Tag: upgrade

BuddyPress!

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on BuddyPress!

This has been on my list of things to do to Jazz-Sax, and now I have. We have gone BuddyPress now. This hopefully will enable more things to happen here, like Forum discussions, and perhaps some sort of group calendar for people’s upcoming gigs, etc, etc. Lots of possibilities. If anyone has any good recommendations on a theme for BuddyPress that would be cool. Or some good plugins for it.

Activity: http://www.jazz-sax.com/activity/
Members: http://www.jazz-sax.com/members/
Groups: http://www.jazz-sax.com/groups/
Forums: http://www.jazz-sax.com/forums/
Register: http://www.jazz-sax.com/register/ (This one doesn’t seem to work at the moment)

UPDATE: Ok, seems my Apache server was configured incorrectly. Things seem to work now.

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Band-in-a-Box 2010 for Windows

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Band-in-a-Box 2010 for Windows

PGMusic announced today that they are out with the latest, greatest version of BinaB for Windows (no new Mac version yet). Nothing really “whoa” in this version, other than if you upgrade from the previous version you can get ALL the RealTracks. Some of the highlights of the update I found interesting are:

  • Plug-in mode….generate tracks and drag and drop them into your DAW like Sonar, FL-Studio, and ProTools. Kinda cool.
  • 3x faster generating RealTracks and freezing of tracks (so they don’t have to be generated again)….finally!
  • RealTracks support Shots, Holds and Pushes….finally
  • Double time/Half Time support for RealTracks
  • 999 undo levels

Best deal for previous owners is the $139 USB hard drive “UltraPlusPAK” or the “EverythingPAK”. You really don’t want to download it. I did…it was painful. Band-in-a-Box is a great program, on any platform for people wanting to practice changes, songs, or even use it for composition. I couldn’t count the times I’ve used BinaB generated drum and bass parts (and sometimes piano) for arrangements…..

Santa says go get it!

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Possible Downtime?

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Possible Downtime?

This site, and my others (jazz-flute, jazz-clarinet, jazz-oboe, etc), will probably be down sometime over the weekend. Basically, this is due to be deciding to retire my huge old Dual Pentium III server with a smaller, more efficient Atom powered computer. I’m not anticipating any problems but……you never know. I think it will be rather painless and hopefully things will be faster and better on the Atom powered computer (MSI Wind PC to be specific).

For the geeks and nerds out there, I’m probably going to put Ubuntu Server 8.1 on it. The current server is running FreeBSD. That might maybe be a possibility as well. I just need PHP5, Apache 2.2, and MySQL on it. We’ll see what happens. The only real issue I think will be exporting the databases, though, since I moved everything to WordPress, that should be simple. It will be interesting to see exactly how much quieter (the current beast is really loud) and faster it will be. The only thing is that I’ll be losing the RAID backup that I have on the current system. Not that it really has ever failed, once in almost 10 years. That is pretty damn good. At some point, the new Atom server will get a SSD (Solid State Disk) so it will be totally efficient and pretty much silent. Well, hopefully.

UpdateComputer comes tomorrow sometime. I am going to put Ubuntu Server 8.1 on it. I don’t think it will be an issue at all moving stuff over. Just tar it, ftp it to the new computer, untar, etc, etc. Reading up on it, the Atom computer should make a ton faster than the dual pentium III 450s I have.

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Looking For A New Server

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Looking For A New Server

I’m looking for a new server to host Jazz-Sax on. The current server, a 1997 Dual Pentium II 450 with an Adaptec RAID card and two 40gig hard drives works ok, but it is huge, eats lots of electricity, and generates a lot of heat and noise.

What I’m looking for is perhaps someone who wants to donate a G4 Mac Mini, or perhaps an older Shuttle Mini PC or something. Something smaller, that eats less energy, generates less heat, and is relatively quite.

Actually, I’d pay a little for a Mac Mini……I’d love to get something small and stick a SSD in there…..

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