I recently completed new version if the music player for my friend Erik and his music production studio GE Music. You can see it live here:
http://producerstoolbox.com/ProducersToolbox_Music/geMusicPlayer44.html
This version has numerous improvements over the previous one. It is much more flexible in how it handles music libraries, allowing for multiple library files of several formats and multiple mp3 directories at arbitrary server paths, all driven by config scripts for easy library updates and management. There was also a major behind-the-scenes refactoring of the code base and a slew of minor bug, so overall the app is much more robust. Also, it now displays album cover art for each Playlist, dynamically loading the album images.
I’m happy because the app has needed some attention for a while, and also because this was my end of the software-development-for-studio-time arrangement I worked out with Erik.
Over the weekend I began converting my ProTools projects from PT7 under Windows to PT8 on the Mac in preparation for brining the songs over to his studio. This meant rendering out all the MIDI instruments (mostly the drums) one track at a time as audio and flying them back into the project. Kind of tedious but not too bad. The one snag I hit was that I double-tracked the snare drum, using two different samples from two different kits. The bouncedown must not be sample-accurate because the resulting audio of the two snares phased against each other and produced a flanging noise. So I had to re-render the snare with the two samples playing at once, and that sounded fine, although I loose the option to mix between the two sounds going forward.
I’m scheduled to go into the studio later this week. I’ll let you know how it goes.