Posts Tagged ‘Music’

Grr. Now I remember my last USB MIDI experience… Last time was with XP in beta, even then it was the same deal. No bloody drivers because XP wasn’t released. Now 7, though its RTM’d isn’t out on the street yet; so no bloody drivers for the just unboxed Axiom Pro 49.

What gets annoying is when you have a phone call earlier in the day where a customer complains about crap not working that used to work or relatively new stuff not working. No drivers, bad drivers, whatever.

I mean come on, it’s not Microsoft’s fault. It’s not like Vista wasn’t in beta for 6 years and 7 for 2+. Hell Microsoft even helps people write their drivers. Still, we get crap drivers way too late which just pisses people off.

I’m not blaming M-Audio here. I’m just frustrated at the statu quo. I’ve not completed my search for updates bits yet so for all I know it’ll be working in 5 minutes. I’m a bit miffed it’s not just a simple plug and play. Or updated drivers off Microsoft Update. My philosophy would be to release early at every point of the process. It’s understandable if the stuff doesn’t work perfectly during the beta. But at least you won’t have customers out in the cold come RTM.

And I do have to say, Vista’s only failure was in its public perception. Yes UAC was overblown, yes they failed to deliver half what they promised at PDC03, but at the same time it was a huge improvement over XP. People will forget that XP was considered crap until SP2 made it what it is. Vista is the same deal. SP2 is amazing most of the time.

Now with Windows 7 people are finally saying it’s what Vista should’ve been, this is rather funny really because even with 7 being as awesome as it is, there’s still a lot left that was still promised and shown at PDC03.

Perhaps Microsoft’s priorities have shifted, for example multitouch wasn’t as huge as it is now. Perhaps Microsoft’s resources haven’t quite been allocated as well as they could be. Or maybe what’s actually being engineered is just a little more complicated than we expected.

I’m still thinking of that amazingly good demo from PDC03 with the millions of photos and albums shown in 3D that was completely fluid, all driven by meta data in a WinFS powered back end. The reality unfortunately is that despite what Microsoft is delivering in 7 and Apple has been delivering in Snow Leopard really doesn’t match up to demos.

Still, 7 is pretty awesome, it’s definitely the best OS Microsoft has yet to release.

You know, it could just be a consequence of trying to move technology so quickly. On both the hardware and software side.

Example, 1080p 56″ LED DLP about 3 years ago was about $3400. Now you could probably find one for $900. LED LCD purchased about two months ago, $3200, at a steep discount no less. Now, $2500, via Amazon.

That’s a pretty fast progression in both price and obsolescence. Maybe everyone just expects too much too quickly .

Maybe Michael Moore has hit on something with Capitalism, I’ve not even seen it yet but I get the feeling we in general have expected exponential growth but have the lack of widespread focus to actually get anything accomplished. And this is due to the current state of Capitalism in the US. It doesn’t seem like everyone is as focused on a singular task as they were when getting to the moon or fighting the Axis powers.

It’s not just technology either, where’s the focus on health, energy, and sustainability? I think Dawkins and Maher might agree that to some extent the lack of focus is exacerbated in part by the lack of reason and the divisiveness of US politics and religion.

But anyway, I just want to make some music damn it .

The ButtKicker LFE Kit just arrived today. All I can say is wow. I’m busy watching all the big blockbuster films with loads of bass. Right now it’s Terminator 3 time. From the very first nuke that goes off, to when Arnold makes his debut, all the way until the truck chase scene. The wow factor does not stop. I’m totally looking forward to watching Band of Brothers tomorrow.

I’ve got a sub in the form of the Boston XB6 but I’ve got the volume down nearly all the way, apartment living and such. The Boston VR3′s go pretty low anyway, the cross over is set to 60Hz but but Boston says 35Hz can be cleanly achieved. The sub and ButtKicker are set to 80Hz. Somehow even at lower volumes it just sounds and feels amazing.

The transducer hits with precision but also rolls extremely well giving big flaming explosions a new sense of realism. Combining that with the great Boston sound and it really makes for an awesome experience.

I’m not sure what else to say beyond that. It’s definitely something that one needs to feel and experience to understand. It’s not gimmicky feeling at all, one person I talked to asked if it was like a phone vibrating, but not at all. It’s far more complicated, smooth and natural.

I haven’t had a chance to test it with music yet. That’s for tomorrow during the day. I will say, it might need some adjusting then, when I first hooked it up I ignored the manual set the thing to 75% volume. I think that was a pretty extreme, it kinda felt like the provided amp was giving the unit /too/ much power. If that’s even possible. Turning it down half way and it’s perfect.

Went down stairs and sure enough, couldn’t really notice any of the vibrations or anything. Not sure about next door though.

That’s the review for now, more tomorrow after music.

Okay, so Comcast has been giving me the runaround with getting my business Internet connection back up and running correctly but one of the upsides of running your own server with DHCP, DNS, Active Directory and all the other overly complicated things is that I can still access all of my own content since it’s local and can write this right now.

I’ve decided to take this time “off the net” to go through and organize the terabyte or so of data I’ve got sitting around including the 500GB+ worth of music. Now there’s this one folder though, that’s only like 60GB but is completely filled with various file formats and bit rates of individual tracks that I eventually wanted to complete and sort.

What an eclectic set of music. It’s got everything, even stuff that I would dare say shouldn’t even be called music. But I love it. I love it all. Even the cheese, since even after only sampling a 30 second clip of the music it brings a smile to my face.

For example I’m listening to We All Die Young from the Rock Star soundtrack, just seconds before I was listening to a Phish cover of the Cheers theme. This random assortment of tracks is totally bringing back to my days of spending all day and night on the Internet and on Messenger just fiddling, talking, and listening to music, and laughing my ass off.

That brings me to listening to the I AM advert song, Kazachok, Protest the Right Way, and all the other gold from back in the day. Sure this stuff is close to trash, but at the right moments it’s also a treasure.

So not really sure where I’m heading with this other than to say I miss the days of having music playing all the time, even while I slept. Music really does get every bit of me, the best and the worst. Right now it’s just putting a huge smile on my face though.

I’m just listening to some random music while getting ready to shift my weight over to the gym. I have to say though, I really wish I had the gym right here in front of my Boston speakers though. Listening to the Boston VR3′s is a total sexual experience for the ears.

Need I say more…

This is a common question on XP and even Vista. If you do a basic search with Google or Live you’ll actually get mixed information with many people (including some Microsoft sources) saying that sharing of networked content is not possible. However let it be known that it is possible and this information is available directly from Microsoft’s own sharing FAQ’s.

If you want to share files in a monitored folder that is located on another computer (for example, a folder on a network share), the remote folder must have the appropriate Windows access permissions assigned to it and the computer that contains the library you want to share has remote content sharing enabled. You can enable remote content sharing by performing the following procedure on the computer that contains the library you are sharing.

1.	Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2.	In the registry tree (on the left), expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE, Microsoft, MediaPlayer, and then Preferences.
3.	Right-click HME, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4.	Type EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then press ENTER.
5.	Right-click EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then click Modify.
6.	In the Value data text box, type 1, and then click OK. If you later decide to disable remote content sharing, you can repeat this procedure and change the value to 0.

For more information, see Windows Media Player FAQ.

I should also note that typically you need to make sure that WMP is monitoring the network share via the UNC path so \\SERVER\Music, while you can certainly have the share mapped to a network drive this will cause issues in certain cases. So if you add M:\ for example, make sure WMP is monitoring and using \\SERVER\Music instead. Issues that come up include the networked content showing up on first use but not being able to play back, and after the machine starts the content not being up to date. For more info check out this post.