TXT:: March has just flown by, and while I've been busy with stuff, I've been neglecting my journal. I'll try to put together a brief summary here.

The other night, I happened to be stranded in San Francisco because my car broke down and rather than deal with a long tow, I decided to have it serviced in SF. Turns out it's just the fuel pump. Fortunately it died on me just as I pulled into Hotel, and the valet parking attendants and Bell Captain were really quite helpful. It worked out ok, but I'm driving around a rental these days.

I was going to drive the rental home on Thursday, but I decided to stick around another day. Fortunately, the powerbook is running fine and I could take care of some unfinished writing.

Have Reason - Will Travel:: Thursday Night, I was invited over to a House Warming Party at the Drum Machine Museum. Mickey T. has put his little studio space through some changes and has converted it into a Performance venue with some cool lighting and video projection equipment as well as pretty thumping sound system. After some arm twisting, Mickey managed to get me to give a little Reason Performance/Demonstration during the party. [me (blinking)- and mickey]

My little performance was really crude since I had absolutely nothing prepared, but I just loaded up Reason and started dropping in loops and samples. One of Mickey's neighbors, Chad, brought over his CD DJ rig and started tossing in some samples and breaks while i put together some loops.

The set started off with a little down tempo acid jazzy stuff then progressed as i changed loops on the fly and turned it into a drum n' bass jam session. Basically i would mute out tracks and program stuff visually without listening. I would drop things in and see how it works. Like i said before it was pretty crude, but there were some nice moments.

Mickey is going to have regular events going on at the Drum Machine Museum space in the future. I don't know if i'll do any more performing, but I do have some new insight on using Reason in a Live situation.

The Week before, my friend, Hami (ReBirth Old Timer) was in town for the Game Developer Conference in San Jose. I spent some time with him and he even came over to my place for the first time. Aside from showing him around California, I took him out for some Disease Free Beef and some real Mexican food (Not UK Taco Bell stuff). We dropped by the Mac-Gap store and visited a Mall.

Hami's Co-Worker, Dave, was DJing at a little local nite spot called the "Sidecar" in Downtown San Jose. Dr. Dave just happened to bring his records along with him - just in case such an opportunity came up. I was rather suprised to hear some great funky tracks. I was expecting something like UK garage or something, but Dave put on a great set. Unfortunately, one of the cartriges was bad and his set was briefly interrupted with a couple of bad skips. Coincidentally I just happened to capture these brief disasters on DV.

Dave is a member of a band known as Supercharger, and I made a little iMovie of Dave spinning and cut a short edit of a an appropriated titled track from Supercharger, "Rock the Disco". Hami makes a cameo appearance at the end. The audio was edited in pro tools and then I imported and edit everything with iMovie. Don't expect too much :-)

iMovie requires Quicktime 4 or 5 :-)

daveatthesidecar.mov (10Mb)

Reason v2.0:: The Propellerheads have announced the new version of Reason at Musikmesse in Frankfurt Germany. There are a lot of new features including some things that a lot of people have requested - including a detachable sequencer window and of course MacOS X support! Check out the Prop site for the details.

Reason v2.0 hack...(900k image file) Here's a little mock up wish list that some people have made. Part of it is recognizable as Reason and Reason 2.0 modules, but obviously there are some interesting modifications. Some people have way too much time on their hands :-)

Well, i was going to mention something about the new digidesign M-Box, but i guess it can wait until the Rv2 hype has cleared and after I've had a chance to give it a proper test and open the thing up to see what's inside. :-)

TXT:: Phil aka "Spongebrain" has done something quite interesting. He has released a new CD and a ReFill concurrently. I doubt that you could create the entire CD using merely his new Orkestra Refill, but the concept opens up some new ideas for people who plan to market their music. You could press multiformat CDs with ReFill or whatever data and music on them :)

I've seen multiformat CDs with Videos as well as music, but it would be cool to get a little bit more interaction from the users of the end product.

Anyhoo, he's got a new Fill available as well as a new CD... Congrats Phil!

On my relentless quest to upgrade to X, I hit a snag. "Supposedly" all of the MIDIMAN Delta series of soundcards will work with systems running MacOS 10.1, however, I picked up a Delta 1010LT and it did not work. Apparently some of the 1010LTs work fine, but there were two cases where it did not. Oddly, the 1010LT works fine under MacOS 9 (well...it's not exactly smooth, but it worked), but would not be recognized in X. So, I returned the 1010LT and picked up a AP2496 instead. Suprisingly, it works pretty well under 10.1. Now i need to test out some of Pete Yandells projects for X :)

TXT:: Congratulations Steve and everyone else at Apple computers! NARAS has finally recognized what the rest of us already know about Macs, and has awarded Apple a Technical Grammy award "As the Leading Architect in Bringing Computer Technology into the Studio and Revolutionizing the way Music is Written, Produced, Mixed, Recorded, and Creatively Imagined"

-- duh -- now they just need to get off their butts and finish OS X ;-)

TXT:: I've been slowly making the transition to MacOS X.1 recently. It's not really a migration since my audio and midi hardware is completely incompatable. I even went out and picked up a card which is "supposed" to be compatible with OS X, but the drivers do not seem to work. Good thing that I can return it :-) So now the upgrade process slowly begins. I have to admit, it's nice to finally use that second processor on the tower. X seems to be a solid system especially if you're into the whole networking thing. As far as Audio and MIDI go, I will have to wait and see.

Since I've been on the system maintenance kick, I went and replaced the HD on my TiBook. It was making a horrible amount of noise and it was pretty unbearable. Thanks to my expereinces from last year, opening and replacing the drive was a breeze. Now the only hassle is waiting to get authorization response codes...

Anyhoo back to the upgrade frontlines.

TXT:: Just dropped in for a few minutes to see what's up... At the Brit Awards 2002, "Outstanding Contribution" Award receipient, Sting, made a particularly poignant comment, "Music is it's own Reward!"

Reason:: I've updated the ReFill Watch with a couple of sites. Dark Jedi has quite a few fills up online and ready to download. The flash part doesn't work with Mac Browsers so go Here.

RB Veteran, Wing, has reopened Wingdingo.com with some new goodies for reason users as well :)

TXT:: No updates in well over two weeks...That's because i've been really quite busy :-) My apologies if I have not responded to your e-mails, but at the moment, i'm ignoring any non- project related e-mail.

TXT:: My old Nanao monitor of 6 years was finally giving out and the color guns were not aligning properly anymore. So it was indeed time to replace it. It's wierd because i used that monitor to make mods, and all the graphics on my websites. Being somewhat nostalgic, I've grown a bit attached to my old monitor--Until I replaced it with an Apple Cinema Display :-) Two Reason Song Windows fit side by side!

NAMMed Again:: blech... I hesitate to post pictures of myself, but Wolfgang Merkle managed to snap a rare one of me as the walking Propellerheads advertisement at NAMM. Yes wearing the well worn, Vintage ReBirth RB-338 T-shirt and carrying around the Reason Record Bag courtesy of Ernst and Midiman :-) Caps2MIDI:: Thomas Alker has updated Caps2MIDI to version 1.0.4. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but according to the documents, a few new features have been added and support in different languages as well. For those unaware of Caps2MIDI, it's an application that converts keyboard messages to MIDI note messages and works through OMS. So if you want to play notes into Reason your computer keyboard, just run Caps2MIDI and set reason to respond to the corresponding IAC bus MIDI channel. MP3:: My little experiment with the acoustic piano samples has led me to upload another example: Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata rendered in Reason