I’ve been playing around with my new music software lately, and have actually come up with something half-decent. I don’t I think I have the patience to fix the areas I can see need fixing, so I’m just going to post it here.

Sumptra is a nonesense word, Sumatra because of the pentatonic influence and Sumptuous because it gets lush at its peak). I like the slow vibe of it, with the build up bringing in glitchy effects and layers.

The start has an ambient feel that I’m pretty proud of. In fact the first 16 bars are what I consider the coolest. The melody is fairly boring, and the song doesn’t develop, and the “breakdown” doesn’t really do its job. Anyway, not bad for a few hours work.

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The Netflix Queue plugin fetches Netflix queue information as RSS data from the Netflix website, parses each movie’s information, and presents that information on the web. Individual functions calls are available for each of those abilities, allowing you flexibility in how they’re used. HTML presentation logic is also templated, allowing you to chose what data shows up about a movie, and what other text is mixed in with it.

To install, simply download or copy & paste the script to your wordpress plugins directory and then activate it in the plugins admin panel. Click the installation instructions in the plugin’s description for more installation details.

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I just installed WordPress 1.5 last night, and boy was that a pain. I had made many custom edits to extend the functionality and look & feel, which came back to haunt me. But at least 1.5 has the idea of themes, which allow for most of the visual and *structural* _changes_ you could want.

I also found a cool plugin for code syntax highlithing called Geshi.

package com.grahame.test;

public class GrahameTest {
public static main(String argv[]) {
File file = new File();
System.out.println("Hello");
}
}

Reason 3.0 was realeased in March. I’ve been waiting for this software for about a year. For those of you not familiar with Reason, its a virtual music studio in a box. You can load up as many synths, effects, drum machines, samplers, etc as you want. Your only real limitation is your computer’s CPU and memory capacity. I’m a big fan of Reason, I’ve had a cracked version of 2.5 for a while and promised myself I’d buy it when 3.0 came out.

My copy just arrived from Sweden a few days ago, and its pretty damn cool. I’m not sure it is really worth a major release number change though. The mastering suite is kickass, I applied it to some old songs and the difference was quite noticable.

The combinator idea is really awesome — you can basically build mini racks that have their own input and output. So you can have 8 synths wih their own effects routing (even their own mixer), and then send that combined “unit” midi data and have them all play at once. I haven’t played that much, but I think this will let me get rid of some of the flatness I used to get frustrated with. I can probably build a super saw now, and of course save it as a preset. Wicked.

I’m really digging the Flickr service. Check out my photos, I’ve added some more, and now link to it from my front page.

If you know me, let me know and I can invite you to be a “contact”, which will give you better access.