Speaking: Running Effective Rehearsals

I'll be speaking at The Worship Collective conference in Cambridge, UK on June 29th. This is an awesome event for musicians and worship leaders.

I'm leading a seminar entitled Running Effective Rehearsals. Obviously, this is a really practical subject, but I promise it'll be fun too. Hopefully there will be some practical wisdom to apply, and some encouraging advice to take away.

Speaking: Worship Collective 2012

Adding to my speaking engagements this summer, I'll be leading a session at the Worship Collective conference at C3 in Cambridge.

I'll be taking a seminar for the keyboard players, where we'll look at technique, working in a band, attitudes, and a hand-picked selection of interesting, useful, and practical stuff.

Installing Groove Agent 3 (Update from Version 1) on Mac OS Lion

It all seemed so simple. I wanted to install my trusty copy of Groove Agent 3 on a new Mac OS Lion box. The license is on my eLicenser already. So it should just be a quick insert-DVD-and-install job.

Shouldn't it?

Of course not.


#Fail...

I've been using Groove Agent for years now. My version 3 DVD was an upgrade disk from the original version 1. If you run that DVD's installer it says you have to have version 1 installed to upgrade. That seems fair enough.

Except you can't install Version 1 on Lion; it is an old PPC application, and Lion doesn't support Rosetta any more.

It's a deadly circle; I now legitimately own some (not inexpensive) software that I can't install. Pete is not a happy bunny.


Attempt 1: tech support

I sent a tech support email through my Steinberg account. Not with much hope, I have to admit.

That was ages ago. What do you think happened?

Yup, you're right. Not even got a "we've got your message and it's in a queue" reply.

Thanks, Steinberg. Thanks a bunch.

But where there's a will, there's a way...


Attempt 2: Check for updates on the website

The Groove Agent 3 support site has a few update installers available (which, naturally, need the full program installed first to be able to update).

There is also a new "full installer" for the Mac to replace the DVD's installer for first-time users. This shows great promise.

Once downloaded, I run the installer. "Insert the Content DVD" it asks (impolitely). OK, again this is fair enough. The content is enormous, and is on the DVD already so I shouldn't need to download that again. It also proves that I own the product I'm installing.

I insert my Groove Agent 3 DVD into the machine. The installer doesn't recognise it. No message. No hint. No continue button. It just sits there.

Of course, it's looking for the "Groove Agent Installation DVD" not the "Groove Agent Update Installation DVD". Swines.

Absolute swines.

But where there's a will, there's a way...


Attempt 3: Trick the installer

Being a techie I wonder. I wonder how rubbish they really are... Is the installer just looking for a DVD called a certain name?

ln -s "/Volumes/Groove Agent Update DVD"  "/Volumes/Groove Agent DVD"

Run the installer again.

Success!!!

The installer runs, it copies over the content from the DVD and there's my Groove Agent 3 sitting there, ready to run.

Goodliffe: 1, Steinberg: 0, (Steinberg Customer Support: -5)


But, we're not there quite yet

I fire up Cubase, pull in the virtual instrument, and a window pops up asking me to locate the content files. That's the content that the installer just installed. Into a standard place. Didn't it think to look there itself? Sheesh.

That's OK, I'll just use the file browser dialogue that appears to load it. Except that the content is automatically installed into "/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Groove Agent".

Notice that first bit. Yes, "/Library". The folder that Apple now HIDES from users in Lion so they can't fry in innards of their OS. I physically can't navigate to the content. Genius.

The trick, of course, is to launch Finder, open the "Go" menu, and hold down the Command key. At this point "Library" magically appears in the middle of the menu's list of places you can go to. Select that folder. Navigate to the right directory in the Finder window that appears, and then drag the target directory into the patiently waiting application's file open dialogue.

What a palaver.

But that's it, I now definitely have Groove Agent 3 installed and running.


Whinge

Of course, I have a clue what's going on inside my computer, and was able to engineer this solution based on my experience and a selection of educated guesses. Goodness only knows what the average user would be able to make of this situation.

(Hopefully this blog post will help someone in time. Let me know if it does!)


Endnote

It seems that every time I want to sit down an use my computer to make music, the computer wants some love, wants its nappy changed, or wants feeding first.

 New driver required! Update available! Incompatibility detected!

Technology really can get in the way of being creative.

Make some noise! (Audio on iOS)

There are two main APIs on iOS for playing programatically-generated audio:

• Audio Units [see here]
• Audio Queues [see here]

Audio units are a lower-level, lower-latency technology. And also, a relatively complex API. Audio queues are higher-level and simpler to use, but have far greater latency.

I have produced a sample project showing the simplest creation of an audio unit and audio queue output so you can compare and contrast the two APIs. Get it on Gitorious here.

The following series of blog entries will describe each technology.

