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This is a truly amazing instrument much more so than the iElectribe. If I didn’t already own an iPad, this would be an app to make me seriously consider getting one.
I own the Korg legacy collection and a rather new radias but this adds something. I can get a similar enough sound from a myriad synths but the iMS has a lot to offer in the performance department.
The dual kaoss pads are magical I can’t writr a more comprehensive review right away because I’m too busy playing with the thing. I also bought propellerhead’s rebirth for the iPad today but I haven’t had the opportunity to mess with it yet. It does look quite promising though.

Take that fandroids. Stop throwing rocks at the throne
This it what it sounds like after messing with it for a few minutes. I’m sure I can take it much much farther.

So whats next? Korg MonoPoly?

So I caved and picked up a radias. Here are my first impressions of it compared to my Ti Polar.

I wish I bought the keyboard version.

This baby sounds very bright to my ears. Is this because all I’ve played in the last 2 years is the Polar? I keep reaching for the hi eq knob and cranking it all the way to the left.

Nice variety of effects but not as cool as the triton’s or the m3′s

The interface is much more intuitive than the Virus’ even though they seem very similar superficially

I don’t get the ring of lights around the knobs. I always assumed it worked like the encoder rings on the Nord lead 3

Has step and mod sequencers that the Virus lacks. Virus 4 added the arp to matrix feature but you have to fire up Virus Control for that

Vocoder sounds more musical to me then the Polar’s but maybe I need to spend more time with the Virus vocoder. Headband mic is a nice plus. Actually i won’t waste time trying out the Polar’s vocoder. I had it for 2 years and it wasn’t inviting enough for me to use until recently. I’m so satisfied with the vocoder that I might not have bothered getting my rocktron talkbox if I had heard it first.

The exposed rack ears are annoying and make the Radias look like a pos

Presets suck so i had no problem wiping out the first few banks. I don’t get this. Korg has some of the best programmers in the world so why the sucky presets? MS2000 patches I downloaded didn’t sound like I remembered them. The artist banks sucked as well to me

I love being able to switch between timbres so quickly and edit them in the context of the Combi as a whole. Again Virus’ multi implementation isn’t as inviting albeit more flexible

Either I’m old and need glasses or the UI on the Radias editor software sucks biiig time. Virus control wins here

Filters sound brittle to my ears. Virus just sounds so smooth

Different enough from the Virus. I was able to recognize the Radias’ sound on an album after the first day of playing with it. Something I have yet to do on a Virus.Other people claim the Virus sticks out like a sore thumb but I just never notice it.

How utterly amazing!. Same virus Ti2 engine but they put the albino mojo on it. Wouldn’t it have been totally rad if they made the black keys a shade of grey?
I’m still very happy with my Polar Ti. I don’t think I’ve stayed in love this long with any single synth. It really did kill my gear lust. Even though I rarely get to make music these days, I always manage to sneak a in a moment of noodling on the Polar.

Then again there hasn’t been anything remarkable on the synth front. Micron SE seems to be just a color job, motif XF was a joke of an upgrade and I’m not even interested in looking at the DSI Mopho keyboard. Is it just me or do the Dave Smith synths have a bit of a basement workshop fit and finish? Sorry but its not just about the sound to me. A synth has to look the part. The blofeld keyboard is out of the question as well because as much as it rocks spec wise, my experience with waldorf synths hasn’t been great. I find them frustratingly buggy.

Reaktor 5.5 seems like a worthwhile upgrade but will I ever have the time to use it . I get the sense that native instruments is tightening up the reliability of their line up. I’ll give battery another chance. Maybe 3.1 isn’t as crash prone as 3.0.x.

Looks like Korg dropped the price from $999 to $699 on the Radias-r. Should I bite? That is one fine synth and I’ve had my eyes on its knobs for a loooong time. Hmm maybe not. The time thing again. Maybe I’ll just get a Korg monotron instead and see if all of the noise about analog synths actually hold water. It can’t be bad for $60.

So I have this ruby script that reads in a bunch of csv files and creates objects of different classs using configuration info extracted from the first couple of lines in each csv file.

My results showed ruby 1.9.1 to be 2.425 times faster than macruby. When I used Cocoa classes such as NSDate in place of ruby’s Parsedate, macruby improved a bit and I ended up with a ratio of 2.212. I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of jruby though. Spinning up the JVM didn’t seem to have much of a negative impact.

I’ll have to profile the script to determine where macruby is choking.

1. ruby19 => 47 secs
2. jruby => 50 secs
3. ruby18 => 80 secs
4. macruby 0.6 w/ NS classes => 104 secs
5. macruby 0.6 => 114 secs

Shorter is better.

I love Ruby so I want to use it everywhere! That means in my browser, mail, yojimbo, word and any application that will take text. So I built a very simple automator service that evaluates selected text as ruby and replaces the selection with the output from the ruby interpreter.

Essentially, this service turns any text entry field into Irb and to make it fit into my workflow unobtrusively, I invoke it using the keyboard shortcut control-option-command R. Of course you may still perform the substitution using either the contextual or services menus.

