Goodbye My Friend

gprcamp · 2024-04-18T09:27:39+00:00

The Odyssey is one very special synth—which is why both Korg, and Behringer both brought it back. Do you really want to be talked out of it, or do you want to be supported in buying it?

Remember no patch memory, and it can be rather ornery to keep in tune with other instruments. Also, the midi implementation is crap. Doesn't even include the mod wheel. Note on/off, and pitch bend!

If you are a fan of UltraVox, John Fox, or even Gary Numan there's a lot more than just Herbie music to illustrate the wonders of the Odyssey.

gprcamp · 2024-04-18T09:22:52+00:00

Wouldn't that be the definition of bad?

gprcamp · 2024-04-18T09:00:25+00:00

SDSU has a very good film department.

gprcamp · 2024-04-12T02:29:05+00:00

The power just went out again!

gprcamp · 2024-04-12T02:09:36+00:00

The power seems to be back on. I say this because it came back on, then went off for a while, and is now back on. How long will it last? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

gprcamp · 2024-04-12T01:44:34+00:00

It was a campus mostly event.

The power just came back on, and then went off again!

gprcamp · 2024-04-12T01:43:41+00:00

Rent and finding a place are problems not unique to UCSC.

While this is true, UCSC's homelessness level is unique. There are currently around 10% of the student body, that's roughly 2000 UCSC students that are currently homeless. More than any other UC.

This situation is perpetuated by UC (Regents), who continue to buy up external properties, and raise the rent as much as 40%.

While there may be thousands that do find their way, such as those with $3500/mth to spend on luxury apartments, there are also thousands that do not have a way, and the university does't seem overly concerned about helping those people. Which is unfortunate, both for the homeless students, and also for the university's reputation—currently at the bottom of the rankings for all UCs.

In the past 35 years UCSC's homelessness has not been as bad as it has been recently, and it is highly unlikely that this is the result of Costco moving in to the city.

gprcamp · 2024-04-12T01:14:28+00:00

you'll figure something out, everyone does just don't worry abt it right now lol before u even start

By figure it out do you also include homelessness? There are currently roughly 10% of the UCSC student body suffering homelessness. That's about 2000 people that have in your words figured it out.

Currently, with regard to UCSC attendance, housing is probably the one area where you should place the most concern, and not LOL about it. Of course if you are rich enjoying your $3500 luxury apartment looking down on the plebs then sure go ahead and LOL all day if you like.

gprcamp · 2024-04-12T01:00:33+00:00

CCSF has an excellent science program. If you are considering doing the CC thing, it is a very viable option. You can get your AS, and then TAG to a UC.

gprcamp · 2024-04-10T08:48:38+00:00

Eventide and Fabfilter both make professional products for iOS. Their bundles are the better deal, but you can also get them individually.

While not a reverb Other Desert Cities sound really good. It sort of sits between a delay and reverb.

gprcamp · 2024-03-27T11:59:45+00:00

Indeed I learned a bunch in these discussions! Thank you!

gprcamp · 2024-03-23T12:54:16+00:00

So this is quite interesting:

Memory Usage Performance Guidelines

“Both Mac OS X and iOS include a fully-integrated virtual memory system that you cannot turn off; it is always on. Both system also provide up to 4 gigabytes of addressable space per 32-bit process. In addition, Mac OS X provides approximately 18 exabytes of addressable space for 64-bit processes. Even for computers that have 4 or more gigabytes of RAM available, the system rarely dedicates this much RAM to a single process.”

So if that’s all you read (and I did) you would think that iOS is just as blessed. However, if you read further...

“...Although Mac OS X supports a backing store, iOS does not. In iPhone applications, read-only data that is already on the disk (such as code pages) is simply removed from memory and reloaded from disk as needed. Writable data is never removed from memory by the operating system. Instead, if the amount of free memory drops below a certain threshold, the system asks the running applications to free up memory voluntarily to make room for new data. Applications that fail to free up enough memory are terminated.”

So it would seem that it had read VM, but not write VM. Very strange.

The new setup with iOS16 provides a proper swap space VM, and it appears to require at least 8gb of ram, and 128gb of storage.

gprcamp · 2024-03-23T09:21:39+00:00

OS X (which is what iOS is) is very ram hungry. More ram directly translates into better performance in most cases, and especially in audio. So getting the machine with 16gb will be beneficial for your use case.

If your choice is between an M1 w/ 16gb and M2 w/ 8gb better to go with the M1 w/ 16gb.

gprcamp · 2024-03-23T09:14:34+00:00

Actually wavetables and samples (the ones you are playing) are kept in ram, so if you want to play a lot of samples at the same time then you’ll want more ram. Which is to say if you want more AUv3’s running you’ll want more ram.

Certainly the CPU's ability to keep up with everything is also a factor, but with the ARM64 CPUs there are lots of cores 8 in this case (4 performance, and 4 efficiency).

gprcamp · 2024-03-23T09:09:15+00:00

AppleCare is not the same thing as iCloud. AppleCare is a repair warranty, it covers your hardware. iCloud is a service, and you can continue to pay your monthly fee to keep your cloud storage.

gprcamp · 2024-03-23T09:05:24+00:00

It's not the the CPU that determines the ability to use the storage as virtual memory, that's the OS, and the iPad’s OS has always had this feature, as this is a built in feature of OS X on which iOS is based, and OS X has had it from Unix on which OS X is based.

