Cool Tools

I hope everyone is having a good holiday and was able to at least take a few moments from the grind. It was good for me to be able to set my own schedule for the day, but it is difficult to just sit around when so little free time presents itself.

I've spent a good part of the past few days playing around on my computer trying to get some things working. I also got a chance to dig into a few cool tools that I think might be useful.

The first of these is Sketchup, a 3D modeling program put out by Google. It is free for the personal, non-commercial version, and currently $495 for the corporate unit, with some extras thrown in. By the time I had gotten thorough the tutorials, I had firgured out many little projects that can be mocked up in this neat, easy-to-use program. It won't do what some of the more sophisticated programs -- like Blender -- can do, but I'll probably create mockups of the sound booth, sanctuary, and maybe even some components like amps, mics, and such so I can have a 3D model to use in tutorials and planning. Did I mention it is easy to use? If I really get going with a ton of projects (and enough to go commercial, with consulting for example), I could easily be persuaded to pop for the full version -- and that from a staunch supporter of free stuff.

I'm also toying with WAMP, which is an easily-installed distribution of MySQL, phpMyAdmin, and the Apache web server for Windows computers. It is contstantly on my mind to create a database of our media (and physical) assets, and -- as expected -- I like the idea of freely available tools to make expansion easy. I'm wanting the media database to have a php front end, and I downloaded dadabik to hopefully handle that task. I've toyed a little with Visual Basic.NET and .ASP and such, but I want to try these tools out to see how it works.

I still have a little time left in the day, so I'm going to try to find a good package to use for diagramming our system and signal chain. Can't be too organized and professional about it in my opinion. I'm a huge, HUGE fan of Inkscape, but if I find anything quicker and easier (at the right price, of course) I'm all over it.

None of this will help my mixes sound better immediately, but hopefully putting in a little organization (and some really cool stuff) will pay off in the long term.