Here’s a quick update: Sound Forge 7 is still practically unusable.
In other news I am very psyched up for the next songfight. The title I’m choosing is More than Soup, and I haven’t been this inspired in weeks.
Hurray!
Archive for October, 2003
October 30, 2003
October 27, 2003
I did my weekly SongFight! ritual on Saturday morning, creating a track for the Green fight starting tomorrow. It’s called Hold My Calls. I focused a bit more on the music this time, and I think it came out pretty good.
Going into this fight I told myself, “I’m going to make a song that’s three minutes long, or I’m a failure”. I worked for several hours and came up with something that I thought was pretty good, but according to the program I was working in, it was only 90 seconds long!
I fought with it for a while more, and I couldn’t come up with a coherent way to make it longer. I spent a lot of time on a new part, and when I added it to the song it was only 8 seconds longer. I had hit a brick wall. I was a failure. I give up.
I dumped the song into Sound Forge for a little mastering, and it said the song was 3:06 long. I had been looking at the number of measures in the other program. It was 90 measures… not 90 seconds!
Obviously I am a dope on several levels here. I must have listened to the song 15 times straight through as I tweaked it and added flourishes to keep it interesting. I thought to myself a few times “this is the longest 90 seconds I’ve ever experienced,” but I was a slave to the numbers on the screen. I just assumed it was boring.
Anyway, I reached my 3 minute goal. I have no concept of time. At least the song came out pretty good.
October 24, 2003
Well, there are a few annoying bugs in Sound Forge 7 after all. I expect a bugfix release to show up within the next month or so. This was Sonic Foundry’s modus operandi, so it’s not surprising that Sony is carrying the torch. At least I got the discount for the upgrade for buying it so soon.
Now I’m ogling Reaktor 4.
Does anybody use this?
October 22, 2003
I have an entry on the current Blue Songfight. It’s a bit of a return to the Starfinger form. Unfortunately I think its way too short.
One of these days I’m going to blow everyone away!
October 20, 2003
My friend Bryan Baker, of gajoob fame (among many other things), has a new website called SonicDetours. I signed up for it this evening, and submitted an old Starfinger track. Check it out. I hope it gets the attention it deserves — it’s a cool, unique idea.
I spent a good bit of the weekend playing with the new versions of Ableton Live and Sound Forge.
They are both worthy upgrades, but Live needs a few bugfixes. It didn’t crash on me, but it was quirky to get some things synced up correctly. I dream of a possibly nonexistent future day when Live has a distortion plugin that is as cool as Reason’s Scream module. I have heard rumors of some good distortion VST’s, but they can get pretty pricey.
Sound Forge now supports plugin automation, and it’s a lot of fun to play with parameter envelopes outside the context of something like Acid. It’s a great tool for making loops and samples. My only beef with that program (so far) is the inane support for synchronizing recording to external midi devices. I actually haven’t gotten this to work, but I have a few more leads to try this week.
October 17, 2003
You will notice that the previoulsy mentioned Brainpipe Songfight entry Angry All Over is now up on this site. Voting isn’t over yet, though, so head on over to SongFight! and check out the tracks.
Starfinger is planning to return for the contest next week.
October 14, 2003
Brainpipe did actually do a Songfight song this week (for the blue fight). I recorded the vocals a capella last week, and Heuristics Inc added music over the weekend. It is very different from my solo Starfinger entries.
October 10, 2003
Well, I finished migrating all the pages to the new design scheme. I’m really proud of this site, but I am going to be thinking about some changes to the track-listing scripts on the project pages, because they look funky. Let me know if you find anything that misbehaves or looks crappy in your browser of choice. Thanks.