Do you think you’re beeeee-tter off aloooo-ne?
Do you think you’re beeeee-tter off aloooo-ne?

I can take the rain on the roof of this empty house, that don’t bother me I can take a few tears now and then and just let them out I’m not afraid to cry Every once in a while even though goin on with you gone still upsets me There are days Every now and again i pretend i’m okay but that’s not what gets me

What hurts the most, was being so close And having so much to say And watchin’ you walk away Never knowing, what could have been And not seein that lovin’ you Is what I was tryin’ to do

It’s hard to deal with the pain of losing you everywhere i go But i’m doin’ it It’s hard to force that smile when i see our old friends and i’m alone Still harder gettin’ up, gettin’ dressed, livin’ with this regret But i know if I could do it over I would trade, give away all the words that i saved in my heart that i left unspoken

What hurts the most, is being so close And having so much to say And watchin’ you walk away Never knowing, what could have been And not seein’ that lovin’ you Is what I was tryin’ to do

I’m not afraid to cry Every once in a while even though goin’ on with you gone still upsets me There are days Every now and again I pretend I’m okay but that’s not what gets me

What hurts the most, was being so close And having so much to say And watchin’ you walk away And never knowing, what could have been And not seein’ that lovin’ you Is what I was tryin’ to do

1. Become angry: call them thieves, sue them, complain about the sorry state of morals, and decry the fall of civilization?
2. Accept the cold, hard truth: that things have changed, the vast majority of people have already voted with their feet against your worldview, and that they will continue to do so?

One of these choices will let you realize you need to adapt and force you to rethink how to make money. The other will lead you to the Unemployment Office as you attempt a futile fight against gravity.

The choice is yours to make. Choose wisely.

1. Open the VMware .vmx / .cfg file of your VM.
   1. Find the config entries labeled sound. Kill them all.
   2. Put the following instead:

      sound.present = "TRUE"
      sound.autodetect = "TRUE"
      sound.fileName = "-1"
      sound.directSound = "false"
      sound.highPriority = "TRUE"
      sound.maxLength = 2048
      sound.smallBlockSize = 1024

2. If you are using Steinberg Nuendo in your VM:
   1. Go to Devices -> Device configuration…
   2. Select VST Multitrack on the left panel.
   3. Change the ASIO controller to ASIO DirectX Full Duplex

Let’s hope this works for you as well as it worked for me. Here’s the obligatory screenshot:

See that? It’s Steinberg Nuendo performing a mix down under Windows XP, running under a VMware machine in a headless Linux computer, displaying to a virtual Xrealvnc screen, displayed on my desktop computer using KRDC (my favorite VNC client). KRDC is set to resize the desktop — that’s why Windows looks a bit blurry. For kicks, XMMS is playing the mix down as it’s being generated, from a shared folder in the Windows virtual machine.

Refer to my previous “cluster computing” audio hack to understand why I went to such lengths.

It’s a 3-hour mix, so the mix down will take a while. I’l just sit and chill.

What do you do when:

• You want to finish a mix set using Steinberg Nuendo.
• You run Linux.
• Your Wine setup broke after a recent OS upgrade.
• Your desktop machine does not have a sound card
  • You can’t even put a sound card in your desktop machine, because it’s an 1U blade server.
  • But you own a separate slave machine with two sound cards, hooked up to a stereo.

Simple. You concoct the absolute hack:

1. Network your desktop and slave machines via Ethernet.
2. Install PulseAudio on the slave machine.
   1. Configure PulseAudio so it starts as a system-wide daemon.
   1. Activate EsounD compatibility on the PulseAudio server.
3. Install VMWare on your desktop machine.
   1. Install Windows XP on a VMWare virtual machine in your desktop server.
   2. Network your XP virtual machine into the Ethernet LAN you already have.
   3. Install WinESD on your XP virtual machine.
   4. Set it up to communicate with the slave machine.
4. Just for kicks (and everyday music enjoyment):
   1. Set your desktop machine to use the PulseAudio server in the slave machine as the system-wide audio output.
   2. Set up the volume control menu entry to run the volume control in the slave machine directly, displaying it back on your desktop machine.
   3. Hook desktop event notifications to Festival so your desktop machine speaks loud and clear through your stereo.

