Archive for the 'Music' Category

Embed “My Music 2″ Flash Player

Published
by
Zz85-nds
on April 14, 2008
in Music and Technology
. 0 Comments

My Music 2

My Music 2 is released after some sleepless nights.

Improvements from “My Music 1″ its not internal with rewrites for engine codes, but go beyond implementing some new ideas planned. The new application is also open for the public which means you do not need to be a facebook user, nor required installations, to use it.

Among one of its features is song embed function which I’m testing below.

Other improvements include keyboard input, improved timings accuracy, instruments selection, learning/game function, and one of the most powerful function, a search for finding and learning music. The search engine is powered by musipedia which now uses My Music interface to provide them a rich searching experience.

There’s also a blog for My Music, which shares more information from developments to motivations of the application.

Remember to check out the app and have fun!

Busy Exciting Holidays

Published
by
Zz85-nds
on December 15, 2007
in Music and School
. 0 Comments

Although exams are over, life’s not a single moment less hectic than school term.

So here’s the track for my trip from KL back to Singapore on Aeroline on Monday.
KL-SG

Tuesday to Friday is Music Camp in school, where there’s fun practicing music, playing games, attending Masterclasses, eating, talking, running to and fro places, losing sleep.

Lots of moments are going on other than myself eg. Brother’s back from Malaysia & Daddy’s going into Malaysia. Next Monday we are going in again. Then Christmas, then new year, then work, then school’s reopening.

nwc2ly.py

Published
by
Zz85-nds
on December 2, 2007
in Music, Technology and lilytool
. 0 Comments

Just a quick post here because there are 3 exams papers in the next few days which I’m not prepared for yet.

Having to do some quick typesetting, I found it useful to use the tool nwc2ly.py I did few years back.

There are few issues I’ll address here as the website is outdated with some invalid html.

1st. the link to get the script is can be downloaded or viewed using sourceforge online svn browser here.

2nd. my email previously at joshakoo/at/myrealbox.com has been abandoned years since
a. I couldn’t seemed to log on at times. b. Some messages could be deleted from the server, and some downloads seem stuck using the pop3. c. It was filled with spam. I can be contacted via zz85/at/users.sf.net anyway.

Anyway here’s some tips for using nwc2ly.py. If there a piece of music available in midi format, I would import it using NoteWorthy Composer. Then I’ll clean up and highlight the parts which I need. I’ll create a new NWC file, and add a single staff in as I found the script usually work without flaws this way.

I’ll run the nwc2ly python script, followed by the lilypond’s convert-ly script to update to the latest syntax. I’ll run lilypond and maybe make some extra changes and fine tune the score. I usually work with LilyPondTool in jEdit and except that the shortcuts for running nwc2ly and convert-ly don’t seem to work for now, but can only look into it when I got the time.

Thats for now, and hopefully anyone who needed help to use nwc2ly.py could have gotten some tips here.

Music Radio Alarm

Published
by
Zz85-nds
on October 18, 2007
in Music, Sleep, Technology and linux
. 0 Comments

(I reposted this because of server migrations incase anyone noticed)
6 hours of my lesson-free day was fighting against my >8 years aged server. I lost the battle with some cuts on my fingers.
Instead of a bad configuration, it seems a faulty network card was playing me out. Lesson learned: If it ain’t broke don’t double fix it. If the server ain’t going to work anymore, there’s no point keeping this post as a draft, gotta publish it now.

Back to the topic, my father brought home a portable Philips radio combined with a Cd player and alarm clock years ago. My impression it wasn’t a very good audio player, its features and sound quality was just minimal. However, there was still few interesting and useful features. It served as clock and I also used it to set my morning alarms to interrupt my dreams by either

a) Turning on a FM station
b) Playing tracks of my CDs, or
c) Sounding alarms likes beeps and rings.

You could set to 2 alarms on it, so I usually turn on the 1st alarm to the CD tracks, then blast the noisy alarms 10 to 60 minutes later. The 1st alarms is for switching my body into a light sleep, and starts the engine of my subconscious mind. If I’m still in deep sleep, the loud sounding alarms is the last line of defense not to be late for school.

There were few CD tracks that never fail to wake me up- Carmen’s fantasy, Walton’s violin sonatas, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and so on… some tracks made me want to lie in bed to hear the songs- Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto 5…

That’s for waking up. For sleeping, I’ll set the timer to turn off the CD or Radio after a period of time. It seems to me I never get to sleep soon if my mind is actively listening to classical music.

— if you are not a computer geek you can stop reading right here —

Here’s did an equivalent on my server plugged to speakers. 4 linux commands I used: screen, mplayer, sleep, killall.

I start my ssh session with putty to my and run screen -r

1. Play lullaby softly
mplayer http://audio-ogg.ibiblio.org:8000/wcpe.ogg -cache 256 -af volume=-5dB
This plays WCPE, the online classical radio at a softer volume. I move to another screen window for the next step (^A,n)

2. Silence the lullaby
sleep 15m && killall mplayer
Sleep here is used sort of like a countdown timer. Here, 15 minutes later, the mplayer is terminated for silence. We need another window for the next step.

3. Countdown the alarm
sleep 3.5h && radio.sh
This shows I want the radio to be turned on again after 3 and a half hours to wake me up…

Thats not too much sleep isn’t it? La la la… ZzZzZZZzZ

Humming Brahms

Published
by
Zz85-nds
on October 13, 2007
in Music
. 0 Comments

Tuned to the Arst3000 Online classical radio while studying, a surprisingly familiar melody caught my attention and then I introduced the song to my friend to appreciate.

It was the opening from Brahms’ 2nd Piano Concerto, 3rd movement- Andante and hearing that always remind me of 2nd movement from Brahms’ Violin Concerto. I felt they were similar: Both were the openings of their movements, both beautiful melodies, both played by instruments not the soloist’s, both played for a while before the soloists start to snatch back the audience’s attention.

Who doesn’t know Brahms Lullaby? Brahms’ melodies have something special in them, and perhaps Mendelssohn always wanted that ability of Brahms to compose melodies, songs everyone could remember remember, whistle or hum (or haunt) after hearing them.

Recently I got hooked to Brahms 2nd Symphony again. In just the first 3 minutes of the first movements, appears 2 melodies I like. 1st is slightly after the 1st minute, and the second slightly after the 2nd minute and both melodies would reappear again couple of times in the movement. The 2nd melody to me feels like a variations to Lullaby.

Other nice works from Brahms (in my collection), (Violin and Cello) Double Concerto, Brahms Violin Sonatas, and the rest of his symphonies, his Viola/Clarinet sonata and intermezzo for piano.

Try Brahmsing!