Well, the FatMan works. I’m waiting on the replacement eprom, but in the mean time I decided to tune it up anyway. My friend Eric brought by his proper, hardware chromatic tuner so I wasn’t tuning the thing to another synth. After getting we got it all tuned, he played this:
Super Mario Brother 2 Theme Song on a PAiA FatMan
hehe…
I’ve already had it sounding all Boards of Canada-ish. This thing rocks.
So, the PAiA FatMan arrived today. Of course I had to start on tonight…
Well, after 176 solder points and a few hours of work cataloging parts, writing down what’s missing (this frustrates me to no end), cutting, bending, and soldering, this is where I’m at. All jumpers in place, all resistors (except the couple which I’m missing) in place, ready to start placing the caps tonight. Hopefully PAiA will come through right-quick with the replacement parts. I’m missing things like the socket for the CPU (for the MIDI bits), a set screw for one of the knobs, an op amp, etc.
Oh well, at least there’s parts of the kit to work on in the mean time. :D This is fun.
Man, cLOUDDEAD fscking rocks. If you’re looking for a bit different sound, check out either the S/T cLOUDDEAD disc or the newest release, Ten. Both are great, although Ten has more of an indie rock sound to it, while the S/T is low-fi swirly piece with smooth flowing, powerful vocals.
Hell, while you’re at it, check out the Hymie’s Basement S/T as well. It’s Yoni (Why?) from cLOUDDEAD and Andy Broder doing a really nifty, especially catchy piece. 21st Century Pop Song just gets stuck in my head in a good way. I think it’s the most listened track on my iPod right now.
Top notch stuff, and a definite divergence from the same-old industrial that I’ve been listening to for the last many years while still remaining high quality.
Oh, YES!
The Evolution X-Session
Someone *finally* made a commercially available MIDI controller with a cross fader. I’m glad I didn’t make one of these a few months ago… Now the big choice… This, or a small key-based controller with knobs?
All,
I’ve been used to using Sonic Foundry’s Vegas for putting together cross-faded mix discs on my PC. However, since Vegas isn’t available on Mac, I’m looking for something else that will let you slide audio tracks on top of each other then adjust cross-fades easily. I’m thinking maybe Soundtrack, or just using Final Cut Express, exporting one big AIFF file, then breaking it into tracks.
Does anyone else have a better idea? I don’t want to go with something like Traktor as I’m not intending to do this realtime…
Okay, iTunes for Windows kicks ass. It’s *just* like iTunes for Mac. This makes me really happy… Although, if this had come out a year ago, I may not own a Mac right now. heh.
So, yes, if you have *lots* of music around, especially if you wish the library features of Winamp 3 actually worked, give iTunes for Windows a chance. It’s slick…
Oh, and there’s all the iTunes Music Store stuff that lets you buy CDs online reasonably.
Yep, I actually did it… I got one. While the iPod is charging I’m going to tear my dashboard apart so that I can build a shelf for the iPod in place of the OEM cassette deck. We’ll see how that goes… I’m all excited, though.
Well, I think I’ve decided what I’m going to do for music playing in the car and the living room. I think an Apple iPod will be the best solution. Now, which one to get… The 15GB is $399, but the 30GB, twice the size, is only $100 more. I’m thinking that if I don’t get the 30GB, I’ll be kicking myself in a few months wanting the larger one. Now, where to get it… And when… It’d be nice to have it engraved, just in case there was any confusion, it’d have my info on it. It’s also be nice to have AAC compression, but I can wait either until I get a Apple or iTunes for Windows comes out. We’ll have to see… Maybe I’ll hook up the RCA <-> 3.5mm cable today and see if this project is really something I want to do.
Okay, after spending the last half hour doing A/B tests of 160kbps, 192kpbs, 256kpbs, and 350kbps .ogg files, I don’t think my ears are good enough to hear that much of a difference. I think I’m going to go with 256kbps, but I’ll give everything a listen at home through speakers and headphones and then decide. Maybe my ears suck, or maybe it’s the noisy sound card in this machine. We’ll see.
Okay, Monkey’s Audio:
27 File(s) 458,098,103 bytes
Ogg Vorbis 256kBps:
27 File(s) 144,111,480 bytes
Defiantely an advantage on file size. I think there’s an advantage on sound, too. The .ape files (Monkey’s Audio lossless) sounded brighter. Hard to tell. Time to get a spectrum analyzer…