Tag Archives: Apple

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He makes the jump….to the iPhone 4.

Yes…the time has come for all good men…no, no…ok. Yes, I made the jump to the iPhone 4 today. The purchase experience was great. The same Verizon store salesperson that helped me with both Blackberries over the last 3 years, was there to assist, and everything went smoothly.

For those who are not on AT&T and/or didn’t know, they are offering the iPhone 3GS for free (annual two-year contract required). As I drove past the AT&T store, the line was out of the door and down the street (oooh, am I about to encounter the same at 8:15am?). No, no line. The salesperson told me many people pre-ordered. I’m a kinda basics guy and didnt see the need for the iPhone 4S (and frankly wanted to keep the extra money I would have paid, in my pocket). Basic black, 8GB iPhone 4 for me.

Ok, though I’ve been rockin’ an iPod Touch since 1G, all you iPhone experts out there, school me on your favorite apps for task and contacts management, as well as your fave Twitter app…they’ll be my main interests, as my 160GB iPod Classic is my main music player. Any other tips and tricks are greatly appreciated!

Great to finally be on board, at a great price!

Have a good day…

:::oceans of rhythm:::

Fresh!

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In The Lab – Dec 2009

Greetings crew….

Happy Holidays (Kwanzaa, Happy New Year, etc) to all. A lot of you catch my tweets about what I’m doing musically, so I wanted to give you a peek at where it all happens. All the composers, songwriters, musicians, etc have such a spot, most of them (obviously your truly) tend to call it a lab of some sort. I was talking with a friend yesterday, who’s a songwriter/musician/producer about studio workspaces and how they run the gamut of styles. I kinda thrive on ergonomics, comfort, and organization, etc…helps the muse flow freely. As for as tools, I’m a firm believer that the best utilize what they have to the max to get the results needed.

I’m looking forward to completing a long awaited CD that my partner and I have been working on, continuing work on a collaboration called “contempojazzsoulhop” with my boys Fave and Todd, a smooth jazz project with KLWJazz, more remixes for Philip Clark, gospel jazz keyboardist Kevin Battle, vocal group Destined 2 Praise, vocalist Dana Yates, more production work with AfterSix Productions, saxophonist Harron Evoria, annnnnnd my own CD project, whew. Ok, anyway, here’s mine, in it’s current form:

That’s about it…now u see where the tweets flow from, the hangout spot.

Happy New Year…

peace,
F!

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Call me a neo-Luddite (old tech wins this round….)

In my recording studio, I have a very old sampler, a Yamaha TX16W. This sampler has a 3.5″ disk drive that reads Yamaha’s proprietary format sample lilbrary. I have at least three cases of sample disks that I’d like to convert before possibly selling them with the sampler. I really didn’t want to fire up the sampler, connect a MIDI keyboard, play the sample, record the audio into my computer, and save it…but…that would seem the only way to do it….UNTIL…I remembered that I could use an old app called Sound Converter to read the sample disk and do the conversion for me. The problem was these disks are ALL 3.5″ DSDD floppy disks. A-ha…no problem – I can buy USB drive 3.5″ floppy disk reader. Drive purchased, disk inserted…no cigar…the drive only reads HD 3.5″ floppies….bummer. Light bulb goes off…pull out ye olde Power Mac 7100, and hook it up….it has an internal CD-ROM drive *and* internal floppy drive that reads 3.5″ DSDD and HD floppy disks….voila! Fortunately, since I started music production on this computer like 10+ years ago, it’s still running Mac OS 9.1, and has Sound Converter installed as well. Cool!

I set it up, hooked up a spare flatscreen monitor, an iOmega Zip drive and again was in business, like the old days! Fortunately, I was able to find the app PC Exchange on an older Mac OS system update disks that had the DOS Compatibility app software on it which allows me to read DOS formatted floppy disks. I popped the first sample disk in, opened the file with Sound Converter, and did the conversion…good to go. Now to do the other gazillion disks!

Definitely paid to keep the old hardware around. Yeah, for those who know, the samples are 12-bit (as opposed to 24-bit today), but I love samples….the bigger my library, the better…they sound pretty decent for a sampler from the 80’s 😉 It’s 3:13am Saturday morning….thankful I can sleep in and late for once! Good night!

peace…

F!

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Seems like the perfect combo: A Hackintosh’d Dell Mini 9

For the longest time I’ve been considering a netbook. Why, for the obvious reasons…ultraportable computing and a good cross between a standard size laptop and the smaller Sony Vaio. I’ve had online discussions and tweets with Roddykat and Kenya and still really think about getting another high end Powerbook Aluminum or better yet cheap Macbook Pro (last generation, not unibody) In any event, as some of you know, I am a die-hard Macintosh fan and have been one since 1991 (my first Mac was a Macintosh Classic II).

Imagine my delight when I came across this article from Gizmodo, a Dell Mini 9 running Mac OSX….perfect combination! I think I may have to try and roll with this. The current issue of Wired has a good article about netbooks that I’ll crawl in bed to read….that may help me solidify the decision!