Curiouser and Curiouser!

Do Western Digital actually support their products?

So I'm expecting to be travelling out of the country soon and decided I would buy a bus-powered external drive to act as a SuperDuper clone as well as a few hundred GB of extra storage.

I looked at a few drives but was recommend to look at the Western Digital My Passport Studio drive which is designed for Mac, 640GB, bus-powered, and supports USB2, FireWire-400 & Firewire-800.

It's more expensive than the raft of 500GB USB-2 externals but, since my MBP has a FW-800 port, I was quite attracted. The extra storage would be useful and since it's for Mac I figured I should have no problems, right? Wrong.

But first impressions were good. The drive was neat and even if the LED display is utterly useless it seemed decently made. It also came with short cables for all 3 connections which was a plus.

I connected it up and got my first unpleasant surprise. Western Digital "Smartware" which pops up like an unwanted drive every time you plug the damn thing in. Quite how any hard disk manufacturer has the gall to use the word "smart" in relation to their software leaves me quite non-plussed. And, as a bonus, it's somehow embedded into the drive firmware so there's no way to get rid of it.

Okay I'm never installing it but I can live with it if the thing just works.

I partition into 161GB for SuperDuper! and the rest for storage. Then we're off to the races. I don't know if ~13MB/s write speed is any good really but it took about 3 hours to do the first clone. SD makes it bootable, we're all green. So time to test.

Reboot, hold opt and...

...nothing. There's my system disk. But where is my clone?

Snap. What partition scheme does this disk have? WD faked me out by having the thing formatted HFS+ already. Sure enough Apple Partition map. So I repartition GUID, reformat.

And 3 hours later I have my shiny bootable clone.

Reboot, hold opt and...

....nothing.

What the fuck?

I backup a step. Open the "Startup Disk" preference pane and there it is. I can select it. Reboot.

Gray screen. System won't boot.

Power down, hold opt, reboot from the system disk.

Now I am pretty angry because I am at least 6 hours in the hole for this and I still haven't been able to boot from this thing.

I register with Western Digitals god awful support site and open a case with them. Their response?

Of course my disk is listed there. I've never had a problem with booting any FireWire disk in the past. Just this one.

I point out that they claim that the disk supports booting FW and all I am asking is why the disk is not appearing as a valid bootable disk. Their response:

So basically they sell the drive with a feature they appear to be completely unwilling to actually support. I'm not happy about this at all, but I've offered them one last chance to actually be helpful.

I note that Dave Nanian from Shirt Pocket software (who make the excellent SuperDuper!) was quite willing to try and support me even though it's not a problem with his application.

I'll update this when I hear back but my current advice would be don't buy Western Digital disks if you have a Mac. They have crappy firmware and they won't support basic features Mac users rely on. In fact I don't get the impression that they think "support" is important at all.

I like autosave but

Just read a piece by Marco Ament about doing away with save as a concept in OSX applications:

Normally I find myself nodding in agreement when reading Marco's opinions but for once I am not. I'm all in favour of autosave to ensure that work isn't lost but, at the same time, I find the idea of not having an explicit save option is a step too far.

In the first place work-in-progress may not be valid/coherent. Do I want it saved? If there is no explicit save then there is no difference work-in-progress that I want and work-in-progress that I don't want.

Further, without save, how do I mark a "finished" item? It seems like any alternative metaphor I can think of is just save by another name.

I'm not convinced saves day is done.

Cognitive distortions

I've just read an excellent article from the PsychCentral blog on 15 Common Cognitive Distortions. A cognitive distortion is anything our mind convinces us of that isn't really true. In general we use them to beat ourselves up and keep ourselves feeling bad.

Reading through the list and thinking about them I can easily see how I apply 10 of them on an almost daily basis right now. For me the list is:

Wait, that's 11. Well there you go. I suspect the other 4 are there and I just don't see myself using them quite so clearly (although this could be an example of overgeneralization :)).

What's more difficult, and the article doesn't really delve into this, is how to avoid these distortions short of full-blown CBT. In the first case I think being aware of, and reflecting upon, how you may be distorting your view of things is probably a good start. It might make a good beginning of a daily mindfulness practice.

