I got an email from the ppl this morning, it goes as follows -

Dear Colleagues 

things that cubase and others have had for a long time, but that make protools at least able to compete now =)

the score editor looks nice - play your midi into protools as usual, and print the midi out as a score. nice feature.

their so called ‘liquid time line’ - ableton has had this for ages.
not sure i’ll use that at all.

they have made the buttons kinda round. woooo. way to go - you edited some images. not worth a major release for.

48 tracks in m-powered and LE - awesome =| I still dont know why they hardcoded in a value for the max number of tracks anyway.
If you buy the addon packs then you can now get 7.1 surroundsound and upto 128 tracks in protools LE !!!
that sounds like a good enough reason to splash out on an mbox.

they still dont have multitrack beat detective in protools le or m-powered, unless you buy the add on that used to give you mp3 export, unlimited tracks and multi track beat detective. - ill just stick to ableton for its warping and use protools to finalise my mixes in thankyouverymuch.

I am looking forward to trying out all the new plugins and stuff that ships with the new protoolls, though I expect they wont get regular use  in my studio. some might though - I still use their crappy eq and compressor all the time.

I’m most looking forward to the new midi stuff that they have - midi editing in earlier versions of protools was poor to say the least. I hope they have improved it a lot. please!

Im sitting my protools 201 soon, and when I did the 110 I got a free plugin, so hopefully this time ill be able to get a free protools 8 upgrade =) since I am paying a lot for a bit of paper that says I can work protools.

RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs

November 30, 2005 | Issue 41•48

so from now on i can use this profile for my blog posts - I have the screenshot capture program running (it ust sits idle till i press print screen, then pops up with the screenshot) I need to configure the video capture on this profile, but hopefully it will be easy this time. ill need to dig through my own posts to find the name of the video capture program i used that uploads to youtube once you have captured your videos, so ill post a video later on today.

Ive been using the flock browser since about version 0.5
they have just released version 2.
whats so good about that i hear you ask ?
well, I sell music online. so I have profiles on most of the ’social networking sites’ I also have a host of email addresses - some purely for myself, others purely for my bands.

so, whats so good about this new version of flock ?

well. It has myspace support for one thing.
myspace is now built directly into the browser.
you dont even need to go to myspace to check if you have new mail. it shows you on your homepage when you open your browser.
flock has had support for youtube accounts for a while now, also flickr accounts, picasa, twitter and pownce, facebook and digg accounts too.
all the information about all your friends shows in a neat column on your homepage, with all the rss feeds you subscribe to and your most visited sites.
handy indeed.
I did notice that it thinks I dont have any friends on myspace (maybe cos I have too many of them) but it does tell me that I have 1 message =) which is all I really want it to do.
ok, scratch that, I just got inundated with myspace statuses! it just took a few minutes to process all the people!
now I have one less account to check when I dont need to be there. all they need now is bebo support (or support for multiple accounts on myspace and facebook, so i can have my personal and my band profiles all in one stream)

another major thing it now has is theme support!

I think though that the best part of flock is the blog editor - you just put the details of your blogs (I have three set up at the moment)
and it gives you a text editor that you can type your blog post in, add pictures, video clips, etc then upload to your blog and view the finnished article - you dont even need to log into your blog to do this - it does it all for you!

there isnt much change from the beta, apart from the addition of myspace, but the improvement over version 1 is fantastic!

try it out for yourself. you will be amiased.
it works on linux, mac and

that crappy other microsoft platform too =)

get it from www.flock.com

anyway, here are some screenshots for you to enjoy..

well, every one knows about iTunes.
there is also windows media player.
Winamp is another, as is foobar2000
Amarok is one for linux, as is xmms.
Songbird is one of the newer ones.

