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Monday, October 14, 2002

In case you didn't think I was geeky enough...

I bought a stack of musical equipment recently, including a mixing desk and a MIDI sound module by an italian company called ORLA. The sound module (a "MicroPartner") is quite small for what it does, about the size of a block of ground coffee. It's got one control - volume - and the rest of it is controlled is over a MIDI cable connected to a keyboard, computer, etc. MIDI is simply "performance information", not sound. Imagine sheet music: "play this note here, this loud. Now release it". So, here's the deal. I want to connect my computer to my MIDI stuff to generate sounds, and from there to the mixing desk. I have two sound sources - the new one, and an older drum machine. The drum machine has really good drum sounds, so I want to use it for drums, and the ORLA for other sounds, like piano, bass, etc. Simple - you send a MIDI signal to the MicroPartner to disable the drum track.

Aha. Here's the problem: The MicroPartner comes with NO manual. It comes in a dinky cardboard box, little bigger than it (i.e. smaller than the average Tom Clancy novel), with ONE SHEET of paper, Italian on one side, English on the other. The sheet says "Thanks for buying me, plug your keyboard here, your headphones here, your amplifier here, look on the top of me for the sounds, and tweak this knob to raise or lower the volume". And has a few pictures. Now, normally a MIDI device comes with a detailed MIDI specification, including what system exclusive (SysEx) messages it accepts, to (for example) disable certain MIDI channels. If I'm sending out MIDI stuff on a wire, and I want only the drum machine to make noise on channel 10, I'll disable that channel on the MicroPartner by sending a sysex message that says something like "Oy! SysEx here. Only listen to the following if you're made by ORLA. Only listen to the following if you're a MicroPartner. Now disable channel 10. End of SysEx" (note to other nerds: it ends up looking more like "F7 41 00 42 10 21 40 10 F0") The problem is that the whole thing about SysEx is that it's different for each manufacturer, and different for each model. So, I looked again at the sheet of paper. Nothing about SysEx. For something that's controlled almost entirely over the wire, that's pretty crappy. So I went to ORLA's website to see what I could find. They're an accordion and organ company. Eeek. With some additional things (like sound modules) for accordion and organ players. But nothing about the MicroPartner. Hmm. So began my voyage of discovery.

A google or two later, I was no better off - My search for "ORLA MicroPartner" returned a few things:

  • The shop I bought it (Thomann.de, a German place with good prices)
  • A German recording studio that obviously bought lots of other stuff from Thomann,
  • and some other German shop

By now it's quite possible that this page has made its way into Google.[Editor's note: as of 2003-06-24, we come top of the list.] Maybe someone will find it helpful - mail me if so :-)

I think you're starting to see where this is going. Apparently the thing doesn't exist. So I went to the newsgroups, using http://groups.google.com. When all else fails, Google. When that fails, go to the newsgroups. And lo and behold, there were one or two references to the MicroPartner, citing it as a cheapo MIDI sound source. Yay google, like I needed to spend hours to find that out.

I mailed ORLA, who replied two days later:


Dear Sir

we do not have our technician available for the next few days and we will be

able to give you areplay as soon as he is back.

Orla Italy

Nice man. Meanwhile, I'm getting more and more intrigued by this. It HAS to have SysEx! I've never come across a MIDI device with no SysEx! So I took it apart, hoping to find something inside that'd give me further information. A possibility was that ORLA bought in the boxes from some other manufacturer and just rebadged them and shipped them with no documentation on the cheap (note to readers - I have a little background in electronics, so I kinda know what I'm doing, a little). The board was just a board, without going into details, very simple really. But there was a big chip in the middle, with "Dream" written on in lovely musical writing, and a number "SAM9273M". Hmmm, I thought. Maybe Dream will have something.

http://www.dream.fr/ was what I was looking for, except they've since been bought out by ATMEL, some American company. So I go to http://www.atmel.com, do a search for the chip number, and come up with a blank. I did find some other Dream chips, including the SAM9773 (similar enough when you're desperate), so I downloaded a few PDFs that seemed to have what I was looking for, if for a completely different chip.

