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Snowferno iPhone Game Beta Released Tonight

brent — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 01:12:32 +0000

Our first foray into the world of iPhone Apps officially entered beta tonight.

It's Monday morning in Melbourne, Australia, where Ben just posted the first beta build (b0.9.2) to the Snowferno website.

If you want to play the game before anyone else — for free! — let us know:
http://www.snowferno.com/2009/05/18/beta-testers-wanted/

We'll be able to add new device IDs in a week or so. Barring any huge bugs, we are aiming to submit to the App Store in about 10 days.

My iPhone 3.0 upgrade is not going well (Updated 3x)

brent — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:06:10 +0000

Update 3 (6/19/09 3:45p): It's a feature, not a bug. I hate that…

Apple - Support - Discussions - Double contacts? … shows people with similar symptoms. Why I had trouble getting iTunes to disable local syncing, I now don't know — but I will no longer be spooked by the option to enable local syncing remaining visible. And I will notice the new text which used to say "Over-the-air sync settings can be changed on your iPhone" now says "You can also choose to sync contacts/calendars with this computer."

I guess Apple removed the either/or restriction on MobileMe syncing. I suppose this could allow you to sync with a home-based MobileMe account while also syncing with a work-based desktop account.

Update 2 (6/18/09 5:46p): I think I've fooled iTunes. It's not "fixed", but here's what I did to get back on track:

I created a blank new Calendar and a blank new Address Book group.
I deleted all mail accounts on my phone, along with all their data.
This left a bunch of calendars and contacts *still* on my phone, so
I unchecked "Sync Mail Accounts" (for now).
set my phone to sync Calendars and Contacts to those empty groups I just created, and checked the corresponding Reset buttons. (The idea being that I reset all my data to nothing, the only way I could find to erase just the Calendars and Contacts.)
Then, after the Calendar/Contact sync finished (erasing all Calendar/Contact data on the phone), in a separate sync I re-added the Mail Accounts.
I ejected the phone and disconnected the USB cable.
On the phone, in the Settings for my MobileMe account, I turned on Contacts, Calendars, and Bookmarks sync. I also had to launch the Contacts and Calendars apps to initiate the data being pulled in from the MobileMe cloud.
After that all finished and I had the correct data on my phone, I deleted the blank Contact group and blank Calendar from my Mac (sync cable still unattached) to verify the Push connection was alive and working.
Only once the blank group and calendar disappeared from my phone via a true MobileMe push did I then reconnect the cable to my phone for another sync. iTunes does not show the MobileMe override for Contacts and Calendars, but at least it knows enough and disabled the local syncing.

Let's hope they address this, altho a quick scan of the Discussion Forums and other online notices seems to suggest I'm the only one on the planet having this issue. Lucky me!

Update 1 (6/18/09 3:09p): Apple Discussion forums are back online. Weird they would go offline right as the download started. Saving bandwidth, or what else…

Original Post
I'm 2 hours into my upgrade and having problems.

Also, why are Apple's discussion forums (http://discussions.apple.com/) closed? Is it to squash the possibility of an onslaught of negativeness about anything that goes wrong?

My specific problem is that my phone shows MobileMe sync is enabled, but iTunes' "Info" tab does not agree. As a result, iTunes resyncs my entire Contacts and Calendars every time, despite MobileMe push sync being enabled. I also end up with two sets of Contacts and two sets of Calendar events — one for On My Mac and the other for my MobileMe account.

Notably (or not?), after the upgrade finished, my phone was renamed to just "iPhone". Developing…

Advance press for D.C. "Darkly", part 2

brent — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:41:33 +0000

More advance press at metroweekly.com for the Washington D.C. performances of Mike's "Through A Glass, Darkly".

Dark Victory: The Gay Men's Chorus of Washington present a gripping, vital new work –Doug Rule, metroweekly.com, June 4, 2009

Tickets and performance info at gmcw.org.

Overheard in the Theatre

brent — Fri, 29 May 2009 03:45:56 +0000

Overheard at Billy Elliot, Imperial Theatre, 5/28/09
During intermission, right rear orchestra, seat Q9:

$4 for water. That's crazy!

Snowferno.com is live

brent — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:21:04 +0000

The website for our upcoming iPhone game collaboration with Ben Britten is now live. Check out snowferno.com for details, screenshots, development blog, and hear some clips from the soundtrack.

