Art Gillespie

Photo

Thu, 24 May 2012 10:24:46 -0700

"A person defined by his consumption can’t ever make a living doing what he likes."

Mon, 17 May 2010 13:07:08 -0700

“A person defined by his consumption can’t ever make a living doing what he likes.”

- http://tynan.net/produce

52 to 40, Week 3: (Incomplete) Flash, No Flash

Fri, 14 May 2010 21:16:00 -0700

Ran out of time without nailing down all the lyrics or even the direction. At one point, this little ditty was about the Apple v. Adobe kerfuffle—hence “Flash! No Flash! Crash! No Crash!”

I figure it’s better to post incomplete work rather than give up on the project altogether, but I’d be lying if I said I was happy about it. Well, except the rhyming dictionary solo. That part fucking rocks.

Lyrics—such as they are—at the Bandcamp page

52 to 40, Week 2: Lullaby For Friday

Fri, 07 May 2010 21:24:00 -0700

This was tough.

This morning, I had no song and only a rough idea of a melody. I wrestled with the lyrics for hours and hours until I hit upon the lullaby idea. While this was fruitful I won’t lie: Writing about how I feel about my kid had me crying like a baby for a good part of the afternoon. There are a lot of vocal outtakes with me choking up.

I’m too insecure in my lyric-writing ability to release something so lyrically naked under normal circumstances, but I ran out of time. So here is me with no impenetrable lyrical abstraction. Please don’t kick.

Gearwise, I recorded vocals, guitar and tambourine through my trusty Rode NTK straight into my MBox Pro 2. (I know, I know—the sad thing is I actually have a much nicer mic preamp.) The piano, organ, and Mellotron sounds came from my Nord Electro 3, and the Xylophone and toy piano sounds are from the Reason factory soundbank. (That awesome toy piano sound in the outro is actually a Thor preset!) The bass guitar is, I’m embarrassed to admit, from the Reason Bass ReFill. I just didn’t have time to play real bass this time. Recorded, mixed, and mastered in Propellerhead Record.

Only fifty weeks to go!

52 to 40: It All Starts Here

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 15:05:00 -0700

So, yeah. I turned 39 last week. This sort of thing has an effect on a guy—the gem in my hand starts glowing (or is it stops glowing?) in twelve months. Fifty-two fucking weeks.

So, faced with this milestone, I figure it’s not enough that I decided to do an Ironman (in 204 days!) before my fortieth. Now I’m also attempting a Jonathan Coulton-inspired “Song a Week” project.

If you’re not familiar with Jonathan’s story, you’re probably not reading this or you’ve been in a coma/meditation retreat/sensory deprivation chamber for the past few years.

The idea is, as a cattleprod to my moribund musical output I’m forcing myself to write and record a new song each week and get it out by midnight (in Arizona) on Friday. All the tracks will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license (see the badge below for details) so you’re free to share copies with friends, make new stuff out of them, sample the bejeezus out of them, etc. Under the license, you’re required to give me attribution, and you shouldn’t try making money off them (are you paying attention Timbaland?)

More importantly, if you make something cool out of any of the songs uploaded, I’d love to hear about it. Hit me up at agillesp at gmail dot com.

I also intend to make the project file for each week’s track available for download, so if you’re using Propellerhead’s Record + Reason, you’ll be able to open up the song’s project files and get at raw tracks. With any luck, I’ll have the hosting and bandwidth for this part of things sorted out before next week’s track is released.

Anyway, here’s week one’s effort, “It All Starts Here”. I hope you like it:

This work by Art Gillespie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at artgillespie.bandcamp.com.

USB Audio for iPad

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:37:00 -0700

I still can’t quite believe it, but it’s official: iPad supports USB audio.

And there was much rejoicing.

It’s all in this message on coreaudio-api, but here are the high points:

With the Camera Connection Kit, you’ll be able to connect a class-compliant USB 1.0 device.
If the device draws less than 100mA, it can be powered by the iPad, otherwise, you’ll need to connect a powered hub.
16-bit, up to 48kHz.

The only commentary I can think to add is the obvious: This is going to be huge.

Ohm Studio

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:39:00 -0700

Yeah, old news, I know. Bear with me. Or not. Whatever.

I had a great discussion today with a friend in the MI business about Ohm Studio and the following came flying out of my mouth unexpectedly:

The collaboration is cool and all, but what I’m really excited about is the cloud-based versioning and implicit backup. I mean, can you imagine writing software without version control? But what is making recorded music if not creating software? If you skew your perspective a bit and look at a DAW as an IDE, then compare it to best-of-breed IDEs you see some obvious missing features we should’ve had for years. The sort of things no self-respecting software developer in the world would work without.

(Is it appropriate to blockquote yourself? Fuck it.)

I didn’t know I thought any of this, but I certainly agree with my self, or my id, or subconscious, or Plato’s ninety-nine-cent-perfect-idea-store, or wherever the hell this sudden insight came from. As an aside, I could write a whole book on how valuable it is to have conversations with really, really bright people as often as possible. It’s not just what they tell you, it’s how you think when you’re engaged with someone ridiculously smarter than you are. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the advice to never be the best player in the band.