In the meantime I'd found a completely different device called a MIDI Brick, similar to (if a lot better and more expensive than) the MicroPartner. It also used a Dream chip, and had a downloadable User's Guide (also PDF). So I had a stack of PDFs with some MIDI information (including SysEx) for chips by the same manufacturer as mine, but all different part numbers. Sigh.

Also in parallel, I found that the manufacturer ID for Dream (the number that follows the SysEx heads-up in the MIDI message, i.e. the bit just after the F7) was allegedly 00 20 00. More on this later...

So in a fit of pique, I scanned through the PDFs, and noticed that the SysEx information to disable a channel was the same for the different models of chip. Hmm. Admittedly, they were all in the same family, all had numbers like SAM97xx, whereas mine was a SAM9273, probably older. Also, the manufacturer's ID in the SysEx messages was 41, which is Roland's ID (Roland are the most prolific manufacturers of synthesisers, you've possibly even heard of them). Intriguing. A short google later and I found that Dream are/were being sued by Roland. Nevermind.

So I tried that particular string of numbers, and it worked. First time. I was amazed. So now I'm going to try some of the other settings. Who knows, maybe my €90 heap of shit is actually not that bad after all? I might be able to get all sorts of sweepy wacka-wacka noises out of it...

On another note, I played a gig last night with my ex-band, and I might be rejoining them in a week or two. I miss it, and now that the academic year is over, I might have time again :-) Watch this space...








posted by Jeremy Smyth 18:27  |  

Friday, October 11, 2002

I can't understand this. Maybe one of you can help.

I have a friend, and something I have to say - hard as it is to believe, this friend has absolutely NO empathy. Like, can you imagine being stuck so far up your own arse that you can't see the other person's point of view at all? Needless to say, I don't think this friend will be a friend for long.

This is bizarre. OK, Friend X is empathetic. X will do anything for you, is considered by everyone the most understanding person around. Is kind, always knows the right thing to say, perhaps is a little sensitive, but is in general a good person to have around, especially if you're a little fragile yourself. Now, Friend Y is a tad different. Y makes arrangements, then doesn't bother turning up. Or calling to explain. Y might call two days later. Y will be in the middle of a serious conversation, and then pull away just because something else mildly interesting is happening in the other room. Having spent ten minutes explaining how you feel about something in great depth, Y will either change the subject abrubtly, with no regard for the emotional energy you have expended over the past ten minutes, or will simply respond with no regard whatsoever for anything you've just said.

I need people like X. I don't need people like Y.

On an almost completely unrelated note, I attended a meeting tonight, my first in this particular group. It was a group of techie people for the most part, fairly wide ranging. One lad in particular was fascinating. Actually, two were, but one in particular. This guy was an "entrepreneur", in his own opinion. By his account a moderately successful one too. He had a slightly misguided (and to my mind unsuccessful) view of the world - he seemed to think the world was out to get him, and was undervaluing him because of something or other. Mind you, he was slightly smaller than average, and I've come across several over-tryers before with that particular challenge.

So anyway, he kept harking on about the fact that the group (and by extension the rest of the group's peers) should exist solely for the purpose of networking, because he needed a network, because he was having trouble generating leads, and that's why he was in this group. And he KEPT harking ON and ON and ON about it. And he kept coming out with more bitter statements about how people weren't respecting him for this or that or the other. And in the meantime, the rest of the group was listening politely, letting him go on and on following his tangent peacefully wherever it led.

Now where have I seen this single-mindedness before? Oh yeah, in people who lack empathy, who have their heads stuck up their own arses. Hmm.


posted by Jeremy Smyth 00:41  |  

Friday, October 04, 2002

Hiatus

Wow. I find myself with about 30 mins to spare, and I don't know what to do with it. I know, I'll blog. That says a lot about my current state of affairs. I even turned down a gig this week. My (ex) band were supposed to play in a new venue in Kingscourt, Co. Cavan (about 2 hours away), and I refused. Now, as you avid readers will know, I left the band something like three months ago, giving them 9 weeks notice. So it's hardly a surprise that I'll say no from time to time. Especially now they have a "new" guitarist (who has since quit too, at about 3 days notice, so ya boo hiss). Anyway, he's doing tomorrow night with them, and she called me three tims this week to try to get me to do tonight. THREE times. And that's after I said "no" last week (I played last week, or the week before, can't remember).


