Sure, I know what you’re thinking… “when would I have to do that!?!”

Well, that’s what I would have said until lately when this became an issue!

Right now, in the studio I am running a “samples only” slave machine without a monitor or keyboard, relying simply on Apple’s built-in screen sharing feature to help me manage Kontakt on that machine.  All is going well until I decide to load another sample library onto the slave computer from some DVD-ROM’s I have and I run into this issue!  Using the eject key on my main computer’s keyboard does NOT translate “through” screen sharing to mean “eject the SLAVE MACHINE’s optical drive”.  Instead, it only ejects the master machine.  Oops!

After some searching around, I found that a feature DOES exist to create what is shown in the screen shot above – a way to eject the optical drive tray from the menu bar!

To set this up, simply navigate on your system to:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/

There will be a file in there called “Eject.menu”

Simply double-click this and presto!  You will have the option to click and eject!  Enjoy!

Blog Post, Logic Pro, Tips and Tricks

I’m a definite believer in cleaning house in order to be more creative.  For a composer, this means lots and lots of computer work.  Perhaps its setting up backups, cleaning out files, installing a new PCIe card or hard drive, updating (all!) your software programs and sample libraries.  Maybe calibrating your monitors.  Whatever it is, eliminating the clutter is a great move towards improving focus during some downtime. Read more…

Blog Post, Logic Pro, Tips and Tricks

As many folks know, in the MIDI protocol, there is actually a particular control number for volume which is CC#11.  However, in MIDI-speak this is called expression so as not to confuse anyone with the volume of a fader in a sequence.  However, in order to add life to your arrangements, it is often very practical to embed this expression information within the recording in real-time and then use the volume faders of your sequence to “balance” things later on in mix-down.

For a lot of folks, this is a mind-numbing process of drawing various shapes in some sort of editor.  For the luckier among us, our controller keyboard may have a port to plug in a continuous pedal of some kind.  Or, our keyboard may have some moveable faders that are hard-coded to transmit certain MIDI signals.  The question is: are any of these CC#11?  And if not, how can you “re-purpose” one to do this?

Read more…

Blog Post, Logic Pro, Tips and Tricks

Anyone who is using the new version of Wordpress might appreciate this!  There is some issues with the new “captions” feature for images.  I found a great fix here which I am simply reposting below.

Paste this to the bottom of your style.css.  Worked like a charm for me!

/* Captions */
.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}
/* End captions */

Tips and Tricks

All of you probably saw Jon Frisby’s (Mr. Joy, Inc.) post-mortem regarding his new game When Orcs Attack!

If not, you can read about it here:
garagegames.com/blogs/48969/13597

Before reading, I would highly suggest you download and play the demo as well — as you will get much more out of this if you understand what I’m referring to! Download it here:

mrjoy.com/games/6

As the audio designer for the game, there were several interesting things that happened during the development for this game that I thought others might find interesting and perhaps applicable to their current situations. For Torque users, however, your mileage may vary as WoA was developed on the Unity3D platform, so some of these “solutions” that we came up with may or may not exist for you and some additional ones may be available as well! In case you are wondering, I also did the two tracks of music in the game, but most of my post-mortem will be focusing on the sound design elements of the game.

What went right

1) (Pretty) Clear scope In all sound design projects for games that I work on, this can be a big issue. Knowing exactly WHEN to incorporate the sound designer at a stage where the scope is pretty well nailed down is key. Most sound designers are working on “per sound effect” price point as opposed to a “retainer format” (unless you are very rich and can offer health and dental plans…), so for the sound designer to produce extra sounds that you won’t actually use can become quite costly. This project, however, was well scoped and I was shown the project pretty late in development, so most of the major features were there and could be seen — so any additional sounds were figured out pretty quickly.

Read more…

Blog Post, Tips and Tricks