From Venus to Mars

It's not how long I work, it's what I'm working on that determines if I'll be able to even see straight, let alone function at the end of the day. Lately I've been quite pleased with progress. I've dug myself out of several holes that were easily big enough to burry a man my size. Today unfortunately, I discovered a whole network of underground caverns to explore.

Cut to the chase.. I'm dealing with Windows XP and Mac OSX. One comes from Venus, the other from Mars. Then I've got all your favourite VST hosts to deal with. Unfortunately, they all do things differently when it comes to hosting plugins. I'm not going to lay any blame here; I've simply learned to accept the fact that this has happened. (For your info, the whole point of VST and having a nice SDK is so that all hosts behave the same, and all plugins behave the same, so they can all happily work together). Finally, I've got various flavours of PowerCore to deal with, and various versions of PowerCore drivers (pre 2.0 and post 2.0). Oh yeah, did I mention Intel Mac? To call having to develop for Intel Mac a "wrench in the system" would be like saying a comet hitting earth 65 million years ago and killing all the dinosaurs was a “wrench in the system”. By the way, I just read that at the Permo-Triassic boundary (some 250 million years ago), 90% of all species died. Even insects took a huge hit! (This info comes from a book called The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins).

Ok, really cutting to the chase this time… It’s all about MIDI, and accuracy of triggering harmony voices from your sequences. Sounds easy, and normally would be. The above paragraph is my only defence.

Favourite unrelated link today: http://www.tolweb.org/tree

Stephen Evans
Developer