About the project

The project builds a sample iOS application that plays a steady sine wave as long as it is running. If you look at main.mm you'll see a single #define for USE_AUDIO_QUEUE_OUTPUT that can be used to switch between the audio unit and audio queue back ends.

There are extra things a well-behaved iOS audio app should do that are not (yet) illustrated by this example project. Notably, your app should use the Audio Sessions API to define what kind of audio session it requires and to handle interruptions to the audio output (e.g. when a phone call it received whilst your app is running).

Make some noise!

Before we work out how to make noise with our iOS devices, we need some audio to start with. For this reason, the AudioProducer protocol defines a simple interface that the audio backends can grab an audio stream from.

It looks like this:

/// Type of audio sample produced by an AudioProducer

typedef SInt16 Sample;

/// Protocol for objects that produce audio

@protocol AudioProducer

@property (nonatomic) float sampleRate;

/// Fills a buffer with "size" samples.

/// The buffer should be filled in with interleaved stereo samples.

- (void) produceSamples:(Sample *)audioBuffer size:(size_t)size;

@end

That is, we'll be peddling signed 16-bit integer samples, and have a single method that can be called to grab the next block of interleaved stereo audio samples.

Given that, I have written a simple SineWave audio generator. It's not the most elegant generator, I'll admit. It uses a resonant filter to approximate a sine wave rather than the maths library trig functions for performance reasons.

The SineWave interface adopts the AudioProducer protocol, and adds two extra properties - the frequency of the sine wave and the peak (amplitude) of the wave. You can see the interface here and the implementation here.

Atomicity

Note that since this is a simplistic example I have made all of these properties nonatomic. However, both audio units and audio queues will pull audio from your application in a background thread (not the main user interface thread).

The audio unit uses a very high priority background thread, as it is a very low latency audio pipeline with little buffering. The audio queue thread is not set as high-priority, as it employs a large amount of buffering.

You must bear these threads in mind when writing an audio generator. Ensure that any parameter that can be changed is thread-safe. Make sure that if the UI is in the process of adjusting values and gets interrupted by the audio thread that no disasters (e.g. nasty audio glitches) can result.

What this looks like in practice is different for each application. But this is an important warning to heed.

Next time

So now we have some audio to play, next time we'll look at how to use the audio queue APIs to play it.

Speaking: Journeys (The loss of a child)

A few weeks ago I spoke at Cambridge Community Church with my wife in a talk entitled Journeys. We spoke about a particularly hard time in our life: seven years ago when we lost our beautiful 12 week old baby girl in a car crash.

Perhaps this is a slightly unusual (and somber) topic for this blog, but if you're interested in our deeply personal and unashamedly Christian viewpoint on the loss of a child, and the importance of our faith, the support of friends, and the church family then you can hear the pair of us speak here. We begin speaking about 24 minutes in.

In the talk we mentioned the song I played at Jess' thanksgiving service, and a few people have subsequently asked about it. If you'd like to listen, there's a rough version of it available to listen to on MySpace here.

Toys: Alesis MasterControl

My new toy arrived a few days ago: an Alesis MasterControl. This is little baby is a FireWire control surface and audio interface for controlling your DAW. My weapon of choice is an old friend, Cubase. So far, the pair are getting on really well together.

It's taken a while for Alesis to release the MasterControl, but from my initial experiments it's been worth the wait. It's a well built unit and very capable. It's not bad looking either. Very good value for money.

You get 8 channel strips each with a touch-sensitive motorised fader, continuous pot and select/record arm/solo/mute buttons as well as a motorised main mix fader. You get dedicated transport control buttons and a jog/shuttle wheel with cursor keys and zoom/scrub buttons, plus a bunch of assignable buttons for skipping around your project and setting markers, etc. You get 2 XLR inputs with preamps, phantom power, and inserts, plus another 6 line inputs. There's MIDI and digital input, too. There are three stereo outs, two headphone mixes, a talkback facility and more.

First impressions with Cubase were good. I inserted the channel strips for my software, installed the drivers, pointed Cubase at the MasterControl and everything just worked. Manual schmanual. Touching a fader selects a channel, which is a neat little trick. The user experience is very smooth. If it was a dedicated Cubase controller some of the button layout could be better, but since this drives many software packages I can understand the compromises made.

There are things it doesn't do - the LCD screen is small compared to, say, a Mackie Control. But compare the prices. Indeed, compared to all the other alternatives from the likes of M-Audio, Yamaha, Mackie and Digidesign this is a very competitive product in terms of the feature/price point.

It's definitely been a worthwhile investment, and I'd recommend it.

Find more of my MasterControl photos here. And more info on the Alesis website here.

Be still, my beating heart.

There's NAMM so blind as those that cannot see. But at least we have the guide dog that is the web to let us see what the NAMM is going on.

