This will make Audiosurf an MMOG. It enables a persistent record of the players path in the game. It does lack the scores next to the play counts however. For me though each play through a song is an achievement in it’s own right. To track that journey is something I crave. Perhaps that’s what makes things like last.fm and twitter so popular anyway, in a way they are social games, to be able to share and display progress is a requirement.

There really is a convergence between social networking sites and gaming like mechanics. This new patch is really a leveraging of emerging experiences that enhances the user experience of both, all through the power of web 2.0. How’s that for some buzzwords?

Lets say last.fm is a game and our profile is our character. I find it interesting that initially when playing audiosurf it I felt like I wasn’t able to ‘improve’ my last.fm character. This is the same experience I have when I use my mp3 player (which doesn’t track my song play count), which frustratingly is most of my music time these days.

… Many layers of meaning can be found in “Cheated Hearts” beyond O’s joyous chorus of “Sometimes I think that I’m bigger than the sound” which some have stupidly taken offense to. It’s a post-breakup meditation on the competing emotions of regret, melancholy, yearning, hope, relief and ultimately release. It may not be Dylan, but it’s fucking great, and Zinner’s sensitive accompaniment of alternatively chiming chords and slashing crescendoes are genius.

It’s so great to read an album review that is actually interesting reading. Reviews usual just seem like press releases, whatever the medium being reviewed is. Fast’n'Bulbous is just great over all, it’s one of those rare sites where you can get a feel for their credibility. Similar to a decent blog I suppose, you slowly get a feel for whether their opinions can be trusted, or if it can’t, whether you can use their opinion as a reasonable source of information. If someone hates a great album or game, that’s useful too.

PS. Cheers to Karen O!!!

Recently I bought an Edirol/Roland UA-1EX external usb sound card.

It comes more from the music world then the computer world, so it far better audio then most sound cards. This also means that it has no internal mixer, as that’s not it’s job. This isn’t a problem in windows, as all the mixing is automatically done in software, but in linux sound is one of those areas that don’t just work (yet).

The fact that people are looking at these issues seriously is a really good sign. Like so many desktop linux issues in the past I’m sure this will improve in the future.

USB sound cards basically confuse the hell out of linux. Or rather it just doesn’t do things automatically yet. I plugged it in optimistically expecting to get a nice prompt on whether I’d like to configure it or something. Hah! Some of the most common problems people had that I googled across, was that their card was detected, but they still had no sound, or for some applications sound would come out the usb card and for others apps sound would come out their onboard card.

So after many googles, I found a solution. For my problem anyway. Which I chronicle below for sentimental reasons.

The first thing is, in Ubuntu 7.04 the UA-1EX is only detected automatically by ALSA (advanced linux sound architecture) when the advanced driver switch on the card is off. It took a while for me to figure that out. I can live without whatever it is as long as I have pretty sounds, so I switched it to off.

Basically if it shows up in the file /proc/asound/cards it is working.
Also, use aplay -l to display a list of currently available cards.

My /proc/asound/cards file looks like this:

0 [nForce2 ]: NFORCE - NVidia nForce2
NVidia nForce2 with ALC650F at 0xeb002000, irq 17
1 [UART ]: MPU-401 UART - MPU-401 UART
MPU-401 UART at 0×330, irq 10
2 [UA1EX ]: USB-Audio - UA-1EX
EDIROL UA-1EX at usb-0000:00:02.1-2, full speed


It’s important to note that since the UA-1EX is a USB card, it wont always be at number 2. USB things get loaded in all sorts of unpredictable orders at boot (or after boot if you plug it in late), sometimes I boot up and it’s 0. Since the standard way of referring to cards is by their number (which obviously wont always work), it’s best to use it’s name UA1EX instead.

So I have the card there, but there’s still no sound. What the fuck now? I noticed in gnome under system->preferences->sound, I can select USB audio for everything (except the mixer). Testing this, I have sound in esd (enlightenment sound daemon) applications, ie, the usual gnome applications for things, like rhythmbox, movie player etc, but not amarok (which I use because it shits over rhythmbox) or any other gnome unfriendly apps. Also the volume control in the system tray doesn’t do a thing. This is because I can only select the onboard sound card as the mixer.

The biggest problem though is that the sound will only work with one application at a time, second applications can’t open it because it’s busy. I did manage to get Amarok to work eventually, but I wont go into it since the way I fixed all this solved the Amarok problem too.

