I finally received the turntable today! Don’t have time to write — gotta scratch!

A while ago I ordered a Stanton T.120 turntable from DJSuperstore, and a Stanton SA.3 mixer and Ortofon Concorde Scratch needle + cartridge from Musicstore.de. Now, the mixer, cartridge and needle were all delivered over a week ago, but apparently DJSuperstore has some problems coming up with my T.120 and apparently they tell me nothing unless I email them 3 times on different addresses and ask over and over again. Last I heard from them they said that the turntable they’d reserved for me was damaged when it went to dispatch and they’re now awaiting a replacement from Stanton and that they’d mail a confirmed date the next day, which they didn’t. Of course, I had to drag that out of them with the spamming mentioned earlier — the last I heard from them without eliciting anything my order was waiting to be shipped and they’d let me know when it actually did.

Now, I’m pretty sure that they’re not trying to rip me off or anything like that, but it’s still a major pain in the ass that they’re so slow and so bad at communicating with their customers. If anyone knows some way of pressuring them into hurrying up, please let me know — I’m getting somewhat impatient here.

So, here we are again, with Yet Another “Back Again” Post – a kind of post that seems to be taking up a little too much space on this site. Anyhow, my dad bought himself a new box to function as server, which is great, because the old one was getting a bit slow. I hope I succeeded in migrating/restoring everything properly, if not, please let me know.

For my birthday, my dad got me a USB MIDI keyboard, which is awesome — especially if I want to use it with GarageBand, because MIDI on the Mac is soooo easy. One thing, though, is that I’d actually rather use it with LMMS and MuSe on my Ubuntu installation, but that seems to be rather difficult. It actually works fine with LMMS, but alas, LMMS does not seem to support SoundFonts and neither can I make (and play) an entire drum kit at once. I have to record each different sound individually — i.e. I have to record the tracks separatly, which is a pain, in my opinion.

So, MuSe and MIDI… It may just be me, but it seems I’ve tried every possible combination of settings and soft-synths, but still no cigar. I know that the keyboard is recognized, because — as I said — I can use it with LMMS, but MuSe just seems to make using MIDI really, really complicated, which is too bad. If anyone knows of any up-to-date documentation on the subject, please let me know, because what I’ve been digging up on google is ancient.

Anyways, I hope I don’t get too carried away with MIDI and totally lose the ability to keep it simple — don’t hesitate to let me know, if that happens. For now you’ll have to settle with my old tracks, until I’ve figured out how to work MIDI on Linux — or at least until I figure out how to make GarageBand obey my every command (hehe, yeah right… Like Apple would let me do that.) Alternatively, if Ardour make that native OS X port available soon and it has (some) MIDI editing capabilities, I might actually use that, because it absolutely rocks my boat.

Finally, if you have any tips or tricks (anything!) regarding MIDI on either Linux or OS X, please comment away (or email me). It’ll be greatly appreciated!

I finally got the stuff moved to another and better web server (very kindly provided by my dad) so hopefully response times will be quite a bit lower than before. I must say, WordPress requiring more than what the old server was capable of delivering was somewhat of a disappointment, but hell, one’s got to get with the times. Standardization over bastardization, glossy gradients over semi-transparency and squircle is the new rounded rectangle!

All this server-raum means a couple of things besides response times. First of all, there may be problems that I haven’t discovered, so let me know if you encounter some. Second, in my experience webmail, ViewVC and stuff has gotten a lot more responsive to the point of actually being usable, so to those affected by that, do enjoy!