Today, I did it. I completed the Perfect Setup even more perfectly than the original Perfect Setup. And I have proof:

Points to ponder:

• You’re witnessing my desktop computer’s KDE desktop.
• The black window to the left with Winamp and the Sound properties capplet is Windows XP running under VMWare. It’s a virtual machine.
• The window at the right is a set of VU meters included with the PulseAudio monitoring and configuration software. That monitor is running on my machine, but it’s actually monitoring the audio output on the slave machine (conveniently tucked away in a corner).
• See the terminal window? I put that there so you could see that the host name of the desktop machine is karen, while the host name of the machine serving PulseAudio is gabriela (you can tell that by looking at the PulseAudio manager.
• The little parrot at the top right corner of the screen is the KTTSD agent in charge of speaking notifications out loud.
• The speaker icon is the KMix volume control. Obviously, it’s not running on my desktop machine, but rather via SSH X Window forwarding on the other computer.

This would have never happened thanks to the work of many talented people who actually wrote the software that powers this Rube Goldberg contraption. Not to mention that I just saved $150 in an USB sound card. I think I’m gonna spend that money on drinks tonight, just because I can.

Next step, getting me a second headless computer with WiFi and hooking it up to the stereo in my room, then have PulseAudio broadcast the audio via RTP on the local network. It’d be nice not having to get out of bed to listen to music. Just kidding! That would be overengineering… but, oh, well, this post is the bastard child of overengineering, isn’t it?

Thanks, Lennart!

Update: it turns out Steinberg Nuendo is quite picky in its choice of audio drivers, and WinESD is just too poor for it.  Therefore, I reverted to running Windows XP on a VMware virtual machine in the headless slave computer with the sound card, and displaying VMware via VNC (read it, it’s got screenshots!). Besides, if you manage to run Steinberg Nuendo with Wine directly (mine broke:-( ), it’s much, much faster, so do that instead.

More specifically, these ones. I mean, Apple’s phones were good, right? But these Sennheisers seem a few steps up the ladder.

Things I can notice:

• They seem to fit my ear more tightly than the Apple ones. Both do seal my ear canal perfectly, but the Sennheisers don’t slip out like the Apple ones sometimes did.
• They have an amazing SPL rating. Let’s not get technical — they sound like the turbine of a 747.
• Their sound is crystal clear. I can’t really tell any difference in clearness from the Apples, so I’ll give them a tie in that sense, but I can definitely notice much more mid-level and high presence in the Sennheisers. The downside is that the bass (though incredibly powerful and punchy) seems to sound lower in comparison.
• As a consequence of having more definition and volume in the high range, I now suffer the pain of additional noticeable hiss using my Palm T|X. Don’t buy a T|X if you’re into music.
• The wire and asymmetrical. I don’t know what’s with the asymmetry thingie.
• The outside appearance is definitely not as slick as Apple’s in-ears.

Well, I’ve been using them for a couple of days now, and I am now fully on the route to becoming deaf sooner than expected. I love them!

So what do I do?

I run Nuendo on Linux. Here’s a quick primer — you should be familiar, very familiar with Linux in order to do this.

But Nuendo didn’t work originally. That’s because Nuendo requires something called ASIO, related to low-latency audio output — why this is required on Linux as well escapes my comprehension, since Linux already has very low-latency output.

Here’s what I did.

Install wine and wine-dev

I’m using KUbuntu Feisty, so your mileage may vary, but you need both packages (yes, the development package as well) because you will be compiling something after a few minutes. In case you’re using RPM-based distros like CentOS or Fedora, the development package is wine-devel.

Link Nuendo to your ~/.wine/drive_c folder

I never “installed” Nuendo using the installation software. I just linked my Windows partition to /home/rudd-o/.wine/drive_c. In my machine, that’s where Wine expects to find the C: drive.

