• CPU Intel Core i7-930
• Motherboard Asus P6T SE
• Graphics HIS HD 5670
• CASE Lancool PC-K62
• POWER CoolerMaster Silent Pro M700
• MEMORY Kingston DDR3 1333 3x2GB (6GB)
• HD 1 Intel X25-M 80GB (SSD)
• HD 2 WD Caviar Green 640GB

First off, the case (pictured) is larger than I expected, probably to accommodate those 120mm and 140mm fans. I planned to get the less blingy K58 or K60 model (no window, and not painted black inside), but they were out. I’m happy with how quiet the case is – obviously a large consideration when making music.

I’ve decided it’s a good time to finally move to Windows 7 – 32-bit for now, which means that I can sadly only use half of the installed 6GB ram. I’ll make the move to the 64-bit version once current audio projects that rely on 32-bit plugins are out of the way.  Either way, I’m very, very pleased with Windows 7 so far.

All my installs went without a hitch with some noteworthy items. The Windows 7 driver for the M-Audio Fast Track Ultra worked out of the box, but crashed when I ticked the “high performance mode” check-box under “settings” in the FTU control panel. I had to roll back with System Restore and re-install the driver, this time leaving the “high performance mode” alone. I’m currently running at the lowest ASIO/WDM buffer size of 128 samples with no problems (I ran the Core2Duo machine at double that – 256 samples).

I’ve decided to upgrade to the latest version of Ableton Live  Lite 8 (8.1.3) – I tried Live 8 on the previous machine, but had it crash on me in a show, so I stuck with Live 7. I’ve played my  last three SL shows on the new machine and so far so good with Live 8 on this PC, except for the little weirdness you can hear from 4:23 to 4:30 in the recording of Live Online #66: Core. Some of my channels dropped out unexpectedly and I kinda expected Live to crash, but it picked itself up and kept going. No idea what happened there ;^/

Finally,  a mention about install times for LA Scoring Strings. It installs off 5 dual-layer DVD’s for a total of 40GB. The documentation warns of a long install, saying that each DVD can take up to an hour to install. That was certainly the case when I installed LASS on the Core2Duo PC 2 weeks ago. Total install time was close to 5 hours. In contrast, the new machine did the install in close to an hour!

Oh, and a note about PC versus Mac. When mentioning my plan to upgrade my PC a couple of people suggested that I move to Mac. I thought about it, but decided to stick with PC for the following reasons.

• My Cakewalk Sonar sequencing software is PC only – I can install Windows on the Mac, but that kinda defeats the purpose, right?
• You can’t get a similarly specced Mac for double the price.
• I’ve never had a problem with XP and I’m more than happy with Windows 7. Honestly, reliability and viruses have never been a problem here.

That all said, Macs are still beautiful ;^)

I’ll update this post if anything crops up with the new PC, but if you don’t hear from me you can safely assume I’m happy as a pig in mud.

For my own experience with the Windows 7 32-bit driver, have a look here: http://moshang.net/soundjeweler_blog/by-the-ways/new-pc/

***UPDATE*** M-Audio released a BETA driver for the FTU on October 13th. I’ll be upgrading to Win 7 soonish and will report on my findings then. You can download the BETA driver for yourself here: http://forums.m-audio.com/showthread.php?p=58296

I reported on a quick experiment with the Windows 7 Beta and my M-Audio Fast Track Ultra soundcard in January and have been following developments regarding a dedicated driver for the FTU with an eagle eye. Well, it’s September and the driver I’m waiting for is still in the development stage (read low on their list of priorities). At least they have added a handy page to chart progress on the M-Audio / Windows 7 driver front. Not sure if the image below will update, but here goes:

Remix - Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy by Lawrence Lessig

I’m no Oprah, but here’s a book I can recommend whole-heartedly. And that without having even read it yet (downloading as we speak).

Admittedly, I’m a fan of Prof. Lessig’s ideas, as is a growing legion of people who have discovered the benefits of licensing their work under Creative Commons licenses.

The PDF version of the book is available as a free download here: Remix - Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy

I had the privilege to meet Prof. Lessig at the iSummit held in Sapporo, Japan last year. On the spur of the moment, I presented an idea regarding CC+ licenses and a sample marketplace on ccmixter.org – it was generally considered a good idea by those in attendance, and though it’s not been implemented, I’m happy I threw the idea out there and maybe someone will act on it in the future.