Drunk

Beautiful Arrows

I think Breaking Arrows is, without a doubt, the best thing I have ever been involved with musically. I don't think it's any wonder that it has done so well on Alonetone (243 listens, 38 comments, and 29 favourites in 12 days) because it is a sublime work that I am proud to have been involved with.

Tess' voice sounds so good and the emotion she packs into her vocal complements the sound of the piano so perfectly. My contribution is the piano backing track. It would be lovely if I was actually playing this but I'm nowhere near this level of skill. It's actually sequenced in Ableton Live.

It grew out of an arpeggio I built from a set of chords & listened to for hours and hours, played on the Braunschweig Upright piano. We both liked it wanted to make a song with it so I created an arrangement with an intro and outro that is just the plain block chords and a middle section that arpeggiates them. The main work was in automating the velocity levels to create a sense of flow in the middle section. Tess took this, moulded it, recorded her vocal over it, and made it into a song.

The music I have made with Tess as Elusive Gene represents the best of my musical efforts which, left to my own devices tend to be overly focused on experimentation and process and less about being something you want to listen to, something that makes you feel. Often I listen once or twice and then move on. If someone else enjoys it that's great but often their enjoyment is a mystery to me.

This track, on the other hand, I am listening to over and over again.

Apologies for this being a (largely) unmixed demo that we did for RPM. Our plans for RPM were de-railed somewhat but we're planning to upload a final version of this track and complete our album later on.

Max for Live, Launchpad, and sequencing

For my birthday this year I bought myself a copy of Max 4 Live. Even though I already had Reaktor it seemed pretty clear to me that, because I use Ableton Live a lot, M4L would prove to be a superior MIDI handling environment. And I really like the look of the devices that came with M4L (at the time I was mostly interested in Buffer Shuffler but it turns out that the Loop Shifter is considerably more interesting, a real gem in fact).

The last month or so I've really started hacking into M4L. It started with my wanting to do some track routing in Live to make it easy to address multiple Kontakt instruments from a single keyboard. That lead to my first M4L device MIDI KeySwitch.

Recently I was very interested in Audio Damage's Axon plugin. For $59 it seems pretty good value except that I wasn't really interested in the built-in synth and I'm trying not to buy any more plugins for a while. It seemed an ideal opportunity to improve my Max chops, so I thought I'd have a crack at reproducing Axon's neuron sequencer as a M4L device.

Neurotik was duly born and in fact worked pretty well. Here's an early prototype playing a hybrid guitar/piano patch from Omnisphere:

In fact I think this is so promising that I heartily recommend that you buy Axon and have a play with it. Audio Damage have a no-fuss refund policy in the, I think, unlikely event that you don't find Axon pretty inspiring to play with.

Neurotik doesn't have Axon's lovely interface or the Audio Damage attention to detail. What it does have is an extra neuron and a more flexible (and possibly less well thought out) design. The extra neuron is because...

Recently I bought myself a Novation Launchpad. I'd been hankering for one as a way of making it easier to launch clips in Live but, at £149, it never justified it's cost. However, when I saw the Novation StepSeq device and realised how the Launchpad could be used to interact with M4L devices I was sold.

As soon as I started thinking about the button matrix on the Launchpad and the connection matrix in Neurotik I realised I had to be able to configure the device from the Launchpad. Then I started thinking about adjusting thresholds in terms of adjusting levels. It just seemed like such a great fit.

This weekend I've taken the first steps towards integrating Launchpad control into Neurotik. So far I have the Launchpad button matrix controlling the connection between the 8 neurons along with the ability to switch the device between 3 sub-modes: connections, thresholds, monitoring.

Probably not a lot of this makes sense unless you (a) know a little about Axon, (b) a little about M4L, and (c) have some passing idea what a Launchpad it. The gist is that I am about 25% of the way towards having my software sequencer entirely controlled by my Launchpad & not needing to touch the computer or look at the screen at all.

That turns a rather geeky sequencer with a dodgy interface that you can tinker with using the mouse into something more akin to a fully-playable instrument with feedback right on the Launchpad.

I'm finding the combination of Max for Live & the Launchpad really rather powerful and exciting.

My kind of noise

For about the last 5 months I've been wanting to get a Novation Launchpad but I kept putting it off because I wasn't sure if it would turn out to be an expensive gimmick.

