thanks to "What Car?" for giving me the chance to attend. I'm really looking forwards to it.

So yes, I will be attending an environmental concert with tickets won from a web site about cars. Go figure, as they say in the classics.

Terra Naomi - Say It's Possible

You probably haven't heard of the singer Terra Naomi. I have, because she's a friend of a friend. She recently moved to London from Los Angeles for a contract with Island Records. I haven't met her or anything (London's a big place), but I hear about her a lot.

There's a really interesting story about her upcoming appearance at the (sold out) "Live Earth" concert at Wembley in the UK (one of many "Live Earth" concerts at locations around the globe). Last year, after seeing Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth", she was inspired to write a song called "Say It's Possible". When Al Gore heard of the song, he apparently asked for her to be added to the list of performers for "Live Earth". How amazing is that!

Those of you who are part of the iTunes matrix can download the song; the rest of us refuseniks will have to wait for the CD (which is apparently in the works).

Another thing that surprised me was when I was sent some links to cover versions of Terra's songs that have been posted to YouTube. For an artist whose only broad exposure to date has been via MySpace and YouTube, I wouldn't have expected people to already be doing covers. I guess these social Web sites really are helping new talent to build up a fan base.

For those of you who play guitar (or similar), check out Terra's video on how she tunes her guitar for her song "Flesh For Bones". Myself, I struggle just to cope with a single tuning for my ukulele (which only has 4 strings), let along song-specific tunings. Then again, Terra's only using 3 strings for this song, perhaps that helps. Good thing I still have my day job ...

E-mailing big audio files

On the weekend, I put in my entry in the dancetracksdigital remix competition. This is a competition for users of Ableton Live where you are given a set of vocal and instrumental recordings, and you have to assemble (mix) them into a final dance track.

My 6 minute entry came to 14Mbytes as a 320kbps stereo MP3 file (the rules required this format). I noticed that they managed the size of the submissions by using the MailBigFile service. This allows you to upload a big file and specify a recipient. The recipient receives an e-mail with a link for downloading the file (which they have to use in the next several days or so).

MailBigFile seems like a reasonable way to send big files around, when you don't do it often enough to want to set up your own proper Web site and management process. Of course, for anything sensitive, think about using something like PGP encryption to protect the contents from prying eyes.

Black Box Ukulele

I've been wanting to add tracks that I play on my electric tenor ukulele to my electronic compositions, so I needed a suitable audio interface. I found that the M-Audio Black Box is now available for less than half its original price, so I bought one last weekend. It's a fun bag of tricks. It certainly makes my uke sound pretty wild.

It doesn't come with Linux drivers, but I've decided for the moment that Windows is an easier way to do music. Linux is getting better, but I want to spend more time on the music than on getting music software to work. That said, I really like Rosegarden for composing music using traditional music notation, so I may continue using Linux for composition, though I expect to do mixing and production under Windows.

The Black Box comes with Ableton Live Lite 6 for doing mixing and production. I hadn't used it before, but it's pretty cool. Using the latest version 2.7 of the ASIO4ALL audio drivers for Windows, it does a great job of recording (with reasonably low latency/delay). I have a long way to go before I'll produce anything worth listening to, but it looks like it should be fun.

Have Yourself a Green Day

On the weekend I flew to Vancouver for a CCTS meeting that is on this coming week. It was the first time I had flown with United Airlines, and I was impressed that they had XM Satellite Radio for the in-flight audio channels. Americans seem to regularly be telling me how great they think it is.

I was less impressed, though, when the audio channels started looping during the flight. So much for satellite radio! It wasn't as live as I had hoped. Still, I kept listening to the same audio channel because I really liked a ballad they were playing with a chorus about "when September ends".

When I was as San Francisco International Airport to change flights, I found a music store and asked the guy there if he knew of a song with the words "when September ends" that sounded like Green Day. Turned out it was Green Day, and he sold me a copy of their "Bullet in a Bible" live album. I like live albums because they have that extra energy from the crowd, and it makes them a bit more fun than studio recordings.