I can now enter a timestamp in a document simply by typing Time.now.to_s, selecting it and hitting ⌃⌥⌘R to get Mon Aug 23 15:52:46 -0400 2010.
“A96tATYEsqJ-9Ag5VZTdqkejjsqwAm3w8gEh-fGHGtXuYhsbgerENqIG”.upcase will yield “A96TATYESQJ-9AG5VZTDQKEJJSQWAM3W8GEH-FGHGTXUYHSBGERENQIG”.

I did this for bash as well. The plan now, is to build a library of methods and scripts that I can use for frequent substitutions.

You need to use expect since “heroku db:pull” is interactive and requires user input.
Alternatively, you can use expectj which as you may have already guessed, is the java implementation of expect.
One advantage of using expectj is that your IDE will autocomplete the expect commands for you.

#!/bin/sh
expect -c "
#Your timeout should correspond to the number of seconds you expect pull to take.
set timeout 600
spawn heroku db:pull sqlite:///home/www/sites/xxx/db/xxxbackup.sqlite3 --app xxx
expect \"Are you sure you wish to continue? (y/n)? \"
send \"y\r\"
set results $expect_out(buffer)
expect eof"
date >> /home/www/sites/xxx/db/backuplog.log
echo "db pull done"


To avoid getting weird decimal conversion issues when using Mysql, make sure you specify scale and precision options in your migrations.
t.decimal :amount, :precision => 9, :scale => 2

Maschine 1.5 is here. I’m trying to download it now but it seems the internet connect at my hotel is throttled so I may have to wait till I get home in the morning to give it another go.
The update is also accompanied by a 1 gig library update as well. I’m not sure at this moment if these are all new sounds of if the library includes existing sounds reprogramed to take advantage of some of the new features.
This baby may have finally tipped. NI has video blurbs by NO I.D, Needlez, Booka Shade & DJ Nu-mark on their site as well as text blurbs by Flying Lotus, Ali Shaheed and Coldplay.

http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/products/producer/maschine/?content=1194&page=1420

In response to Apple’s decision to limit iPhone OS app development to C, C++, objective-c and JavaScript. The Flash Blog

I think that by restricting Developers to a specific set of languages, Apple can somewhat ensure that developers target their platform specifically rather than have developers submit apps that are built for the lowest common denominator of mobile devices. I guess they don’t want to foster an environment that mirrors what’s on the web today. Most websites leave out a ton of features just because IE6 cannot support those features. I do believe that developers produce their best work when they target a specific platform and take advantage of the unique features that platform has to offer.

It is also good business for Apple to maintain a base of developers that are “married” to their platform. Imagine an environment where most iPhone developers migrate to Flash CS5. In such an environment, if Apple releases enhancements to their frameworks, developers would have to wait for Adobe to integrate those changes into Flash before the developers could take advantage of Apple’s improvements.

What if Google buys Adobe and decides CS6 will only come out on google chrome and Flash will only support Android? Apple and all developers that target iPhone OS get left in the dust!

Let’s face it, we always have a choice of mobile phones but when it comes to graphics applications, Adobe is a very strong monopoly. I’d be cautious siding with them on an issue such as this. It may not end well. How much is the web premium suite again? Do you think we would have to pay that much if Adobe and Macromedia never merged?

Adobe is a behemoth. IPhone devs may not be able to use Flash but I’ll bet my last dollar that 99.9999999876% of all graphic content you’ll see on Apple, Sony, Microsoft, Palm & Android devices as well as the web will be created using Adobe’s tools. Isn’t that enough?

I don’t necessarily have an issue with Adobe’s goal of making flash an indispensable tool but I do think that a lot of comments in the blogosphere wrongly suggest that Adobe may have altruistic motives. Adobe’s goal isn’t to give developers choice; it is to maintain and extend the dominance Flash currently enjoys. Apple’s goal isn’t to limit developers choice but rather to ensure that their platform doesn’t become just another deployment target for Flash.

Consider the following: 
If a developer uses Flash, who becomes responsible for performance tuning? The developer or Flash? 
My guess is Flash.

If Flash achieves 65% penetration into the iPhone development market? Who becomes responsible for how efficient Flash generated byte code runs on iPhone?
My guess is Apple because end users will not attribute sucky performance to Adobe but to Apple. 

Both companies are right so there really is no need for Adobe evangelists to pretend this is a fight about open vs closed.

I bet the blogs on here will have a totally different tone if MS/Google/Apple release free tools that allow developers to deploy their apps as Flash files. We will not hear all the clamoring for choice on the developers behalf.

I have been messing with beta version of the imminent maschine 1.5 update. One of the features the update adds is a vintage engine with E-mu SP-1200 and Akai MPC-60 modes.

If you select the SP1200 mode, you get an option to choose from Lo, Lo-mid, Hi, Hi-mid filter times. I’ve never used an SP so I cannot really comment on how accurate the emulations are. They do sound crunchy in a good way to my ears.