May 2007
When Hardware Attacks
So the other day I’m merrily doing some remix work in Ableton Live when the mouse starts acting funny; it’s acting as if the button’s always pressed down. I presumed it was a Bluetooth issue, reset the mouse, but it didn’t go away. “Huh. That’s weird.” Tried a wired USB mouse. Same thing.
It was when I tried the trackpad that I could feel that there was something blocking the physical button from underneath.. then I noticed the odd angle that my MacBook Pro was sitting at…lifted it up to find that I’d fallen prey to the infamous MacBook Pro Battery Bulge issue. Thought I’d dodged that bullet, as Apple had published a battery-management software update some months ago, but I guess not. Thankfully there’s an exchange program, so it’s just a matter of bringing it in to my local CompuSmart.
I recently got Tracktion 3, an audio and MIDI sequencer with a uniquely uncomplicated interface; it seems to also be the first program I’ve seen with a truly scalable, vector-based UI. I’m still getting to grips with it, but it seems to do exactly what you’d expect it to do; it takes very little figuring out, and there’s extensive built-in help. The one thing that’s bugging me right now is that it doesn’t seem to want to talk to my Novation Remote SL controller, even though it’s advertised as supporting it. I’m sure there’s just some parameter somewhere that I’m missing, but it’s annoying when you want to just plug in and work.
[UPDATE] Finally got it working thanks to the helpful people at Mackie…It was a matter of setting some MIDI preferences…the Remote SL uses Port 2 and not Port 1 to communicate with the host program. (It’s always the last little thing, isn’t it?)