The problems with the gnome apps and the sys tray volume control was because like many usb sound cards the UA-1EX doesn’t have an internal hardware mixer. This isn’t bad, on the contrary it just means it doesn’t care about those fiddly things. It’s got more important things to do, like spitting out good audio. It means though that only one application can use the device at a time (until I add a software mixer that is). Windows is smart enough to do the software mixing automatically, these sort of desktop conveniences are one of the rare of things windows is actually good at.

The problems with the other apps, was because they are just talking directly to the ALSA or OSS (predecessor of ALSA) system rather then the ESD. As it turns out the ALSA system was just sending the sound to the onboard sound card because it was the first one in the cards list. So I had some apps with sound coming out the usb card, and others coming out of the onboard card. You’d think that gnome would tell ALSA where I wanted all the sound, but as we know, sound in linux doesn’t just work (yet).

The solution to all these problems is just make ALSA tell gnome what to do instead, and then tell ALSA what to do.

Under System->Preferences->Sound->Devices set all the outputs and inputs to ALSA. The mixer I just left as the onboard card, so once again system tray volume control is now useless, but I couldn’t be bothered working around that since I have an amp sitting on my real desktop.

So all aware desktop linux apps will use ALSA. Now all we need to do is tell ALSA what device to use. I think it defaults to the first one in the /proc/asound/cards list. So we have to correct it with an .asoundrc file. It’s a file that lets you tell ALSA to do fancy things. You can mix together multiple sound cards, all sort of things. I only wanted to replace my useless on board sound card completely so I just needed a really simple file.

You can create a file called .asoundrc in your home directory which ALSA will look at, but I preferred, to use a system wide one as /etc/asound.conf. Otherwise I wouldn’t have sound till I logged in, thus missing out on the login prompt sound (oh no!), also of course then multiple users will get sound that works as long as they tell gnome to use ALSA in their preferences.

My asound.conf file started out like this:


#/etc/asound.conf

pcm.!default {
type hw
card "UA1EX"
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card "UA1EX"
}


This tells ALSA the default device is UA1EX, and the default control (ie the mixer) is the “UA1EX”. Since the UA-1EX doesn’t have a mixer, this seems a bit silly. Still it sort of worked, the default device was now my usb audio card and I had sound with everything, everyone was happy. Unless of course two things tried to use it at once. This can be fixed though

It might be worth pointing out, if this sort of setup works for someone with a different usb sound card and the mixer works then there is nothing more to do. You can test to see if your card has a mixer with this setup, by using the command, alsamixer. If it can’t find a control thingi (mixer) on the card specified it will tell you, other wise you will get a nice display that lets you adjust different volume controls.

So since I don’t have an internal hardware mixer, I want it to be done in software. ALSA can do this with dmix.
See version two of my asound.conf


#/etc/asound.conf

ctl.dmixer {
type hw
card "UA1EX"
}


I got this off the ALSA website. The only thing I changed is the type to be plug, since it’s a usb card, and obviously the card name to be UA1EX instead of a number. I honestly have no idea what the details of this really means. But basically it sets dmix to be the main device thus giving us a software mixer. The default device is set to be a slave of the alias dmixer.

Anyway the important thing is, ALSA can set up software mixing. All apps using ALSA will just spit out sound, ALSA will mix them together and send it onto the usb audio device.

So now it all works! Starting the command alsamixer brings up the volume controls. The system tray gnome volume control doesn’t work but that doesn’t bother me. All the application volume controls talk to the software mixer in ALSA, so it’s really no big deal, Amarok even gets that pretty fade out when you close it.

Hurrah! right? Well not quite, as with all things linux there’s always exceptions. Some applications just aren’t smart enough to work intelligently with ALSA or whatever library they use (here’s looking at you Neverwinter Nights). Often they’ll try to use the old predecessor known as OSS (open sound system), yes I mean you Java sound library! (this has implications for Puzzle Pirates). These are pretty rare though, and there are often workarounds. I might make another post about this since this is kind of long. Specifically about Puzzle Pirates and NWN.

If anyone has any suggestions or improvements on this setup please let me know.
Bleh that was long!

They were just down the road. This makes me so sad..

It does strange things to me. I went for a jog with it (I don’t usually jog), it was 1am and freezing cold. Though when jogging the only part of me that really feels the cold is my lungs. I ended up with a unstoppable grin, I was jogging through pure imagination. The beat was running up and down my spine, dancing with me past midnight. I must have looked ridiculous, I love it when that happens. I seriously lost it.

