4 Note Improvisation

Ambient 4 Note Improv by Neville1308
This is a track based upon four notes. Almost all parts are limited to using these four, except the main melody. It is a multi-tracked improvisation, with only one track needing a second take.

The instruments used are:

• Korg Triton Studio
• Rob Papen Albino II
• Linplug CronoX
• Arturia Prophet V
• Arturia Modular Moog
• Arturia CS80V
• GForce ImpOscar.

I intend to keep working on this (especially the middle section) and post the progress as I go.

This is something of a departure for me (at least from my perspective) as this is much more electronic ambient.  Probably a result of me starting to listen to artists like Ian Boddy and the music of my piano teacher, Carmen Lazaro.  Not that I would compare myself to either of these artists, but more that they have shown me a new way to think about music and sound.

This is the first time in many years that I have used purely synthetic sounds, having previously tended towards real world sounds, albeit played via a synthesiser or sampler.  With the acquisition of some new VST plugins, the quality of the analog sounds now justifies their use.

It is a long piece, around ten minutes long with a slow start, a middle section which is slow (and still needs some working on) and an ending that is, you guessed it, slow.  This is not a piece to dance to but more of a soundscape to relax and let it wash over you.

I hope you enjoy it, or at least find it interesting.

Why I downgraded from LibreOffice 3.4 to 3.3.2

I've been a happy user of LibreOffice since the first beta was released in 2010. I was keen to try out the new 3.4 version with a view to seeing further enhancements and efficiencies.

The first thing I noted was that it seemed to take longer to load some of my larger spreadsheets, and even some of my smaller spreadsheets.OK, the LibreOffice download page does stress that 3.4 is not ready for production use and the stable version should be released around the end of the month as 3.4.1 (if I understand the release schedule correctly). The additional load time didn't worry me too much, I usually load spreadsheets up at the beginning of the day and continue to use them throughout the day, so a few extra seconds was not too annoying.

Today I encountered the deal-breaker.

I have a few spreadsheets that I regularly use to track finances. With these I have a 'Net Value' column; a 'VAT %' column; a 'VAT €' column and a 'Gross Value' column. As I do not want a lot of zeros cluttering up the spreadsheet and not all of the entries will have VAT, then I do a check to ensure that the VAT value is calculated only if a % has been specified. Likewise, the Gross value is only calculated if there is a value in the Net Value. It looks something like this as a logic expression.

Net Value	VAT %	VAT €	Gross Value
NET€	VAT%	IF VAT% = blank THEN blank ELSE NET€*VAT%	IF NET€ = blank THEN blank ELSE GROSS€ = NET€+VAT€

This has worked fine in OpenOffice version 2.x right up to LibreOffice version 3.3.2. Now, with version 3.4, LibreOffice returns a “#VALUE” error for the Gross value when there is no VAT. What appears to be happening is that the creation of the blank in the VAT € column (“”) is interpreted in version 3.4 as a text value, and so canot perform the addition.

I cannot see that this would be a particularly unusual configuration, and yet it has slipped through the updates unseen by the developers. I don't want to have to re-write all my spreadsheets to get around this bug, so I have uninstalled 3.4 and reverted to 3.3.2.

Let's hope that this does not become a permanent 'feature' of LibreOffice!