SteveCastellano.com

the obsolete logic hardware key

I talk a lot about music hardware on this site, but the music that I write wouldn’t sound like much without software. Logic is my main audio production app, and I’ve been using it in various incarnations since about 1989, when it was called Notator SL, and was available exclusively on the Atari ST platform.

At that time Performer, by the embarrassingly named Mark of the Unicorn (more commonly known as MOTU for obvious reasons), was all the rage, but Macs were out of the price range of students and many Europeans, leading German software companies like C-Lab and rival Steinberg to create some truly kick-ass sequencing software for the less expensive Atari.

So in that respect I’m pretty lucky; I backed the right horse for once, and in spite of some kind of rift at C-Lab that resulted in a new company called Emagic, and the buyout of Emagic by Apple (there’s a detailed history  at TweakHeadz Lab), I can actually dig out files I worked on 15 years ago and import them into my current setup.

In other respects, I’m like anyone else, in that I’ve been heavily reliant on music software that is no longer supported, and which has been rendered obsolete by seismic changes in Mac processors and operating systems over the years. And the more I invest in software instruments – my current arsenal consists of Logic Studio, Reason 4, and Native Instruments Komplete 6 – the more vulnerable I am to the sudden dissolution of any of the companies that produce them.

Bitheadz Retro AS-1, which I used to refer to as the “Retro-Ass” synth, was one of the earliest consumer-level real-time analogue synth emulators, and it worked pretty well on my 266 MHz PowerMac. I still have the install disk somewhere, which means I could install it on an XP box if I felt the need. Thankfully I don’t feel the need, really, and all I’ve lost is my initial investment of $250 or so – though I was pretty cheesed when these guys went under, without so much as a gurgle. As of now, there’s certainly nothing I needed the Retro-Ass to do that I couldn’t duplicate with Logic’s ES2 or a number of the NI synths. But there passed a few long years during which this was not the case.

Propellerheads RB-338 was from the same era, and emulated the Roland TR-303 bass synth and TR-808 and 909 drum machines. It emulated their user interfaces as well, which had a lot to do with the 303’s idiomatic lines in particular; that interface resulted in a lot of melodies that no one would have come up with first on a bass or a keyboard. It wasn’t quite powerful enough to construct a song on its own, but it laid the groundwork for Reason, which is gradually evolving into a soft-synth based audio workstation with the recent introduction of Record.

Propellerheads did a great and generous thing when they pulled the plug on ReBirth, in that they released a Reason ReFill with all the ReBirth sounds and made it available for a free download. Of course, you no longer had the 303 or the UI. And if you had been downloading the user hacks, which replaced all the sounds in the drum machines with user-created samples, of course you didn’t have those anymore either.

look i still have the manual and everything

Aside from Notator, the music app that I spent the most time in on the Atari was an amazing patch editor/librarian for my Yamaha TG77 called Synthworks SY77, made by Steinberg. The SY/TG77 is a hybrid synth that was both a ROMpler and an FM synth, boasting “Advanced FM” (AFM) synthesis. AFM2 gave you access to not only sine wave operators but more complex op waveforms and even ROM samples as operators, plus resonant digital filters, which was pretty groundbreaking at the time. I amassed a huge collection of sounds for this machine that would have been impossible to create and maintain without Synthworks.

Considering the fact that the Atari had no hard drive, merely an internal DD floppy drive (I had the external floppy drive as well, which made me some kind of power user), 1MB of internal RAM, and an 8MHz processor, Synthworks did a phenomenal job of indexing, retrieving, and comparing over 3,000 patches. But Synthworks was also a powerful editor, giving you intuitive graphic controls for the SY77’s myriad parameters, even allowing you to create FM algorithms that were not available from the front panel of the hardware unit itself. It could also generate random patches based on a selection from the library, or allow you to proportionally mix parameters from up to four separate sounds using a simple point-and-click graphic interface. Neat-o! And while this software hasn’t been supported for over a decade, I still refuse to admit that it’s dead – I still have the software, an Atari, and the hardware dongle, in case I ever decide to fire the TG77 up again.

