RAID5, generally speaking, is a bad idea. Unless you have some very specific needs, RAID5 increases complexity, is more prone to hardware failure and administration errors, and does not automatically back itself up. If two RAID5 member drives fail at the same time, *all* your data is SOL. Individual drives, such as a bunch of externals, are probably a better choice for most people. And if two individual drives fail, you can still get data from the rest of them.

But people are nevertheless drawn to RAID5’s speed and size; it’s a great way to effectively have a freaking gigantic drive. It’s set and forget, easy to expand in the future (with some filesystems), and for reads is substantially faster than one drive. If one RAID5 drive fails, it’s an easy fix via drop-in replacement.

Some advice: when building a RAID array, use drives from different sources. Going different brands is probably a good idea, but caveat emptor: Company A’s 1TB drive will most likely not be the same ultimate size Company B’s. The available space will quite probably be skewed by a few KB or MB.

It should go without saying, but build your array only when you have all drives in hand. To more easily allow future expansion of your RAID, when it comes partition time shave a meg or so off your smallest drive. And when you decide to expand your array, buy a drive that’s the exact same model as one already in there. It will probably be cheaper than the newest model anyway.

Spot on zinger by Gruber:

I.e. if you think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you can no longer build a Flash-dependent web site. (And if you don’t think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you’re probably wrong.)

50 years ago, if an aspiring Joe Rockstar wanted to step up from recording his garage band to mastering his first demo, he’d soon be thwarted by the cost of time with specialized expensive studio hardware like mixers, multitrack recorders, and (down the line) audio effects like EQs, delays, reverb, and synthesizers. The 90s opened many doors as music software grew up, but limited processing speed and hard drive throughput were frequent road bumps.

Today, a basic laptop and a multichannel sound card are capable of satisfying most common production needs. There is an entrenched market for audio software, and some even stays true to the venerable style of vintage rackmounted audio hardware (i.e. Reason). In some cases modern musical products (such as an MPC drum machine) provide a ‘good enough’ cheaper alternative to their yesteryear equivalent (hired session drummer).

As someone who loves music and technology, I want to take a moment and acknowledge recent years as some pretty incredible ones in the history of music production. Like many other creative fields the advent of cheap and ubiquitous computing has enabled a larger school of musicians to more easily realize their musical ambitions. I think it’s fair to say we are in the early years of the next generation of production and people are in a race to catch up and stay on top of the possibilities.

Personally, I’m an Ableton Live fan, and Logic is pretty cool too when I can cut through the overwhelming interface. (At least the Apple buyout brought us GarageBand.)

I definitely want to give a shoutout to Spectrasonics too, a company whose products I discovered last year. When I first plugged the family’s MIDI keyboard into my old PowerPC Mac, virtual instruments (VSTs, RTASs, or AUs for the OS X guys) existed but had nowhere near the ambition you find today. Between Omnisphere, Trilian, and Stylus RMX there’s an impressive quality to Spectrasonic’s sampling I’m happy to see out there. Trilian, their bass instrument, has 6 different dynamics and 6 different samples that round robin each time you hit a note. There is so much data in the samples that on my MacBook Pro it takes upwards of several seconds just to load an instrument. But the result is worth it – who would have thought a virtual instrument could sound so realistic?

Here’s to the next 10 years of music production!

To keep your bookmarks and RSS feed favicons looking shiny, I changed the onpaws.com favicon again. I was getting tired of the crusty current one which I made on a whim one day:

Passable at 64×64, but it always looked crummy at the more commonly seen 16×16:

After becoming intimately reacquainted with the various ways to disable Photoshop’s on by default selections and fill anti aliasing, I started with a 16×16 canvas this time, using the pencil tool and as per usual keeping the background transparent. This was a candidate:

But I’m happy with this new one for now- it retains the motif of circle + ‘p’ descender from onpaws -> op.

What do you think?

What took them so long?

