stefkeB

I have joined the vi.be website at http://vi.be

It is our local equivalent of Myspace for bands, which allows you to discover and contact other musicians. If you're Flemish and you play music, it is a recommended community.

I am re-installing everything. My Powerbook's drive died, so I had to start from scratch (and the partial backup I could recover). I've switched from Tiger to Leopard, but still have iLife '06 for PPC on that machine.

On the iMac, I have the more recent iLife '08 which is nice (especially iPhoto, which we used to reorganize most of our family snapshots). Garagaband seems to be improved somewhat, but not dramatically. I have not had the chance to try others.

Last week, because it was my birthday, I bought a new iMac. It is meant to replace my old Desktop PC from 2000, which did not serve for music for quite some time. While I am happy with the Powerbook, it's still my laptop for work and it's disk died recently. While it is recovering and a new battery is ordered, I had to replace my home computer too. Because of music and graphics I chose the iMac, which is reasonably priced and comes with iLife (including the nice Garageband).

I had a rehearsal/brainstorm with the "Reverse Violin Company", yesterday evening. We listened to eachothers tunes, looked at lyrics and gave suggestions. We also wanted to record a new song, based on a lyric I wrote. It was hard to find a suitable "genre", so we decided to try with drum loops to get into a particular groove. After a few rock oriented drum samples, we settled with a more electronic beat and then the creative energy got bigger.

If you look for a Linux distribution oriented towards multimedia, you can try one of the 7 distributions as discussed on http://www.junauza.com/2008/08/7-best-linux-distributions-for.html There are several interesting options for Open Source music creation applications, which include Ardour, Audacity, PureData, Rosegarden, CSound. I tried many of them, but not as extensive as Cubase or Ableton Live.

Check out http://www.whateveriswrongwithyou.com to download the new song from Marillion for free and participate in a video-contest. You could win £5000 along the way.

While playing on your own has its advantages, such as full creative freedom, no pressure and no arguments, I would like to start a band. So if you live near Leuven and like some of the things I created, please send something to my hotmail adress, using "stefkeB" as username.

I don't understand Drupal anymore, but anyways. Music posting works again so I have uploaded many new songs again to this site. I also am recovering from a hard drive failure: the disk of the Powerbook died WHILE MAKING A BACKUP! So I end up without disk and with only 18GB from the 100GB drive backed up. I still have to restore the last backup from june from our local system, which I hope was made as late as possible. I will surely have lost some of my personal pictures, but by pure luck, some of my latest recordings did survive.

The worst thing happened. I had ordered an external Lacie drive, two months ago. When it finally arrived, I started making a backup of my laptop and while the system was copying, it hang. I had to force it to shut down and discovered that the internal hard drive could not be found anymore! So I ended up with only a partial backup without pictures, desktop, music and movies folders, but luckily with the few recordings I made last week, during my holiday. And the original data, on the laptop drive is gone forever.

At http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sound_samples you can access a huge (8.5 Gb) library of different samples, accompanied with free resources (e.g. tutorials). Read the license before you apply them into your music making.