Stagebuilding for Genesis

From thursday june 21 'till monday june 25, we've been building and breaking down the stage for a Genesis concert as they played in Belgium on sunday. It was a huge stage , built in the Koning Boudewijn football stade and I guess about 38 meters high . I went to my work by bicycle every day and got quite frustrated just from the noise of a thousand cars passing me by every morning and evening. The job was cool , and there was a great atmosphere , I especially liked Vasy , the crazy American steel engineer with mushroom drawings on his T-shirt , but all my other workmates were nice dudes too .

Ideas for songs

These are personal ideas. I share them , but if you don't want them , I don't want to know your reasons why .

The day I stop smashing my guitar , I'll only want to smash your car .
If I close my eyes , the days get bright and sunny, but if I open my eyes , the days get dark and cold.
Waarom met de auto als de fiets zo leuk is ?
Collecting seeds that aren't copyrighted yet (mbreges' idea)

Compiling from source : wav2mid

Here's my first experience trying to install wav2mid , a package I downloaded here .
Too bad I didn't find the time yet to write down usefull things here. Next week I'm job-free again ;-)

I want to convert a drumrecording to a midifile

This isn't a howto or tutorial yet , it's my experience with trying to get the job done.

Except for Cubase , I don't know of any program that can do this but I'm figuring it out .

A .wav to .mid converter is what I need .
The first thing I found was this package called Waon , so I went downloading it here as it didn't appear when I did a Synaptic (package manager) search .

then I opened a terminal and typed :

$ cd /place/where/I/saved/waon/
$ tar xvfz waon-0.8.tar.gz

then into the new folder , to read the installation notes (skip $ gedit INSTALL if you just want to install):

$ cd waon-0.8/
/waon-0.8$ gedit TIPS & gedit README & gedit INSTALL

to find out I need FFWT , "the Fastest Fourier Transform in the West" subroutine library . mmm , interesting :-p UbuntuStudio already has it , mmm , nice :-)

let's get on with :

/waon-0.8$ gedit Makefile.waon

to view the Makefile , edit and save it as Makefile and then at the terminal type :

/waon-0.8$ make

now I got some errors .
first thing i could read is the package fftw3 couldn't be found in a way .
so I went back to synaptic to mark "fftw3-dev" and hit apply.

to undo the first attempt to install i did :

/waon-0.8$ make clean

and try again :

/waon-0.8$ make

okay, the first error disappeared. the next is simple , just back to Synaptic and mark "libsndfile1-dev" as it is needed to compile our desired package "Waon". Then again :

/waon-0.8$ make clean

and

/waon-0.8$ make

Now I got clean output . Let's hope I can figure out in the coming days how to work with my new piece of bits and bytes called "Waon" . But now I must find my own waon in a good sleep.

Second way to go : wav2mid , by Guenther Sohler . He gives a source code package for download , so I'll have to learn compile from source . mmm , encouraging . See my writing under the title "Compiling from source : wav2mid" . (I have to finish it so there's not much to learn yet .)

Installation of the newest version of CAPS

There's a new version of CAPS , the C Audio Plugin Suite , a suite featuring 38 plugins, free for us Dudes !

Here's how I managed to get the latest version -0.4.0 on my UbuntuStudio box instead of the -0.3.0 version I got from synaptic :
I simply followed the comments in the LAU-list .

First make sure you have g++ installed (I used g++-4.1 version 4.1.2-0ubuntu4) , then download the latest release here.

Open a terminal and type :

$ cd /place/where/you/saved/caps_0.4.0.tar.gz

unpack the files and go inside the new folder

$ tar xvfz caps_0.4.0.tar.gz
$ cd caps-0.4.0

optional but recommended :

$ ./configure.py

to work around something I can't explain in detail, edit the Makefile with your favorite texteditor:

$ gedit Makefile

and change line 4 where it says
OPTS = -O3 ...
to
OPTS = -O0 ...

