FingerPlay gives you a selection of controllers — sliders, X/Y controllers, and drum pads — all of which send MIDI messages via Wi-Fi to a tiny Java-based server app on a PC. There, you can connect the MIDI output to whatever app you like, just as you would with any other MIDI controller gear. The controls are set up in separate “pages”; a scroll bar on the right switches between the pages.

I did some quick testing, using the drum pads to trigger drum pads in Hydrogen, and using the sliders and pads to control the gain and muting of individual loops within SooperLooper, and it did a great job, responding quickly and smoothly to my input.

FingerPlay MIDI's pad page

FingerPlay MIDI's slider page

Here are the steps I followed to get it up and running:

1. Install the FingerPlay MIDI app on your device, and download and extract the server app from the FingerPlay MIDI site
2. Load the ALSA “virmidi” driver:
   sudo modprobe snd-virmidi
3. Launch the server app:
   java -jar FingerPlayServer.jar
4. Connect the “Virtual Raw MIDI 1-0″ ALSA MIDI device up to whatever app you want to control.
5. On the phone, launch FingerPlay MIDI, and hit the icon in the top right corner to open the settings screen. Set the “Server Address” to your PC’s IP address (or hostname), and click the “Connect to Server” button.
6. Scroll further down on the settings page and open the “MIDI Out Device” option. In the list, select the top “VirMIDI” option — in my case, it’s “[hw:1,0,0]“.
7. Exit the settings and start hitting some controls!

You can use the usual tools of choice to see what MIDI messages are actually coming out for each control — I tend to use QMidiRoute, since it also lets you remap or process the messages if you need to. As you’d expect, the sliders and X/Y controls send MIDI CCs, while the pads send notes. With Hydrogen, I had to transpose the pads up an octave to match what Hydrogen was expecting, but when I did, tapping out drum lines seemed quite responsive.

One thing to watch out for with tools that have MIDI learn features, like SooperLooper, is that the sliders and X/Y controls send “trigger” CCs when they’re touched in any way, as well as the CCs you’d expect. I had better luck with SooperLooper when I set up the bindings manually instead. My bindings file is available here.

This is another Seq24/Hydrogen/Ardour recording, with Blofeld synths, though I also created my own drum sounds (mostly on the Blofeld again) for this one. I also used PHASEX as the synth for the lead arpeggio — it’s a simple patch, but I really liked how it sounded, so it stayed in the final version.

EDIT: Turns out that the download links were broken! I’ve fixed them now, so if you had trouble downloading, please try again now.

He explained on the show that he doesn’t use Linux for his music production, and I should say up-front that I don’t have a problem with this. Linux certainly isn’t ideal for everyone, and if Bacon has a solid, working Windows-based setup, there’s nothing wrong with him sticking with that and focusing on making music.

However, it’s very clear to me that he has no idea about the current state of Linux audio production, spreading the usual outdated nonsense about JACK being overly complex to set up, ignoring the existence of quite usable MIDI sequencers like Qtractor and Rosegarden, and giving very short shrift to Hydrogen’s abilities as a drum synth. These tools, with a suitable velocity-layered drumkit, might not give the same results as quickly as Bacon’s proprietary setup can, but they’d certainly do the job, especially once you run each drum in to Ardour for separate processing.

Why do I have such a problem with this? Well, it’s because Bacon is widely known and respected as an open-source evangelist, and also as a musician, so his words carry weight. I and my fellow Linux musicians know he’s mistaken, but a casual listener would assume that he knows what he’s talking about, given his background, and would probably write off Linux as a music production platform because of it.

Again, to be clear, I’m not saying Bacon should use Linux. I’m not even saying that he should spend the time to learn about making music on Linux. I just wish he’d stop talking about it as if he does know what he’s talking about.

PSIndustralizer's needlessly-OpenGL-enabled GUI

If you’re going to use PSIndustralizer, you do need to be aware of some issues. The most annoying is that, with settings for “Spring Tension” or “Speed” that are too high — and “too high” is a vague description, because it’s never exactly clear how high you can go before having problems — the render times jump from a second or two up to perhaps a minute or more, and the only way to stop the render is to exit the app. There’s also no JACK support — not a killer, since you render and save the samples rather than using it as a realtime synth — and the exported files sometimes need to be cleaned up manually to remove some nasty DC offsets. Still, I think the sounds hidden in there could well be worth the hassle.

“Haha, what? No way! That’s awesome!”

Following up Super Mario Galaxy was always going to be a hard task; it turned 20 years of platforming tradition on its head — sometimes literally — with its mind-bending, gravity-defying spherical worlds. Rather than trying to reinvent the genre once again, Nintendo has simply taken the shell of the original game and stuffed it to bursting point with an incredible wealth of crazy, inventive, and unique ideas.

It’s hard to understate just how imaginative this game is. Just about every time you enter one of the game’s dozens of levels, it throws some new gameplay mechanic or concept at you, and as soon as you’ve mastered that, you’re thrown off to the next level and the next crazy idea. Incredibly, with just a couple of exceptions — Spring Mario, which makes a (thankfully brief) return from the original, and some motion-controlled gliding levels — all of those ideas are not just brilliant, but brilliantly executed as well.

The result is, simply put, one of the finest, most enjoyable games I’ve ever played. If you’ve ever been a fan of platformers, you need to play this game.

http://wootangent.net/

Why the change? Well, the old URL made it seem like a blog attached to the old linuxgamers.net site, which it definitely wasn’t — the only reason I put it there to begin with was because I already had that domain set up. I thought about just ditching the “blag.”, but this blog has very little to do with Linux gaming, so running it at linuxgamers.net wouldn’t make sense.