Each track slowly adds layers. Like it’s filling in the colours of a landscape.

Jazz, funk, electronic, experimental, unique. I don’t know how hard it would be to listen to for someone who wasn’t searching for the new weird. I’ve tried to recommend The Lounge Lizards or Medeski, Martin and Wood to people before, but they seem to be too hard to follow or understand for them. I can never tell. While they sit with a blank stare hearing a cacophony of sounds, all I can here is the beat. I have a thing for the offbeat. Maybe this will be the same.

Though, this album has lasting appeal. It still surprises me and I’ve had it months now.

Really great, fun, music, nice atmosphere, although we were packed in like sardines.

The only downside was the volume, as is usual for all live music, they had everything amplified. Which for such a small venue, wasn’t necessary. My ears are ringing, which I really really hate. I forgot earplugs. So I left early. Still it was good music. I’ll take earplugs next time and hide behind a wall of people, to protect me.

I found it hard to find the address of this place. Here it is:

204 High St
Northcote VIC 3070

at Google maps.

I’m heading to my homeland today. 2 hour trip, motorbike screaming just to maintain 100kph.

I’m visiting a friend I haven’t seen in maybe a year? maybe more. Should be fun.

Uni is a little crappy lately. I dropped a class, got to make it up next semester. They’re all very nice to me about it though. I’m still behind drastically in one of my classes (which I should have finished completely by now).

My sis is moving in for a few months. Haven’t lived with her in years.. Should be good.

And my big news, is that I’m committed to visiting New Zealand over the winter break. If only for a few weeks. I aiming at a month. Lots wandering around aimlessly. Maybe I can rent a bike there? Price could be an issue though.

If I like it too much, I might not want to come back.

I just need to get away. Do something on my own for a change.

I’ve been gaming too much, to avoid study. That’s why I fucked up my class so much.

But still… I’ve finished 4 seasons of Pro Evolution Soccer 6. The lynchpin of my team is Zinedine Zidane. I wouldn’t let him retire. In the game he just turned 38, even at 38 he’s amazing.

Speaking of which, I saw the movie “Zidane”, it’s excellent art movie. A full game from Zidane’s perspective, no dialogue as such. He gets sent off in the end, but creates an amazing goal. He drags his feet when off the ball, as if he’s playing with an imaginary ball. So subtle.

I haven’t shot archery in weeks. I’m getting back into though.

Ballet just finished for the term. 2 week break. I’ll miss it.

I’ve decided I need to do exercise of some sort in the mornings or I do nothing of use with my day. Cycling, yoga, or a jog, maybe even swimming, but that seems like too much.

I’ve been downloaded and purchasing tons of music lately. I bought a Sophie Koh cd, should be arriving soon. Some Veda Hille CD’s arrived. I’ve got some new Nina Nastasia albums, and I’m expecting some more Tujiko Noriko. It’s funny I think most of my music lately seems to be by women artist. That’s a turn around. I actually remember saying I couldn’t find any music by women artists. Shows how hard I looked.

A great friend of mine made me love them.

Every album I’ve been interested in even though I drifted away for Californication, but Stadium Arcadium has sparked my interest more then ever before. I’ve been listening to it on my mp3 player constantly. I shoot archery to it sometimes.

They really made an awesome album. I have so much I want to say about it, but I have to go.

It was great. I volunteered this year.

I think I might have felt ripped off if I’d paid for it. There was some really great acts, but previous years have had much more great stuff. I bought a CD of Gerry O’Conner and Giles le Bigot.

I slept badly pretty much every night, I really hate sleeping in a tent.

We stopped at Mum’s on the way back, it was rather painless. She’s got a Dog now, it looks like a mop. Very cute though.

C,J, and I drove up, strangely we didn’t end up hating each others company at the end of it. In fact I think we were more hostile in the begining.

While I was volunteering I met a fantastic girl. I didn’t get any contact details which I regret, but we may meet at an organized time. She was like a magnet.

“Here is a memo to all employees from the administration about employee conduct during the christmas period

1. Do not feed alfoil into the paper shredder to make tinsel.
2. Do not use the push button phone to play jingle bells.
3. Do not file work requests under Bah-Humbug.”
(starts the scheduled classical music)

I like how they add these in with a completely straight face (so to speak).

I love the ABC.