Well I'm about to buy a new Mac Pro and that's going to be expensive. I figured that, after that I do that, it's going to be very hard to justify buying anything & this was my last chance. So, yesterday, I went to Dawsons in Reading and picked one up.

So far I'm very pleased with it. Clip launching in Live is much easier than using a mouse. I often found it very hard to deactivate one clip and launch another, in a different track, using the mouse and that becomes trivial with the Launchpad. From this admission you can tell I am not a hardcore gamer. The mixer mode looked useless in the video's I've seen but, in fact, I think it could be useful when I'm more used to it.

For the basic functionality I'd say the Launchpad is great, but probably not worth £149 to me. But I don't regret the purchase because I've already found extra value in two ways:

First I played with StepSeq (Novations Max for Live sequencer for Launchpad users), you get some idea what monome users have been enjoying all this time. StepSeq is a bit rough around the edges (it is a beta) and I found it messed with the other modes of the Launchpad when I was using it. But it hints at what I might be able to do with my own Max for Live devices. I have some specific things in mind that I will be trying to develop in the next month.

Second I've found that the Launchpad actually makes a better keyboard for playing LoopShifter than my keyboards. I'm a bit of a LoopShifter freak so this is actually quite cool. I've found that it's easier to remember clusters of good regions in the shifter and quickly swing between them. It makes Loopshifter into a more playable instrument for me.

To that end here's a piece I made last night playing 3 Loopshifter's directly with the Launchpad. Effects used are Dubstation on a send, fed from the 3 Loopshifters, and Eos on the master channel (along with compression & limiting).

The only downsides of the Launchpad I can see so far are that (i) it's not a class-compliant USB device so it requires a driver from Novation, (ii) it's only an 8x8 grid and you quickly realise a Launchpad-128 or Launchpad-256 would be better :)

Glitchy with a laid back feel

I've been playing a lot with LoopShifter which is the main instrument that comes with Max for Live.

I'm still a vastly inexperienced piano player and most of what I try and improvise on the piano sounds really bad as music. But I have a great piano sound and some parts can sound okay (e.g. I play short arpeggio's that sound nice). So I've been feeding little bits of music to LoopShifter and playing with the resulting timbres.

One of the things LoopShifter does really well is a kind of crackly, spitting, granular sound that is often an unwanted by-product in other granular effects/instruments but sounds really good coming out of LoopShifter.

So I've been doing my thing... turning snippets of straight piano into glitchy improvisations and then adding some backing parts with Stylus RMX. In this case a very minimal kick drum with some EQ, delay, and some Replicant.

I felt an urge for it to sound more musical and turned to Omnisphere for some accompaniment parts. Really Omnisphere is such a great idea factory. It's hard to browse the sounds available not find things you want to use.

In the end one of the steel guitar patches, run through Omnisphere's Retroplex delay, had the perfect kind of lazy, ethereal, quality I was looking for. I went about arranging that and then continued rummaging for some more sounds to fill it out.

The resulting track is rather longer, at a little over eight minutes, that I intended and, if i were in a critical mood, i'd say it needed another element to justify that length. But overall I think it's not bad. Hope you enjoy it.

Ode to a Speck

New track I made yesterday:

I'm still on a granular kick and messing about with Loop Shifter a lot to see what different types of source material come out like.

Update: fixed confusing typo in the title.. i do not make odes to specs!

Easy interaction with Ruby code

I really wanted to be able to interact with some Ruby code I was writing in a back and forth with TextMate. So I added this command as "Interact" (and bound to Cmd+Ctrl+R) to my Ruby bundle:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'appscript'

$TERM = Appscript::app( 'iTerm' )
$SESSION = $TERM.current_terminal.sessions.end.make( :new => :session )
$SESSION.exec( :command => 'bash -l' )
$SESSION.write( :text => "/usr/bin/irb -r #{ENV['TM_FILEPATH']} && exit" )
$TERM.activate

Since I use iTerm and always have at least one window open what this does is to tell iTerm to spawn a new window with a bash shell and then execute IRB, requiring my code.

The net result is that hitting Cmd+Ctrl+R gives me my code in an IRB session ready to test via the REPL. I can poke around, hit Ctrl+D to get rid of the IRB session, go back to TextMate & make some changes, then hit Cmd+Ctrl+R to get a new IRB with the updated version ready to test.

I'm finding it makes for a very easy back-and-forth.