You’ve heard the saying — but where did it all begin?
Who was that snowball, and what exactly was it doing in Hell?

Snowferno is a new take on the classic marble roller game - set (very) loosely in the 9 rings of Dante’s Inferno, with 20 puzzle challenges & starring the original “Snowball-in-Hell”.

Programming and artwork are by Ben. Mike and I are writing the music and designing (most of) the levels. We are nearing a beta release and hope to hit the iTunes App Store early July.

Advance press for "Darkly" in Washington DC

brent — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:10:05 +0000

Dan O'Neill writes a great article for the upcoming production of Mike's "Through A Glass, Darkly" by the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington DC.

Singing Through the Silence of Crystal Meth Addiction
–Dan O'Neill, dc.bilerico.com, May 8, 2009

"Survivor: Live" opens today

brent — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:35:06 +0000

Our Live Entertainment projects for this year include "Survivor: Live", created by two longtime partners of FatLab Music — RWS & Associates Entertainment, Inc. and Joey Wartnerchaney of Manhattan Creative Group — and scored by me.

RWS, under agreement with CBS Television, is producing the first-ever live entertainment adaptation of the Emmy Award-winning television series, and I was thrilled to contribute the music.

The show centers around physical challenges with audience volunteers. For the show, I wrote an expanded theme song adapted from Russ Landau's iconic "Ancient Voices", plus arranged all-new tribal/hip-hop versions of "369", M.I.A.'s "Galang", and Destiny's Child's "Survivor".

Two parks open their productions today — Denver's Elitch Gardens and Oklahoma City's Frontier City — with Buffalo's Darien Lake to follow May 23. Performances are four times daily thru the end of each park's summer season.

Related:

CBS stages live show for 'Survivor' –Variety.com 3/23/09
Interactive 'Survivor: Live' stage show hits theme parks –Entertainment Weekly 3/24/09

Airfoil Speakers Touch app is a great tool for iPhone devs

brent — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:27:31 +0000

As I wrote previously, Rogue Amoeba's just-released iPhone app "Airfoil Speakers Touch" is a slightly baffling piece of software with limited use in practice. I don't think much of the criticism it is getting on the iTunes App Store is their fault tho, and the upcoming 3.0 SDK features may let Rogue Amoeba finally create what users think this app will do (and what they really want — Airfoil for iPhone!). But, for now, it's baffling.

As a composer embarking on scoring my first iPhone game, however, I now see a tremendous use for this. Our audio system has great studio speakers, but iPhone music has to be optimized for audibility over the tiny phone speaker as well. Instead of the laborious "export, mp3, copy to iTunes, sync, iPod play" routine, I can simply hijack Live or DP and beam the audio to my phone. Tweaks made on-the-fly are immediately heard.

A phone call will still interrupt the audio with no option to resume, and I still can't control the host from within the app… but it did just make my workflow much simpler.

Overheard in the Theatre

brent — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:30:56 +0000

Overheard at 9 to 5, Marquis Theatre, 4/27/09
At intermission, left mezz, row B, seats 9 & 11:

I'm gonna run to the restroom.
What's our seats… 9 & 11?
What happened to 10?
Weird.

Photos of "I Want More Life" premiere at the Guthrie

brent — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:24:04 +0000

Photos from today's "Kick-off To Kushner" launch event at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis:

(See these and more photos in the Guthrie Theater's Facebook photo album.)

The Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus debuts 'I Want More Life'

'I Want More Life' sheet music

2nd Performance of 'I Want More Life'

Previously:

Airfoil Speakers Touch released for iPhone and iPod Touch

brent — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 16:10:16 +0000

Rogue Amoeba has announced the release of Airfoil Speakers Touch, a free companion app for their cross-platform audio streaming tool Airfoil. This app gives any iPhone or iPod Touch the ability to receive streaming audio from an Airfoil app on your local wi-fi network. It's a free dowload on the iTunes App Store. Airfoil is required and a free demo can be downloaded from Rogue Amoeba. Licenses (which remove the 10 minute time-limit) are $25.

A while back I wrote about my 4-part solution to stream audio across a network and still have your listening count. It's oddly become one of our highest traffic posts, currently ranking #7 in a Google search for "airfoil iphone".

My hunch is that most people want a way to broadcast *from* their mobile device to another person's audio system — a wireless patch cable.

