Sorry I've been dead recently, but I'm back now!

Yeah people, sorry about being gone for ages and ages with no new music or art or software to speak of. My brother got married in Cyprus so that was a nice holiday, my sister got engaged so I'm looking forward to another nice holiday and I started University!

University > College is all I can say. The atmosphere is about a million times better than it was in college. God I hated my college, the amount of times they screwed me over, BUT, I do thank them for one thing... teaching me some stuff. It turns out that the college course taught me some level 3 work along side the level 2 work which means that the majority of my lectures I'll fly through since I've technically already done them.

I'm not going to get exempt from the lectures, hell no! I can show off with my awesome skizilzzz, hehehe... That and half of it I've already forgotten, BUT LETS PRESS ON.

I have my own server now! Well, not much of a server, it's a refurbished desktop computer running Windows XP Professional. I use it for FTPing work back and forth between home and university. Yes I have a notebook computer but better to have a back up than nothing at all. I will also be using it to host my own website. OMGWTFBBQ. My own file storage, my own web pages, my own PHP scripts, my own MySQL server, NO FEES and full administrative control. Excellent :)

Expect it to go live in the next few weeks (when that happens this blog will be deleted too). I'll add a guest book to the site so that anyone can comment on anything in particular so nobody has to register... although in best interest it might be a better idea to have people register to comment, or at least provide an email address. *shrug* I'll figure it out eventually... with all that out of the way, time to work on my dissertation (aiming for 15,000 words here)

New MSN contact address

I am removing my ageing hotmail.com email address, this unfortunately means that my MSN contact list will be purged and deleted. If you wish to contact me via MSN use my google mail address. benanderson.dragon@googlemail.com

That is all.

My internet is pretty much buggered...

So yes, very little activity from me lately...
My internet connection has almost died on me and my mobile broadband refuses to work.
We're paying for 8mbps internet. We typically get 3.7mbps... okay not exactly what we pay for but we live a very long way from the telephone interchange so thats the best we can get.

For the past god knows how many weeks the internet has now slowed to near dial-up speed. No I'm not joking... Estimated 7 hours to download a software update for my MacBook (I forgot to mention that I bought a white MacBook, woo!) which is unacceptable by all standards so my MacBook is stuck on OS 10.5.6 because it would take far too download the 10.5.8 update. I'm not bothering with the update anymore since I've ordered OSX Snow Leopard (OS 10.6). Because both my Macs are less than 90 days old I got the update for £7.95 each direct from Apple! Not bad when the typical upgrade price is £40 (family pack) and the stand alone OS is £129 ;)
The DVDs are full install DVDs too!, not rubbish "upgrade" DVDs ala Microsoft Windows.

So yes, until I can find someway to get our internet back to what it is supposed to be I can't upload any music because the connection constantly times out.

I PASSED!!!

I said ages ago that I failed my course...
HA
no...
I PASSED!!!!
I BLOODY PASSED!
I'm off to university baby! 8D

Beeb Track, an SN76489 and BBC Microcomputer tracker in development

I can safely say that this tracker will be bloody brilliant when its done!

I already have a playback routine complete, only sixteen lines of code and no bigger than 332 bytes (0.32421875 kilobytes) of memory, though this routine is missing the fourth channel (noise/sound effects). Even after the addition of the fourth channel into the routine it will be, I think, 20 lines of code and still under 400 bytes.

To listen to a demo of this routine playing through a simple 16 bar loop, follow this link to download the MP3. I know it's not a long demo, since all I have is a playback routine I had to manually input the 48 register values to get this tiny loop and I couldn't be bothered to input anything more.

You can set the speed of the song in hundredths of a second. So a setting of 100 will be one second between each note. The Playback routine also supports note sustain (as you can hear in the demo) and note cut.

The playback routine is the typically the most difficult part of any tracker development, but three hours later this puppy is complete. Give me one month and you may have a working tracker ready for you all to play with on your old BBC Micro :)

Peace
~Ben Anderson

It arrived early, work has started.

My new iMac computer, you can see a picture of the beautiful thing here arrived a full three days before it's expected due date (when Apple say 24 hour delivery, they really do mean 24 delivery!).

Work has started on my FM tutorial and I may start writing a tracker for the BBC Micro computer (no promises though). :)

Peace out
~BenA

Reason4 & Ableton 8, impressions not good.

Right, so... as you all know I now have a macintosh so I've been trying out demos of all the audio applications available for the platform, two of them I was hoping to use was Ableton 8 and Reason 4 but sadly these are no where near the standard of FLStudio's user interface and sequencing. Lets put this into perspective, shall we?

REASON 4
I would've used Reason 4 but there are 3 BIIIIIIIIIIG problems with it that make it virtually unusable to me.

• No VST support - Why Reason has never had VST support is still a mystery to me. Everything works on reason refills which no one develops. NO ONE. I'd miss out on loads of software. Propellor Head, please.... SUPPORT FUCKING VST.
  
• Unnecessary Graphics Prettiness... No really, all I want to do is put some reverb on an arpeggio. I want it to happen NOW, but noooooo, I have to select a reverb unit, put it somewhere in my virtual effects rack then connect it to my synthesizer mixer input or something along those lines with a virtual wire. The point of this software was to get AWAY from all this clutter, in reason it's worse because its all with a mouse rather than by hand. It becomes a total cluster-fuck. Why can't I just select a mixer track and then add reverb to said mixer track with a simple mouse driven UI? God only knows
  
• MIDI... It's an audio application geared to electronic music... and it has no MIDI output... electronic music... with no MIDI output..................................................................................................................................... *brain caves in*
  

Reason 4 has ONE good thing going for it, THOR, but that doesn't justify how much the rest of the application is lacking in many vital areas.

ABLETON LIVE 8
Ableton Live 8 has all the features of FLStudio 8 Professional which is perfect! It means that I am still within reach of all the tools I know and love but there are two major flaws with Live 8.

• FLStudio 8 Professional costs £200. This is good price considering what you're getting. FL8 Pro has exactly the same features and tools as Ableton Live 8 but Ableton Live 8 costs A whopping £138 MORE bringing the total cost of Live 8 to £338! For that price I can buy the XXL edition of FLStudio which has all the features of the Pro version as well as some of the best software synthesizers ever devised bundled in with it! In short, Live 8 is far to expensive for what you get, especially considering FLStudio 9 is around the corner.
  
• Live 8's user interface is the worst user interface in history. Nothing is clearly marked, there is no on screen helper, none of the buttons have any resemblance to what they are supposed to do (Except for the Play button) and the screen is cramped because none of the windows float, they are all in a fixed position. Working with Live 8 is unintuitive and sloppy with nothing redeeming about it's user interface at all. When I first used FLStudio (way back when it was still at version 4) I was able to quickly browse the application and get a feel of it right away. Mixer is there, tracks are there, synthesizers are there. Brilliant! I was laying down tracks in under an hour of installing it. In Live 8 I didn't understand any of the UI, mostly because it's so badly outdated. It uses a similar UI to old atari ST sequencers which were not only bad but completely frustrating.
  

Live 8 is a good application with alot going for it, but it's high price to feature ratio (especially when compared to FLStudio) leaves alot to be desired. It's user interface is clunky and unintuitive with no clear definition for any of the buttons. I've had to design user-interfaces before for my computing course, If I handed in a UI similar to Live 8 I would've failed the class, I'm not joking.

So it looks like I'm sticking with FLStudio on Microsoft Windows. I wanted to make the shift over to Mac OSX and never look at windows again but I love FLStudio more than I hate Windows (and thats a whole lotta lovin' right there!)

~Peace