Recently, I finished a book publishing project I started around last Christmas. The book is titled “12 Partitions pour Xylophone & Métallophone à 8 Barres” and contains sheet music of French children songs that can be played on toy metallophones (aka glockenspiel) or xylophones. To self-publish the book, I used CreateSpace, a subsidiary of Amazon. It is now for sale via Print-on-Demand on all Amazon stores :

• Amazon France
• Amazon Canada
• Amazon UK
• Amazon Deutschland
• Amazon España
• Amazon Italia
• Amazon USA
• Amazon JP

Update Jan. 2019: I have made an English version of the book, titled “12 Songs for Toy Xylophones & Metallophones: Vol. 1 - Children’s Songs from France”. It is available through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), since CreateSpace is being shut down by Amazon. Check out the Amazon US store, the UK store and the Japan store. The publishing process through KDP is pretty similar to the one with CreateSpace, with basically the same options and workflow.

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Using Paulstretch Mono algorithm as a starting point, I used the Chuck programming language to generate the track.

I am aware it is indeed quite a boring / droning track but as my first foray into audio synthesis, it will do for now.

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Dave Brubeck died yesterday. Here are a few songs in his memory:

The Dave Brubeck Quartet - Koto Song (from “Jazz Impressions of Japan”)

Dave Brubeck & Paul Desmond - These foolish things (from “1975: The duets”)

The Dave Brubeck Quartet - Take Five (from “Concord on a Summer Night”)

I recently bought a new Windows computer and, since there is no AppleScript on Windows, I have to do without the Doug’s scripts for ITunes that I used on Mac OS X to automate the management of my music library. But Apple has made available a COM API, that can be used by any language to script iTunes, as long as it supports COM. This includes Ruby MRI, with the Win32OLE package in the standard library. But I was curious about IronRuby, the .NET implementation of Ruby, which recently reached version 1.0 and therefore, I decided to reimplement with it some of the scripts I used the most.

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Some music for the occasion :

First Snow - Stephan Micus (from Desert Poems)

From Sweden, DJ Trexx : A Union of Peace, Love and Bass. Glorious!

Check out the video of French band The Outrunners. Love the 80’s vibe, very Miami Vice-like.

Muxtape is a website that lets users share mixtapes online, which is pretty cool, as is their minimalistic design. This Ruby tutorial will show how to use Mechanize (together with Hpricot) and rb-appscript to scrape the site, download the mp3’s and add them automatically to an iTunes playlist. The last part will only work on Mac OS X (because of rb-appscript).

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Recently I listened to something I haven’t heard in quite a few years, namely the album “Whiskey”, by Swedish crooner Jay-Jay Johanson. I remember I listened to it all the time when it was released some time in the mid 90’s. It was then described as a trip-hop Scott Walker. I was surprised I still enjoyed the music as much. Have I changed that little?

So tell the girls that I am back in town - Jay-Jay Johanson

Over - Alpha

Over - Portishead