Not only the Joomla system was outdated, the design could also use fresh and new inspiration.

So here is the new website, powered by WordPress with a fresh design. All content has been transferred and old links are being redirected. I hope to be more active on the new website, which should be easier with WordPress. I’ve great ideas and plans, now I only have to find the time to execute them…

Oh I almost forgot it, but during the migration I discovered a news post pointing me at the fact that this is already website number 3!

I wanted to use the same color of cable for all inputs and another color for all outputs on my audio interface. The interface has 8 inputs and 8 outputs. DAP has great patch cables in all the colors of the rainbow. The problem is that they only sell them as pack of 6 with mixed colors. So if you want 8 the same, you end up with… well a lot of patch cables.

But the final result looks great, and in the end you need patch cables anyway if you have a patch panel.

A lot of people have been wondering what the total desk looks like, well here it is:

A friend of mine is gonna come over to make some professional photos that show all the details of it.

One of the reasons it took so long is probably because the remaining stuff was soldering and more soldering of cables and ordering of even more cables. Mostly not my favorite job, but when done properly it gives a huge satisfaction and saves you cable spaghetti work in the future.

So I started by taking out most equipment and redo some cabling. New where all the audio cables to and from the audio connectors in the 19 inch panels at both the front and back.

I used yellow RCA connectors for the digital S/PDIF signals to and from my mixer.

One thing I noticed was that I was missing the easy access to USB connectors of my PC. Although it has two of them at the front, you have to lower down the front bezel which is annoying. So I bought an additional D-Size panel and brought 4 USB connections from the back of the PC to the front of my studio desk.

I also build in the Ethernet connectors, Neutrik has simple connectors that don’t require the use of a punch-down tool on a LSA strip. This is just plugging in on both ends, much more easy.

I also connected both amps for future usage and analog radio recordings.

New is the patch panel that is not yet fully connected. I still need to order patch cables to connect the soundcard to the patch panel and actually connect everything together. But that should be easy.

The final result of both racks at the back once closed with blinds.

Power on! Network up! Let’s go!

I finished the main power cable for the low voltage lighting.

Time for soldering and wiring everything together.

The LED lights in the switches work on 3 volt. The computer PSU gives 3.3 which after a long test run with a switch appeared to be to much. So I needed to put resistors in front of them.

Time for wiring the power to the LEDs.

After a lot of wiring it was time for a test run, with at least the LEDs of the switches working.

Unfortunate one switch’s LED appeared to be dead on arrival. Not that those switches are expensive, but it’s gonna take a lot of time replacing one with all the wires connected at the back of the panel.

After connecting the goose neck LED lights it was time for another test. A beautiful white light hit the surface of my desk for the first time.

Hooked up the dB meter.

And while I was working on the final wires for the CCFL lighting in the 19 inch racks, things started to become chaotic in a great Saturday afternoon hobby kind of way.

Time for final mounting the panel and cleanup.

I brought in my MOTU sound device and hooked it up to the computer.

Slowly I’ve started to drag everything from my old temporary desk to my new studio desk.

A holiday gift for myself, with some smart buying you can save a lot of money on these kind of things.

And finally, after hours of installing, things started to work. Music came out of the speakers, lights started to light up and buttons started to tweak parameters.

So whats left… well the entire audio cabling to start with. The main audio cabling is done, but all the custom cables to and from the patch panel are still on the to-do list. I need to do some cable management, and for the mean time I need to give my DJ hardware also some space.

People have asked me a number of times for an overall picture. I will post one when I’m more close to the final result, till then it will remain a surprise.

We got power people! I finished the power in the racks and the PowerCon connectors.

Also I decided on the hardware for the PC workstation and went for a proven value for money configuration.

I already have experience with this motherboard as it is currently running in my main computer. This new version is only a revision of the previous design but still uses the same components.

Because the computer case has less room then a normal case I went for a low profile cooler that has enough cooling capacity while remaining as quiet as possible.

Also the power supply is a low noise piece from the correctly named brand Be Quiet!.

The 19 inch computer case is a very cheap piece with great value. It comes with everything you need and actually has all the futures you find in more expensive cases.

First the default front fan needs to make place for a quiet model.

In order to mount the the DVD drive I needed to remove the entire external bracket case. Once removed it is easy mounting DVD and HD drives.

To my suprise the case even uses an anti vibration construction for mounting the drive case.

Then there is always the magical moment, will it work or not. Thankfully it worked out of the box, or actually boxes. After some tuning the system remained cool and quiet.

Time for installing Windows, I’ve gotten used to installing this from a USB stick which is fast too.

And almost done…

I must say that the SSD disk is incredible fast, system boots like a rocket. One suprise was by the way the UEFI I got when powering on the first time..

I also got the remaining switches and decided to order a yellow/orange switch that will function as master switch.

One of the lasting this I got to was a part of the cable from the PSU to the switches.

To keep wiring in the racks clean and have a way of running wire between the racks I ordered a few meters of cable chute. I like this type because you can enter and exit the wires at any place and also keep them together while the cover is not on it.

But first I had to drill holes for the cables to get out of the 19 inch rack in the first place.

