[LAU] Time to move along

[Leigh Dyer]

On 12/02/12 8:57 AM, Jeremy Jongepier wrote:
> Remixing Leigh's (Pneuman) track is simply taking me too long and the
> baby's due next week so I'm just releasing this remix. It's not finished
> though but I will probably never finish it, for the moment I have enough
> of all the quirks of the software I'm using.
>
> Here's the remix, hope you like it. Actually it's not really a remix but
> basically a complete new song.
>
> http://downloads.autostatic.com/music/pneuman-move_along_dj_autostatic_remix.ogg

Thanks so much for posting this, it sounds great! It's definitely an 
honour to have you put so much time and effort in to this.

> So sorry Leigh that I probably won't finish it but it just doesn't work.
> Every time I wanted to work on this the track sounded differently again
> (probably because of some rogue plug-ins, I suspect some of the Calf
> ones), or the session didn't start up because JACK doesn't like some
> apps loading simultaneously or too quickly one after another and there
> were also some stupid actions on my side like deleting complete tracks
> or buses of which I thought I didn't need them anymore resulting in a
> complete mess. Next project I will make a backup of my Qtractor session
> every single time I have worked on it.

I know the feeling -- while working on "Texel" I was pushing Ardour 3 
the whole time, finding a lot of bugs along the way, and there were a 
number of times when I couldn't even load the session due to various 
crashes. It all came together in the end though, and I hope that my bug 
reports and testing helped in some small way to advance Ardour 3's 
progress along.

> All the samples were fed into Qtractor by Hydrogen. Hydrogen is a great
> sampler but the 0.9.5 version I used is so unreliable. One of the main
> reasons I don't pursue this remix is Hydrogen. Reordering, adding or
> deleting instruments, ah ah, don't even try, very often Hydrogen stalled
> then and if it did work the JACK graph wasn't updated properly. And
> because of this behavior and trying to troubleshoot it I had moments
> when I thought, wtf am I doing? I want to make music, not filing
> bugreports or troubleshooting my own system. One day my session didn't
> start up anymore. It really took me too long to find out I had to raise
> the number of available JACK ports. Default is 256 but this project uses
> way more ports than that.

I'd really, really love to see a simple LV2 sampler plugin that I could 
load in to Ardour or Qtractor -- something that I could easily load in 
to a track, load a sample in to, and then have playing MIDI within a few 
seconds. I've started to use LinuxSampler more, just so I can use its 
plugin instead of using an external app like Hydrogen or Specimen, 
though I've had some crashes there (in the LinuxSampler LV2 plugin 
itself, I suspect) that I haven't had time to chase down yet.

> Qtractor... Yeah, I cursed at that one every once in a while too. But
> that was also because of the other apps I used that just don't work that
> well with Qtractor, specifically seq24. I really need to ditch seq24 and
> start looking at alternatives like HarmonySEQ. seq24 is dead and staying
> with JACK 0.118.x just because of seq24 is just plain silly. But
> Qtractor proved itself again, dozens of tracks, dozens of plug-ins, no
> biggie. Automation is still a tad fiddly but if I find a good way to
> express what the actual issues are I'm sure Rui will improve it faster
> than you expect.

I'd love to see seq24 get some updates, too -- it still runs okay for me 
on JACK 0.121, but its JACK transport support hasn't worked for me since 
the days of JACK 0.116! It's difficult to do much with it without JACK 
transport support, though at least you can still create some patterns in 
it and then import the session in to another sequencer.

> So, time to move along. I probably won't be making any music for some
> weeks, my girlfriend is 39 weeks pregnant so I'll become dad again very
> soon. Also I have a different busier job for which I also try to study a
> bit at home. Luckily it's fascinating stuff (Asterisk & Kamailio, so
> VoIP telephony with SIP) and being the only one at that company with a
> solid Linux background is very gratifying also, but also very demanding.
> But new stems are coming my way, next project will be a remix of a The
> Cut/Up track (http://www.reverbnation.com/thecutup). And I'm also
> working on some acoustic stuff, so something completely different.
> Despite our little family growing I do hope to release more stuff in 2012.

That all sounds really exciting -- best of luck with it all!

Thanks
Leigh