Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Comments
Rereading a collection of essays, articles, and profiles by Harry Crews.
Just finished the magnificent “The Knuckles of Saint Bronson”
I recommend almost anything by Crews.
I'm listening to a Korean suspense novel along the lines of Silence of the Lambs. I'm still on the fence about it. It's not bad, but not a real page turner either (or whatever the audio equivalent of that is lol).
https://www.chirpbooks.com/audiobooks/the-only-child-by-mi-ae-seo
+1000
Just finished rereading “the Snopes Trilogy” by the shirtless gentleman in the link:
https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:9b1a76d4-09f7-3d77-9d91-d5d7d016622a
Montgomery Ward Snopes remains one of the most hilarious names ever created.
Just finished reading Voice of the Fire, by Alan Moore, which led me to watch an interview with him where he touched on discordianism, which has in turn inspired me to re-read John Higgs ‘KLF - chaos, magic and the band that burned a million pounds’.
The Philosophy of Modern Song
by You Know Who.
Irascible, cryptic, thought-provoking, insightful…all the adjectives…
It is also beautifully designed.
The Canterbury Tales. Can be slow going from time to time when I need to look up Middle English words that are unfamiliar to me, but a wonderful insight into the lives of people from over 600 years ago.
The Illliad and The Odyssey in audiobook format. I'd tried reading the former before but I just couldn't get into it. Audio helps a lot and I'm actually enjoying it.
Any suggestion on Chet Atkins? I want to read an essay on his works, but did not find anything. If you have suggestions let me know please.
Just starting Iain M Banks' 'Culture' series (book one is Consider Phlebas).
It was a close toss-up between Banks Vs Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth series.
I've never read either author before.
I’ve been way into audio books over reading them the last couple years or more. Especially if the reader, or voice actor is great or they have an ensemble cast doing different characters.
The Iliad is a bit of a struggle, admittedly - largely due to the Catalogue of Ships. The Odyssey is a joy. It's amazing to think that they were probably preserved unwritten and passed on orally. And sung.
William Basinski [drone & ambient musician]: Musician Snapshots (The Music You Should Hear Series Book 1)
You’re in for a treat. They’re so good, I wish I could read them for the first time again. FWIW, Consider Phlebas might not be the best place to start. It’s brilliant, but the the Culture books don’t have to be read in order, and I usually recommend The Player of Games when someone is interested. If you enjoy TPOG, you’ll want to read the rest.
I reread all the Culture books last year, and I know I’ll do it again in another couple of years. There's nothing quite like them, and Banks’s vision of a possible future is unique. Neither dystopian nor utopian, although both are represented. His SF is stunning.
Something I have struggled with (due to ADHD) - I listen to the start then suddenly realize that the voice has moved on by multiple pages while I’m still thinking about something entirely different and not listening. I have tried, but it’s just a hugely frustrating experience to me.
Don’t think I’ll ever have any option than the printed (or digital) word.
The way I explain it to students (I teach Homeric Greek in the day job) is that the Catalogue is the map at the start of a fantasy novel, but encoded as oral poetry for live performance to audiences trained on the cognitive resources of lists in song, which were able to preserve a surprisingly accurate record of the political geography of the late Mycenaean world across half a millennium of a dark age so dark that they were only vaguely aware of the civilisational collapse that triggered it (which is one of the things the Odyssey is about, as the last story in Greek myth and the end of the age of heroes). It absolutely blows my mind.
From time to time the Iliad is still performed orally. On 27 September 1996 the Denver Post reported on a round-the-clock reading at a local high school, including this passage which reads strikingly in hindsight:
The Post's website has since taken that down, no doubt because the location of the reading and interviews was Columbine High School.
Thanks very much for this insight. I actually had the intention to self learn Homeric Greek (I understand it’s pretty different from the Plato/Euripides/Aristophanes Greek that I’m reasonable on) but life got in the way, unfortunately. I’ve only read Homer in translation, alas. I completely understand the scholarly importance of the Catalogue of Ships, but it’s still not an easy read! I have to say that learning Greek was hugely satisfying, and I will get back to it.