With this app, you still can't stream *from* your iPod Touch/iPhone in the same way that Airfoil does — it is receive-only. (I guess it would be good for like an ~~office-wide "radio" station~~ (see update below) or something?) Also, since you only receive audio while the Airfoil Speakers Touch app is open, you can't use Remote to change the song at the music source either.

But maybe if you had one phone running Remote controlling an iTunes streaming thru Airfoil to *another* iPhone receiving…..

Get 'Airfoil Speakers Touch' from the iTunes App Store

I think we'll have to wait for some of the features coming in iPhone 3.0 before streaming off the phone will be possible. I'm sure if *I'm* getting the Google hits on this, Rogue Amoeba surely is as well and will be on top of things.

UPDATED: I've played with this a little more now, and I can't see much use for it. Perhaps if you were stuck with a crappy PC that had no sound card or no headphones jack, this would give you remote wireless headphones via the phone. And because you have to launch the mobile app before Airfoil can broadcast to that destination, my idea of joining a "radio station" wouldn't be possible. Using this app out-of-reach of the Airfoil source would just get annoying. Third, a phone call properly silences the incoming music, but that results in audio reverting to the host computer's speakers… hope that's okay in your quiet office! Oh, and it doesn't automatically reconnect (yet?) when the phone call is over.

I love Rogue Amoeba's apps, but Airfoil Speakers Touch feels like they are just cutting their teeth on the iPhone SDK for when bigger and more useful companion apps become possible.

Previously:

iPhone Remote app + Airfoil + Airfoil Speakers = iTunes Heaven

Guthrie's Kushner Festival launch event to feature Mike's newest choral work

brent — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:24:58 +0000

Mike's newest choral work, "I Want More Life", commissioned by Dr. Stan Hill and the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus and with text from Tony Kushner's "Angels in America: Perestroika", will premiere in Minneapolis on April 18 at the Guthrie Theater's free "Kick-Off To Kushner" event.

Kick-Off to Kushner Flyer

This performance of "I Want More Life" is one of five planned performances by the TC-GMC in conjunction with the Guthrie and the Kushner Festival.

Previously:

Where to find us in '09 (and a 2008 wrap-up)

Reminder: Set your blogs ahead too

brent — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 15:04:55 +0000

About the only thing left in my world that doesn't adjust itself to Daylight Savings Time are my WordPress installations. So, along with that wall clock and old VCR, don't forget to set your blogs ahead one hour, too.

In your control panel, go to:
Settings > General

…and choose a timezone value that is +1 your current setting. (i.e. Eastern Standard Time is "UTC -5", so for the summer you need to set it to "UTC -4").

Finale 2009 still sucks

brent — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:09:48 +0000

Finale 2009, by its own admission, is more paid bug fix than new feature upgrade, and even then it falls short. It is a program full of potential yet completely hampered by bugs. Those skilled in using Finale do not really *use* the program, as much as they have developed a vast palette of workarounds to get the output desired. Using it is feels like building a deck of cards.

I was glad to see that 2009 fixed their incompatibility with MOTU devices using non-default CueMix names (as in "Finale crashes-on-launch, can't use the program at all" incompatibility). They left this specific fix off the list — but Finale 2007 worked, 2008 didn't, and now 2009 does again. (Yes, I deleted my preferences.) $90 upgrade for nothing, thanks '08. It stayed in the box and was never installed.

"Save as PDF…" problems not fixed since 2007
OS X's built-in "Save as PDF…" feature is one of the best things ever to happen to Finale for sharing music electronically. But just try to "Save as PDF…" a part that has a slash in the name (say "Piano/Vocal" for instance). Finale just decides to leave the part name off. This would barely make sense on WINDOWS (maybe replace the illegal character with an underscore?), nevermind that "/" is a legal character for Mac files. WTF? And hopefully you don't want to "Save as PDF…" both the score *and* the offending part in the same "Print…" command, because the part will overwrite the score without any warning, and you'll be left with only the part — but named to look like the score. Nice hack-up of OS-level file operations.

Another example of bad Save box behavior is evident in Auto-Saves. Old Finale files always open as "Untitled" in newer versions. If you have Auto-Save enabled, it will prompt you to "Save As…" upon the first saving. But, if you have any other dialog box open at the time Auto-Save is triggered (which in Finale is extremely likely), the "Save As…" sheet opens behind your dialog box. The save window can be clicked forward in front of the dialog box you're in, but it never gains the mouse or keyboard focus. Meanwhile, it did manage to steal the focus *away* from the box you were just in, thus leaving you with zero control over the program, no ability to save your work, and your only recourse is to Force Quit, losing all your work. This is exactly the opposite result you should get with an Auto-Save feature. This is not new to 2009. Does *anybody* at MakeMusic actually use Finale on a Mac? They'd find this bug in under 15 minutes. How is this okay in commercially-released software — not to mention, version 2009b.r3!!

