The band I’m in, Fly Like Venus, played their first show recently! It was at the Company Pub and Kitchen, which is a pretty nice venue, with its own stage and crew. We got it on video and it can be viewed in the little box below.

As an addendum to the last post, I would be remiss to forget to talk about Fly Like Venus for a little bit.

The last time I updated this site, which has gone from a dump of my old LiveJournal, to a fairly recurring life blog, to a mainly defunct music blog, I had just recently become a father. In the following, oh, year and a half, I’ve been a little preoccupied with doing that thing.

However, I’ve found time, carved into the recesses of the night, to finish a couple more albums of music.

(Previous posts 1 and 2)

For the most part, Gem Warrior is done. What a blast it has been! I’m not sure I’ve worked so hard on a project in a long time.

I made a game!

Much progress has been made on Gem Warrior since last I posted, and I’ve learned a bunch about Ruby and how to properly structure a game. I’ve also come to a fairly good stopping point where people can start to actually beta test the game and I can get much needed feedback outside of the echo chamber of my own head.

A game where you’re typing words on a command line is not exactly “modern gaming”, but it has a certain charm that tugs at a (hopefully) shared computing nostalgia. Also, it’s a lot easier to program something where the output is text, rather than graphics.

Thus, I’ve embarked on a game development project called Gem Warrior, a roguelite text adventure, (eventually) replete with a juicy command list, glorious monsters, and a hyperkeen randomized world that challenges you to discover its seemingly boundless majesties, and defeat an Evil Guy to Win the Day!

I’ve been interested in sound and audio for a long time now. Probably from the time I heard my first beep or click from a child’s toy (can’t be sure), my mind got hooked on these air fluctuations and how to make more of them.

Once I got into playing guitar and messing around on computers and patterned air movements (i.e. music), this became a fully-realized obsession. Even with all of the complexity inherent in my musical endeavors, the simple things still feel good, and if I can make a simple Ruby gem that can beep at you, then by Thor’s hammer I will!

Ahem.

After much frustration with some low-level audio manipulation in Javascript, I decided to change gears and make my first Windows Form application using Visual Studio 2010 and a great 3rd-party audio library. Yes, it’s really 2015; I’m just behind. In this, I have gotten further in my goal of gluing disparate audio files into a single one. Which is pretty great.

While working on a tool in Ruby to make sampler tracks out of several album components, I realized I did not yet know enough about how to manipulate audio to do what I wanted. I needed to approach it from a different vantage point, and a different language altogether.

So, I decided to see what the state of audio on the web was, having not done much beyond hosting and downloading MP3s years ago.

Spoiler: it’s pretty frickin’ cool now, guys.

2015 is apparently the year that I get inspired to work on web projects again, and rediscover the joys of the change-refresh cycle, JavaScript/jQuery, and HTML5. I just finished (is that really possible, though?) a couple new web apps and I’d like to drop some knowledge about them.

Lullabies, by Michael Chadwick

Sometimes, you just need some relaxing solo classical guitar to lull a young person into a state of unconsciousness.

In order to facilitate this, or maybe just to offer up a collection of pleasant music to play in the background for some other task, I made a Lullabies album. The whole shebang is pay-what-you-will, or you can just stream for free.

I’ve messed around with my own personal file host system for years, so that I could share stuff with others over the Internet. Initially, it was just a lazy (FTP to host) + (email link to friend) system. However, the uber way to handle something like this is to write a slick terminal script one-liner.

My OS of choice is OS X and I updated to Yosemite recently, so I decided to figure out how to do it and I’m thinking someone out there may find this information useful for any script that needs email capability.

Well, I finally released “Dumeh“. To those whom I’ve spoken to about this piece over the last decade, it may be a bit surprising that I’ve finally finished, but I think it’s time. I’ve written a bit on this piece on the blog, but the story of how the idea behind Dumeh began goes way back.

$ echo 'Hello World!'

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are a great thing and they make computing a lot easier. I’ve been fiddling with audio programming a bit lately (mainly loading/modifying/saving WAV files), and while getting your hands dirty allows for more flexibility and automation, I still love Audacity and Logic for their accessibility.

That being said, the command line is still often more powerful, but it comes with a higher learning curve.

That, and it still feels like magic most days.

I’ve got a bunch of albums on Bandcamp. They’re generally anywhere from 20-50 minutes long. Sometimes, you just want to test out something and not try to take in the whole enchilada in one sitting, so I decided a while ago to start making “samplers” that are ~2 minutes long and provide a kind of appetizer mashup option.

This is kind of tedious, so what else but code could come to the rescue!

For some reason, I’ve really wanted to make a game lately. I play them so often that it’s natural that I’d eventually want to make one. My recent renaissance in personal development is helpful in accomplishing this goal. But where to start?

While dynamic creation of collections of variables is often a very helpful thing, sometimes it treats all its members the same, even though they are not. Jekyll, the tech that creates this very site, is a bit non-picky about what it puts in its site-wide navigation, but it can be taught.

As promised a few days ago, I come back to you with my list of favorite apps and utilities, only on the Apple side of things.

People love lists. The Internet especially loves lists. It’s no surprise, really: a note followed by another note in a simple, structured order is easy to follow and gain knowledge from. Thus, it’s time to kick this new blog off with a tried-and-true, yet still hopefully useful, list of my favorite Windows apps.

Code(dev) + coda(music) + name + wanton need to use a specialized TLD = codana.me :)