So, it turns out that the song was "Wake Me Up When September Ends". Great song, great album. I was amazed how many guitar styles from the last 50 years appeared in the songs they played, which says good things to me about their musicianship. Recommended.

I beg your pardon, I never promised you a Rosegarden, part 3

Well, here's the funny thing. I wrote previously about how I had been having problems getting the Rosegarden sequencer and music editor to run under SUSE Linux 10. I haven't been able to find a fix for the problem as yet, but what I did discover is that it is mainly one of the supplied samples (unfortunately, the one I always use as my first test) which displays the problem. Many other pieces are not noticeably affected. So, I'm back using Rosegarden again, the latest version from CVS compiled on my laptop under SUSE 10.

I still highly recommend Rosegarden. Certainly it's given me a great way to write music using regular musical notation, which is the way I learned to do it at school. Note I said a great way to write music, rather than a way to write great music, but it's just something I do for my own interest and edification.

By the way, for editing digitised music samples (rather than MIDI sequences), I've started using Audacity, and it's pretty neat. It's also available for Windows and Mac, so it's probably the best (read only) multi-platform waveform editor available.

Anyway, I have things working again. It just remains to wish you all a Happy New Year! Have a great one.

I beg your pardon, I never promised you a Rosegarden, part 2

I wrote that Rosegarden doesn't run properly in a SUSE Linux 10 VMware session. Well, it turns out to be rather different to what I thought.

After that post, I installed Rosegarden directly in my host SUSE 10 installation, i.e. not in VMware. Guess what? I had exactly the same problem. So VMware wasn't the issue; in fact, VMware did a perfect job of replicating the behaviour on my physical laptop. So what was the problem?

I'm still in the process of tracking it down with the help of the Rosegarden developers on their mailing list, but the thing we are looking at is the system timer resolution. It used to be that Linux systems had a timer resolution of 10msec (milliseconds). They could not time anything more accurately than that. This is not good enough for MIDI, since people can hear that size of delay in a piece of music. Recent Linux versions (and I assume this included SUSE Linux Pro 9.3) reduced the resolution to 1msec, which is great for audio applications. However, there were apparently some issues for some applications with the ten-fold increase in timer-related CPU activity.

It seems that in SUSE Linux 10, the system timer resolution is now 4msec. While this is better than 10, it's a lot worse than 1msec. This may be the reason for the problem with Rosegarden, but it's far from certain as yet. The jury is still out; I'll let you know when and if there is a solution. I certainly want and need a solution.

I beg your pardon, I never promised you a Rosegarden

I've mentioned previously how impressed I am by Rosegarden as a tool for composing music. I was thrilled to find it included with SUSE Linux Pro 9.3, so I was somewhat gutted when I realised that it wasn't included with SUSE Linux 10. I looked around the Web, but no-one had created a suitable Rosegarden RPM installer for SUSE 10.

Next I downloaded the source RPM from SourceForge, but it wouldn't compile without errors. I'm guessing that as SUSE Linux goes from one version to the next, packages that don't compile are simply dropped from the distribution. That makes sense for them, but it's a potential pitfall if you upgrade your SUSE Linux and then find that you are missing an application that is important to you.

I found a recommendation to download the latest Rosegarden sources directly from the CVS repository at SourceForge. I did that, but found I also had to download a number of supporting packages (and some newer versions than are supplied with SUSE 10). I also had to install scons, which is a new-age Python replacement for make (and hence a bit of a competitor to Apache Ant and Apache Maven). However, with all of that, I was able to compile Rosegarden and get it running.

