Geek Rock USA

Replaced the Roland Gaia with a DSI Tetra

So after playing around with the Roland Gaia SH-01 for a while, I really was not happy with the sound. The tones were fairly thin and harsh. The knobiness of the interfaces is great, but patch management is difficult because there is no screen or indicator for what patch you are on.
I replaced it with a Dave Smith Instruments Tetra synthisizer which is much more compact and doesn’t have a controller. I have a keyboard controller, so that wasn’t a big deal for me, but I would have loved a Keyboard version of the Tetra like the DSI Mopho keyboard because they are such high quality builds and would have provided easier live control. The Tetra is actually pretty easy to use considering it doesn’t have much space for controls on its surface, but the software editor it comes with is obviously much quicker for complex patch and sequence writing. The sound out of the Tetra is AMAZING. It’s has a nice and fat tone that can get very smooth or crunchy depending on the patch settings.
I am still trying to replicate the great patch and control I had with AMSynth on my Linux live performance laptop, but once I spend time building up the patch I should be able to get pretty close. Well done Dave Smith. Roland, I expected better from your brand.

2012: 04/06
CATEGORY: Audio
Linux
TAGS: dsi
gaia
roland
tetra
Write comment

Roland Gaia SH-01

Got a new synth recently, the Roland Gaia SH-01. An entry level synth with lots of knobs, buttons and faders. I tried out the Korg R3 first, but didn’t like the lack of control since everything was in nested menus. I was debating between the Gaia and the Novation Ultranova which are in the same price range. I chose the Gaia because it provided more performance controls and the vocoder wasn’t a must have.

I am fairly please with the synth so far. The presets are pretty varied, but provide some good examples. I got the Fischer extra sound back from Roland which shows off more of the power this thing has. My main gripes with the thing so far are the lack of a screen to describe your patch selection, the lack of preset descriptions on the hardware and manual, and the lack of a tube emulation effect. I also wish the Gaia had the awesome R3 feature that used LEDs around the knobs to show current position when you switched patches.

Sadly, Linux support for this device is behind. It does not register as a standard USB audio device and the support for it is in kernel 3.2. This is a problem for my live setup that runs my linux laptop based sample through my USB audio interface to the PA.

For the device still being somewhat new, there are some good community initiatives going on around the Gaia including a dedicated forum and a guy who is developing an open source program to interface with the Gaia MIDI implementation and provide library management. Unlike many synths you buy these days, Roland didn’t include software with the unit but is selling it separate for an extra $100 dollars, WTF.

Forum: http://www.gaiausers.com/
Gaia Tool: http://www.grauw.nl/projects/gaia-tool/

2012: 01/29
CATEGORY: Audio
Development
Linux
TAGS: music synth roland gaia
Write comment

Discovered DuckDuckGo

I was reading the blog post about the new Linux Mint 12 release candidate and noticed they switched to a new default search engine. Intrigued by something possibly better than Google’s sometimes less than great results, I decided to check it out.

It is called DuckDuckGo, and promotes it self as like Google but better privacy, better instant answers, and less spam. The !bang feature is pretty cool, and looks useful for geeky programming searches(http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html).

It’s now my default serach engine in Chrome, let’s see how this turns out.

2011: 11/12
CATEGORY: Development
Internets
Write comment

Rails and Rake in Production

Two completely different parameters are used to run rake and rails in production environment, which both default to dev. I had to hunt these down at first, and thought it would be useful to document them in one place for the future.


rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV="production"

rails s -e production

Cheers

2011: 10/28
CATEGORY: Development
TAGS: rails
rake
ruby
Write comment

osxfuse is the new macfuse

OSX doesn’t have native write support for NTFS drives yet, just read. But you used to be able to install ntfs-3g with MacFuse to get the support. I tried doing that with my new MacBook on 10.6, but it threw errors when it tried to mount the drive.

Thankfully, a group picked back up the project and renamed it OSXFUSE. With full Snow Leopard/Lion 64 bit support. Yay for R/W support on NTFS drives!

http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com

http://osxfuse.github.com

2011: 10/01
CATEGORY: Mac
Write comment

Replacement G2x

I got my replacement G2x, and to my delight, it came installed with Gingerbread! YAY!

It is amazing how much better the G2x works on gingerbread. Frankly, they should have never released the thing on Froyo.

Still awaiting an update to use the front facing camera in Skype or GTalk. :/

2011: 09/21
CATEGORY: Android
TAGS: Android
g2x
gingerbread
Write comment

T-Mobile G2x Gingerbread Update

So, I waited patiently, but never recieved the OTA update for my phone. I finally checked on T-mobiles site last night and to my suprise there was an annoucement that the OTA was done and you have to go get it from LG if you were missed. :/

I worked through the update, and all went well. The updater from LG is a Windows only application(oh, the irony of updating my linux phone with a windows app through parallels on OSX). Phone rebooted, and all seemed well, except no mobile network connection and the battery was reading as 999%. WTF.

Talked to LG, they said its T-Mobile’s problem. Talked to T-Mobile today, and did a factory reset on the phone, still no go. They are now sending me a replacement…..that possibly does not have Gingerbread on it. Hopefully this doesn’t happen the 2nd time around.

I await the arrival of my new G2x, but for now I’m rockin my old RAZR.

2011: 08/18
CATEGORY: Android
TAGS: Android
g2x
gingerbread
lg
t-mobile
Write comment

OSX, Apache, PHP, and MySql

I first tried out MAMP. Very easy to download install and BAM! you have a MAMP server running. I started to run into complexities when I had to install pear packages on the MAMP server and needed those in my development environment as well, basically when I was in shell and Eclipse.

I then ventured down the route of installing those things in the system and using the OSX preinstalls where available. OSX already comes with Apache and it was easy to uncommented the one line to start PHP5. The last thing was MySQL. I had used MacPorts previously, and had a decent experience with it, but a coworker of mine recently suggested Homebrew as an awesome way to install packages on OSX. I decided to give it a shot. Installation was a breeze and MySql was up and running in no time. Mad props to this dudes blog post.

Now that I have all the frameworks in place, next steps are to get Propel ORM a shot for database object oriented goodness.