PSA regarding Komplete Kontrol and Apple Silicon

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PSA: If you’re running Komplete on an M1 Mac under a DAW which supports an Intel/Rosetta plugin bridge (such as Logic), DO NOT update Komplete Kontrol to v2.8.0! This WILL break compatibility with any Reaktor or Battery instruments you’re using! (As well as any other legacy Intel VST2s that you’re hosting by Komplete Kontrol for whatever reason.)

Komplete Kontrol 2.7.2 still runs under the Rosetta bridge, but 2.8 has been updated to be M1-compatible — but Battery and Reaktor HAVE NOT yet, and they’re not expecting to have those updated for a few more months.

There are a few workarounds:

  1. Launch your DAW under Rosetta (and lose your CPU performance everywhere)
  2. Convert the Komplete Kontrol plugin to directly use Reaktor/Battery (and lose NKI and preset browsing)
  3. Perish (or, y'know, wait for the plugins to update, same diff really)
  4. Update: Native Instruments were kind enough to provide a download of v2.7.2 for those who need it

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Another Novembeat compleat

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This year I managed to do 25 out of 30 tracks, and some of them were even used in games!

I’ll be releasing the Bandcamp version of the album on Friday (which is, of course, Bandcamp Friday), and if you wait until then to buy it I get the full purchase price. (Better yet, buy my entire discography and receive a crapton of music spanning over 20 years of releases!)

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Novembeat 2022 plans

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My plan for Novembeat this year is to produce music that would be suitable for looping background tracks on video games. Ideally this would be driven by folks making music requests for their game jam games!

As always I’ll be releasing the album on my Bandcamp and my itch.io page. Most likely I’ll have Bandcamp just have the “soundtrack” version and itch have both “soundtrack” and “bgm” versions (where “bgm” will be suitable for looping, as opposed to “soundtrack” which will just play in one-shot mode).

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Focusrite 18i20: A quick review

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Yesterday my other big hardware upgrade arrived, a Focusrite 18i20 for my Mac mini in the studio, to upgrade the 18i8 I had before (which is now on the Mac Studio in the office).

The tl;dr: for most people the 18i8 is just fine and the 18i20 doesn’t really add anything. Consider the 18i20 only if you have a couple of fussy needs.

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Giving vinyl another shot

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Several years ago I tried using Qrates to do a pressing of Refactor. Unfortunately it didn’t hit the minimum preorder size, so the project was canceled.

Recently someone at Qrates reached out to me and was enthusiastic about the idea of me giving it another try, and since Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To has somewhat broader appeal, I decided to give it another shot.

So, if you would be so kind as to visit the Qrates crowdfunding page and maybe even consider buying a copy or two or ten, it would be greatly appreciated.

Un-sticking from Bandcamp

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So, within a day of the Bandcamp announcement, several folks had already started building their own tools for escaping from Bandcamp. Of particular note (and brought to my attention many times) is one called blamscamp, which is a web-based GUI that builds a web player bundle for itch.io.

This tool definitely has a lot of merit, but in the near term it only handles one specific use case, namely taking a collection of already-encoded-for-the-web mp3s and turning it into an itch previewer. The player itself is nicely-written, but this isn’t the sort of tool which works well for me.

So, I adapted the player engine into my own version, which is a CLI tool. Feed it a JSON spec, audio files, and ancillary data (album art and lyrics and such), and it automatically encodes and tags the album for MP3 preview, high-quality MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC, and builds a web player (based on the original blamscamp’s although it’s diverged quite a lot now). And, if you install butler, it can also automatically upload these bundles to your itch page!

Here is the first public demo of it.

With all that said, I do still intend to keep using Bandcamp as my primary music distribution platform; it’s been very good to me over the years, and just because they’re being bought out by a questionable company doesn’t mean it’ll actually go downhill. But diversifying my offerings is always a good thing, and by posting my music in both places, I get even more of a potential audience. Plus, the satisfaction of owning (a big part of) my own delivery pipeline.

The pyBlamscamp pipeline can also be adapted to anything that takes a bundle of files; it could also be used, for example, to simplify the process of posting albums on Gumroad.

At present the main difficulties of it are that it’s a Python application and that it relies on external encoders. One of my potential change sin the future is to have it self-host the encoder libraries which would make a lot of things easier, and would also make it more feasible to provide a stand-alone application.

It’d also be really handy to have tools that make it easier to create and edit the .json file. That’s definitely a rough edge that’s not suitable for general end users.

There’s also a heck of a lot of things that still need to be done even for my own uses. But for now, this tool is at least ready to get started with.

EDIT: god damnit I should have called it “bandcamp” aejrklajrlajlajla i’m not gonna rename this twice in one day