Plaidophile

I am in this week's Song Fight!. I enter as Sockpuppet. Please listen to the songs and vote for the ones you like.

now is a good time.

So the recent release of the abysmally complex and un-fun DJ Hero inspired me to pull out my old Beatmania stuff and play it a bit more. It is still an excellent game. So I brought it to work and played it a bit during a break, and it was disappointing that everyone who walked by thought I was playing DJ Hero and wondered why the graphics "were so 8-bit." All modern rhythm games owe so much to Beatmania (it was the first to have the "notes falling toward a controller" layout, and the first to have a mock musical instrument for a controller, and so many aspects of its design and presentation are things that are copied pretty much exactly in the more "modern" rhythm games) and it's almost criminal that most hardcore rhythm game players don't even know that it exists.

Things I like about Beatmania:

• It has an incredible variety of music. When R343L came by she said, "Oh, it's like Rock Band but with techno," but she just happened to come by when I was playing a techno track. If she'd been there for the previous one she'd have heard some Motown-style funk, and the next one was new-wave fusion jazz. There's also classical and rock and pop and IDM and who knows what the hell else. Much of it is hard to classify, like most of my broad tastes in musical styles.
• You are actually playing the music. On most rhythm games you're just hitting buttons, and hitting the wrong button will make the overall pre-mixed track mute, or (on a good day) play some random jarring instrument noises. On Beatmania, though, you are actually playing a sampler keyboard, whose sample triggers are changing as part of the timeline. It is totally transparent to the player, BUT it means that if you mess up the timing or miss a note or play the wrong key, you actually get off-time or partially-missing or wrong samples. Another side-effect of this is that you really have to play with your ears as much as your eyes, and so it doesn't matter that there's no way to calibrate it for display lag because if you're looking at the event line, you're doing it wrong.
• Relatedly (and completely unlike DJ Hero), when you are scratching it is actually scratching. Okay, it's not speed- or direction-sensitive, and the metaphor of the turntable can vary often (sometimes it's a scratch, sometimes it's a spin, sometimes it's just another sample trigger) but when you're on a scratch-heavy track, every scratch you make produces a separate scratch sound. You have to be able to count small numbers very quickly, which is a lot harder than it sounds.
• You get a hell of a lot of music on each disc. Yeah, in the days before DLC, you had to buy additional CD-ROMs to get more songs. But each disc has about an hour's worth of songs. (Because the tracks are composed of samples, and often have the same samples used across songs, you easily get a CD's worth of music, sometimes more, even with all the audio tracks being separate.) Yeah, some of the later mixes have repeats from the previous discs, but so what? Each disc is a unique gaming experience.
• The visuals! Most rhythm games give you basically nothing interesting visually. Oh, yay, a band on stage, big deal. Beatmania gives you fun semi-interactive music videos that react to the song and to how you're doing. And the visuals are fun, with crayon scrawlings and tongue-in-cheek discotheque visuals and occasional IDM-ish weirdness.
• Winning doesn't involve just not failing, but ending on a high note. (Actually it's possible to completely bomb out at the beginning and then recover towards the end. Finishing strong is more important. Except in expert mode.)
• Even though it's over 12 years old it's still fun and challenging, and the later mixes took it a bit further and provided multiple difficulty levels and even multiple arrangements of the songs. Okay, sure, Guitar Hero and Rock Band have the multiple difficulty levels, but that's just adding more events you have to hit more or less on-cue to keep the same sounds going as always. On Beatmania, the fact you're playing the notes directly means the advanced difficulties actually start to fall apart in different ways, and you know it. And there's always new challenges, too — expert mode (where you have a budget for mistakes for an entire setlist), double mode (two controllers one gamer), special challenges (key randomization, hidden/sudden/extra-fast note markers), and probably lots of other stuff that isn't even occurring to me right now.

It is a shame it took Konami so long to release a version for the US. It is a shame that by the time they did, reviewers thought it was just a Guitar Hero ripoff. It is a shame that the US version also lost much of what made the game so much fun (the visuals were genuinely "serious," the song selection was oriented towards American pop and bland mainstream electronica, and the Konami original songs seemed to be selected based on fitting in with that rather than based on the fun factor). It's a shame that even with how abysmal DJ Hero is, people think DJ Hero is some sort of genre-defining thing. (Not even the mashup aspect of it is new — Beatmania has had several mashups in its oeuvre, albeit mashups of other Beatmania songs).

It's also a shame it's so hard on my wrists because holy cow did I miss playing this wonderful game.

I have basically every worthwhile mix for the PS1 (except Sound of Tokyo, which I should be receiving soon, having finally sourced a copy on eBay), and the first Gameboy mix, which is basically a "best of" for the first few PS1 mixes, in chiptune form, and the chiptunes are exceptionally well-done. Right now I'm considering also getting either an import or modded PS2 so I can start building a IIDX collection, even though IIDX didn't really seem so much fun (since it seemed to be all about the difficulty instead of the fun). It's just too bad I didn't get back into this stuff a few years ago when it was still easy to source a PS2 modchip. (Maybe not so bad for my wrists though.)