When I got my MacBook Pro in 2006 it was heavily marketed with Aperture, Apple’s new pro photo management app. Yesterday I was happy to see Aperture get a long-overdue update to version 3, which is welcome, but hardly seems to do more than bring it to feature parity with last year’s release of iPhoto 8 (2009). In the meantime I’ve personally tried moving to Lightroom a few times because, you know, it actually gets regular updates and unlike Adobe’s other products that end in otoshop, is not mired in UI slurry. Unexpectedly, RAW support didn’t get a major shot in the arm. People complaining about lack of GF1 support should look here.

One thing noteworthy: evidence of a supposed Google-Apple conflict recently discussed ad nauseam by segments of the online tech community is nary to be found in this release. The Places features still uses Google Maps. While this was far easier for the developers to implement, I’m now more curious why Apple bought PlaceBase last year, (mentioned before).

Update: What conflict?

I either must really, really not be the target audience, or Finale 2010 for Mac is underwhelming to the point of sucking. Last week was my first time using Finale since 2003 in music class, and my install lasted about 10 minutes before going straight to the trash.

It feels like a Microsoft product of the late 90s – scattered, intractable UI with backwards compatibility concerns taking form as an innovation hindering albatross. The UI is almost exactly the same as I remember the OS 9 version being, with the same Carbon era UI quirks. They embraced OS X by lamely Aqua-fying a few buttons. It seems like the developers value backwards compatibility and user familiarity with all of the Finale quirks to the point of being uncompetitive with modern music software. Maybe the legions of Finale users fiercely resist any attempt at change. And granted, Finale is among very few competitors when it comes to music notation. But what a travesty. My sympathy goes out to the many musicians out there that have no choice but to use this.

I’ll be sticking with Ableton. GarageBand, the same one that came free on my Mac, is fine for those few notation-needed occasions.

Certain things that once seemed cool when the blogging world was nascent I now consider trite unnecessary clutter.

Therefore, as of today:
Blogroll: gone.
Tag cloud: gone.
Post calendar: gone.

When you’ve got search, who uses a tag cloud? Or when you’ve got archives, who cares about a post calendar? And a blogroll seems spammy. Better replaced by posts linking to content on the sites you like and read.

This is step one of an effort to redesign onpaws.com with experience. Next up, individual pages need some overdue attention.

1. Despite buying Placebase in October 2009 the iPad still uses Google Maps. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to wait until June to see what that brings to the table.
2. Similarly to the original iPhone’s ugly chin, 3G connectivity requires an ugly plastic window that even wraps around to the front. Look for the 3G picture here.
3. ‘iPad’? Really? To me, that’s evidence not enough women work at Apple.

I’ll reserve final judgment until I’ve used one, but despite a certain appeal of an Apple-designed e-book reader, an LCD display seems far from ideal for reading (for photos/videos, sure). After years of reading text on an LCD screen I can say it’s OK at best. eInk or real paper is far better than another LCD screen.

While typically people work in a studio to accomplish most kinds of creative production, inspiration can certainly arrive at less than opportune times. In the case of music making, my two favorite DAWs (Logic and Ableton Live) both offer onscreen keyboards that simulate a real MIDI keyboard. Obviously you sacrifice velocity sensitivity, but this can be immensely useful when, say, waiting at an airport.

The keyboard is limited in that its only one octave at a time and starts at a. In Live you can change octaves with z and x, in Logic as the screenshot shows this adjusts volume.

In Logic 9, simply hit caps lock and an onscreen keyboard appears.

In Ableton 8, hit Cmd-Shift-K or click the little keyboard icon on the upper right.

The only thing left is mod wheel support, if you know any free solutions for Mac let me know in the comments!

Four years ago I installed some Cat5e cable throughout the house (that’s Ethernet cable for you non-network types). Last time it was for three upstairs rooms, and it went pretty well despite the sweltering heat in the attic.

Last week I finished installing another outlet in the den. This one was harder since the cable ran two stories and across the house, from one side of the attic to the far side of the basement up to the den, but the result is totally worth it. It was free since I used exactly the cable I had left from four years ago with 1′ of extra. The PS3 can now stream NetFlix and media from other computers to the TV, no stuttering or dropouts like I got on the wireless. And I can still crimp cables like nobody’s business.