Well Vista is gone now. There were to many problem with software running on it. I don’t have a Vista disk with me or I would do a fresh install so instead XP is going back on it. I may install it later on but not until I get more RAM for my laptop. Till next time…

Later

I have finally taken the Vista plunge! And I have to say it isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Me and another guy at my co-op placement decided we need to educate our selves for the growing Vista world. Working at a IT place saying “Vista sucks’ didn’t get us very far with customers that liked it. Anyway’s, I ran the upgrade script and only had 2 applications that didn’t work to well in Vista.

1. AVG… It didn’t like the upgrade… Had to un-install and re-install it… no bigy
2. Norton Ghost… I new this one was going to shit badly

Still having a few issues with little things like Miro. Miro will not start at all, even after upgrading Miro. Second thing would be, the Documents, Pictures and Music buttons in the start menu. They just don’t work.

All in all it’s a good OS. The problems I just mentioned is enough to drive me to just do a fresh install. I’m hoping to do this next week.

Next Topic I want to discus is Visual Basic. I downloaded and installed Visual Basic 2005 Express the other day. I have to say that VB is one kick as language. Only took me a day to get the concepts although I’m still going through tutorials and stuff. I’ll post some of my applications later on.

Anyway’s that’s all for now see yall later.

Well I have made myself a 8 LED segment that flashes to the beat of music with Winamp. It’s fairly straight forward. I started with this tutorial.

Here is the parts list

The steps are fairly easy just go through it and you shouldn’t have any problems.
Here are some pictures on the construction of myn.

At first I had lade all the components out onto a bread board where it’s sat there for about a year. Just Yesterday I got the idea of buying a board to stick all the components on. Heres a picture of the before.

This next picture is of all the components soldered onto the board.

Little bit of carpet tape had here it is.

Done!

Heres a Video of all LEDs working!
Click Here (8MB)

Well my birthday was on July 23 and my parents decided to get me a new mixing board. Well it arrived today and boy is it neat! It’s the new Alesis MultiMix 12 FireWire. It is a small version of the bigger recording studio mixing board. It does have firewire witch is already built in so there is no $500 add-in card later on. For around $300 it is a very nice digital mixer.

The FireWire port is what made me really want this board. It connects to the PC or the Mac and sends all 12 tracks through the firewire into a multi track recorder. In my case I use Adobe Audition. It alows me to set the diffrent devises to diffrent tracks. This makes fixing sound problems very easy when editing.

Another cool feature is the Firewire allows sound not on to come in, but go out to. So it acts as a sound card as well as a recorder and a mixer.

Another thing that the MultiMix has is a Digital output (Yellow Plug on the top). This again, acts as another output from the main mix.

To sum up this board is very cool and I would recommend it to anyone that wants to get into small recordings and or Podcast which is the reason I got it.

P.S. I have a tutorial on how to convert you PS2 Head set into another sound card. I haven’t made it step by step yet but I will post it later on.

May 11th, 2007 Ubuntu Studio was released and I finally decided to get my hands on it. Downloading and installing just like all the other Ubuntu Alternate installs. After installation was complete I immediate started messing around with many audio packages included. First one I started with was JACK.

JACK is used to change sound routes through your computer. In my case I first had ZynAddSubFX Software Synthesizer open and was messing around with the many different sounds it comes with. I then opened another cool app called JACK Rack and Patchage. JACK Rack allows you to add thousands of diffrent effects into the main mix. Then through the Patchage i connected the out put of the Synthesizer into JACK Rack then took the output of JACK Rack and connected it with the audio out put of my sound card. Heres a screen shot of what was going on.

I can now also take the input from the sound card and patch it through to the JACK Rack and guitar effects.

The one thing I didn’t like was not having control on volume with Audacity. So I went out on the net and found a package called Ardour. Ardour is a multi track recorder. Through JACK I can connect diffrent audio devises to Ardour. This means that if I have 4 USB Mic’s and 2 Guitars I could plug them into my box and connect the devices to Ardour. Then Ardour can record all 4 Mic’s and 2 Guitars individual. This is very nice for editing later on. You can ajust levels for certen Mic’s or guitars. Very cool.

Now of cores this all uses a fair amount of CPU. But if your using digital inputs (ie. FireWire recording devices, USB preamps, etc) it takes allot of the stress off your CPU. If you are looking into making a small or large audio editing studio I would strongly consider a Digital Mixer with FireWire out. I would also buy a high end motherboard and processor.

I have a bunch of broken USB PS2 head sets that I’m hopping to use for Guitar and Mic digitizers. I will make sure to document the hole experience.

The one thing I found about Ubuntu Studio is there is no good video editing apps. They all suck. I went out on the net and found A good one, but really it sucks to. I will get back to you if I find any good ones.

All-in-all I enjoy Ubuntu Studio. If your into audio editing or doing podcast I would strongly recommender Ubuntu Studio for you.