DigitalRecordingOnline.com – Guitar Builder Journal

Fender Stratocaster American Special

Fender Rebuild

Over on my home recording blog, I started a Guitar Builder Journal, where I will be documenting my adventures in refreshing an older Fender Squier Stratocaster.  Many have said that the Squier brand is crap and I won’t argue that point in that the materials may not be to the standards or an American Standard.  However, I intend to prove that with some improvements to electronics and tweaking, you can take a basic Squier and make it into a really nice instrument without breaking the bank.  Is it worth going this route vs. just plunking down for an American Standard?  I guess we’ll see.

Check it out at: DigitalRecordingOnline.com’s Guitar Builder Journal

 

Linux Noob: Java in the Browser (Chrome or Firefox) on Fedora 14 64 bit

Ack!  This was not an intuitive endeavor to get Java applets running in Linux but I finally got it done.  Here’s what I did.

Though I used the defaults, my installation for Java seems to be a bit different than one’s I have seen on the web while I was researching this issue.  Here is my path:

/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_24/jre/lib/amd64/

I found an article that closely described the fix (click here).  You need to create a symbolic link that looks something like this:

ln -s /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_24/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so

,,,AND… this needs to be in the correct folder.  So for my instance (64bit), this symbolic link needed to be created in the following folder:

/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins

So, to put it all together, it should go something like this:

[root@Dave ~]# cd /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins
[root@Dave plugins]# ln -s /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_24/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so
[root@Dave plugins]# ls
libflashplayer.so                      libtotem-gmp-plugin.so
libnpjp2.so                            libtotem-mully-plugin.so
librhythmbox-itms-detection-plugin.so  libtotem-narrowspace-plugin.so
libtotem-cone-plugin.so
[root@Dave plugins]#

I then refreshed my browser and the applets started flowing.

See how easy that was?

 

Linux Noob: Reaper On Linux

I love Reaper.  It’s been my go-to Digital Audio Workstation software for over two years and it, hand’s down, has the best bang for the buck for audio engineering (IMHO).  So, when I made the move to Linux, I was rather bummed about not being able to use it.  I have yet to see Linux offerings that provide the same level of complexity and support as I have with Reaper. I know that I just waved the flag inviting a flame war, but that’s my opinion.

So, I have created a post on my other site, DigitalRecordingOnline.com detailing the steps.

I can quickly tell you that I used the following to get it going:

• Wine
• WineASIO
• JACKLab’s XenCenter
• Reaper

If you have been trying to get this working, check out the walk-through and let me know if it worked for you.