Here’s a picture Bob Chao took of me doing the presentation (used under a CC BY-SA license):

(L to R) Lawrence Lessig, Lanon Prigge (moderator), MoShang

(MoShang by Mark Forman - used under a CC by-nc-sa license)

My friend Mark Forman (or bbluesman) offered to do a photoshoot for me, so we hit the Martyrs’ Shrine here in Taichung last Wednesday. I’m very pleased with the way it turned out – the photo above is my clear favorite. Have a look at the rest of the set here.

Mark obviously put quite a bit of work into it, and now I’m looking forward to another shoot, again with Mark behind the camera, but this time together with Chris Bailey. Hopefully we can get a couple of nice shots as promo material for Chris and my upcoming Suncake Lounge album.

Happy 2009!

Having skipped on Vista, I’ve eagerly signed up for the Windows 7 Beta. It’s been getting good press and I think I see why. I’ve installed it in a dual-boot config. on both Em.’s 5 year old Ben-Q laptop and now on my own dual-core system. It offers a very smooth experience on both machines (the laptop has less than a gig of ram!), especially with aero running on my desktop system.

I’ve yet to experiment with my audio apps, but I think that’s going to have to wait for a Win 7 driver from M-Audio. I installed the Vista 32 driver for my M-Audio Fast Track Ultra in compatibility mode, and although it works (I have sound) I’m noticing a glitch in mp3 playback with the Win 7 Media Player and in Firefox every 10 seconds or so. While it’s good enough to play music with in the background while surfing the net (Win 7/Firefox is performing like a champ in this capacity), actually making music with this driver is another question.

I’ll probably go ahead and install Reason and Sonar soonish. For all I know the glitchy playback affects mp3′s only. Either way, I’ll be booting back into XP to do production work until Windows 7 is officially released and available in retail.

My desktop specs:

Asus P5B-E motherboard, Intel 6420 CPU (2.13 GHz Core2Duo), 2 GB ram

(click for a larger view)

I ran into Atomic Gaffer at one of my sets in Second Life again today and he reminded me of this photo he sent me a couple of weeks ago – don’t know how I managed to forget about it then, but this is without a doubt the coolest pic of my avatar ever. Stands to reason – Atomic (Gary Davis in RL) tells me that he did most of Paul Mcartney’s stuff online for EMI for almost 12 years. Man, talk about rubbing shoulders… But enough with the name-dropping – head on over to Atomic Effect Studios to see more of Gary/Atomic’s work for clients around the globe.

EeePC 901 running Reason 4

After restraining myself for months now, I finally buckled and got myself an EeePC 901 (XP version) – it’s a tiny black beauty with a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB Ram, and 2 SSDs (4GB for the OS and 8GB for program files and documents). I paid NT$16500 over here in Taiwan (got it at NOVA in Taichung), or just over US$540.

It shipped with a Chinese version of Windows XP which I’ve promptly replaced with an nLited version of XP Home in English. It would probably have made more sense to install XP on the 20GB Linux version of the 901, but I was told there wouldn’t be stock before August. Though the nLited XP is far smaller than the usual, I’ve decided to leave a 1.5GB page file active on the OS drive, leaving very little space to spare on that drive. I installed all the EeePC drivers from the supplied rescue CD without a hitch.

I believe there is still some clutter left over from the initial ASUS configuration, since XP wouldn’t allow me to format the drive with a working version of XP present on it – to get around this, I guess I could have installed my version of XP to the other SSD first, but with everything up and running now I just can’t be bothered. System restore, the other large space invader is disabled. I can always change this configuration if I run into problems, but so far so good.

