Here we go!

Awesome Audio app and another announcement

Well day two of my incarnation as a blogger and I've yet to achieve much. What I have been doing is discovering some hoopy cool stuff that I didn't know about previously. First up is Picasa - as a graphic artist I never really gave any consideration to Picasa even though I'd heard and read nothing but good stuff about it. I'm a huge fan of The GIMP which I use for both photo manipulation and for building custom textures for the 3d models I build and I find that there's not much I can't do with it. Picasa's editing set up in comparison is far faster for many tasks and sooooo easy to use. It's effects are intuitive and simple to use. I've yet to come to grips with Pacasa Web Albums - I publish much of my artwork on our website at www.wizitch.com and also in my online gallery at Renderosity  where the images are related to my ongoing Saga: The Chronicles of Inthandonia; The Wizard Wars - but I'm eventually going to set up some Picasa web albums for my other art and graphic work so people can see stuff I've done that has previously only been on my own hard drives.

Here's an example of one of my photographs after I've subjected it to multiple Picasa filters. The original

photo was of a foggy winters morning on the banks of Christchurch's Avonside Otakaro River. Sadly this section of the river has been extensively damaged in the earthquakes - more on that later also.

Audiotool

I am a MASSIVE fan of Google - I use Google Chrome as my browser and have just found a very cool Flash driven app in the Google App store. Called Audiotool it's a web based music creation package that runs within the Google Chrome browser. I've been listening to tracks made by other Audiotool  users all evening on the Audiotool Radio. This app lets you create very sophisticated music - for free. You can upload it for the listening pleasure of anyone. The user interface is very slick and intuitive consisting of a node type editor which looks and works like the real instruments, mixers effects and so on that a musician would encounter in a working studio.

For a newcomer to multi track recording I suspect the interface would be somewhat daunting at first. As I'm a musician with a reasonable amount of experience with recording and digital sound recording I'm hoping to use this very cool tool in future projects of my own.

This afternoon I spent some time setting up my laptop with an extra flatscreen monitor and my sweet set of Altec Lansing speakers. I'm listening to Audiotool Radio with the app running in a Chrome browser window on the external monitor - the radio feature has set of graphic visualizations (similar to Windows Media Player) and this provides a nice ambience for listening to other folks Audiotool creations whilst giving me a series of funky beats to type along to as I write up todays entry to this blog.

So that's it for today - I'm off now to play some more and see what fun I can have with this very cool software.

Have a nice day!!