Dear Sir McCartney:

While you think you may be speaking in your own interest, anyone who has wanted to download pirated versions of the Beatles catalog has likely already done so, as there are many avenues by which to do that which don't involve an official EMI release. All you are doing by insisting that EMI recompense you for any pirated "leaks" of an official EMI downloadable version is preventing the people who want to buy them legally from doing so.

Love,
A fan

So, ever since the Logic 9.0.1 update went out, it's been wonderfully solid. Thanks, Apple!

However, there is still one issue with it which has been bothering me since version 7 at least (and maybe even earlier): it would be really nice if it were smarter about prefetching upcoming audio files, so that if I've, say, had a project open and idle for a few hours, it doesn't give me an "audio engine overload" error every single time the playhead touches a new uncached file for the first time.

The easy workaround is to just do an offline bounce but that's silly, and only partially solves it for extremely complex projects. Most of the time Logic is sitting there with an empty HD load indicator, so I know it could be better about actively prefetching assets. It's not like playhead motion is a Turing-complete problem or whatever (it only moves in one direction and usually doesn't even change speed that much).

Obviously, freeze tracks aren't the answer, since it just replaces a bunch of small un-cached files with a bunch of large uncached files.

Maybe there's a buried setting. It's not like Logic is short on obscure preference panes after 20 years of accretion...

I have a song in this week's fight, entered as "Sockpuppet" as usual. You know what to do (namely, listen to all the songs and vote for the ones you like).

You are missing out on one or more friends-only entries. Please log in, if you have an account.

So I upgraded to Logic 9, and have finally had a chance to use it for a new project from scratch. I like how keyboard focus is now finally indicated on the screen, so I don't have to click on the element I want to manipulate every time just to be sure it's going to go to the right thing (which was a major problem with 8 and negated much of the point to keyboard shortcuts to begin with), but on the minus side they completely screwed up the way comps work.

For a while I've been thinking about submitting my album to Magnatune for distribution and licensing and the like. The thing is that for their submissions they want just a single track from the album, and I'm not sure which is the single best track on the album.

So if everyone could just list their top three tracks from it, and which of theirs is their absolute favorite, I will factor that into my decision process.

Everyone I've talked to about my album seems to have a different "this is the best track!" opinion but maybe if there is enough overlap between top-threes that will give me a better idea of which is most likely to be accepted.

I'd post a detailed writeup but having just seen the video recording, I have to say that it's followed basically the same arc as my Austin set, with different songs and a different cast of characters.

We are streaming the show live on the Internet. The show starts at 6 PM PDT tonight. My set is scheduled to start at 9:30 PM (the headliner!) but you should watch the whole show, especially since I'll be drumming for Naked Philosophy (the opening act) and singing in John Benjamin's chorus at 8:30ish.

I'll also be in a few of tomorrow's sets (Jon Eric and Octothorpe and maybe others?) but we don't have a lineup scheduled just yet. I also forget when the show itself starts.

If you like kinda-difficult abstract-art shooter games with blippy music, you might like to know that I did the music and sound design for Broken Garden. Enjoy!

I forgot to mention it over here on my increasingly-neglected blog but I am going to Song Fight! Live this year. I am leaving the loop pedal at home and am going to try my darndest to get a good accompaniment from people on actual instruments. So if you happen to be in the Spokane area on the 17th and 18th I would appreciate an audience!

Apparently there will be a (small) cover charge (club sound guys cost money) but I have no idea what it is. Probably $5ish.

Martinis: It was fun to make these for people, having practiced quite a lot lately. Not only did we finish off my bottle of Tanqueray, but we put a decent dent into the 1750mL bottle of Sapphire. Highly recommended. A+

I have had this song stuck in my head since last Friday make it stop make it stop make it stop

DDR 4th Mix: The 7 Jump

Yay, I entered Song Fight! this week. You know the drill — listen to the songs and select your favorites (one of which should be Sockpuppet).

My lyrics (and remix pack) are over yonder.

Woo!

Woo! Now I just have to ship 5 off to CDBaby and then they can finally be available for sale!

If anyone who knows me in person wants to buy one right away, I guess $10 is a good amount. (On CDBaby they'll be like $12 or something but then they take a $4 cut.) Let me know in advance if we're going to be in the same spot and you want a copy.

So, the world of independent music distribution has gotten pretty interesting. Right now the key players seem to be CDBaby (fulfillment and digital distribution), TuneCore (digital distribution and manufacturing), and Disc Makers (manufacturing and digital distribution). They each have their strengths and weaknesses in each arena.

It's about freaking time.

Of course, after I spent the $19 for Discmakers to generate a UPC, I found out that TuneCore provides them for free. Meh. I also found out that TuneCore does manufacturing now and they're about the same price as Discmakers, so I could have saved a lot of trouble in dealing with Discmakers' crappy interface. Meh. Oh well.

No idea when it'll be available on iTunes/Amazon/etc. (Tunecore said "within 4-6 weeks") but I should be getting the first 100 CDs sometime next week. I guess I'll send like 20 of them to CDBaby and see how that goes, and one to Pandora, and so on. (And for the next 100 I'll try Tunecore's manufacturing instead.)