I'm pretty tired. I fell asleep before dinner tonight. My friend called and woke me up late, so I've been working on interesting stuff. I got midi to work in Linux, finally. I've written everything down so that others may walk the trail I have blazed. My trail is so new, it just came out weeks ago in the 2.6.3 patch. Support for emu10k1 asfxload was added. Of course, it was possible to get midi using sfxload, but this is really something new. So I listened to my old list of midis tonight. But just last night I told you that listening to other people's midis is not the purpose of my midi adventure. So I thought about how I can use midi to my advantage. Takashi Iwai's virtual keyboard will be my first experiment. I will connect it to aseqview so that I can view what is going on when I press the keys.

Good night.
<5 hours passes.>
Good morning.

Okay, back for more philosophy. My plan last night for world domination via midi, tracking, and csound seems a little silly, no? Why would I use tracking at all? Why don't I just use midi and csound? Criticial thinking desires not only for questions to be answered, but for questions to be asked. This is the way of the scientist. So my reasoning for using the tracker is to pick out beats, rhythms and repeating sequences. Since the tracker is very oriented towards rhythm, and allows copying very easily, I decided that tracker is probably the best way to take a good 1 minute midi song and create a good 5 minute song. Also, having something in mod format is important. The scene really stresses the importance of the mod format. While most things are distributed in mp3 or ogg, a lot of the work is done in mod and nearly every song from the scene has a mod that sounds as good or similar to the end result. That is because mod is so flexible. Instruments are containers for samples. Samples can be just about any audio. Unlike midi, no work must be done to load samples. Unlike midi, there are no default samples in mod. Unlike midi, mod is limited to 4, 8, or 16 channels while midi is hardware dependent (my emu10k1 can do 64 channels).

The Linux 2.6.3 kernel is now compatible with Yamaha Motif ES 6,7, and 8 as well as many others. If you have purchased any of these thousand dollar keyboards with USB interface, have fun with linux. I am currently looking for a midi keyboard, but probably in the sub $100 market (more like half that). Of course the connector that goes from midi to gameport is expensive by itself. The question is: do I want a sequencer or a synth? There is a difference. The sequencer can generate notes, but not play them. The synth can generate notes and play them. Since I'm going to be exporting to my computer, there is probably no need, except what happens when the computer is missing? I can't just lug around my beast and midi won't connect to my laptop. Would the keyboard ever leave the studio? Probably not. So now it becomes a question of shipping. Yes, shipping is 70% of the cost that I want to pay. E-bay may have amazingly low prices, but it cannot solve shipping. If I could find one locally, I could cut shipping from the algorithm.

I had a very strange dream last night. Weird shapes, distopian themes, robots, black ops. Too much caffeine? Not enough? It was pretty realistic. It might have just been a replay of Cowboy Bebop Knocking on Heaven's Door. Yeah, that's probably what it was. Like Spike said, "Deja vu.. I remember having noodles before."

If you like me like my friend inf0 are learning Japanese, here is a page I wrote to help myself learn Level 3 kanji. I got the list of kanji from the pdf over at The Japanese Page. But mine is much better. It requires the EUC-JP character set, but that is pretty standard. Linux supports it fine.