BulkDump

Sometimes I kind of forget my blog. Sorry about that, I’ve never been good at keeping journals. Especially now that I disabled usage of any links in comments. Was getting like 10 spams into moderation queue per day, so I added few keywords into the blacklist, and now almost forgot my blog because it’s been so quiet after that. Hehe.

My cat created small accident couple of days ago. Shame I didn’t take picture, but I was more concerned about the Tascam US-2400 at that time. My other cat, Viivi, jumped over the Tascam US-2400 quite hard and it dropped from the spider stand. I just heard crash and went to see what happened; there it was, one end of US-2400 in my cat’s soft bed and the other end pointing up to the ceiling, the controller was leaning towards the stand. Fortunately it survived the crash unharmed, not even a scratch. It’s really quite well built with metal casing. However the cat bed suffered slightly, but nothing too big. Now I’ve positioned the controller slightly better, so this should not happen again. Now Viivi is sleeping in her favourite place - on top of my amplifier (it’s warm) and next to Genelec 8040A. I sometimes wonder how she can sleep there, Genelec playing directly to her ear. I guess it sounds that good

Now the real subject I was thinking about to write about. That is overhauling the Orion’s MIDI input and output handling into something more “modern”. There are some issues and big limitations with the current implementation which I’d like to get rid off. Considering the MIDI input might crash Orion very randomly when deleting generator you’re controlling with MIDI controller at the same time. Hopefully 7.2 fixes that, but the quick fix most likely affects the performance a bit. Not to mention the limitations; for example motorized controllers don’t work, no endless knob support, no customizable transport controls. Midiout is limited to assigned 4 parameters, no real deal with Midimaps. Oh, and no sysex support or automateable program change events.

I know Orion was not originally designed to support those, it was mainly ment to be software virtual studio. However time has gone forward and we’d atleast need support for motorized/touch sensitive controllers and some special controllers such as Novation Remote SL. Some have asked for Mackie HUI protocol support as well. My personal needs go forward with US-2400 native support and better Midiout to support several hardware synthesizers.

I’ve tried to think ways to implement all this with the easy-to-use Orion way. I’ve done some industry “spying” by taking a look at Cubase, Sonar, Reason, Logic and few others. They all work a bit similar way, you setup your enviroment and tell what kind of controllers you have available. For special controllers there exists presets, possibly with some special functionality programmed in. Such as HUI or US-2400 would need for time displays and VU meters and other status leds. I was thinking something into this direction with few quirks. By default there probably would be chosen port assigned as Generic Midi controller, which would be corresponding to midi input and output ports Orion has now.

I also would like to close the gap between Midi-out synthesizer and Midi-in controller, after all, all are just devices. What I don’t want to do is to go to Cubase way of using midi recording. It’s just so confusing. What I’d like to get rid of from Orion is the Easy/Advanced midi mode selection. One mode is enough with best of both worlds. Mixer surface controllers support with automatic mappings to Orion’s mixer. Automatic knob assignments to generators (VSTs too). Yet, leave all that learning assigment support, modwheel is the universal controller . I really don’t want to see CCs and other stuff when making music, when I left tracker programs behind, I wanted to leave numbers and hex codes behind too.

Maybe some of you have ideas how it should work? I have quite clear picture about it (a lot of it not listed here), but it’s mainly guided with my way of working in my studio. I wouldn’t mind having some discussion about this, you never know if it brings up some good ideas I haven’t though about yet.

I had this problem of not being able to control my favourite (and you know to my surprise that application actually uses my BarMenu Components Delphi package for it’s menus and popup menus, so even more reason to be my favourite!) video player KMPlayer from the other room we have the TV for watching videos. That constant running between rooms was killing. I had then the idea using my PlayStation Portable as remote controller. It took a moment of thinking that I could harness the webbrowser into use through my WLAN. I couldn’t find any software already doing it, so I decided to create my own small program.

I did some more research to find what the PSP browser is capable of and ways how I could control KMPlayer. What I learned is that there’s no way to get AJAX working in PSP browser, but Flash could work. But for now I settled with invisible frame for GET url requests from the main frame links. That way the main UI would not refresh and links would be “executed” in the invisible frame. I needed small webserver for this purpose and it felt too much trouble to setup apache or something else bigger. So I went for creating own webserver with Delphi’s Indy components. After hour or so I had working webserver which could serve html, images and stylesheets from a docroot directory as any webserver would do. That was all I need to serve nice webbrowser UI for my PSP. Some tweaking was done for port configuration and adding a bit more security for the webserver so we don’t have backdoors.

Now next part was figuring out the interface to KMPlayer. Researching did pay off and I found out that (Win)LIRC protocol was rather simple and KMPlayer supports it out of the box. Creating own LIRC server was done in matter of minutes. Nothing more than simple TCP port listening for clients and sending oneliner text strings as command execution. That server was built into the same application as the webserver. That way I had direct link from the webserver to the LIRC server. I implemented virtual URLs for the webserver in form of /command/command_name_here. Any command executed that way would be directly sent to the clients in the LIRC server. Instantly I had as many remote controller “buttons” I needed.

That app was built as standard Windows Service, so it works completely in background and I created installer to easily install and uninstall it. I forgot to take some pictures of the UI in the PSP screen, but I do that later. The default UI in this version contains only Play/Pause and four seek buttons. But I’ll let you to customize it for your own needs. After all it’s just plain html you need to create and all the commands are automatically available for assignment in your LIRC compatible applications. Or why not create full screen Flash app to call these command urls?

So short, my life got much easier now. I just use my PSP from the other room to control KMPlayer! No need to worry about walls what would be problem with standard IR controllers. Maybe some of you find this application useful as well. Let me know…

Download: PSP Remote Controller Daemon 1.0.0

Good source of PSP Webbrowser capabilities: http://www.brothercake.com/site/resources/reference/psp/

I took some photos of my studio couple of days ago. First I was thinking about setting up some photo album script, but I decided to be a little bit lazy this time and I setup account on Nebula.fi’s service which provides me 5GB webspace with very nice and simple photo album web application. Considering the price is only 5 € per month, I decided fiddling around some 3rd party php scripts would be too troublesome.

The dark overview shot has my two cats somewhere in the picture as well. Can you find both of them?

I recently ordered Tascam US-2400 from Thomann. It came alright within a week, but to my disappointment the power adapter was broken so I couldn’t really use the US-2400.

I wrote email to Teac/Tascam (Tascam’s European service) about my problem and Dirk Born (he’s Technical Marketing Manager according his signature) replied promptly to me. He said he was sorry and asked me to send the broken PSU to him for replacement. So I did and yesterday UPS delivery guy brought new working PSU for my US-2400.

What’s best is that all this service was done in one week to Finland from Germany. Great service from Tascam/Teac. Big thanks to them again