Stay tuned for part 2, I’m going somewhere with this, honest.

I haven’t uploaded any original music in a while so I thought I’d just toss this one up here for you to listen to and comment on. Recent developments in OS X and Logic Studio necessitated my upgrading my hardware to an Intel system, and to make a long and somewhat geeky story short I’m now running Logic Studio (Logic 8 for the moment), Reason 4, and a complement of Universal Audio plugins off of a MacBook Pro with a UAD-2 Solo/Laptop card jammed into it.

This is the sound of me putting the new system through its paces, and pounding away at the Wurlitzer, which is a great way to relieve stress if you haven’t tried it.

The Reacquaintance

I reserve the right to remix and re-upload this recording tomorrow, and probably several times on the weekend.

I got it into my head that I wanted to dig up an old MIDI file that I had created back in the Atari days, for reasons that escape me now. After deciding that hooking up the Atari itself could only lead to disappointment, I tracked down a freeware Windows app called Gemulator, dusted off the original Atari ST diskette, jammed it into a Toshiba USB floppy drive that almost got thrown out in November when we were cleaning out the spare room, connected said floppy drive to an Intel MacBook running XP via Parallels, installed and launched Gemulator, and, as the French say, viola. Of the music I heard when I successfully imported the original Notator files into Logic, I can only say “not so good.” But the exercise itself just goes to show… something, I guess.

I gave a mouse a cookie this weekend. The mouse was a new Motorola KRZR K1m, the cookie was Parallels Desktop for Mac with Windows XP Pro. No one who hacks phones uses a Mac, as near as I can tell.* So if you want to hack your phone, or even use the bundled Motorola Phone Tools software, you need a PC or an Intel-based Mac running Windows under either Boot Camp or Parallels. I did consider both, but I’ve been running Vista on a MacBook at work using Parallels without too many complaints, and I couldn’t spare the drive space for a Boot Camp partition.

When I saw XP running in coherence mode though I was more excited about finishing the WordPress theme that I started a few months ago entitled The Foundation Remains (after the picture that I shot this past summer). Without wanting to start a Mac-PC debate, I’ve never been too crazy about how IE 6 makes my web sites look – mostly because of the way pre-Vista Windows handles text aliasing, i.e. doesn’t alias text. I had also run across some well-documented inconsistencies in how IE 6 deals with CSS, particularly in the way it adds padding to containers so that your pixel widths don’t add up, and how it tends to ignore minimum width and height specifications. But as the majority of visitors to this site are still using IE6, with IE7 (which I haven’t tested yet because I don’t have it at home, and from my limited experience it seems to play a little nicer anyway) just edging out Firefox for second place, I can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist. See? I care, sort of.

Once I no longer had to run from one machine to another to reload the beta site it took me less than a weekend to put the finishing touches on the template. It started out as a full-bleed fluid centre, static sidebar “holy grail” template with a minimum width, but shortly after I discovered that it was indeed the “holy grail” I decided that it was more trouble than it was worth (see above) and set my expectations a little lower. And what I had left was still plenty to do.

This template was coded pretty much from the ground up in Coda, tested in IE6, Safari and Firefox. But really, if you’re currently using either of the first two you should switch to something else. Let me know if you run into usability issues in whatever browser you are using.

*Edit – I just saw a VersionTracker update for BitPim 1.0.2.20071001 for OS X, released the day after I posted that. That means someone must be doing it.

Default screen saver: RSS Visualizer.

And do I care what is feeding it? Not really. It’s a screen saver. It runs when I’m not around. So I leave it on the default, which is Apple Hot News. And once in a while, out of the corner of my eye, I see something interesting, and then it all seems kind of worthwhile. I think at one point I had O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter feed running but it was a little too interesting. And I spent too much time staring at my screen saver. Until I realized hey, I’m staring at a screen saver, at which point I nudged my mouse and just went to the O’Reilly site instead.

So, to recap: RSS Visualizer with Apple Hot News, just interesting enough.

Until now, as it seems to have turned my MacBook into an all-day commercial for the iPhone.

