Wednesday, April 15, 2009

free samples

Testing some stuff, and giving fast impressions mainly for myself...

sfz player (soundfont player):
here
1) Bluenoise drums vst:
here
very good. Rock kit. Standalone vst.
2) Hispasonic samples:
here
piano, sax, vintage keys, guitar. Only tried piano, decent, and vintage keys, some of them really usable. Works with sfz player.
3) DSK rhodes:
here
No, no multisample.

Friday, April 03, 2009

flash player per chant

http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/

Thursday, March 26, 2009

MIDI controllers numbers

here

Sunday, February 22, 2009

trying to find the right slideshow...

It should have:
1) autostart
2) credits and info written
3) link to full page view or at least bigger view.

Unfortunately flickr's slideshow doesn't have autoplay, but it has full page view.
Let's try with the blogger's one.

EDIT:
maybe found some interesting infos here (for changing size), will check later:

Saturday, February 21, 2009

more pictures to the chant trio blog

Today I added some other pictures to the chant's blog, all the picture edits are made with the little/great Mtpaint. Ah, I've also bought a little toy to start making some circuit bending...

more later

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Internet radios

My new passion: internet radio (aka online radio aka web-radio).
I discovered this list. I'm currently listening some European radios, my preferred at the moment being Musiq3, the classical music channel of the Belgian radio.
There are so many to choose from. And it gives this nice feeling of maybe not knowing what it's currently streamed so you can discover new things (anyway you can check the program list).

I'm using ffmpeg to listen radios using this command (from the Puppy Linux forum)

ffmpeg -i "http://streaming.rtbf.be:8000/mus3128xrtbf" -f au - | aplay
You can put other adresses between the two quotes. And if you find some .asx you can always save the file, open it as text and paste the weblink.

What is nice about this command, is that it is included even in a barebone puppy linux distribution, so, no need to install other players, codecs, etc. Ffmpeg seems to be a very powerful tool.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Emiliana Torrini in Milan

Yesterday I went to the Emiliana Torrini at the Magazzini Generali.
Great gig, I have to say. The supporting bang, the icelandic Lay Low was awesome, the music is made with a very great simplicity, yet very deep. I definitely like folk music for this very reason.
The set of Emiliana Torrini was perfect, cozy and at the same time hyper-professional. Her band is wonderful, tight, pop-sounding but with a lot of freedom, not the typical studio band.
I really like her songs, her light touch, maybe, if I can critic something (but from the musician perspective, I'm not a critic, thanks god...), I miss a little depth on the dramatic side of her songs: not that I'm a great fan of drama per se, but I felt that some emotions are not expressed in her music, they are present in the person, but kind of too much hidden in the music under a always "nice" surface.
Difficult to explain in words, but the supporting band had this feature, even if their music is somehow less original and more stylistically clear than Emiliana's own.

Excellent job from the PA people at Magazzini Generali: sound was very, very good!

Great concert, and it was full of Icelandic (and I guess other Nordic people - no finns though :-)
How many? Well, when Emiliana ended the regular show, before the encores, the whole place exploded in a choral shout: "Mera, mera!" (more, more)...than I felt that Italians were probably in minority, but those that were there, are of course the type of Italians that try to listen different things from the Italian mainstream radio-tv stuff, pure seekers, nowadays in this country...

Ciao