Fine Print

I've bought myself a Brother P-touch D400.
I was getting a little tired of trying to work out which power supply went with which unit by following the cables. I had previously just written on the PSU with a silver Sharpie, which is fine when you can get in close enough, but I have to use reading glasses and sometimes digging those out for 3 seconds use is a pain. The Brother label printer at large font settings is much easier to read, and I don't need my glasses.
Me being me I couldn't justify the short term use of the machine even if it wasn't that expensive. I was very happy when I found out that I could print barcodes like the one above. Barcodes can be read by any phone with an appropriate app. If you have such an app try it on the picture. Because Code39 and a few others accept ASCII characters I thought, why not use it as a code transport device. I'll be extending a script I'm publishing at the moment to write encrypted text to both bar and QR codes. All quite easily done in the Linux CLI.
I have also resurrected my bluetooth thermal scanner for QR codes. I'll try and get that connected to my laptop, it might work. It currently works very well with my phone but I'd like to use it away from that particular device.
I have 2 weeks holiday coming up. I imagine a large portion of that will be spent in the terminal, and I'm not talking airports.

A Little Knowledge

I've been tidying up a few loose ends tonight.
It only took me about 2 hours but I finally managed to get my Zyn-Fusion plugin to be sequenced by LMMS. I suppose it is straight forward but only once you've exhausted all the other options. I went through all the other options first. The result is that I can now automate creating multisamples for Bitwig.
Zyn-Fusion is pretty much the only plugin synth you'll ever need which is why I spent so much time getting it to work the way I wanted.
Before I started messing about in the studio I revisited a shell script (pictured above) that I rediscovered a week ago. At only 4 lines it makes encryption in the terminal editor Nano a piece of cake. Now that I've found it again I'll probably add to it and get it its own page on Github so that everyone else can use it. I have a little bit of reading to do first but I know what I'm looking for so that shouldn't take long.
It is after all the season for giving.

Finishing Touches

If there's one thing I've struggled with in my songwriting it's been drum fills and endings.
Specifically at the end of a drum phrase the pattern just seems to repeat until the end and restart or run into a different pattern. This is down to the fact that playing something believable on a single keyboard key is extremely difficult and no amount of tweaking the MIDI file afterwards seems to make the situation any better. I decided a while ago that I'd like to get my hands on a Yamaha DD-75 but at around £200 it was an expense that could wait. I kept a search saved online for 'Yamaha DD' to see what would come up. Sure enough a decent DD-65, one model down from what I'd been looking at, came up at a very reasonable £34 starting price.
I eventually won it for £36 plus £8 postage which is fine by me. Despite not having more sounds or the latest samples it's perfect for my needs. I just need it as a realtime MIDI trigger. The sounds will come from samples stored on other units or from Bitwig.
It needs a little tidy up which it'll get and it will then sit as a very useful addition the the hardware side of the studio.

Never Give Up

It's often worth going beyond popular wisdom and searching for the truth.
Today was a fine example of that philosophy.
To make making styles for my QY300 easier I decided that the best tool for the job was the Linux DAW software LMMS. The MIDI routing is second to none and with a decent sequencer attached it's pretty much perfect. The problem was that wherever I looked on the internet the answer was that LMMS would not run on a Raspberry Pi. The RPi just didn't have the resources. All I needed it for was MIDI and because Seq24 runs without a problem I didn't think that running LMMS as a MIDI controller would be a problem either. The internet kept on saying no, but I wasn't about to give up that easily.
After a couple more hours of searching and reading I found a possible solution. Someone had installed a version of Lubuntu onto their RPi and simply downloaded LMMS from the repository. I know that Lubuntu is a really lightweight system and I was going to be installing it on a RPi 2 which is kind of pushing the boundaries but I thought it was worth a go.
Two hours later and a new install of Lubuntu was indeed running my QY300 through LMMS without a problem.
As the title of this post says, never give up.
That would be just too easy.

Serendipity

The picture above is nothing much to look at.
It's just another instance of Bitwig Studio. Tonight I decided to build a track from scratch so I started in D minor in Sundog Song Studio. I made two blocks of 4 bars and then exported the MIDI file to FL Studio to re-voice. It was more a jam session with FL Studio, I wanted to get an idea of the sounds I'd be using. I didn't settle on anything in particular so I didn't export any multi-samples. I did get a feel for the track though.
Next I imported the MIDI file into Bitwig and got to a stage where the 2 groups of 4 bars were in their own space and I added some basic drums. I then decided I wanted the first 4 bars of chords to be 8 bars. By the time I'd done that I'd not only moved the second chord up a semi-tone too much but I'd forgot to resize the loop to 8 bars. The resulting 4 bars sounded really good, mistakes and all so it's been kept.
My next mistake was adjusting the bass wrongly after I'd duplicated it several times. The result was my original bassline alternating with an offset version. Again it sounded good so it's staying too.
It's only the start of the track but my mistakes have given me ideas as to what I need to do to make the track more interesting.
At this stage all I can predict is that it probably won't end up in D minor for long.