One more piece of bad news, at least for me - when I fired up Rosegarden in a SUSE Linux VMware session, Rosegarden complained that precision timing was not available. That confirms my previous (less than surprising) conclusion that VMware isn't ideal for running multimedia programs (at least for Linux sessions, it's worked OK for me running Windows XP virtual sessions). So I am going to have to build Rosegarden all over again in my host copy of SUSE Linux 10, rather than in my virtual session. To be fair, multimedia Linux in a virtual hardware environment is pretty bleeding edge stuff, so I'm not going to complain too much that it doesn't work. Still, give it a year or two, I'll probably give it another try. Might give Xen a try at that stage too, see if it can support the full spectrum of the things that I need and like to do.

Composing Music With Linux

Like a lot of people in IT, I'm a bit of a frustrated musician. At various times, I get the itch to write some music. I studied music at high school, including a bit of musical composition, so I read music, and I like to write music the same way, with a staff and bars of minims/crotchets/quavers/etc. My frustration with a lot of earlier music software was that it didn't allow you to use normal musical notation when composing.

So, I was very happy to find that SUSE 9.3 Pro shipped with a copy of Rosegarden, an open-source software application for composing music which allows you to create and edit your music using proper musical notation. It's good too, very slick, better than some Windows music applications that I've used, for example. I definitely don't feel like I'm using something inferior just because I'm using Linux (although I don't claim to be an expert on music composition software, what's available and how easy to use or functional it is).

Mind you, Linux being Linux, there were a few technical hurdles. Rosegarden saves music by default in its own '.rg' format, but that doesn't help me if I want to distribute it for other people to listen to. Rosegarden exports MIDI files, which is a good start, but MIDI relies on each machine being able to play back all of the instruments in a piece of music, in more or less the same way that the composer's machine did. This is a bit of a weak link, and it took me to while to configure the timidity MIDI player so that it played back my tune that same way Rosegarden does. Linux music software often uses soundfonts; I'm currently using the popular Fluid R3 soundfont, so I had to set timidity up to use it. It still wasn't quite right, until I realised that timidity was assuming that MIDI tracks 10-16 were percussion tracks (where each different note pitch is used to select a different percussion instrument). Once I overrode the default setting, it was fine, it played back just as I wanted.

With timidity, I was also able to generate a raw (uncompressed) '.wav' file. I started with a 6K '.rg' file, from which Rosegarden produced a 33K MIDI file. Now I had a 38M '.wav' file (that's right, 38 megabytes, not a typo). Clearly I needed some compression, and MPEG layer 3 seemed the right choice. The application I used for this is notlame (the name is due to an earlier MPEG layer 3 encoder called 'lame'). With 'notlame', the default settings gave me a 3.4M '.mp3' file that sounds pretty good. However, I thought it might be a bit large for some folks; I wanted a version that was no more than 1M. Normally MPEG layer 3 encoders ask you to select the bitrate (e.g. 96K, 128K, 192K) to control the quality/size trade-off. notlame has a neat feature where you tell it how much compression you need, and it selects the necessary bitrate. That means less trial-and-error. I selected a compression of 40 to get my 38M '.wav' file down under the 1M barrier.

With that much compression, there were too many obvious encoding artifacts; you may or may not know that MPEG layer 3 compression is psycho-acoustic compression, meaning that it removes details that you are less likely to actually hear (because you will probably be concentrating on other details). However, the more aggressive the compression, the more that loss of detail turns into something that you do, in fact, hear in the music. So to get suitable quality under 1M, I had to encode as mono rather than stereo, which did the trick.

OK, so here is the result. I'm not a professional musician, you have been warned. I started writing it yesterday evening, and finished it this evening; I probably spent about 6 hours on it in total, including finding the Linux applications I needed and learning how to configure them. I don't think that's too bad a result (but you can make up your own mind). The song is called "Black Panther", by the way:

• Black Panther, MP3, stereo, 3.4M
• Black Panther, MP3, mono, 883K

Ukulele in Downing Street

So, it's not just yours truly who thinks it was a good idea to take a leaf out of George Harrison's book and travel with a ukulele. Now Tony Blair is doing it too. Good on him. A man of the people. Well, a man of the people who play ukulele, anyway. All 5 or 6 of us ...