News from Great Castle Wilson

  • Why do you need Windows?

    I’m planning on getting Deb a new laptop for Christmas. (Yes, she knows about it already.)

    Of course, I have been trying to convince her that what she really needs is one of the new MacBook Pros, because they really are excellent hardware. Unfortunately, even if I did get her a MacBook Pro, she would probably run Windows — used to be a link to Bootcamp on the Apple site — on it most of the time.

    You see, Deb tells me she needs to run Windows. When I pressed her on this, she claims that she has a couple of programs Quilt-Pro and Stitch Painter that she uses regularly — read “occasionally” — which she can’t live without. I told her about the joys of Parallels Desktop and how she could still run her Windows programs at the same time as Mac OS X, but she wasn’t convinced. Hm…

    Well, if you didn’t click on the above crafting software links, I’ll let you in on the punchline: Both programs are available for Mac OS X. I ran the demo of Stitch Painter, and it seems to run fine.

    So, I got to thinking… All you Windows users out there, what do you actually still need it for? For me, I can think of only one thing: Games. In fact, I still do have a PC, but literally all I use it for is gaming. (It has one 60Gig drive in it, since that’s all I need to hold my active game files.) There may be a day when Macs have as many games available as PCs — they certainly have the hardware to run them now — but as of today, there’s only so much WoW you can play.

    Let’s see, what else do I use regularly… There’s Eclipse, or course. And Lotus (er… IBM, or is it HCL) Notes — nm. You can’t get it any more. — and Office at work. I make music with Reason and Logic Express. I run the GCW family of websites, and I watch TV.

    That doesn’t include all of the free stuff that comes with your mac for personal productivity (iCal, Address Book), internet (Mail, Safari), and multi-media (iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD), all of which I use regularly. The fact that my contacts, events, todos, and bookmarks are all automatically sync’ed between the G5 and my laptop makes them even sweeter.

    All in all, I’m done with Windows. What about you?

  • “The Lameness of World of Warcraft”

    That’s the title of a new article from Slate magazine. The obvious soundbite is…

    It’s a shame, then, that the first massive online game to break into the mainstream is so horribly flawed.

    … but it’s less biased than that over all.

    I find it interesting that at least some of the problems he identifies have been addressed in Everquest 2, but EQ2 has nowhere near the following that WoW does. The problem may really just be that gamers like the lowest common denominator.

  • Zune.

    I think the Zune will do very well in the “crass american don’t know usability from ratshit but likes flashy colors” crowd.

  • Microsoft’s war waged with FairUse4WM

    Monday link of the day (for those of you who don’t read Engadget):

    Microsoft’s war waged with FairUse4WM

  • Frequency based ducking.

    I was driving back from the orchestra rehearsal on Thursday night and started thinking about a comment Ken Walker made about my latest musical composition. He didn’t like the fact that I had used “Voice Ahs” as the lead sound. The thing is though, I wasn’t using that sound. I was actually using something quite a bit more subtle/interesting. Unfortunately, all the subtleties were lost in the overall sound of the mix.

    One of the things that producers do to fix this kind of problem is to use a parametric EQ to carve out a space in the frequency spectrum for particular sounds, thereby making them more prominent. The problem with this is that it is a manual process.

    Suddenly, it hit me: Build an “inverted vocoder”.

    Vocoders work by splitting the frequency spectrum of a signal to be processed into many (say 128 or 256) small bands and then setting the level of each band based on the amount of energy present in that part of the frequency spectrum of a separate modulation signal. When you feed something rich in harmonics, like a ramp wave in as the signal to be processed and use the sound of your voice as the modulation signal, you get that traditional “singing robots” vocoder sound.

    But what would happen if you inverted the signal, so that by default all of the frequency bands were “full on” (i.e. not cutting out the sound) and as the energy went up in the modulation signal, it was automatically lowered in signal to be processed? (You would want to be able to control the overall amount of reduction that occurs. Using too much would probably cause the result to be “unnatural”.)

    Now imagine, feeding the backing track for your mix in as the signal to be processed and the “lead” line (or whatever it is that you want to make more prominent) as the modulation signal. The result would be to automatically reduce in the backing track the frequencies that contained the most energy in the lead line. Effectively, you would be automatically EQ’ing the track to make the lead line more prominent. (Of course, you still have to mix the original lead signal and the processed backing track to get the final result.)

