Media Player 11
31st August 2006, Design, Music, Technology2 Comments
Well, after a very frustrating week trying to have my PC as both a bonafide recording instrument and a home jukebox I’ve finally given up on iTunes and all its various hacks. The Beta of Media Player 11 has been released and its a serious step up, and more importantly, while it doesn’t officially support ASIO drivers, its playing through mine just dandy.
If and when a proper ASIO plugin gets released all the better. If and when they release an iPod plugin I’ll be double happy but I doubt that’ll happen, so iTunes will stay there in the background for file transfer. It’s a shame, I still love iTunes, its simplicity itself but all the design and ergonomics in the world mean shit all when you can’t play a tune through it. For the record, I’m not as mad with Apple as I was with regards to the iBook fiasco as I sympathise with anyone trying to write something decent for Windows from the outside in.
Inside an iBook
26th August 2006, Design, Technology4 Comments
Funny, in my last submission, I referred to the loveliness that is the front-end of Apple products. Hello iBook. Lovely minimal snow-like laptops. Hello smug Apple adverts about Apple computers that just work. They just talk to cameras and the like, suggesting other laptops don’t. I’m not pro-windows, unix or macintosh but I get the impression most of their adverts are aimed at smug little Apple product owners who last used a PC c.98. I think its fair to say most systems now read most cameras, scanners and don’t take 10 minutes to start up unless there’s something wrong with them.
There’s no doubting OSX is a good system, but for all their posturing about talking to all sorts of devices, iBooks seem to have an awful lot of trouble talking to themselves. My mate’s first iBook screen stopped talking to its logic board. Apple offered to replace all logic boards on a bunch of model numbers. My mate’s wasn’t one of them. He bought a new iBook. Within weeks it stopped talking to its DVD/CD drive. Annoying but he persevered with it, even while the smug Apple guys shrugged their shoulders almost suggesting there was nothing wrong with the iBook, even though it couldn’t read something as basic as a bloody CD. (more…)
iTunes, Quicktime & Windows
26th August 2006, Design, Music, Technology1 Comment
Works great in general. But Apple’s typically egotistical statement when it was first released for windows that it was “the best windows app ever released” was quite wide of the mark. Particularly due to the fact that Quicktime for Windows is nowhere near the offering that Mac users experience, yet Apple insist on iTunes being tied to it. Needless, and a little bit like the behaviour of a certain Microsoft over the last decade.
So all was well, in general. However, I write music on my PC, not just download it and play it back. (more…)
ASIO 4 All
3rd August 2006, Music, Technology0 Comments
Hail be to these guys. I’ve been trying to get my VST guitar effects playing nicely through my PC for ages now. My soundbox is a Yamaha UW500, and all goes well for around 5 minutes and then the sound just starts chopping up into a digital mess. Lots and lots of searching and writing to Yamaha yielded nothing but a very poor driver update that actually took the situation backwards rather than forwards.
Then I found this generic ASIO driver. Quick install and Bob is most certainly your Uncle. It does beg the question though, I pay Yamaha nearly £300 for a soundbox and have to rely on the benevolence of a developer out there to fix my problem. Surely something wrong here?
Procedural vs. OOP
1st August 2006, PHP0 Comments
I’ve been looking into whether or not to migrate to Object-oriented Programming from my vastly more learned Procedural methods. Bearing in mind I’m using PHP4, the benefits of OOP are less clear. Indeed, many basic operations become mind boggling, round-the-houses operations, simply to fit within the object model. This to me feels a little like when dealing with the Council regarding say a parking ticket - you want a simple answer and have to go through 6 or 7 departments to get there. In a big organisation or in this case, big program, I can understand the need for a rigid system and everything having its role (strictly nothing more, nothing less). But in a smaller firm, or in this case my program, it just feels like red tape.
I’ve been spending the last few months refactoring one of my programs after reading up on MVC models, studying a bit of Ruby on Rails and ploughing through tonnes of threads on the virtues of OOP in PHP. (more…)