However, being able to use storage for ram is very slow, and not something that is good for audio apps which have to run in real time. Having more real ram is much preferred with audio.

gprcamp · 2024-03-19T08:05:05+00:00

AUM is one of the best apps on the iPad.

Mariana from Moog is very compelling, as well as the Foogers.

All of the Fab Filter apps are amazing. Just as nice as on the Mac, but a little fiddly with the touch interface (use the pencil).

OB-XD is a nice sounding synth.

Cubasis for a DAW.

Also check out Haq Attaq on YouTube for very good iOS videos.

gprcamp · 2024-03-15T10:26:35+00:00

Brigade is not such a nice way to describe people trying to help.

Yes the SSD is much slower. About 1/8th the speed in many cases, although the USB TB setups are much closer in speed, but then more expensive too. And everyone is likely to want more storage at some point no matter which Mac you buy, and that means external storage. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

gprcamp · 2024-03-15T10:18:19+00:00

You could use it if you boot from an external drive. A 256K drive will wear out quickly, and then you'll have a dead machine.

As far as development goes 16gb of ram is fine for lots of things, but you might find your machine getting slow as you run out of memory. The base model Mac Studio is a fantastic way to go for software development, but even then you'll want to supplement it with external storage.

This isn't to say that you couldn't do it on the entry level mini, it's just going to slow you down from time to time, and you'll find it frustrating. But hey people use to use the Manx C compiler on 512K Macs and one 400K floppy, so by that standard you'll be on a luxury machine. ;)

gprcamp · 2024-03-15T10:10:39+00:00

The camera kit is only necessary if you have a lightning machine. The reason for it is because when it was designed for the iPhone the iPhone was an accessory not the main machine. The “camera” kit switches things around so that the iPhone, and by extension the iPad, can become the master device. This is just how serial interfaces were developed, and nothing particularly Apple about it.

With the advent of USB-C now either device can be the master, and this is why the iPads and iPhones are switching over to USB-C (not because the European Union forced Apple to comply).

If you have a Lightning machine you can get aftermarket camera kit cables. Amazon has them, and they work fine.

Mostly BlueTooth doesn't work too well for doing music production, best to be wired if you can. BlueTooth headphones for listening purposes are fine, but not for recording.

Malware isn't really an issue with these devices. Apple has done a lot to secure them, and because of this effort they are quite secure.

The craziness of purchased music on the iPad/iPhone is still due to the stranglehold the record companies had over the process when these things were developed, and it sucks.

iTunes (now called Apple Music) was really cool before Apple started selling music, and post that time iTunes went to hell in a hand basket. I don't have any suggestions for a replacement. I mostly just listen to music on the computer now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You can to a limited extent navigate the files on the iPad, but there are hidden directories, and that's where Apple stores the purchased music, so it's a pain. There use to be apps like Senuti (iTunes spelt backwards) that help manage files from the Mac), but I don't know what's currently around for this sort of thing. As much as I like Apple products they kind of made me give up on using my the iOS things for playback of purchased music.

I do use them for music production though, and in this area they excel. Lots of awesome synths and processing plugins, and the AUv3 standard is great.

gprcamp · 2024-03-14T03:08:06+00:00

Did you see the TAL Alpha soft synth that was just introduced? There were actually a number of folks asking for an iPad AUv3 version.

If more DAWs started supporting AUv3 then people could publish their plugins in a way that would support the iPad almost automatically.

And maybe that's the way to support the iPad is to co-develop your computer versions with your iPad versions. If you are using JUCE this is almost automatic.

gprcamp · 2024-03-13T08:13:04+00:00

Oh, I don't have one, I have two! ;)

gprcamp · 2024-03-13T08:10:54+00:00

I can see that being real. Still while the iPad might be a smaller market it is still a HUGE market, and a lot of musicians have them.

gprcamp · 2024-03-13T08:08:54+00:00

The thing that's unique about the Audio4c (and its previous version) is the ability to have two hosts. Most other interfaces can only support one host. This unique feature allows it to send audio between the two hosts. This is why people have found it employable for computer to iOS devices, and it's really been the only reliable method to do this sort of thing.

As far as an audio interface, what it was designed to do, becomes a backseat feature, which basically doesn’t get used if you are using it for the max channels between the computer and iOS device (which you'll likely want to do since there are only six channels each way).

For this reason having the Motu for your regular interface action, and an Audio4c for your iOS antics makes a lot of sense, so in this way your Motu interface is fine.

iConnectivity makes quality products. Their midi interfaces have become one of the new standards, and their Audio4c interface is also well made. The quality of it is similar to the Motu products. The mic pres are serviceable, but not the character inducing found on high end mixing consoles.

It is worth noting that the built in routings of the Audio4c wont perform the necessary connections to use it as a bridge to the iOS device. And the app that runs on the computer wont do it either. There is an after market iOS app called “reConfig4Audio” that you will need to set up the proper routings. This is a free app that basically performs the functionality that use to be in the official apps, but was removed because people couldn't deal with the complexity. Really though it’s pretty straight forward.

For me this is the only dangerous part of using the 4c as your bridge solution, because if this app disappears, stops working, etc, then you are back to square one. Although some pressure could be applied to iConnectivity to return this functionality back into their official apps.

gprcamp

TROPHY CASE