Ive tried them all, and I keep looking for one that is going to do everything I want.
I have thousands of music tracks on my computer (not least as I make on average 3 per day by myself.

so, what are we looking for in a media player ?

well, the ability to play every kind of music track you have and can get would be nice.
real audio, wma, mp3, flac, ape, .pls playlists, .m3u playlists, stuff like that, instead of having forty different players, one for each format.

videos would be nice, but you can have a separate app for all your videos (i dont mind running one application specifically for music and another specifically for videos) though you can get everything to play in one app.

so, I have decided to focus purely on music for this. since I like music.

im going to show you a way to sync your windows media player library and your itunes library, how to import your library from itunes into songbird, how to embed all the nice high res artwork that itunes adds to your mp3’s so that all your media players can benefit and also how to ditch itunes and windows media player all together and start using songbird. with all the cool features that you like from both itunes and windows media player.

so, lets have a look at the media players.

windows media player 11

so, the interface is ok, its not the best (search seems to take an age and it waits for you to stop typing and press enter before it starts)

it has a ‘now playing’ list at the side, where you can drag and drop songs that you want to play.
all pretty standard.
it doesnt, however have one of the main features that i’m looking for.
the ability to play songs and NOT add them to your library. but It’s slow as hell. I want my media player to open in less than 30 seconds, infact, i want my media player to open in less than 2 seconds. I dont need it to automatically search folders for new music. If i add new music then I want to make sure that I get all the metadata correct, and so I can add it to the library when I want to add it to the library.

It does look pretty good though.

itunes just got upgraded to version 8. Its bloated and very slow. the ‘new’ layout for the albums view is ok, but i prefer the old way to do it - ill pick a genre, or an artist, then i want to see the albums and a list of the tracks, like in windows media player. on the up side itunes does have fantastic support for all your album artwork, which is nice. still, it does take an age to search for it.

which brings us to songbird.

it looks like itunes. it behaves much like itunes, it can import your library from itunes. but it does struggle with the artwork.
if your artwork is perfect in itunes then you can go to this site and download a script called itunes_insert_artworkmake sure you close itunes.
then run the script, and it will embed all the artwork from itunes into the metadata for the songs. that way when you import the metadata from itunes into your songbird all the high res artwork is already there.

one of the major benefits to songbird is that it is based on mozilla stuff - so it has a built in browser. and therefor all the benefits that can bring - stuff like tourdates for the currently playing artist, their wikipedia info, and other cool stuff (if you want it) it can even do the swooshy itunes and ipod touch album art view, there are addons for it, like you get addons for firefox.

thats the best feature about songbird. by far.
dont like it ? change it!
it doesnt support X, Y or Z - get the addon that does.

so now I have songbird setup with all my artwork (it has an addon that can search for artwork from amazon, last.fm and a host of other sites, so if your itunes didnt find the artwork, then you can search for it inside the app).

a few addons i suggest for song bird are:

Concerts - a songkick plugin that tells you the tour dates for bands in your library.
Album art manager - manage all the cover artwork in your collection.
Media flow - the funky itunes cover browser.
MashTape - get tourdates, pictures, videos, etc of the currently playing artist.
The Exorcist - a tool to show you duplicate / missing tracks in your library - one of the best plugins out there !

 

 i dug out all my dads old LP’s, Neil young, Yes, the eagles, Free, Santana, the beatles, there are so many good ones. t  here are about 150 or so LP’s that ive got to work my way through, and about 100 singles (there are loads of 78 singles too, but I need to fix the Telefunken downstairs to play them =) I had laughed when people said to me that vinyl sounds better than a cd. after listening to about 20 LP’s that i have as cd versions and as vinyl, i can agree with this statement. the sound quality isnt as crisp (probably cos these records are old, and so is the stylus) but the feel of the records is far better than the feel of the cd. the artwork is amaising. cd artwork can be good, but artwork on vinyl records is fantastic. the other good thing is that there isnt a shuffle, or a fastforward. you put the record on side one, and listen to it till the arm goes back to its seat, then you have to get up and turn the record over to listen to the other side. something about that makes each record like an actual experience, not like a cd, which is more of a collection of songs.

the other thing that ive noticed is the dynamics in the records - there is little (or no) compression on everything and as a result it ‘feels’ far better. im going to start mixing like this for my new metal record. I might even get a couple of vinyls made for it, just to hear it on a real record player.
im just listening to a 20 minute jam of ‘words’ from the LP ‘Journey through the past’ by neil young. its fantastic.
well, I have my work cut out for me this weekend, listening to as many records as i possibly can.