Its amazing the number of skins available for Reaper. This is one of the new flavors of the week , most of them created by the community.

See the discussion at Reaper forum:

http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?p=249175#poststop

Here is the line6 page for it:

http://line6.com/podfarm/index.html

Pod Farm is the next incarnation of the Line6 GearBox plugin. If you owned that just doing update via the Line6 Monkey is only you need to do. The UI looks much better and you do get dual amp configuration which is nice. Time and playing will show whether there is more tone. It does seem to come with more pre-sets which include the GearBox plugin presets.

Lately , I was turned on to Delicious. They have been around for a while so I’m a bit late to the party. Very useful especially to bookmark the posts I make into the various forums and some of the resulting web surfing that arises from that. You can embed your delicious links into your blog as I have done on the right panel of this blog. I might move that to the main content area. I wish that there was a filter so that I could limit the links here to be just music related links. Currently , either one shares a Delicious link or not.

no not alpha male but I did just get my Frontier Designs AlphaTrack which has to be one of the coolest control surfaces out. It installed in a second and became immediately useful and immediately indispensable. Click on the image and check it out.

If you looked at the demos, it was simply a no brainer, if you had BFD 1.5 you simply had to purchase the upgrade and quickly, it was that impressive, and it is but I can’t help thinking that Fxpansion may have been pressured by their retailers to have this available for the xmas / end of year retail season. I think that maybe its release was a tad early.

The features, the sound quality, the workflow, the interop to trigger units, the number of grooves provided all of these make BFD quite arguably the top virtual drum package. Unfortunately, I don’t get to enjoy all of that. I’m still trying to make sure that my investment in some of the expansion paks is safeguarded. You see the upgrade process from 1.5 to 2.x is not free of its kinks and so I have started the year on a very frustrating note indeed. That’s what I get for being an early adopter

Blogging from my pda . Maybe I will blog more consistently in 2008 ?

Well more of a comparison. I purchased the Edirol FA-101 firewire interface because I needed a unit that could hook up to my then notebook based DAW. However, as part of my efforts to resurrect my home studio I decided to put back to use my old MOTU 2408mkii. Said unit was actually dedicated to my PowerMac Dual Processor G4. I now wanted to leverage the 2408 from my new PC Core2 Duo. That entailed buying a hardware upgrade from MOTU, the 424 PCI express interface card. So what are the differences between the two units ? Here we go:

Portability

The 2408 is simply not. It requires a PCI card in the host machine. The Edirol on the other hand requires firewire on the host machine and as a matter of fact on the MAC it just uses the native firewire support. So the Edirol will be indespensable on the road on a notebook or on the occassion that I may want to record a gig.

Latency

The Edirol on my Core2 Duo system provides 3 ms latency at 152 samples which is the lowest the ASIO driver will allow, nonetheless this is quite good. However, the MOTU provides 1 ms latency at 64 samples and I can go down to 32 samples but did not want to push my luck. So I’m a happy camper indeed.

Sampling Rate

Here the Edirol outshines the MOTU providing up 96K sampling. The MOTU only goes up to 48K but in practical terms that’s just fine. Most pop to even instrumental guitar music i.e. my music does not need to go over 44.1

Connections

The MOTU has by far more connection possiblities but again in practical terms and for me that would entail getting more hardware to leverage the ADAT and Tascam connectivity provided. So effectively , the MOTU has 10 channels available including 2 spdif i.e. digital connections. That is exactly what the Edirol provides except that the Edirol does toslink i.e. optical instead of spdif. The Edirol does provide 2 mic connectors with decent preamps. In reality I prefer to go thru something like the Studio Projects VTB1 which is a tube hybrid pre-amp which does a great job of warming this up.

Conclusion

The MOTU will become my interface on my main audio workstation. The Edirol will be now dedicated to my G4 which I have plans to make a midi workstation which I can use to pump soft synth’s output back to my main DAW on the PC.

The MOTU 2408mkii is a great interface even six years later after my initial purchase. I will probably look for another on Ebay. The new 2408 mkiii has great specs but is overkill for my needs. If you are looking for a digital interface for your audio workstation I would highly recommend finding an used 2408mkii.

from both work and art. We are again visiting one of our favorite spots out in the New England country. The place is called Race Brook lodge and its a beautiful rustic type of old New England farm setting. We caught the foliage a bit early but there is some and its all beautiful nonetheless. We actually go climbing up into the mountain where this lodge is nestled in. There’s a creek right on the property , following leads to about a 15 foot waterfall. Tanzi, our Rhodesian Ridgeback loves it.

When I get back well, there will be a lot of day gig stuff to catch up on. On the music front , Jon yesterday sent me back a Reaper project containing piano comp with some midi bass and drums to one of my original compositions we are collaborating on. We are also collaborating on his second album. In this case, my collaboration is in the form of doing some sound engineering. We’ll be doing some of those sessions soon after I come back. More later, which includes some video I recorded at the two sessions at Peter Karl’s Studios in NYC.

Woke up this morning to find a plumbing crew getting ready to replace my sewage pipe. We have had issues this morning but our landlord just popped this one on us.

MediaWiki i.e. the php framework used by Wikipedia, and the framework I was using on my last wiki, is actually quite prone to spam and it takes a community to fend of the evil spammers. Obviously, I don’t have a “community” per se so I found a great wiki framework with a lot of bells and whistles and which has quite decent security mechanisms in place. The framework is called PMWiki and one can read up more about it here.

I like PMWiki so much that I got rid of my regular web site and now my new PM wiki is my web site. I do need to spend a bit of time adding more content but I think it already has the “look” I always intended to implement.

So check it out:

http://www.monteirosfusion.com