I got the Eee with an eye to replacing the aging BenQ Joybook 5000U I’ve been using to do my live shows on and also for streaming shows into SL. Reason 4 installed without a hitch, along with my T-box USB midi interface and was soon doing tests with my WX-5 windcontroller. I was a little concerned with the performance until I remembered to optimize XP for music applications (following this guide). I’m happy to report that the little Eee is now performing on par with the BenQ machine it is replacing. Latency using the built-in souncard is at 42ms, and though that’s rather high, it’s the same as what I’ve become used to with the BenQ. Audio quality is perfectly acceptable, but I’ve opted to up the ante a little bit and have just ordered a Behringer UCA202 USB audio interface. There are a number of reasons for this choice:

a) it will be much less expensive to replace the US$30 UCA202 than to repair the audio jacks on the Eee should they start to give problems after multiple plug-ins and plug-outs (the jacks on the BenQ have become a little finicky with use).

b) the optional ASIO drivers for the UCA202 should theoretically give me much better performance in Reason, allowing me to reduce the previously mentioned latency figure.

c) the UCA202 is USB bus powered. A big consideration given the fact that I’ve run into problems on stage before when the wall-wart powered M-Audio USB Audiophile was unhappy with the amount of current it was receiving.

d) I did streaming tests with the ShoutCast plug-in for Winamp (essential for my SL live shows) and whilst the Eee had no problems encoding the audio (in fact barely registering CPU use), I wasn’t happy with the sound quality of the audio coming into the Eee via the built-in mic-in jack. I think I might have been overloading it with the output from my desktop’s M-Audio Fast Track Ultra interface. The UCA202 should fare better. That said, I’m more than happy with the audio quality of the Eee’s built-in mics when using SKYPE.

e) man, it’s cheap! Add the US$30 for the T-box and I’ve got a USB audio/midi solution for roughly US$60…

And thankfully YES, the Eee is more than happy to play my WMV encoded video/backtrack whilst running Reason. Keep in mind that my Reason requirements for performing live are not too high, never running more than a single combinator device. No doubt, you’d run into “computer too slow” messages pretty soon if you started to do more complex arrangements (confirmed when I tried to play back the included demo tracks).

So far I’ve been extremely impressed with this little machine – not to mention more than a little relieved that it will be able to handle the musical duties I bought it for! I’ll report back on latency once I have the UCA202 installed.

PS. as an added benefit, the Eee works surprisingly well as an E-book reader (if at 1.2kg slightly heavier than I expected) to replace the Mio Pocket PC GPS I’ve been using for this purpose ;^)

EeePC 901 as E-book reader

*** UCA202 UPDATE ***

The UCA202 is a true plug-an-play device and uses the generic USB audio CODEC. The ASIO drivers with the UCA202 were a bit of a catch 22 – they worked just fine, and on this machine I could reliably go down to 17ms latency in Reason without crackling. But the ASIO driver overwrites the USB audio CODEC for that USB port, meaning you can’t then use the UCA202 as the default audio device in XP. In other words, ASIO = no Winamp or Media Player via the UCA202. Since I need Media Player for my shows and Winamp for streaming, ASIO seems to be a no-go for me and I’m back to 42ms latency via the generic USB audio CODEC. Oh well, I’ve been playing like this for two years now, so at least I’m used to it. Besides, the other benefits I mentioned above for using the UCA 202 still count. I did my first Second Life show with the Eee last night – in this configuration, the Eee provides my live instrument sounds from Reason whilst streaming audio into SL via Winamps’s ShoutCast plug-in. It performed flawlessly.

I was trawling the net the other day for a freeware alternative to something like Apple’s Garageband. Couldn’t find anything similar, but I did find a very cool online sequencer called Splice. It allows you to find free CC licensed loops and sounds, upload your own loops or sounds and then to mix them together in a composition.

As sequencers go, it’s pretty basic; you can time-stretch and trim loops (unfortunately you can’t transpose them), add volume and pan curves, add 4 effects to each track (though you can’t edit any fx parameters), and there are two soft synths available (again no editing of synth parameters). But hey, it’s free and runs in your browser. Once you’re done with your track, you can publish it to the Splice website under a CC license and download your mix as an mp3.

To get some idea of what Splice is capable of, I spent an hour with it yesterday. Below is the result, rather unimaginatively entitled “Hour One”:
[audio http://moshang.net/audio/49874_MoShang_hour-one.mp3]

On the track’s page over at the Splice website here you have the options of downloading the mp3, opening the track in the online sequencer to look at how it was made, or to remix it.

I don’t see the Splice sequencer replacing Reason or Sonar for me anytime soon, but it’s still fun to play with and a good introduction to sequencing. And did I mention that it’s online and free? You’ve been editing your photos online with Photoshop Express, now welcome to sequencing in the cloud.