Your mileage may vary. You may want to copy the contents of your C: drive there, or use winecfg to point Wine to the right directory.

Download wineasio

wineasio is a library that allows Wine’s JACK output plugin to serve ASIO programs. Nuendo is one of those.

Here’s the download.

Install JACK and its development files

In my machine, the two packages I needed to install were jackd and libjack0.100.0-dev. Again, your mileage may vary.

Get asio.h

asio.h… I got that file using a samizdat method, because otherwise I would have had to sign an agreement with Steinberg. Turns out asio.h is quite widespread in the World Wide Blag. Just jump here and copy the text. If this link ever dies, just look for file:asio.h in Google Code Search.

Uncompress the wineasio tarball

And then place the asio.h file in the uncompressed folder.

Compile and deploy

• Open a terminal and change to the wineasio uncompressed folder.
• Run make. At this point, if you failed to install the required development packages, you will see a slew of compiler error messages. Go back and reread the earlier sections.
• Then, as root, run make install.
• Then, back as your regular user, run regsvr32 wineasio.dll.

Configure Wine to use the JACK driver

Run winecfg on the terminal. On the Audio tab, select the JACK output plugin.

Now I had to do a fix, because my Wine installation wasn’t finding a file named libjack.so.0. I did this:

ln -s /usr/lib/libjack-0.100.0.so.0.0.23 /usr/lib/libjack.so.0

So go find a library named libjack-0.something.so.something, and link it so it’s named /usr/lib/libjack.so.0. Why my distribution failed to do this for me, escapes my understanding.

Start the JACK driver

This is easy. I used the command jackd -d alsa -r 44100.

Start Nuendo

Use your terminal to change to your Nuendo folder, and then run wine nuendo.exe.

Pay attention to any of the error messages. If Nuendo starts up and doesn’t say that the audio engine couldn’t be enabled, then you’re set to start recording and playing back.

Good luck with your Nuendo and Linux. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m heading for my latest 6-hour set/megamix.

Update: I have a showcase of two alternate methods that use VMware and Windows directly if you can’t make this work. I know it’s hard to make this method work, and with my machine recently updated to Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, this method stopped working.

Cómo lo sé? Porque visité la página de eventos de last.fm:

Lamentablemente no viene a Guayaquil.

Lo que probablemente no sepan es que, en aproximadamente un mes, una nueva y probablemente sólida estrategia para ganarle a la RIAA se pondrá a prueba legal en los EE.UU.

La extremadamente ingeniosa estrategia

Comencemos por el principio. En los EE.UU. (y en muchos otros países, pero ciñámonos a los EE.UU.), descargar música de Internet es completamente legal.

Ilegal: compartir música, mas no descargarla

Lo que no es legal es compartir dicha música. Es decir, si Juan me pasa una canción por Internet, el alegato de delincuencia cae sobre Juan, no sobre mí.

Puesto que todos los programas peer-to-peer suelen compartir una porción apreciable de las bibliotecas musicales de sus usuarios, éstos suelen ser los objetivos más socorridos de la RIAA. Para el efecto de este artículo, imaginemos al infame programa KaZaA.

Cómo te “pilla” la RIAA normalmente

La RIAA tiene en su nómina a unos pillos mercenarios que fabrican un software de computadora llamado MediaSentry.

MediaSentry no es más que una especie de KaZaA supercargado y semiautomático. Su misión: buscar canciones en las computadoras de otras personas, y descargarlas para constatar que la RIAA posee el título de copyright de dichas canciones.

Una vez que MediaSentry te pescó y descargó un par de canciones de tu computadora, lo que sigue es rápido. La RIAA te enjuicia en una jurisdicción lejana de la tuya, te avisa con poquísimo tiempo de anticipación, y te manda una “carta formulario” donde lista los resultados del programa MediaSentry. En las deposiciones entregadas a la corte, la RIAA hace referencia a una infracción continua y presente de copyright.

Parece que te tuvieran de los cojones, ¿no?

