Every week there are 10-20 Shazams of my music, mostly coming from Japan.  If you happen to stumble on this website after doing a Shazam, please reach out.  I'd love to know where you heard the songs.  I haven't released any music since 2008, so this is a surprise to see an uptick in 2021-2022.  :-)

Here's one that's at the intersection of my fields: tech and music.

I bought a new virtual instrument (Wave Alchemy's Evolution) that happens to use Native Instruments Kontakt as the platform.  For those not familiar with electronic music production, Kontakt is a synth platform that runs on your computer that other people can create instruments with.  It's also a fine sampler.  Native Instruments (the company that makes it) makes buckets of money with this stuff.  But I digress!

So I bought this new instrument and it just was NOT showing up in the library section of Kontakt.  However, if I ran Kontakt as an admin, it did show up.  Well, unfortunately, in the music business it's not uncommon for users to run as admin all the time because the developers and users of these products sometimes have a poor understanding of the Windows security model being this is a Mac-first industry.  And musicians, god love them, just want stuff to work, they aren't going to troubleshoot it.  So admin all the time it is.

But not me.  I can't go against the very core of my nature with regard to IT security!  It just feels *wrong*.

So I fired up ProcMon.exe to see what's going on.  I mean it has to be a permissions thing right?  

Well this one was easy.  After filtering on the Kontakt exeutable and searching for "access denied" I found an interesting file.  The file "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Native Instruments\Service Center\NativeAccess.xml" was showing as "access denied."  I tried to open the file and was denied.  So I looked at the properties and saw it had exclusive (non-inheriting) permissions that only allowed SYSTEM and Administrator access.  No other file in the folder did that, so I'm going to assume this is a mistake/bug/whatever.  And previous instruments I bought always installed okay, so maybe this only happened after an NI update?  Not sure.

The file looks like it's just a master record of everything installed from Native Instruments, so that would make sense that if a normal user couldn't see that, they couldn't see newly installed instruments (presumably the other instruments' installation are cached in the per-user data somewhere).

So, I reset permissions on that file, allowing inheritance, and now it works.

Easy.

I was bored so I thought I'd have some fun with this.  The theme is "I work so I can buy..." and then a bunch of instruments and other music items.  :-)

Check it out!  https://teespring.com/stores/i-work-so-i-can-buy

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/beastie-boys-co-founder-adam-yauch-dead-at-48-20120504

In case you haven't heard, MCA of the Beastie Boys has cancer.  I'm wishing him well.

The title says it all.  No matter what you think about his (admittedly bizarre) personal life, he was an absolute entertainment phenomenon.  There will never be another entertainer like him.  Thriller will always be one of my most prized albums in my collection of vinyl.

With this and the death of Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett, this has turned out to be a hell of a depressing week.  It can't end soon enough.

A woman steals something from someone.  Actually, she stole 24 things.  And they were from a company, not a person.  Actually, they are illegal music downloads and she didn't really steal from the copyright holder as much as she obtained copyrighted material from a third party without the copyright holder's permission.  It's still theft.  And you won't hear me argue otherwise because I do believe copyright infringement is a serious crime.

So did she perform an illegal act?  Yes, absolutely.  Should she be forced to pay a civil penalty beyond simply the market value of the product she stole?  Yes, sure.  That's part of the punishment for committing a crime and its also a deterrent for others thinking about committing the same crime.   Should she have to pay a penalty that is 80,000 times the market value of the product?  pfffbbbtbttttttt!  WTF?!  HELL NO!

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/06/18/minnesota.music.download.fine/

This is ridiculous.  These types of excessive fines do nothing to add value to copyrighted material like music, books, and videos.  If anything, it just makes copyright holders look like petty bullies, diminishing the value of the works that they are protecting.  As a copyright holder of my own music, I am sympathetic to the concerns of copyright holders regarding illegal downloading of music.  I was a big defender of shutting down Napster (the original highly illegal one).  I also have no sympathy for The Pirate Bay.  But this case… This case is just absolutely ridiculous.  It is beyond excessive.  IANAL, but to me this case seems to be an Eighth Amendment violation.

The punishment needs to fit the crime.  Make her pay the court fees, the market value of the music, plus a $250 civil penalty and call it a day.

Quietly, and without much fanfare, nerds.de released an updated version of LoopBe30, a virtual MIDI patchcable driver, which now supports 64-bit operating systems, such as Vista 64 and XP 64.

Users of 64-bit operating systems have been getting the middle finger from many audio companies (such as these guys, although recently they have taken a slightly softer approach). It is/was really short-sighted, because 64-bit operating systems are, in general, higher performance and can address more RAM, which are both monumentally important to audio production. It doesn't matter that audio width greater than 32-bits provides little more (no perceptible) clarity than 32-bit. That is not the issue. If the OS has less overhead and greater bandwidth, more registers, and more RAM, the entire system will be faster, releasing resource pressure for the audio application, leading to overall higher performance. These guys understood and were the first to fully embrace 64-bit computing. Good for them.

Whoa, I went on a rant there. Sorry. The point of this post is to introduce you to the first (that I know of) 64-bit version of a virtual midi patchcable. What the heck does that do? It allows you to pipe midi-enabled software and hardware through multiple chains of midi within your computer. A good example is to pipe your sequencer's output through the mighty, mighty Midi-Ox, which will send the signal out your interface's midi-out to your hardware device.

Now 64-bitters can join the party! It's a niche market, for sure, but it's important when you rely on it!

It's worth noting that developing a 64-bit driver is not trivial because Microsoft requires that all 64-bit drivers be signed, which takes time and money, working with MS's quality labs, to make sure it won't crash the operating system and follows "best practices" set up by MS (a good thing). Thankfully, nerds.de took the time to do it.

I'll give a review of LoopBe30 in a later post. This is just to announce it's release! The big question for me? Will it work with the old school 32-bit Midi-Ox (another powerful program that refuses to make the jump to 64-bit at this point).

CD Baby has finished setting up my CD for sale. You can now buy it at the following link for the low, low price of $10.95: http://cdbaby.com/cd/avianwaves.

Unbelievably, I've already sold a copy, before any promotion. I think I like this CD Baby thing...

The SNOCAP store on the front page and the MySpace page is currently offline as new MP3s are validated by SNOCAP and come online. In support of the new album release, I've re-encoded ALL singles from the self-titled album using LAME. I used the original 96Khz/24bit masters as the input files and used LAME's "extreme" quality option, which uses variable bitrate compression for maximum quality. The files are a little bit bigger, but none exceed 16 MB (and that's two songs in one file: Out of Darkness + Toward the Light). Price is 99 cents per song (the usual cost).

Note for DJs: The SNOCAP singles are not cross-faded together (except for Out of Darkness + Toward the Light, which were recorded together and so are not easy to break apart), like on the retail CD. I have my artistic vision and all that for the album, but the SNOCAP singles can be arranged however you want. That makes these singles ideal for radio/club play.

Coming soon: Ring tones!