luminescente

Spent christmas at home in Aveiro. The usual pack of gifts, including clothes, some candy and a new Apple [Might Mouse](http://www.apple.com/mightymouse/). Damn, I was waiting for the Bluetooth version to come out but this one will do nicely too… At the xmas company dinner Luís got me a nice digital thermometer. Now I can measure how far from absolute zero this shitty house really gets (estimate: 10 degrees, max).

At home went through some of my old MP3 CDs and came accross some of my older creations (done in Impulse Tracker) rendered as MP3. Listened to them on the train back to Lisbon and got a grip before shedding any tears. At home googled for a bit and found [someone](http://members.fortunecity.com/helder_redhell/mp3/RedHellCD13.htm) who has them on a old CD somewhere.

Googled a bit more and found some tracking software usable on my Mac: [Renoise](http://www.renoise.com) and [Schism Tracker](http://rigelseven.com/schism/). Impulse Tracker runs under DOSBox, but it’s slow as hell on my 12″ Powerbook. Schism Tracker is a pixel-perfect clone and as far as I can tell, seems usable. Renoise seems much more powerful, but it has a Fast Tracker 2-like interface, unfortunately, and I never seemed to go along with FT2 back in the day, so I guess I won’t manage it now too. On the other hand, Schism fits like a glove (pun intended…).

Ah… The memories of late night tracking with the room fully darkened and nothing but a glowing 14″ CRT burning my retina with the Impulse Tracker screen layout while music flowed from the SPK OUT of my GUS Ace/SB16 combo. For a break, I’d dive into Turbo Pascal 7 and code some new effect to try to outdo Sérgio (and fail miserably every time…).

And now, back to my long forgotten habit of sample-ripping to gather a small instrument library, fetch my still unfinished tracks (some older than 5 years) and make something out of it. Be afraid!