The Winter NAMM show, the major annual audio industry trade event has just kicked off. It's a popular time for all the MI companies to announce their latest wares. My company is exhibiting there, and I'm sure everyone loves our shiney new stuff. But I'm more interested in some of the other things I've seen announced...

It's a Keytar, Baby!

First up - and I think my heart has missed several beats - Roland have announced a new keytar, the AX Synth. They stopped making the AX-7 "shoulder mounted keyboard" eons ago, and these instruments have since entered keyboard geek folklore. Keytars are so bad they're good, and I love looking like a muppet playing one live. Now Roland have created a new one. And it looks pretty good. Well, visually it actually looks pretty darn awful, but that's par for the course. I want one. I'd settle for two.

Cubase 5

In other news, I've been waiting to see what Steinberg have been cooking. A new Cubase version has been in the pipeline for some time. It's quite suprising what they've done in this release; a lot of unexpected features have been integrated.

They've pulled in Yamaha's pitch correction software and integrated it into the audio editor. That's novel. Sadly, it won't sound as nice as Melodyne, but it's a fairly impressive thing to find in a DAW. They've also added a cut down version of Groove Agent (in the same vein as the cut down Halion in Cubase 4). Novel. Both of those are annoying extras, as I already bought Groove Agent and Melodyne. The external plugins will still, unoubtedly be better than Cubase's native code. But tight integration is cute and handy. And not having to muck around with Melodyne plugin's data files would be pleasant.

They've not particularly spruced up the rather functional-looking project window (which I'd've imagined would have been on their list), although various popup windows have had a chintzy spring clean. So it's even more of the standard Cubase random not-quite matching visual interface, then.

There's loads of other changes in Cubase 5. They've definitely upped the ante for what a DAW provides. It does look interesting, but I'm not sure I actually need to fork out any money to upgrade. But I might; it's annoying to not be on the cutting edge any more.

Melodyne

And of course, there's more tantalising news of the new Melodyne with it's awesome DNA sorcery. They've now called the first release Melodyne Editor. It's still annoyingly "not quite" out.


So what do I spend my bucks on?

Food for the kids would probably be the best option...

Breathe 2008 (the aftermath)

Phew! What a weekend...

From Friday through to Sunday I was playing keyboards at C3's awesome Breathe conference, at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge. It's a great venue to play, and it's nice to play on a much larger stage than usual. The band were excellent, and it was great fun to spend the entire weekend playing together, although very hard work.

During the event I had a very weird experience: In December last year, I had my bike stolen from outside my house. On Saturday I strolled into an enclosed service area out the back of the Corn Exchange, and what do you think I found? My stolen bike. A little worse for wear, but happily leaning against a wall.

Cubase 4.5

A surprise present awaited me on return from my holiday: Steinberg have released a new free minor update to my DAW of choice, Cubase. I've always foolishly updated Cubase immediately before finding out problems from early adopters on the forums. New shiney things! Must have! Now!

So is it any good? Yes, thankfully.

Here are my initial impressions:

• It's no more buggy than before, as far as I can see. Well, that's a start. But it gets better...
  
• Support for adding/removing audio interfaces whilst Cubase is open has returned on the Mac!!! Hurrah!!! I cannot say how cross I was when this feature silently disappeared in a Cubase update (somewhere around 4.1 or so). When using my MacBook Pro, I'm always flitting between audio interfaces: I have two firewire devices in my studio at home, another at work, and a USB interface for on the road. Sometimes, I'll also just use the internal mic/speakers for a quick noodle. A desktop installation clearly doesn't suffer this problem, but having to shut down and restart Cubase every time I wanted to use a new audio interface (often) was a real drag. They've fixed it. Steinberg, I love you!!!
  
• It uses more CPU than the previous version. This is actually a real bummer, but is (thankfully) offset by the previous bonus point (for me).
  
• MP3 export has been fixed - it can now write ID3 tags correctly, so I don't have to resort to a third party tagging program after export.
• The new Yamaha S90ES piano is a very cute addition. I'm a keyboard player, so this really does it for me. I use a Roland stage piano live, and so now I can look smug at my Yamaha S90ES owning co-band-member. I've got his piano sound too :-) However, I have to be honest: I prefer the sound of the TruePianos plugin that I use. The Saphire module just does it for me, and their new Amber is also great. So I'm not sure that I'll end up using the Yamaha all that much. (However, if I'd had the Yamaha from the start maybe I'd not have bothered with another Piano plugin. Who knows?)
  
• New drum loops. Whatever. They'll float someone's boat.
• New sounds. The guitars are OK. The basses are pants. There's some other stuff, but nothing as impressive as the Yamaha grand.
• VST3 Sound. It's a low-level thing. You wouldn't notice it as a user. There's no interface change to the MediaBay. You won't until (unless) other VST manufacturers start supporting it.