mountain masala

rax AU host mixer with funky screen stuff

I've been playing over the weekend with Rax 2, a MIDI host program for Apple audio instruments and effects. I first bought Rax when it was put out by Granted Software, who have made a number of great, inexpensive programs (including ReVision and Still Life). Anyway, Rax has been taken on board by Plasq who have significantly upgraded it.

What does Rax do? Well, connect your MIDI keyboard to your computer (I use a Tascam US-428 at home or a Roland UM-1 if away). Fire up Rax and you're presented with a multi-channel mixer. You can load in any Audio Unit instrument and play it using your MIDI keyboard. You can assign different instruments to different channels and adjust their levels. (I haven't gotten quite as far as trying multiple istruments at once yet, but that's the whole idea. There are plenty of AU instruments out there.

Then you can also add in Audio Unit effects, and again there are a stack of those available from Apple and others.

Rax includes the option of recording your songs for later playback live. This is through a new Onstage panel which I'm still figuring out. You can have multiple racks of sound libraries with multiple instruments and multiple songs.You can drop in an existing MIDI file and play along. All sounds great if I can figure it out.

Another new feature is a number of Quartz visualisations which (presumably) can be ported to a data projector (I don't have one handy at the moment to test) and have elements triggered by the MIDI keyboard. So you get a live performance visualisation as well. Some of the visualisers are excellent and some are OK or a bit weird. Plus you can have a go at making your own or editing other people's!

Apparently you need to use the Quartz Composer tool which is part of the OS X Developer tools. And there are apprently plenty of other people's compositions. eg. here.

The plasq website has a set of free screensavers for Mac based on these visualisers. They're great.

Overall it seems brilliant. I bought the earlier Rax for US$20 and now its US$50, but still great value. I'll be happily playing some more tonight.

steve collins coming to adelaide

steve collins from the grace community in london is coming to adelaide in a few weeks time, and will be our guest at the next [re]generate. steve is being brought to australia by cheryl, and she has been nice enough to share him with us.

steve will be talking about alternative worship and his perspectives on the 'emerging church' - and probably why he hates labels as well.

[re]generate is on tuesday 17 october, 7.00-9.30 pm at the Colonel Light Hotel in Currie Street. The idea is that we talk over a meal, which will cost you $15. You have to book in by 11/10 - call the amazing Rosalie on 8416 8427. then steve and I will be leading chapel worship at college on Wed 18th, and he'll be leading an session 2.30-4.00 pm. all welcome.

you can download the poster & blurb about his visit here (1.4 mb PDF)

really looking forward to meeting him and having him with us.

unseen footprints

our wonderfully-talented and good friend nic gillan did the design for the new australian christian book of the year, "unseen footprints" by sheridan voysey, a radio guy who is christian. it's a personal exploration of finding god in the everyday, inviting others to do likewise and move towards faith in the one who is around and within us.

The judges said, "Unseen Footprints provides an excitingly fresh and creative look at the intersections of the divine in daily life, and presents the faith in a way which connects with today's generation. It explores our responses to situations of pain, fame, yearning and delight without descending to sentimentality or religiosity."

the book is published by scripture union australia.

the footnote is that ellen was doing work experience with nic while she was finishing off photos for the book, so ellen has a photo credit for a pic of nic's shoes outside st peter's cathedral in adelaide.

and we don't even have a copy of the book yet...

(which reminds me of the win some years ago of tom kerr's "if jesus was a teenager today" designed by claire from art issues.... now redfishbluefish.... just thought I'd nostalgise for the healesville folks out there... ooh it makes me want to whine about jbce design.... but enough of that... AND... I THINK I MADE SOME RANDOM COMMENT ABOUT WHETHER THE COVER PHOTO SHOULD BE ZOOM OR RADIAL BLUR... AND MY SUCCESSFUL SUGGESTION WAS NEVER CREDITED!!! )

feeling like george harrison here, so I'll stop.

well done nic and sheridan and ellen!!! you're all brilliant!

you can buy the book here. A$19.95

a review article here.

easy potato frittata

this is quick and simple and was gulped down the other night.

slice a brown onion thinly. peel and slice 5-6 medium potatoes thinly. heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil on medium heat. as the onions and potatoes and fry until potatoes are soft (you'll need to turn them). add 1 teaspoon thyme and cracked black pepper are they're cooking. meanwhile whisk 5-6 eggs just enough to break them up. put 1 cup grated cheese into the pan. pour in the eggs. top with sliced tomatoes and 2/3 cup parmesan cheese. add more cracked black pepper.

cook gently until you think the bottom is cooked, then put under the grill to cook the top. finally put it back on the stove to heat the bottom.

if the cheese sounds too fatty, forget the recipe and go and buy some hot chips instead!

extreme skipping

darren put me onto dvblog and from that I went to squigglebooth. Go and look at Extreme Skipping. ha. Squigglebooth is a community of film makers, and one of them has another blog of great videos on the WWW called ticklebooth.

have fun.

3G movies

just bought a new phone, an NEC N412i, witha COLOUR SCREEN and did my first conversion of a movie clip to 3G using Quicktime Pro. It converted an 86 second full quality DV clip (720 x 576 pixels, 300 mb) - a promo for our college's courses - to an 812 kb 176x144 pixel 3G movie. The audio went to 8 khz mono.

Of course at that size it all looks and sounds a bit dodgy, but I've been hoping to try this stuff for ages and now I'll be able to play with both the image and audio parameters. And folk will think it's very amazing when I show them this week. (if they only knew how easy it is to select the 3G export presets...)

I think that being able to send short sharp communications like this is fantastic. of course, I am drawn to new stuff regardless - an 'early adopter', as they say - apart from when it comes to personal technology....

we've have the same 34 cm TV, a hand-me down, for probably 20 years...
we still have the Denon CD player that we bought as a shop demo in 1992 (mind you, it was top of the range back then)...
only this year we retired Yvonne's 25 year old Pioneer amp (when I bought an $80 second hand Rotel amp that's 30 years old and its brilliant) (well, actually, I did have an excellent Marantz amp and Acoustic Research speakers back in 1979 but I sold them so I could do the full-time-study-for-God-thing)

but I digress...

so I'm looking forward to playing with the whole 3G thing in terms of purpose, format and file size.

is anyone else doing that?