(comment: It is probably better for performance to leave the Makefile as it is, but in case you get errors, this is the way to go.)
save it and go back to the terminal to do :

$ make
$ sudo make install
$ password:
********

Now you should get those new tools at your hands , they can be found between the other LADSPA plugins under a name beginning with "CAPS: " .
Enjoy 'em and don't forget it's good music we need ;-)

You'll find more information at the CAPS homepage . Thanks a lot for the plugs Tim !

Set the default sound card in Ubuntu (or UbuntuStudio)

When your computer has more than one sound cards installed, you probably want to use one of them as the default output. Here's a step by step tutorial for the newbie ...

Step 1: Open the terminal and type

asoundconf list

you get a list of the recognized cards like this :

peter@ubustudio:~$ asoundconf list
Names of available sound cards:
SI7012
M1010
Live
M2x2

Step2: In my case , the M1010 is the one I prefer so I type :

asoundconf set-default-card M1010

and the job is done.

Note: When I reboot my computer, the soundcards switch places so I often have to do these settings again . I'm looking for a way to fix this , if you have any recommendations , please leave a reply.

Installation and configuration of a midisport 2x2 usb - LinuxQuestions.org

www.linuxquestions.org/linux/blog/freakrush/2006-1...

Note created June 14, 2007

Installing M-Audio Midisport 2x2 : I just follow this How-to created by "Yaaarrrgg !" .

(In short) :

sudo -i
cd /tmp

then get firmware from the 'usbmidi' package

wget http://homepage3.nifty.com/StudioBreeze/software/bin/usbmidi-20040829.tar.gz

unpack

tar xvzf usbmidi-20040829.tar.gz

to simplify the instructions copy the firmware to /etc/firmware

mkdir /etc/firmwarecp usbmidi-20040829/testing/MidiSport/ezusbmidi2x2.ihx /etc/firmware/

install fxload if not yet installed

apt-get install fxload

find out what bus and device id the midisport has

lsusb

load the firmware (change "003" with your bus number and "004" with your device number , found from lsusb

fxload -I /etc/firmware/ezusbmidi2x2.ihx -D /proc/bus/usb/003/004

On the page I also found a script for loading the midisport .

With "Alacarte menu editor" in 64Studio or in Ubuntu >>system>>preferences>>main menu I added a new menu-item with the command "sudo /usr/local/bin/midisportsetup" set to open up in a terminal. I'm not sure if this is the right way to do things , but it worked for me.

I also added one with the command "sudo modprobe snd-seq-midi" that I need to make Alsa find the /dev/snd/seq . The same as the previous counts here, I'm not sure if it's the best way to work. Try it and see if it works.

and...

... thanks a lot Yaaarrrgg !, for your great and detailed tutorial.

HowTo play samples with LMMS

... a little easy clicking tutorial I wrote to answer a post on the LMMS users list :

(no MIDI keyboard is needed as you can use the pencil to draw your MIDI-notes , but it's a usefull thing if you want a feel and touch to play with the sound. )

Step 1: click the "instrument plugins" button in the upperleft corner

Step 2: choose "Audio File Processor" and drag-drop it where you now see "TripleOscillator"

Step 3: click on the AudioFileProcessor button to edit and then go find your sample , using the blue folder icon, also choose if you want to play the sample reversed and/or looped and set a good start and end point.

Step 4: next go click in the song editor to create a first pattern for the audiofileprocessor to play. If you want to use a MIDI keyboard to play with the loaded sample , you can choose the right MIDI in port by clicking the little piano icon. (in case you connected the MIDI keyboard out port and configured your MIDI device and so on)
To create a pattern, click once in the song editor on the AudioFileProcessor-track, then double-click on it to open it in the pianoroll editor.

Step 5: play on your keyboard or click on the pianoroll to listen how the samples are being played at the pitch you play .

There's a lot more to learn but this little howto may be a help to get you started , if anything is not clear , please leave a reply.