Posted on

iTunes 7 – looking good!

I finally had the time to upgrade iTunes to version 7, I must say that the improvements in this build are pretty impressive.

The Good

Tasks View

What I particularly like is how they separated the “current performing tasks” into it’s own page rather than having to click and cycle through the main display. This can get very irritating if you’re downloading a lot of podcasts, then are listening to something. Say you want to change the playhead position on that song – you’ll have to cycling though the different tasks until you see the “task” for the current playing song.

Apple has solved that by putting it on a separate page view:

Read More

Posted on

Guitar Rig sample

I’ve recorded a “lick” using Native Instrument’s Guitar Rig 2 instead of the GT-8. I must say I’m leaning towards using GR2 over the GT-8 since it’s much more flexible. You can record a guitar dry signal and just mix and match effects on post-process. This makes it possible to improve/change the tone if you suddenly realized that you wanted a “different sound.” This was also a perfect opportunity to brush up on my guitar tapping technique – I’m so out of practice and it shows hahahaha.

I also tried using Toontrack’s DFH EZDrummer. I must say it is quite impressive considering it’s a really stripped down drum module with not nearly enough features as a Battery or BFD, but it gets the job done for quick and dirty tracking. Perfect if you want “decent” drums but have no time to really set it up. Of course when you start finalizing your songs, it would be andvisable to swap in the more robust drum modules in place of EZDrummer.

Posted on

Some audio mumbo jumbo

After much research on the safety of trying to connect an unbalanced 1/4″ jack (TS) to a balanced, phantom power enabled XLR input on my mixer using a simple interconnect adaptor, I decided that I should just invest in a DI (Direct Injection) box – which will solve the problem beyond any reasonable doubt.

Considering mixers have 1/4″ jacks (which support both balanced or unbalanced inputs) anyway, you may be thinking why go through all the trouble of trying to connect a naturally unbalanced instrument cable to a balanced input? Read More