In any case, centralized version control and backup is a great start to getting recording engineers/musicians the same tools software engineers have had for ages. I applaud the OhmBoyz innovation on this front. Here’s hoping that the established DAW manufacturers will ape the shit out of it like they did with Tracktion’s ‘Freeze’ feature back in the day.

superamit: But one day, pretty soon, you’ll realize that you...

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 09:26:04 -0700

superamit:

But one day, pretty soon, you’ll realize that you haven’t used your laptop in days. That you tend to grab your iPad first whenever you need to visit a website or answer email. That your laptop never leaves your desk anymore.

autoLAME 1.0

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 11:34:29 -0700

About a year ago, I wrote an Automator action that converts audio files to mp3 using the LAME framework. I’ve been using it long enough that I think it’s ready for public consumption.

Download autoLAME

The action is compiled 32-bit/64-bit Universal so it’s compatible with Automator on Snow Leopard running in 64-bit mode. However, on Snow Leopard you’ll also need a Universal build of the LAME framework, which I’m providing until someone tells me I shouldn’t.

Download LAME.framework 32-bit/64-bit Universal

Need an expert iPhone/iPad/Mac OS programmer who specializes in audio? Get in touch!

"[…] Carly Starr, head of international marketing at Sub Pop, replied more precisely. What does..."

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:22:00 -0700

“”[…] Carly Starr, head of international marketing at Sub Pop, replied more precisely. What does indie mean? “Nothing,” she said.””

- Is Indie Dead? (via Marco Arment)

Haiti

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:29:57 -0700

Please donate to help Partners in Health help the poorest of the poor in Haiti.

I don’t know about you, but as a professional nerd in a first-world country, I have a relatively ridiculous amount of disposable income—witness my XBox 360, PS3, and Wii, for starters.

There’s no imaginable excuse for those of us enjoying this absurd level of plenty not to break off some of the money we’ve set aside for Apple’s upcoming tablet and use it to save and restore lives.

Please do it. Now. I promise that helping people is much more satisfying than a new gadget.

Also, if you’ve never heard of PIH, they’ve been providing healthcare to the poorest of the poor in Haiti since the late eighties. The organization is the subject of Tracy Kidder’s excellent book, “Mountains beyond Mountains”

Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell To Make Us Miserable

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:32:01 -0700

Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell To Make Us Miserable:

I have nothing to add. Perfect.

marco:

Perfect. (via energyface)

Remember when I dismissed Verizon’s Droid because it only had 256 MB of storage for apps?...

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:33:00 -0700

Remember when I dismissed Verizon’s Droid because it only had 256 MB of storage for apps? Well, the only tech story going this week—the Nexus One from Google—only has one hundred and fucking ninety megabytes.

I’m astonished at how much virtual ink has been spilled on the Nexus One without mention of this limitation.

iPhone web apps and HTML 5's Offline Application Cache

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 10:05:45 -0700

I’ve been having fun in my spare time over the past few days messing around with creating web apps for the iPhone. Javascript is a fun language, and webkit has some really cool tricks up its sleeve. (-webkit-box-reflection!)

Since I’m training for next year’s Ironman Arizona and javascript countdown timers are the “Hello, World!” of client-side web apps, I started by creating a countdown timer app for that event.

If you’re on an iPhone or an iPod touch, you can install it by clicking here.

My goal was to create an app that would run when the iPhone wasn’t connected. (e.g., in Airplane Mode) To do this, you use HTML 5’s Offline Application Cache, which consists of adding the cache-manifest property to the file’s html element:

<html cache-manifest="myapp.manifest">

and creating the file myapp.manifest:

CACHE MANIFEST

#version 0.0.1 (change this to update the app)

Since all of the countdown app’s code lives in the main html file, and since the file that declares the manifest is automatically included, you don’t need to list any additional files in the manifest.

When I tested this on my iPhone in Airplane Mode, it didn’t work. It turns out that the manifest file must be served with the HTTP header Content-Type: text/cache-manifest and my web host was serving it as text/plain. Rather than submit a support request to NearlyFreeSpeech to have the server’s mime-type configuration updated, I just made my manifest a php file:

<? 
    header("Content-Type: text/cache-manifest");
?>
CACHE MANIFEST

# version 0.0.4

Fortunately, Mobile Safari doesn’t care about the manifest file’s extension: myapp_manifest.php works just fine:

<html manifest="myapp_manifest.php">

Great.

I also wanted to experiment with adding advertising to an iPhone web app, so I signed up for AdMob and added their code to the app. Easy!

Only it didn’t work. My AdMob ads were not showing up.

It turns out that when a web app uses an offline application cache, all resources are expected to be local—even when a connection is available. Since the AdMob Javascript is included with an http:// URL instead of a relative URL, the app never loads it.

