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Recently I became aware that the Jack Audio Connection Kit‘s second version, called Jack2, has a mode called “asynchronous mode“, which is different from Jack1’s mode of operation, now referred to as “synchronous mode”.

A common tool in any digital musician’s toolbox, particularly guitarists, is impulse responses. They capture a snapshot of the sonic characteristics of a speaker cabinet, which can then be replicated digitally. This makes it much easier to work in a DAW, since you don’t have to decide your sound when you record, you can record the line out signal directly and experiment with the speaker configuration afterwards. Not to mention that you have access to tons of different speaker cabinets without actually owning them, in databases such as TONE3000.

However, one thing that always frustrated me is that impulse responses are static. The microphone that is used to record the speaker cabinet can have a large impact on the sound, depending on placement, orientation, and type. But this is set in stone once you download one impulse response, and you may have to wade through many to find the perfect setup, if they are available at all.

I do all my music making in Linux, but it’s no secret that the number of available plugins is vastly larger for the Windows platform than for Linux. Luckily, Alexandre Bique has made the nifty vst-bridge that enables you to make a bridge from a Linux VST host to a Windows VST plugin. I won’t go into the details of how to use it, since this is already well covered in its README, and is not very complicated to begin with.

What I want to talk about is getting good performance out of it. It has recently received some patches that make it better at performing in realtime, but there are some caveats, and I am going to talk about two in particular. Continue reading →

I’m an avid user of Dropbox, and also of the fantastic layered filesystem UnionFS-FUSE. However, I found that they don’t work well together. Whenever I tried to mount a unionfs folder somewhere where Dropbox could see it, Dropbox would seemingly randomly omit files from upload. Scary! This is supposed to be my backup!

It took me a long time of trial and error, but fortunately I was able to find the magic flags to make it work. If you mount your directory with these options:

unionfs-fuse myfolder=RW ~/Dropbox/union-folder -o big_writes,large_read,readdir_ino

…then Dropbox and UnionFS-FUSE should work together happily once again!