Okay, so I'm not going to pretend software piracy is okay. It's not. We are all aware of this.

On the other hand, I don't think stealing from consumers is okay either, especially when they paid you a considerable sum of money already for your product.

The backstory, in case you haven't caught it: AVID, formerly Digidesign, have been essentially caught out crippling their Pro Tools multitrack recording software. A crack has spread through the mysterious channels of BitTorrent that allows you to release the arbitrary restrictions placed on Pro Tools - namely, in the entry-level LE product, limiting the track count to just 48 and the voice count to 96. Tracks and voices are different things, which we won't get into here because they're complicated. Suffice to say they are different but related.

Here's the kicker, though - it's not just for LE. It also releases the restrictions placed on their high-end HD systems. We're talking people who have spent thousands and thousands of dollars here. AVID have always been insistent that the restriction was in place due to the hardware - the better the system you bought, the more hardware came with it, and the more tracks and voices you got. We are now finding out this is not the case.

In fact, the crack releases you from needing any AVID hardware at all.

What shits me most about this - other than the blatant lying from AVID - is people rushing to their defence. I read this from a British engineer: "Yes, it's an unlimited track count theoretically, but in reality you've got more chance of finding rocking horse shit." He wrote this in the same paragraph as stating that he just spent £13,000 on a new HD|3 system, the highest end system you can get.

Let's jump on to store.apple.com/uk.

For £13,000 you can get the highest end Mac Pro - with two 2.93GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon CPUs, that's eight cores total, and 64GB of RAM. I'm not sure if I said that hard enough. SIXTY-FOUR GIGABYTES OF RAM. That's not only the entire session in physical RAM, it's probably all the RAM Pro Tools could ever possibly use. If you can't run 192 voices natively on that machine, I will eat my hat. I will eat all of my hats, and the hats of all my friends.

Actually, I must confess: that's not true. For £13,000, you cannot get one of these incredible, outrageously powerful machines.

You can get two.

So we're working on some new material for the first time in a while. I've finally gotten confident enough in my vocals to actually record some stuff, and we're doing some interesting things with layering. This is probably something you'll hear on chronicide, but it's not ready for general consumption quite yet, I should think.

After quite some time we're also getting our live set back into gear, so probably expect something on those lines in the near future.

echo point

[chorus?]

and i'd love to live in silence
 (though i fear it's a meaningless life)
and i want not to fear
but i can't help but hear
all the echoes of the struggle and strife

[alternatively]
and i'd love to hear just nothing
the beating of blood in my ears
 but i can't stop the noise
 and my mind it destroys
with the echoes of all of my fears

is that they're very, very expensive.

-Morgan

WARNING: AUDIO GEEKY POST AHEAD

So we got this thing called Record. It's basically a sequencer; it allows you to record audio and MIDI and then plays it back. But it's from the guys who do Reason, and so of course, it's actually a paradigm-shifting mind-blowing completely-different-to-what-you-once-knew piece of software. Basically, they take Reason, and strap on a big ol' SSL mixer and proper recording ability. This means we can now actually use that incredibly powerful vocoder with real vocals, and moreover we can write and mix songs at the same time. That might not seem like a big deal, but when you mix a song, you sometimes realise that it's missing something, or maybe this melody should be slightly different, or maybe this is a bit too crowded but when you thin it out it gets kind of boring. The ability to mix - and to mix properly - gives us a much better idea of what the song is going to sound like at the other end.

Basically it's awesome.

Along the same lines, I'm currently working on my own interpretation of the Ableton's Live. Live is an okay piece of software, but I feel like what it does can be done better, and probably with significantly less bloat. For the record - this isn't Live, it isn't a Live clone, it is something different in the same category - something to make playing electronic music live easier. I'm tentatively calling it Loopback.

This is one of the first songs we wrote on the new album. Features vocals from the incredibly talented Jordan Smith.

Listen to The Takeover / Accidents (Reprise)

So, this is the new website.

I know what you're thinking. "You just had a new website. You never updated that one. You're never going to update this one." Well, I made that website on the basis that it would be easy to update, and it was even harder to update than the old one (which we never updated). It turns out that writing a good back end is hard and takes a lot of work, so I let someone else do it (the good people at Django). I wrote the front end and made with the prettiness, and now we have a fully functioning site that actually might get updated every so often.

So, have a poke around, although there's not much here yet.