The fix is to add the AdMob url to the manifest file’s URL whitelist:

...
NETWORK:
# All URLs that start with the following lines 
# are whitelisted.

http://mm.admob.com/static/iphone/

This is great, because when a connection is available, an ad loads, and when there isn’t, no ad loads, but everything else in the app works as it should.

So, if you’re having trouble getting HTML 5’s Offline Application Cache working with your iPhone web app:

Be sure to check the Content-Type header your web server is setting for the manifest file is text/cache-manifest.
If you’re including resources from the network be sure the resources’ URLs are added to the NETWORK: whitelist.

swifferwetjet: Schrodinger LOLcat FTW!!!!!

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:02:53 -0700

swifferwetjet:

Schrodinger LOLcat FTW!!!!!

Mythical Threat Level: Orange

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 08:48:00 -0700

Great comment on this piece by Nate Silver (via Daring Fireball) in which he compares the probability of being on a flight with a ‘terrorist incident’ with that of being struck by lightning:

Well if Nate’s not going to do any editorializing, I’ll fill in the gap: We need a god damned war on lightning. Look at how dangerous it is! Will the terror of Zeus never stop!? Won’t somebody please stage some Shock and Awe(TM) and overthrow the cruel tyrants at Mt. Olympus?

iDrum Underworld Edition gets end of year list love.

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:31:41 -0700

Number six in Music Ally’s The 40 best branded iPhone music apps of 2009.

I was promised jetpacks.

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:03:00 -0700

I’ve been a gadget-freak as long as I can remember, and for just as long, I’ve strongly suspected that the “productivity” or “happiness” or “massive penis” that the next awesome gadget would surely endow me with was an illusion. Deep down I knew my gadget habit was probably as useful as, say, my love of fine food. I absolutely love good food, but it doesn’t exactly make me a more productive member of society. The difference was, of course, that I didn’t justify a good meal by saying it would make me more productive, happier, or better hung.

Not any more. Gadgets are really making my life better, and it only just hit me this weekend.

My wife gave me my christmas gift—an Amazon Kindle—early this year, on Saturday. I immediately started reading “Coders At Work” on it, and while this isn’t a review and I haven’t spent more than four hours using the Kindle, I can say that my initial impressions are very favorable. More on that at some later date.

The next day, I went out for a three-hour training ride to the middle of fucking nowhere™ and back. About two hours in, my front tire went flat, and for reasons I won’t go into here because they make me look like an idiot, I was stranded. Since I was only about halfway back from the middle of fucking nowhere™, I couldn’t just call my wife and ask her to pick me up at the corner of Ima and Dumbass, because even though she knows that intersection well, I was nowhere near there.

But I have an iPhone.

So I pulled up the maps app, tapped that target icon[1], tapped ‘Share Location’ and MMS’ed it to the missus. As I learned in the first war in the gulf, GPS can find you anywhere—even in the middle of fucking nowhere™.

But, as you may have guessed, the middle of fucking nowhere™ is a fair ways from our house, so I had a long wait ahead of me. What to do for the next half-hour to forty-five minutes?

Oh, yeah, I have an iPhone. I checked Google Reader, then I checked Twitter, then I remembered something: Didn’t I hear something about Amazon releasing a Kindle app for iPhone? Yes! There it is in (or on, depending on which way you lean) the App Store! For free!

A minute later it was downloaded and installed. Now, I’m no downloading-an-app-over-the-air virgin or anything, but this is the first time it struck me how completely awesome it is that you can grab an app anywhere you have a cellular connection. But that’s nowhere near as awesome as what happened next.

The Kindle Reader app grabbed “Coders at Work” in less than a minute. When I tapped on the book’s cover, it opened to the same place I had left off on the Kindle device the night before. And there I was, sitting at the side of the road in the middle of fucking nowhere™ in my silly-looking cycling outfit reading Doug Crockford’s and Brendan Eich’s takes on Javascript, complexity, and how to hire great hackers.

And of course, when I finally got home, I ran to the Kindle device and, yes, “Coders at Work” came up right where I had left off reading at the side of the road on my iPhone. I never had to tell the device or the app to sync, it Just Worked.

Now, I know we humans have tougher problems to solve than keeping The Fat Triathlete occupied while he waits for a ride in the middle of fucking nowhere™. But damn if I don’t feel—for the first time in my life— that the gadgets I own are actually helping me work on those problems rather than getting in the way.

Bring on the next gadget!

[1] Am I the only one that feels like they might be calling down artillery or an air raid on their heads when they tap that button?

Charity Suggestions

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:09:00 -0700

I’m looking for a music- or music education-related charity (U.S.-based, 501(c)3) to raise funds for next year as part of the Janus Charity Challenge and my first Ironman in November. If you can recommend any—even if they’re not necessarily music-related—please drop me a line via agillesp@gmail.com or @artgillespie on twitter.

Thanks.

Everything is a Project

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:51:00 -0700

Great article on Scott Berkun’s site on the universality of project management:

… project management is only as boring as the thing being managed.