    This is similar to another process used by producers called “ducking”, which lowers the overall level of one signal when another signal is present, but with this mechanism you only remove certain frequencies.

    What’s really weird about all this is that, I have never heard of anyone doing it before. If anyone else knows of software (or hardware) that implements this algorithm, please let me know, I’d like to find out if it works.

    As unlikely as it is, if it does happen to be a novel idea, remember that I thought of it first. 😉 I’m probably not going to have time to do anything about this myself, but if you decided to try it, I’d appreciate it if you let me know. (And if turns out to be the “next big thing” in studio technology and you start making millions, it would be cool if you sent me one. LOL.)

  • Bonus link of the day

    At least the Australian Government gets it.

    Piracy stats don’t add up.

  • The Windows Vista EULA

    Here’s a Monday link-of-the-day for those who don’t normally read The Register:

    Surprises inside Microsoft Vista’s EULA

    I’d seen these issues mentioned before, but the article captures a number of links to other sites with reasonably deep analyses of the situation.

  • “Macs rule!” or “Honey, where’s the remote?”

    As you know, I got an EyeTV Hybrid, and I’m very happy with it. One of the nice things about the device is that you can control it with your Apple remote, if you attach it to a Mac that includes one. Unfortunately, I’m using the EyeTV with the PowerMac in my basement, which does not.

    So the obvious next question is, how could I remote control the EyeTV. (Because you know, it’s not a real TV until it has a remote control. :-))

    First off, the EyeTV appears to have an IR receiver built into it, so I tried a couple of the universal remotes I had around the house, but didn’t get any reaction.

    I then considered just buying a remote. The Elgato site identifies several commercial Mac remotes that will work with the EyeTV, but even I could figure out that buying one doesn’t make sense: it’s not like I’m actually going to use it, I just want to be able to claim that I could.

    Then it came to me: Salling Clicker!

    Salling Clicker is a software package that allows you to remote control almost anything on your Mac (or PC) using a bluetooth cell phone or PDA. I’ve been running it on my laptop for quite a while. It’s a convenient way to make sure that I always have a presentation remote with me, since I know I’ll be carrying my cell phone.

    There was only one problem: The G5 doesn’t have a bluetooth interface either.

    Now, I still had a D-Link USB bluetooth transceiver from back in the days when I used to use my PC for something other than game playing. I remembered from the last time I plugged it into the PC that it needed a very specific driver to work, so I went to the D-Link site, only to find out that there was no Mac driver. Hm… Oh well, I plugged it in anyway and, as I should have guessed, the Mac recognized it immediately.

    The rest of the story is short: installed Salling Clicker, paired my phone with the Mac, discovered that Clicker already knew how to control the EyeTV (woot!), and happily spent the rest of the night clicking through the channels.

  • EyeTV Hybrid

    I decided to purchase an EyeTV Hybrid. I was frustrated with the quality of the TV listings software I was using and, from all accounts, the EyeTV software is the best thing you can get on the Mac. I wasn’t able to find the device at any local retailers (of course, *sigh*) so I ordered one from CDW.ca. This took quite a bit longer than I expected, but it finally showed up today and I just hooked it up.

    It’s an interesting beast. It uses software decoding, so (unfortunately) it uses significantly more CPU than the old one. On my G5, that works out to be about 25% when just streaming live TV and close to 95% when recording. Note: 95% is fine; max load is 200% on a dual CPU box.

    The good news is that the picture quality is significantly better than the old myTV.PVR box (including de-interlacing on the fly, *woot!*), and the software works. Here’s the proverbial “picture worth a thousand”:

    The even better news is that, even though EyeTV does not directly support Canadian TV listings, Guillaume Boudreau’s EyeTV EPG Proxy worked perfectly me. One caveat: Setting up the virtual host to fake out data.titantv.com convinced Great Castle Wilson that it’s name was “localhost”. It took me a while to figure how to fix that, but it’s all good now.

  • All is confusion.

    If you notice, any random behavior on any of the Great Castle Wilson sites, please let me know. I am doing some er… odd things to my machine (like upgrading from PHP4 to PHP5), in order to get some new software running on it.

    More details once I get it all going…