Riviera Blog

The year 2004 combined the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day and the centenary of the entente cordiale. On both sides, ceremonies great and small proclaimed friendship and recalled what the two countries had survived together. Yet an opinion polled showed that among the words the French most commonly chose to describe the British were `isolated’, `insular’, and `selfish’. The British, though somewhat less negative, commonly described the French as `untrustworthy’ or `treacherous’, and nearly one in three considered them `cowardly’ — doubtless a distorted echo of 1940. How sad that when our two peoples want to feel proud of themselves they need to slight each other.

That Sweet Enemy: The British and the French from the Sun King to the Present, Peter and Isabelle Tombs.

It’s not often that I think “oh, so you don’t necessarily need a Mac to do this sort of multimedia stuff? cool!”, so let me blog this: Introducing ardour, a multi-track audio recorder and mixer. Even if its interface looks daunting (see screenshot below), it’s actually not that hard to use, and I’ve had hours of fun recording guitar parts and mixing it with other bits and pieces. Nothing I wouldn’t be ashamed of putting online, but the point is it was fun all round. Ardour uses Jack, a sound server that sits between your sound card and your audio applications. This makes it possible to easily transfer data between other apps, and in particular here, hydrogen a similarly powerful drum machine.

All this runs well on my completely ordinary (but full-duplex) audio hardware, an onboard Intel chip, although I don’t make use of DSP intensive real-time sound effects (flanger, chorus, etc.) which I already get with my V-amp 2 box.

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