Other little things
Staff styles no longer have the final say. My old trick of selectively enabling "Allow optimization" on only certain measures doesn't work anymore. And when I tried to selectively hide Measure Numbers (staff style with Items To Display > Measure Numbers unchecked), it did nothing.

The new 2009 Expressions categories work beautifully. But the arbitrarily hard-coded six categories is odd, nevermind the fact that it doesn't merge categories when you import a library file. How else do you push a house style out to other files, then? The whole thing is still clunky and does not foster any confidence. Plus, I heard these categories only came to Finale because Sibelius does them that way.

Lyrics still are tedious in Finale. You already hope and pray they don't get messed up, and after a certain amount of copy/paste, you give up on keeping anything orderly behind the scenes. I was surprised that now in 2009 Automatic Hyphens and Word Extensions don't display when you first open the file. Open and close the "Edit Lyrics…" dialog box and they reappear. Why? Why not! (It's not every file, just don't forget to always check that the program is doing its job.)

Now that Finale 2009 "runs" sufficiently on Leopard and our score files aren't stranded forever, it's finally time to box this line and investigate Sibelius.

Where to find us in '09 (and a 2008 wrap-up)

brent — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 21:21:08 +0000

2008 ended with the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus' premiere of Mike's oratorio "Through A Glass, Darkly" being cited for "Outstanding Achievement in Opera" by MN's Lavender Magazine (Thanks! But…opera?). At least five more choruses around the country have expressed interest in staging their own concert productions in the near-future.

"Last Days of Left Eye" was released on DVD on September 9.

"Go-Go Beach" played a few more places including high schools in Australia and Metro Detroit, bringing us to 107 lifetime performances spanning 4 countries and 12 US states.

I wrote the music for a full-length dance show conceived and choreographed by Jeff Shade called "Playground" which was presented in December at the Manhattan Movement and Arts Center.

Here's a quick overview of some things coming up for us in 2009.

March 25-29 - "Go-Go Beach" at Centennial High School in Roswell, GA.
April 18 - Mike's newest choral work, "I Want More Life", will be premiered by the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus for the occasion of the Tony Kushner Celebration at the Guthrie Theater. Commissioned by the Chorus especially for the Kushner Festival, the work is a TTBB setting of a monologue from Kushner's play "Angels In America: Perestroika". The performance will be at the Festival's Community Kick-Off event prior to the opening of "Caroline, or Change".
May 3 - "I Want More Life" will be performed by the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis at a concert in celebration of the 40th Anniversary of the Minneapolis-based professional chorus VocalEssence. The TC-GMC was invited to join five other choruses to mark the occasion. (tickets)
May 8-9, 15-16 - "Go-Go Beach" at ShowBiz Starz in Taylor, MI.
May 15 - The second performance of "I Want More Life" in conjunction with the Tony Kushner Celebration at the Guthrie Theatre, performed opening night of the world premiere of Kushner's new play "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures".
June 2 - The third and fourth performances of "I Want More Life", for the Guthrie's "Talk-About" series.
June 6-7 - "Through A Glass, Darkly", performed by the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington DC at Lisner Auditorium - GW Campus, Washington, DC. (tickets)
June 8 - The fifth performance of "I Want More Life", prior to Tony Kushner’s “Global Voice” talk at the Guthrie Theatre.
June 19-20 - "Through A Glass, Darkly", performed by the Miami Gay Men's Chorus at the Miami Beach Colony Theatre.

That's not to say I'm not doing anything… just nothing with dates yet. Ben Britten, Mike, and I are writing an iPhone game, hopefully releasable by mid-year. Being our first game together, we really don't have any idea how long it will take to complete, tho. I am also developing a theatre-related website with some folks, but it's too early to talk about that. And a few music projects in mind, once the paying work clears up.

Mike is also scoring a short film by filmmaker Andrew Lund and edited by our film cohort John Daschbach. It is looking to be a serious contender this film festival season. There are some rumblings about possible future choral commissions, too. More as things develop.