Oh, wonderful! I hope you get the chance. The Chicago Homer is a fantastic resource here, as on iOS is the touch-parsing in Attikos with direct lookup in Logeion (both free). The differences from Attic are pretty minor, because it’s primarily Ionic with some Aeolic forms mixed in but very little from other dialects, and most of the differences are the result of three things: older forms that have become obsolete in classical Greek; metrical stretching of normal forms to fit the metre; and occasional influences from Aeolic dialect (such as the dative plural in -essi). Your classical Greek grammar still works perfectly well for Homer; you don’t need to learn entire new tables, and the verb system and all its forms look very much as they do in classical Attic, with a few easily recognised and remembered exceptions (mostly associated with the verb to be). And in a number of key ways Homeric Greek is actually easier than Attic: most words are used in only a few grammatical forms; sentences are constructed a line at a time with much simpler use of subordinate clauses and indirect speech than you’ll find in classical prose; and there's a very high rate of vocabulary reuse compared to later texts.
I'm loading presets into Mersenne synth, listening whilst Alexa on my Echo Spot reads Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence to me.
I keep coming back to this book.
Your enthusiasm is fatally contagious! I'll give it another try. I'll have to refresh my Attic first (I sound like a property developer). I finished my Masters last year (I'm a late in life student) and haven't done much since, so I'm a bit rusty. Thanks for the tips - I know Logeion well, in fact.
That's what I've found too. I think I just don't like my internal voice as well, lol. I listened to two versions of the Illiad and the Odyssey, and
The Odyssey was really surprising in that I didn't know it was being told in flashback. I also couldn't help but see Armand Assante in my mind. I think that was the first on screen version of The Odyssey I ever saw (and this listen made me realize how much artistic liberty they took).
Fantastic. Thanks for those insights.
Right now, I'm thinking I want to listen to The Aeneid, but I am not sure if I should expect something similar to The Odyssey from a Roman perspective, or what.
That's a very good way to think of it (except that it's only the first half that's modelled on the Odyssey, and then the second half is a remake of the Iliad). It's quite a dark poem, a foundation myth for a nation then just warily emerging from a devastating civil war that took down the entire political system, and a refugee story about having to let go of everything that matters for a future you'll never live to see. But at its best it gets you right in the gut.
Thanks for the synopsis.
That version has a fascinating backstory. It was originally adapted by Nicholas Meyer, the legendary screenwriter, novelist, and occasional director behind The Seven Per Cent Solution, Time after Time, and various Philip Roth adaptations, but best known for saving the Star Trek film franchise with the even-numbered (= the good) instalments (Wrath of Khan, The Voyage Home, The Undiscovered Country). He wrote it in a state of utter brokenness following the death of his wife, which he channeled into the story of a man trying to get home to his family, and the original draft (the only one of his scripts he put up on his old website) is absolutely amazing – far and away the best Homer adaptation for any medium. But when Konchalovsky came aboard – a genuinely great filmmaker in his own right, but not a natural fit for this material – he chucked out Meyer's screenplay and wrote his own vastly inferior (and cheaper) version over Meyer's basic structure, and Meyer was relegated to an Executive Producer credit. Nevertheless, for Meyer himself it was a way back into screenwriting that led to some of his best work – including the Martin Guerre transplant Sommersby, which riffs in a quite different way on his lifelong obsession with the Odyssey.
I’m trying to plug holes in my knowledge of English literature, so I’m reading Middlemarch now. Liking it - funnier than l expected.
I just finished a book about getting better at skiing, "Breakthrough on the New Skis: Say Goodbye to the Intermediate Blues"
And that is a very good book for this subject. Only the writing style is a bit over the top, the guy repeats himself a lot.
And now I am re-reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. From my memory, it was a really good book (the inspiration for the Apocalypse Now movie). But when I read this book in bed, after a few pages I fall asleep instantly (which is a good thing). The book is thin but it takes a lot of time to finish it.
I'm also a fan. I recently listened to an audiobook version and the woman reading it was so amazing that it was half my enjoyment. Lots of good nuggets of ideas in there.
I am reading The Three Body Problem which is a cool science fiction book, and Asterios Polyps which is a dope graphic novel! I recommend both
Asterios Polyps is one of the best graphic novel that I read.
Others mention:
V For Vendetta
The Sculptor