It's not like I don't have an excuse. Put it this way - I'm sitting in work at the moment. It's a Friday night, 7:30pm. Traffic has died down to a trickle of zooming cars. Cars don't normally zoom past this window, as we're in the city centre. They normally queue. No queue now, it's "zoom...................zoom................zoom" and so on. Now, why am I here until 7:30? Answer: because I was writing part of a Java manual. Why couldn't it wait until Monday? Because of the fact that I told Boss Person it'd be done last Friday. And I won't be in this building until next Thursday - I'm teaching offsite for the first three days of next week. Teaching a course I taught once. That I haven't taught in almost a year. That I'm not that familiar with. To 12 people. Who work for Microsoft. In their building. So I'll need to spend time swotting up on it. But I can't; time is something I have very little of.


Right, let's go on ANOTHER little rant. Time. As you know (all of you being avid readers of course), I have two jobs, one of which is currently forcing me to write a few Java manuals. The other is as an associated lecturer with a correspondence university, linked to over there on the left. Now, it's the end of the academic year, the guys have submitted their last assignment for correction, and I've a stack of them at home. But... due to a whole stack of stuff happening last month, I haven't even FINISHED correcting their LAST assignment. Correction: I've finished a lot of them, haven't finished a few, and (most importantly for them) have only returned a handful. And thankfully, them being a nice bunch, they're largely forgiving and patient and nice in the emails they send to ask "Where's my assignment? Did I forget to submit it? Did the system lose it? Are you still correcting it?" etc. So, you can guess what my evenings and weekends are spent doing. And why I refuse to play gigs for a while.

So, to recap, what am I doing still at work on a Friday night at 7:35pm? (I don't type that fast...) Hrmph. Well there's a friend I haven't seen in a while, and we need a pint, and I need a pint. Badly. It's a very long time since I've had a pint. And he's in town tonight, except he can't meet me 'til later, and by the time I get home, and get back into town, I'd have about 5 mins rest. So, I have half an hour to spare. Had. Now I have about 20 mins :-)

Oh, and some Norwegian lad invited me to play Go with him today, suggesting that he was going to follow in his anscestors' footsteps and conquer Ireland. Git. The game's here if you want to have a look. I'm black, and as of just now, it's looking like I've lost a stack of stones at the bottom left. If there's a load of space at a5, a6, a7 kinda area, that means I've lost them. Otherwise, they're probably in the process of being surrounded. Nevermind. Bloody conquerors.

I wouldn't mind, but the Vikings didn't really conquer Ireland so much as rape, pillage, rape again, enjoy the shagging a bit too much, marry a few Irish lassies, and settle down and go native. The Celts on the other hand appear to have pretty much demolished the place. Until the Anglo-Saxons came along, but that's another story... I think I'm a celt, much more than a Norwegian anyway. And to bring this mini-snippet of conversation full circle, I'm currently playing another Celt (a Cornish lassie) at that same website. Yay.

And finally, just to round off my current tirade, I'm reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance again, and it's not as epiphany-inducing as it was the first time around. And the reason why is striking irony in me. If you haven't read it, this won't make sense, but it's about quality. Sorry, make that Quality, with a big Q. It's kinda how quality is something you can't "see" or "touch", you simply "know" or "feel". And how Quality exists in all things, be they artistic (Romantic) or scientific (Classical). Now - here's the clincher. When he goes on about Quality, and the philosophical chain of reason he uses to get there, it just doesn't "feel" good. Maybe I got swept away the first time, and said "wow!" too much. Or maybe I'm getting cynical in my old age (It's my birthday this month, everyone. Pressies to the usual address :-) But it just doesn't sit right. He's making some pretty impressive claims. I might just have to read some other books of his, which are lauded and worshipped in a number of R. M. Pirsig fan sites (do a google for Robert Pirsig and you'll see what I mean. The upshot of this is that I'm stretching my philosophical muscles again, and hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll be able to return to the partially-read "Gödel, Escher, Bach - an Eternal Golden Braid" and "Anarchy, State, and Utopia". If I ever have 30 minutes to spare.


posted by Jeremy Smyth 20:00  |