Velvet Grooves

Hi All, thought I’d update this site a bit as its been a while.

I’ve decided to setup a record label with a friend of mine from Wales. Full details of this will be given in due course. In terms of what kind of music we’re looking to work with, this comes under “anything that excites us” – i.e. doesn’t matter on genre or specifics, just if we hear it and like it a lot and we can work with it, we’ll look into releasing it. It’s an exciting thought for us as it’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time.

Anyway, there’s SO MUCH to look into as yet with setting up a label, so I won’t put much up here until we’re ready to go. However, the website build is using a similar strategy to the one employed in my Artist/Band one (albeit a little more complex and involved than that one). I’ll go into further details with that once it’s complete.

So… before any details on where you can find info on the label, you can just follow me and Matt on the following Twitters: me = @velvet_grooves and matt on @madeofsteam

Work for Velvet Grooves will still go on as I work with bands, record labels and small companies alike on promoting my services.

That’s all for now. Hope you’re all well :D

Cheers,

Paul

Thought it might be best to look back into the iPhone programming again, seems as it looks like a popular search option.

Dualbooting MacOSX with PC

First of all, I did manage to get the MacOSX dual booted on my PC in the end. It was with iDeneb. Search for that on google, but the one I have is 1.4, which contains firmware 10.5.6 – sufficient for the latest developments. Setting it up wasn’t easy though, and I don’t say that lightly either. These OSX installations are very hardware specific, so you’re better off doing your research first into what works best with your hardware.  I’ll even give you a few links on where to go to get started:

Infinite Mac: http://www.infinitemac.com/

Insanely Mac: http://www.insanelymac.com/

OSX86 Wiki (for research on you hardware vs what to install): http://wiki.osx86project.org/

Now, as I’m nice, I’ll even provide you with the specification I used for my hardware:

PC Spec – AMD Athlon 64 3500. 1GB Ram, Nvidia Geforce 7800 PC, RTL8187B Wireless Lan, nForce Ethernet, MSI K8N Motherboard, and Sound Blaster Audigy 1. That should be enough :)

iDeneb configuration: All languages installed, Additional fonts, Keyboard/Mouse USB as standard (I wouldn’t encourage PS2 here – even with the patches I couldn’t get mine to work), Audio – Sound Blaster, Chipset – Apple Nforce ATA Experimental, Kernel – Voodo, Wireless – RTL8187B (this didn’t work still, so I’m on nForce now), Video – NVInject 256.

Be careful when you’re installing, as you might install the OS, reboot your machine and it freezes, or tells you to constantly restart, or comes up with a DOS like error dialog. Chances are, if you get any of these, you’ve configured it wrong. And you can try posting it on Insanely Mac (or whoever else), but the likelyhood that you’ll get something back which is accurate yourself is very unlikely. Why? Because there are literally LOADS of people asking, so you can tell it probably gets quite tiresome for some people on there. Search and research! ;-)

Anyway, mine works quite fine. The internet isn’t exactly perfect, but it loads when it feels, which is often. The iPhone SDK works a charm – although I can’t transfer to my phone, you have to simulate via the on screen one till you can buy a license. Audio works fine, video/DivX works fine, most things do. So I’m quite happy with mine, at least till I earn enough to buy a proper Mac (any donations??? ;-))

Oh yeah, and dual booting – you have to stick a “chain” file on your boot drive (C:\ in my case), then alter your boot.ini file to incorporate this. Make sure you format both drives then install the Mac DVD first (this is extremely important!), or if you’re booting from one drive, via two partitions, install the Mac on the 2nd partitition first, then install Windows on the 1st partition, then stick your Chain file on the boot drive, followed by an editting of the boot file.

Word of warning though – BACKUP YOUR DATA! Yes, it might not go as planned. You might have hiccups here and there. You might have to reformat a few times, so backing up your files is massively advised!

iPhone Programming

I’ve managed to get the Hello World app compiling on mine already. How cool is that?! Obviously that’s pretty basic though, we want to do the more exciting stuff! So here’s a few tutorials I’m downloading now to get into this:

iPhone Game Programming

Hello World

More tutorials

I’ll let you know how I get on :)

Some discussion about a “web scene” in Birmingham:
http://forum.multipack.co.uk/comments.php?DiscussionID=77&page=1

I went to the Island Bar on Friday night to see Sunset Cinema Club, Lonely Ghosts, 4 or 5 Magicians and Idiosync. Brilliant gig, really really loved it! And one of the first times I’ve been to a gig in Birmingham when I’ve not had to worry about how to get back to Redditch (where I live). As a result, I enjoyed it to the maximum.

I wanted to think up some ideas of how to incorporate Social Media into the gig so that it can be well documented. Admittedly, it was a bit late thinking (literally hours before setting off), but this is something I definitely plan for next time. Truth be told, my University dissertation was on something very very similar, albeit the application is less applicable now than it was. The web has moved on ;). But Twitter, Flickr, shared audio recordings, video recordings, and whatever else can be incorporated should be experimented with at gigs. I have an iPhone here, so my initial thought here would be primarily how one would do this with an iPhone. Should be fairly easy.

Anyway, there are lots of exciting possibilities of incorporating Social Media into gigs, from anywhere in the world. As long as either the venue supports free WiFi and/or you already have the Internet on your phone by contract. This is something I’ll be looking into over the next week or two as Idiosync are playing again on the 14th May at the Flapper and they’re my neighbours band…

To get involved in the discussion on Birmingham’s “web scene”, use the link above. For a place stated as second most Social Media compatible in the world (first is apparently Chicago!), I find this quite strange…

Enjoy the read!

Australia 1789. A Young lieutenant is directing rehearsals of the first play ever to be staged in that country – with only two copies of the text, a cast of convicts , and one leading lady who may be about to be hanged….

Ticket are £6/£5 from the Box Office or join our facebook group for details of special promotional tickets.

The Rage Ensemble is an amateur company run by Rage giving people the opportunity to work with professionals to create productions using film,theatre,music…

If youd like to assist with this production Click here to contact us.
If youd like to:-
a) act in future productions
b) assist with this production
c) attend this production
d) find out about ticket promotions
join The Rage Ensemble’s facebook group.

Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists – by David Byrne:
@ Wired.com

Just caught that again on Twitter via @MixMatchMusic (via @buzzsonic) but I remember reading it a while ago, and it’s a great read…