I had been working on a piece on Saturday - Yorkie. It combined two segments which had been made separately. I listened through yesterday a couple of times and sent it off to Gilbert. It uses some human sounds that came with the Soundforge. I went to PlanetAcid site and downloaded the latest tune which had quite a good groove. While I was on PA I noticed a download to do with Audio Mirroir. When I had downloaded it I found that there was a quantity of wav sounds but most of the sounds were .sfi. This is an audio environment setting which gives a particular sound ambience. After quite a long while I found what I thought was the application set-up but it wouldnt run on this version of Windows. Maybe its possible to emulate the required earlier version of Windows. I think the Audio Mirroir was originated by Sound Foundry but when they sold their products to Sony they dropped that one.

When it was ferretting about in the Help section I came across something about loading VSTI synths - something I used to know how to do but have forgotten. In following this up it seems that I messed up the Sony Music Studio software so that it wouldnt load. I uninstalled and reinstalled it to cure the problem. I rolled back to where Windows was a month ago. Today I have come to the conclusion that a replacement is needed and so I have ordered Cubase Essentials 6. I tell myself that SMS was good while it lasted (almost a year) and didnt cost much. You have to steal yourself if you rely on software. A lot of wav and mp3 material from SMS is still available. I have downloaded the free version from Planet Acid and that works fine but with limited functionality.

I bumped into Rich Ruttenberg on Jango in the Bill Evans stream. He seems to do a lot of recordings for film music in LA but he also issues modern jazz recordings under his own name which apparently were done in a friend's home studio.