I’m sure the iPhone is a fine thing if you like that sort of thing. And I’m an early adopter, a gear pig if you will, so I understand why it is generating a lot of excitement. But I don’t need one. I have a phone. And to be quite honest, I spend enough time on the internet and listening to tunes and sitting in front of Apple products already. I’m not looking for ways to fill those few remaining internet-free moments noodling around with wireless data devices. Hell, I don’t even have an iPod. And someday I plan to read a book.

Anyway, you can’t get them in Canada yet, and when you do the data charges will break you, mostly because Ted Rogers is a tit.

So Apple, unless you’re ready to start putting Hot News back into the Hot News RSS feed, maybe you could re-name it Hot iPhone Marketing, and I’ll be over at the O’Reilly MacDevCenter if you need me. Because Guy who stood in line for 8 days to buy iPhone says It’s the coolest thing ever is neither hot nor news.

Firefox has a pantload of cool features, not the least cool of which is the multi-engine search tool. If you live in Canada though, you may be a bit weary of getting your eBay search results in $US. It just occurred to me that there must be a simple way to revise that plugin to automatically search eBay.ca, and there is.

Select the Firefox application in the Finder, right/control-click to get the contextual menu and select “Show Package Contents” (or use the pull-down advanced tools menu from the sprocket icon in the finder window toolbar). I find it easiest to switch to column view at this point. Navigate to Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/eBay.src and open this file in a text editor. Now it’s just a matter of looking for the URL, which you’ll see on the fourth line:

action="http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll"

Now change that to read:

action="http://search.ebay.ca/search/search.dll"

Save that file, restart Firefox and viola. Search to your heart’s content à la canadienne.

I’d like to inaugurate the new criticism category by reviewing my new 65 watt iBook adaptor. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Well, let’s begin.

Words cannot describe my loathing for this device. That’s a pretty strong indictment for something so banal as a power adaptor, particularly one that I haven’t even taken out of the box. Power adaptors, though, eh? Meh. Plug them in, they work – or rather the thing that they, in turn, plug into, works. What’s to loathe indescribably? Verily I say unto thee, the reasons I loathe the Apple 65w iBook adaptor are threefold.

Firstly, this is the third one I’ve bought. And I’m not the grab-the-cord-and-yank kind of guy; my gear may have a bit of rack-rash, but generally speaking you won’t see me holding the frayed end of a power cord in my hand with my face blackened like Yosemite Sam’s after that unfortunate blowback incident when Bugs put the cork in his shotgun. I have a healthy respect for electricity. With the exception of my family, friends, cats and piano, everything I love runs off it. These adaptors, simply put, are inexcusably fragile. The half-capsule jack, containing the oh-so-clever multi-coloured LED ring, comes with a cute little rounded snap-on plastic cap of the type that offers no protection at all and is prone to being lost within a week of purchase. The jack itself is attached to a cable with about the diameter and tensile strength of a licorice whip.

Secondly, these things hit the market at a whopping $149 CDN, making them the most expensive power adaptor I have ever paid for by a margin of over $50. Eventually the price dropped to about $100, still at the top of the pops. Just out of curiosity, I thought I’d look up the replacement cost for one of the more specialized adaptors in my collection, the 1 amp 12 VAC adaptors that come with my Metasonix modules. They clock in at about $10 or so from Jameco. They are a perfect example of the “wall wart” phenomenon that Apple thoughtfully avoids with their design (actually Apple gives you the option), but if I started with $100 I could probably afford a few power bars to compensate.

Thirdly, this device is too precious in both senses of the word. There can’t be anything about a power adaptor that makes it worth that kind of money, and by that I mean I don’t need the wall-wart option, I don’t need the fold-out winding arms (they broke off my first one and I didn’t miss them), and I certainly don’t need the glowing multi-coloured ring, which I’ll bet dollars to fluorescent green donuts is the most expensive component. Fine to build in to the cost of the computer, but make a replacement without the useless crap and sell it for a reasonable price.

Rating: 5/10, and it only gets that much because it actually does what it’s supposed to when you plug it in.