AnalogX

February


Site Time...

Saturday, February 27, 1999 [01:11 AM PST]

    I went through the site, and changed the size to a predetermined size, as well as changed it to no longer use frames, so all pages have the menu, even when linked directly, which will be handy. I hope you don't mind, but I jumped the gun an moved last months news, etc into the archives, since I was already bashing around. I also changed some of the HTML in order to speed up loading of pages (not like it was a big problem before), and cut down most pages by about ten percent; not too shabby.
    The new album is going well, two more songs that I really like, named "Ritual" and "Rise"... I don't know if their names will remain, since I just used the word that sounded the most accurate; not really a scientific method. I really like the feel of these two newer songs, I've broken out of my approx-130bpm phase finally, with these two coming in at 90 and 112, which are both pretty low speed for me. I'm finishing up another track, but more than likely I will finish off the final features in the Arpeggiator this weekend, since no bugs have been reported, and change it's status to 'release', for those of you who weren't daring enough to run a beta :)



Arpeggiation, AnalogX-style...

Thursday, February 25, 1999 [05:51 AM PST]

    It's late (or early, depending on your perspective), and I'm about ready to go to bed, but before I do, I thought I would share what kept me up until the wee hours in the morning - the AnalogX Arpeggiator! In my opinion, arpeggiators are one of the coolest musical devices ever conceived, but unfortunately all of this big-dollar keyboard companies lost sight of them when they went digital back in the mid-80's. Sure, some companies like Korg and Roland have brought them back in some of their latest boards, but the interface to actually use them is just about as unintuitive and non-fun as possible. So with the watchwords of Analog and Fun, I decided to write this Arpeggiator... It's quick and easy to use, you can customize the pattern it uses for arpeggiation, it will work with chords or single notes; hours and hours and hours of entertainment stuffed into 50k! Now THAT's entertainment! In case you don't already know, it's available in the downloads area, so make sure you have a good chunk of time, because once you start playing with it, you're not going to want to stop.
    Keep in mind that this is the first release of this program, not all features are implemented, and I have not extensively tested it. What does this mean to you? Really nothing, at worse, it may exit while you're playing with it; if this does happen, PLEASE send me an email, describing the problem, what you were doing, and a copy of the 'debug.log' file that is created each time you run it. It's based off of the same codebase as the Virtual Piano, and I haven't gotten any bugs yet from it, so hopefully this will be pretty solid, and all I'll be doing is finishing up the features.



Bach in the key of H...

Monday, February 22, 1999 [04:08 PM PST]

    Proving once more that idle hands have way too much free time, AnalogX brings forth the first MIDI utility - Virtual Piano. The first in series of programs (hopefully), Virtual Piano turns your computer keyboard into a MIDI controller, allowing you to not only use A-G, but H-Z as well!!!! That's more than a 200% increase in the amount of letters you can use!!! Sure, it still boils down to the same notes, but think of all those letters... So what are you waiting for? Head on over to the downloads area and grab it.



Program or DIE! Or write music...

Sunday, February 21, 1999 [07:12 AM PST]

    You guessed it, another program hot off the AnalogX programming assembly-line, this time geared towards people who want to take a little bit more of the guesswork out of the EQ'ing process. Now, while this program won't make you some sort of super-duper-deluxe engineer, it will tell you what frequencies correspond to what notes, so that you can target areas more accurately. Simple, straight-forward, and small, like all of the wonderful AnalogX utilities, it's available now in the downloads area.
    On the music front, the new CD, "On the Net" is coming along quite nicely, with a new song entitled 'You heard it here first'... There's another song in the pipeline as well, which is shaping up quite nicely. I've been playing around at some uncommon BPM's (for me), and I quite like the feel that these newer songs have.



Don't forget, tomorrow is Valentines Day!

Saturday, February 13, 1999 [01:08 AM PST]

    Whew! I've been busy lately, and I haven't been able to update as much as I would like, but I'm taking the time to rectify that right now! Quite a bit has been going on; I've been running a Shoutcast streamed MP3 server occasionally, and playing all the tracks off of 'Tranquility Lost', so if you look in the server area, under Techno, and see AnalogX, that's more than likely what you'll hear!
    I just completed another cool little utility, requested by one of my fellow Paris users, called 'Metro'. It's a quick and easy little program that allows you to hit a key, and it figures out the tempo... Very handy when you hear something and like the flow, and would like to know exactly what tempo it's at (please note, exactly is a relative term). Once again, shattering all that is known about Windows programs, it's a whooping 32k, so it will probably take you longer to get to the download page than it will to actually download this wonderful tidbit... Ready? Here's the link! You might also notice I put up a utility called 'Capture', that's one I did a while back, but never got around to putting it up, until now! bahahaha!
    I've also revamped the program pages, creating subpages for each program, and in most cases including a screenshot as well. A while back I also added version numbers, so people could actually see if they had an older version, and now I'm adding last updated dates as well, to make your stay here as pleasant as possible. That's it for now! Enjoy!