It may take me a day or two to sort out all of the links, so if you find anything broken, or anything that still links back to the old domain, please let me know!

“They say they are advocates of consumer rights, but the truth is these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music. Their mission is to spread the word that our music should be free.”

This could not be further from the truth — Creative Commons gives artists tools to control what they wish to allow other people to do with their own work. It’s not aimed at tearing down traditional copyright, and it’s certainly not aimed at providing free access to existing copyrighted works. I’ve talked about the fact that I use CC because it’s in my best interest, but I wouldn’t claim that it’s the best option for all artists.

I can only think that ASCAP is targeting Creative Commons because it’s becoming a credible alternative to the old performance royalty model. If a cafe owner wants some background music for their customers, they can play any appropriately-licenced CC music; that is, any work not using the “Non-Commercial” clause. As more music becomes available under these licences, and awareness of its existence grows, it will be increasingly practical to work with CC music rather than pay ASCAP fees.

It has to be said that a part of why I use open-source music tools is simply because that’s what’s available for my preferred platform: Linux. That’s not the whole story, though — I ran Mac laptops for six years, and I’m still quite comfortable using Mac OS X, so I could easily have run commercial music software if I’d wanted to. Why didn’t I, then?

Free as in free

Perhaps the biggest factor for me is cost; as a hobbyist musician, the money I can spend on my craft is limited. While the open-source world has some unique selling points — JACK, for one — I’m willing to concede that commercial tools like Logic are better in a lot of ways than open-source tools like Ardour and Qtractor, and the open-source world certainly can’t match the breadth of plug-in synths and effects available commercially. The fact is, though, that the open-source tools cover the bread-and-butter stuff well enough for my needs, so I don’t need to shell out money to get that basic functionality.

If I was making music for money professionally, then it’s quite likely that the cost of a commercial setup would pay itself back in time savings. As a hobby, though, my time is free, as long as I’m having fun. For the price of a Mac Pro and Logic, I could go buy a Minimoog Voyager, and I sure as hell know which one of those purchases I’d have more fun with.

I’m certainly not opposed to paying money for software — adopting open-source software for pragmatic reasons leaves me ideologically free to buy commercial software for pragmatic reasons, too. I might not get $700 worth of fun-value out of buying Logic, but I could definitely get $150 worth out of buying Pianoteq PLAY. I’ve also thrown a little money Ardour’s way, because I want to see it continue to develop and grow.

The cost of making money

Well, that covers the free software, but what about the free music? Especially today, when independent musicians can sell their music online alongside the big-label releases, what’s pragmatic or selfish about giving my music away?

The pragmatic reason is that, as the old adage goes, you have to spend money to make money. TuneCore lets you sell your music in online stores, like iTunes, Amazon MP3, and eMusic, but it’s not free — there are fees, both up-front and ongoing, and while they’re minimal, I doubt I’d sell enough tracks to make a profit. Other services do the same thing by charging a percentage, instead of outright fees, but there’s still a time cost, and sorting out disc codes and doing a bunch of data entry and uploading isn’t an activity that counts as Free Hobby Fun Time.

The easiest thing I could do would be to set up PayPal payment for downloads via Bandcamp, but even that has a hidden cost.

Feedback loop

I love having people listen to my work, and it’s great when they let me know they’ve listened and enjoyed it, but it’s better still when they take the time to describe what they didn’t like about it, or suggest improvements. Good feedback is worth its weight in gold, and the number of people out there with the time, inclination, and necessary experience to give constructive feedback is very small.

By eliminating cost as a barrier to entry, I’m getting more people listening to my music that I’d get otherwise. That’s awesome in itself, but having a larger audience also increases my chances of getting the kind of feedback that can help me become a better musician.

It’s important to note that even $0 minimum, pay-what-you-want downloads can be a barrier. You may not be forcing people to pay, but you’re still implying that you’d like to be paid, and many listeners — particularly the fellow musicians that could give you constructive feedback — won’t be comfortable downloading your work for free. Even if they do pay and listen, they’ll be a lot less likely to give you feedback, since they’ve already given you their hard-earned cash.

Maybe this will all change in the future — maybe I’ll make it big, start charging for my tracks, and have cash aplenty to pump in to a plugin-laden commercial music setup. If that ever happens, I might have to come back and eat these words, but for now, it’s great to know that I can keep making free music with free software for as long as I want.

• Slap together a basic four-bar drum pattern in Hydrogen
• Export that pattern as a loop and import it in to SooperLooper as loop 1
• Play a bunch of random crap over the top, and if it sounds okay, grab a loop of it
• Lather, rinse, repeat

I saved those sessions, and had a quick stab at turning one of them in to a proper track, which I call “sl3″, by importing the loops in to Ardour and moving/coping them in to an arrangement. I also threw in some effects for good measure: EQ, a couple of delays (can’t help myself with those!), and an insert out to Rakarrack to add some guts to my fairly limp bass loop. I’m sure I could make it more interesting by re-recording a few parts — replacing the drum loop with a properly programmed part with a bit of variety, for instance — but hey, for an hour-and-a-half’s work, I think it sounds okay!

It’s been really interesting to see how Japanese people celebrated the return of Hayabusa — cuteness was out in full force:

There was even a Hayabusa cosplayer at JAXA’s public viewing area! JAXA is doing some very cool stuff at the moment — its recently-launched IKAROS spacecraft will hopefully prove the potential for solar sails for space travel — so I can’t wait to see what they, and the Japanese public, come up with in the future.