Music people

Go download the free Ableton Live demo and then have a look at Adam Freeland’s Live set on there site, here. Fabulous.

Programming people

What’s the difference between music and programming anymore anyway? Bloody hell, all of today’s music has been recorded, mixed, and sometimes even conceived on software.

When I went broke a month ago I sort of sold out and took back my old programming job. At least they called me before I called them!

Jackson Hole is a tough place to find a bartending job, especially in the off-season. In fact you’d be better off trying to break into the hooker scene in Amsterdam. Keeping journalistic ties with fasterskier.com has given me some opportunities to supplement my income while staying very much a part of the cross country skiing world.

This time around though, I have don’t have the pressure of deadlines. I’m also working on my python-based audio scripting engine, which is a piece that only I have knowledge of and so I’m sort of working in a social hole. Oh well, at least it’s money.

The good news is that I finally get to focus on Play’s python-based scripting engine. We’ve paid a couple of guys to write some subtle portamento and legato scripts, but as of yet no one with notable python experience has gotten a chance to sit down and flush out the development workflow. It badly needs scripts written with good style and reusability concepts so that the infinite multitudes of users that write scripts for it will have a solid place to start.

Build settings and complex symbol linkage, processor optimizations, and deployment schemes still scare the nuts off me. So, the goal these days is to do most of my work in Play itself instead of actually developing the application.

The cool thing about this for Python is that we’ve found that the language works extremely well in a real-time audio environment. It is very fast, and imposes no noticeable CPU overhead on our professional sampling engine. I am excited to have some content and discussion-prone scripting topics on this blog, and end this needless bickering about my poor job experiences.

Oh yeah, and post some pictures of sick ski lines.

Yay