Inocente hasta que se comprueba lo contrario

Excepto por un problemita, que nadie había notado hasta ahí. Técnicamente, la RIAA no tiene ninguna evidencia incriminatoria. Absolutamente ninguna.

Obviamente, las transmisiones iniciada por MediaSentry no cuentan, por múltiples razones, entre las cuales está que MediaSentry comete sus fechorías en nómina de la RIAA. Tampoco perdamos de vista que la RIAA está engañando activamente a los usuarios de programas peer-to-peer — la legalidad de aquel acto es por demás cuestionable.

Es decir, como la RIAA no tiene evidencia de que tú has infringido la ley al transmitir una canción a un usuario que no posea la licencia para escucharla, entonces la RIAA no tiene forma de establecer que un delito ha tenido lugar.

Todo se reduce a la elemental distinción entre simplemente “poner a disposición” y “transmitir”. Mientras la RIAA no pueda probar que tú hayas transmitido ilegítimamente una canción al menos a un usuario, simplemente no hay caso.

Y eres inocente hasta que se pruebe lo contrario.

Ergo, eres inocente.

Al menos esta es la tesis que será probada en unos días.

¿Ramificaciones?

Una, muy importante. Recordemos que en los EE.UU, si esta tesis es sustentada por la corte como válida, quedará asentada como ley común hasta que una corte superior la revierta.

¿Y cuál es? Pues, simple: la RIAA no podrá más iniciar juicios usando estas tácticas rastreras de telemarketero, y se verá obligada a obtener evidencia genuina. Lo cual es un poco difícil ya que la RIAA no cuenta con la colaboración de los amantes de la música. Ese es el ligero problema con demandar a los clientes de uno.

Es tan obvio que no sé por qué a nadie se le había ocurrido antes. Supongo, empero, que ahora es obvio porque alguien más lo pensó primero.

Ahora habrá que buscar una estrategia para protegerse de los soplones que la RIAA con seguridad contratará para seguir demandando a sus clientes .

It sounds better

Honest. I’ve done the comparison myself. An MP3 in its highest quality settings, with the best encoder there is (LAME), still doesn’t sound exactly like the original. An Ogg Vorbis file encoded using an average of 130 kbps (quality setting 4.9) is indistinguishable from the original.

I did the tests using an expensive sound card and a very expensive set of Technics headphones. The difference is dramatic.

It’s free

Yes, it’s free. Free as in free beer. But, more importantly, free as in freedom. You’re free to do whatever you want with Ogg. You do not need to pay royalties for software patents. You’re not at the mercy of giant corporations

How do I switch?

You don’t need to switch your music collection to Ogg. The best course of action is to just rip any new CDs to Ogg directly. The Play Ogg page has more info about it.

If your portable music player doesn’t support it, there are countless player managers that will transcode the files into MP3 before saving them to your portable music player. For example: I have a Palm T|X that doesn’t support Ogg (it does, but let’s pretend it doesn’t). Amarok transcodes each Ogg music file into MP3 before saving it to my Palm’s memory card. I don’t have to do anything — it’s fully automatic!

Basshunter is an all-out genius.  That song almost made me cry.

Magic box performs this wonderful song:

Here I am,
I know it’s late… It’s crazy….
….maybe not….
I’m sorry marin…

Marin, I hope you can hear what I’m saying
Marin, ’cause I always needed to tell it
Marin, I’m not here to ask you to love me
Marin, at least tell me that you forgive me.

Chorus:

Marin, I want you to know that I’m sorry
Marin, I really cannot keep on worrying
Marin, I’m feeling that we could be happy
Marin, in time, what happened to feelings?
Marin, without you a really went crazy
Marin, so long, and why are you still waiting?

Marin, I hope you can hear what I’m saying
Marin, ’cause I always needed to tell it
Marin, I’m not here to ask you to long me
Marin, at least tell me that you forgive me.

Chorus:

Marin, I want you to know that I’m sorry
Marin, I really cannot keep on worrying
Marin, I’m feeling that we could be happy
Marin, in time, what happened to feelings?
Marin, without you a really went crazy
Marin, so long, and why are you still waiting?