Month: December 2014

The Pros and Cons of Legacy MIDI Music Gear

Posted on by Timothy Dempsey

For bedroom composers and aspiring producers all over the world, the online marketplace has made it possible to add second-hand legacy MIDI music gear to our arsenals “for a song”. There is an upside and a downside to this revolution made possible mostly by eBay and Craigslist – not to mention Harmony Central before them.

Pros

The upside is price, or rather the savings. Hardware synths circa 2003 from the major manufacturers (Roland, Yamaha and Korg) can be scored for 25% of their retail prices when they were new. Some sounds are subject to being dated, but for the most part they still sound amazing. My preference is for 128 voice synths exclusively from here on.

Cons

The downside is USB support and development, or rather the cessation of development. While the MIDI specification is over thirty years old and not going anywhere, more ports and advanced features are available only with USB, like sample loading to hardware synths from your computer. I spent hours wrestling with a driver for Windows 8 to learn from Roland’s site that Windows 8.1 for the Fantom-XR is no longer supported.

I can only speculate why support would stop: allocating resources to support new OS versions of USB on legacy hardware devices isn’t practical. Manufacturers have an interest in selling their latest models at full MSRP prices.

This lack of support caused me to do the unthinkable when Yamaha returned a TG-55 that failed as “no longer supported”. I was willing to pay for repair for this workhorse; the unthinkable act was that it went out in the trash.

Workarounddempseystudio-music-MIDI

If you have the opportunity to trot out some older computers to pair with legacy music hardware, this is a route to take. In my case a circa 2003 Mac Powerbook fits the bill nicely. This did the trick when I was eager to explore drag-and-drop audio files for the sampling feature of Roland’s Fantom XR, my latest addition (and believe me, it was far from a drag-and-drop workflow but that may be the topic of another post).

To their credit, the big three manufacturers almost always keep legacy drivers available for an older OS like Mac 10.4. If this is not an option, the appeal of the savings on legacy gear is diminished. While still viable due to the MIDI standard, the advanced features and multiple ports available via USB are not available if your new OS isn’t supported any longer.

CMS Deuce: WordPress and Drupal

Posted on by Timothy Dempsey

For more than ten years, two of the leading leading content management systems (CMS) have been making quite a racket. Sorry about that.

I’d like to weigh in on the two top contenders: WordPress and Drupal. For clarity’s sake I’m only considering the self-hosted WordPress platform, not the wordpress.com hosted option.

The conventional wisdom is that WordPress is a better choice for new users, while Drupal is more powerful but comes with a steep learning curve. Both are open-source (free) so there really is no barrier to entry from a financial side if you are inclined towards tire-kicking either – or both.

I have over six years of personal hands-on experience with WordPress using it almost daily, five of those hosting my own independent webcomic from 2009-2014. That comfort level steered me to recommend and implement the platform for dempsey-doodles-blog-wordpress-drupal-deuce-tennistwo sites for my last employer. An intranet and a portfolio site for the custom builds division of an events organizer firm.

  • Downloads
    There really is no competition when it comes to downloads and installed sites. Created by Matt Mullenweg, WordPress beats the options handily by a factor of ten. It’s what I am using as I type this, so you could say I’m a brand advocate.
    Advantage: WordPress
  • Multi user site(s)
    WordPress has folded in a formerly different product WordPress Multi User (MU) into later versions of the WordPress core. It was very simple to add Subscribers to the intranet and train two staff to be Editors, ultimately moving an HR person into my former Administator role. Any computer-literate professional in the work force can publish or maintain a WordPress site once it is built. Drupal has the ability to fine tune toolbars and limit the visibility of certain site sections to certain users, but it feels like you are “rolling your own”.
    Advantage: WordPress
  • Blocks
    The terminology of Blocks is not one that I love so much, but rather the feature of highlighting the Blocks (via the somewhat clumsily worded  “Demonstrate block regions”) that I find to be a great visual aid, particularly if you aren’t familiar with a theme or have taken over someone else’s site. I’d like to see this adopted as a convention in browsers. I know the beloved Firefox Web Developer add-in can show DIVs, but the implementation is clunky and cluttered.
    Advantage: Drupal.
  • Themes
    For my upcoming Drupal site, a gallery of sketch cards (you can have a sneak peak here), I bought a great premium template from Themeforest, the leading resource for both WordPress and Drupal themes. Since there are fewer Drupal installations, there is a related dearth of portfolio type themes, but I found one I love. In the WordPress world, the third-party options abound and make it hard to decide. With fewer choices,  I’m paradoxically giving this
    Advantage: Drupal.

So, we have a CMS deuce, and it isn’t even tennis season! After starting this post I found a great round-up which adds Joomla! to the game, explained in  concise terms with tables and graphics and pull quotes. Read it here.

What do you think? Agree or disagree? Please leave a comment.

Related Tweeting

Magento Zero Inventory: Not A Bug, It’s a Feature

Posted on by Timothy Dempsey

Let’s call it questionable user experience.

In honor of the frenzy in the States over the last few days regarding commerce – or in spite of it – I took the plunge into the initial setup of my online store. I have amassed dozens on hand drawn sketch cards to test the waters. These are usually sold for cash when I table at small, regional cons and art fairs.

I initially aspired to release this for Black Friday. Then, Small Business Saturday. Okay, at least Cyber Monday would be a great time to launch. None of these self-imposed deadlines are workable. It will go live when it is ready. When it comes to selling online, it has to be ready.

After a quick round-up of hosted solutions I knew that I wanted to spend a budget of zero (that’s in US Dollars) because I am willing to put my sweat equity into it for the sake of learning. This led me to Magento’s Community Edition which is open source and had a first-time setup that evoked my experience with installing a handful of WordPress sites. It was a breeze to install.

The lag and slow performance continues to be a deterrent. It simply is not snappy enough to let me fly-through various experiments without frustration. It is very hard to complain about a free, open source solution that empowers small business owners to sell their goods online as easily as Magento’s Community Edition.

You know where this is going, right? I have a complaint that affects every New Product added to my catalog.

It only reared its head when I couldn’t add a second product to my catalog despite being absolutely sure I had done everything right. The item refused to appear. A quick search turned up this four year old blog post by Ashley Schroder titled “Why are my Magento products not showing up?!” with 120+ comments, which he finally disabled from new comments. Here is mine.

There are a couple of solutions for workarounds – and they are just that – workarounds. How is this logic considered… logical(?):zero-inventory

Apparently when adding a new product, the inventory defaults to “0”. Magento Zero Inventory; therefore the product doesn’t show. This makes no sense to me – if you are adding a product, you must have inventory. Even if the developers of Magento could explain their logic on this, it should be presented in a bold, colorful modal alert. “You are adding a new product with zero inventory. Is this what you want to do?” If you read the comments on Ashley’s post, a lot of bright people were stumped, and stumped hard.

Counter-intuitive, and a likely reason a small Mom-and-Pop shop with casual computer skills could not implement without enlisting a Magento developer. I’ll still continue to build my online store, but at a slower rate, and I haven’t scratched the surface of themes yet.

Stay tuned.