Author: Heath

10
May
2021
22:08

Cover Of “Strange Deja Vu” By Dream Theater

I’m super excited and honored to have been part of this amazing international virtual collaboration with such incredible artists. When my friend, Andrés Ayala asked me to provide the vocals, I immediately said yes, jumping at the chance to once again work together. I met Andrés when we were both hired for the same band for a 6 month contract on the Carnival Liberty cruise ship, so I already knew he was a virtuoso guitar player as well as a really great person. He gathered this group together as well playing guitar and mixing the audio. I’ve never met any of these other rock stars, and yet here we are all coming together to make some great music. You have to love the power of music as well as the power of the internet and technology!

Guitar and audio mixing: Andrés Ayala
Bass: Josué Hermart
Drums: Carlos Rojas
Keys: Vincenzo Lizzi
Video Editing: Lucia Mendez

25
Apr
2021
23:39

Post For One

You’ll never see this so I don’t know why I’m posting it other than it feels good to get it out of my head and into the universe and my page feels like a safe sanctuary where I can do what I want, while also knowing that likely no one will see it. Also if by chance you do ever see this, I know it’s by your own choice and not because I somehow forced these words upon you. I don’t know why you suddenly decided to block me after all this time, but I can only assume it was because of a post that had nothing to do with you and only to with my own brain being an asshole to me. Just in case that was it, I edited the post for clarification. Regardless, I’m sorry for whatever the reason was that made you feel it necessary to get me even further out of your life (which I didn’t even think was possible). I understand, I’m sorry, and I hope all is as well and happy as it seems. Welcome back to Austin. Goodbye. I love you and wish you a truly great life, even if I can’t be a part of it. You deserve all the love and happiness it has to offer. #SayWhatYouNeedToSay #PostForOne #ThatOneBeingMeItTurnsOut

24
Apr
2021
14:57

Setting Up My Behringer Xtouch With Reaper

EDIT 1/19/2023: I just had to re-set up CSI and the newest version at this time is 2.0 and seems very different, so many of my original instructions aren’t relevant any more, I think. I’m still poking around and setting up the new version with custom layout. The instructions on his Wiki are great and this new version incorporated a lot of the things I had previously customized. I really only messed with the “buttons.zon” file and copied over a lot of the customizations I had made for my personal workflow as I don’t use a lot of the more advanced functions like VCA, or mapping FX parameters or anything like that. I did notice the X-touch had a firmware update I hadn’t installed (1.22) and still I could not get either of my AMD Ryzen machines to recognize the X-touch in update mode. Luckily I had an old Intel laptop around still that recognized it while in update mode and I updated the firmware. Overall CSI 2.0 seems way better right out of the box and eliminated the need for some of the tweaks I had previously made.

ORIGINAL POST:
I have used Reaper as my Digital Audio Workstation software for about 15 years now and absolutely love it. Recently I decided it might be nice to get a physical control surface to use with it. I initially got a Korg nanoKONTROL to dip my toes in the water. It’s a decent little surface, but I very quickly realized that if I was going to go this route I wanted to go all the way and actually have motorized faders and all the bells and whistles, so at the suggestion of many other users I got a Behringer Xtouch. The Korg unit had taken a lot of setup and tweaking to get it working with Reaper. The Xtouch works right out of the box though with only basic functionality mostly. I thought I’d document my journey for posterity in case I ever need to remember what all I did or in case it can help anyone else.

Continue reading…
09
Apr
2021
1:55

Reverse Engineering A VLC Media Player Skin

Summary of this post: inane geeky technobabble about reverse engineering a “skin” for VLC media player. Ye have been warned.

I use VLC as my media player. Like most folks, I wanted a dark skin for it (which they have supposedly been working on a default one for years now). There are lots of user created skins you can use. I have a very specific taste in what I want. Dark, minimalist, compact, I want to see the actual volume percentage, and I want the progress bar to display current time/time remaining. Most of the skins, I couldn’t stand. I found one that almost met all my needs though. Darklounge. The only thing was it had a progress bar that displayed current time/total duration.

I looked into how to edit skins. There is an official skin editor that is ancient (as are most skins). I figured changing that one thing should be pretty simple. I downloaded the editor. Oh, it needs Java Runtime Environment. Ew. This is too much trouble for my tiny change. I find lots of other skins to try. Jump through hoops to download them. None fit the bill. I decide to bite the bullet and try and install JRE just to do this and then I’ll uninstall everything. The skin editor still thinks I don’t have JRE. I read somewhere about setting a JAVA_HOME environment variable in Windows settings. I do that. Hey the editor starts now but I can’t for the life of me get it to even open the skin I want to edit. Again I abandon this project and try every possible other skin to see if any are good enough. Nope.

More research. I discover that the skin files (.vlt files) are actually just .zip archives. I change the extension. Windows can normally open those by default, but not this one for some reason. So I fire up 7zip which CAN read the archive. It’s just a bunch of .png files and one .xml file. So what I need HAS to be in the .xml somewhere. I look up the variable that skins use. I find the “$D” variable for “Duration” and change it to “$L” which is the variable for “Time Remaining.” Save the archive, and BAM! Perfect! I finally have my dark, minimal, compact VLC skin with volume percentage and that displays current time/time remaining. I do a highly satisfied victory butt dance in my chair. I’m practically Neo in The Matrix*

*That is sarcasm as, while this wasn’t necessarily “simple,” it’s fairly elementary amateur tech stuff.

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