I needed a clean cover for this in either matching white or black. Apparently these simple plastic things cost you a lot of money, if you are able to get them at all. I only found them online and then it is always tricky with the colors. So I decided to get a few cheap from Ikea and paint them black myself.

I thinks the end result is great and still beats any price I found online.

In my studio console are the blue CCFL lights, the rack lights and the gooseneck lights on top. They will all draw current from a separated computer power supply. But in order to switch things on and off I still needed a switch panel just for that. So I found these beautiful switches with build in LED lights and planned on putting them in a single unit height blanking panel.

The problem is that they require 16 mm holes, which is beyond my normal drill accessories. And for good results you should use a column-type drill. So I went to my friends at Aviotech who have the proper equipment and experience with these things. So I spent a morning drilling slowly 12 holes. I didn’t bring my camera, so no pictures.

I’ve ordered the remaining 6 switches, so hopefully I can put these in later this week.

My power switch panels are equipped with euro-sockets, which is for most hardware fine. However the low voltage hardware that comes with external adapters do need a wall socket to be plugged into. So I planned a 2 HE 19 inch panel with 6 sockets on the back of 19 inch rack. I know there are pre-drilled panels in which you can mount your own schuko sockets or have them pre-configured. Since the price difference was only a few Euros I went with a pre-configured panel from Accu-cable.

I do regret this a little bit, since the mounting holes are in no way 2 HE mounting compatible, so the final mounting is not perfect. But this is on the back, so that does make it a little less of a problem.

Time for labeling the cables and mounting them to the sockets.

You can see that the panel was supposed to be aligned with the top of the rack profiles, but due to the strange hole distance it isn’t.

Main power is almost done, only need to solder the cables to the PowerCon connector. This week is probably going to be soldering week.

3 Songs didn’t make it into the mix. Louder is a dubstep track with a tempo that didn’t fit in. Forever is in Minor and didn’t sound right with the other songs. Get back asap from Alexandra Stan is a different story, I simply forgot that track and didn’t feel like modifying the mix.

I made the mix with Ableton Live and was able to mix all 21 tracks in less than 22 minutes. The mix didn’t reveal any incorrect song keys and was probably impossible without taking the harmonics into account. Download link of the mix is below.

Track List

Ableton Live Session

That is actually a serious challenge to find descend black bolts in M3 size. After checking a number of stores I decided to go to a specialized shop. They did have very nice black bolts for me and I even could buy them individually. So, 64 bolts and nuts please. There you go, that will be €44! Ouch, I didn’t see that one coming. Apparently this was a very strong type bolt which wasn’t required for my application. So I checked out some other types, but still they remained expensive. As I said before, I was going for nice design but not against every price. So for now I’m sticking with simple metal bolts which might get a paint job.

I’m still waiting for the 5 pin XLR connectors for the MIDI signals. It is too bad Neutrik doesn’t have nice D-Size 5 pin Din connectors. Actually, nobody seems to make these so I’m going with XLR and will make some adapter cables.

I did forget to order a RJ-45 connector for network, so that one is still in the shopping list. For those wondering what the yellow tulip connectors are for, they are for the s/pdif signals. Normally these are orange, but Neutrik doesn’t offer these in orange, so I went with yellow which normally is used for composite video.

To use more dance music then DJ Tech Tools did I’ve decided to go with the Dutch Radio 538 Dance Smash Volume 4 CD. It contains recent commercial dance tracks in radio edit format. And of course a bikini woman. Here is the track list:

The challenge is to get the actual key of the track. DJ Tech Tools used Music Notes for that. However, they don’t have sheet music or the song key for all the tracks and the source of the information is unclear to me. It might be correct but doesn’t have to be. For example the sheet music might say a song is in Major C but the song might be performed in different key.
So we’re going to need to do this our self.

If you are a musician and have experience you can probably hear this or find out by playing the notes along on a piano. First of all I’m not a musician and know nothing to only a very little about music theory. Second, I don’t know how to read notes and definitely can’t hear them. The same goes for chords. Third I always use Camelot notation because I don’t know the wheel of 5ths. I even wrote down what Camelot key corresponds to the actual keys on my MIDI keyboard. You get where I am! Great, let’s continue.

But there are also things I do know. For example, I do know how to use a computer and software to find the correct key of a song while trusting my ears. So using Ableton, two VSTs and a small MIDI keyboard I went out searching for the song key the old fashion way. I’ll might blog about this another time, but for those interested, on the website of Mix Share (Rapid Evolution) is a description on how you can find the song key by ear.

So here are the results shown with Camelot notation:

What does this mean? If we look very strict to the correct key results, it doesn’t look good at all:

If we are a little less strict and say that a compatible key is also valid, the results improve much:

The problem seems to be that the software has a lot of trouble determining if a song is in Major or Minor. If you look at these results, you might say that most music is always in Major. As rule of thumb that is true for this genre of music. But if you play trance music, it is the opposite. That genre has more songs in Minor key.

Beatport shows the song key also for their tracks. I wasn’t able to find all songs back at beat port, but most of them. It is hard to say how Beatport acquires the information. There doesn’t appear to be a perfect match between their results and one of the results I had with the software. This can of course be caused by small differences between the songs I used and the songs they have. For example, the tracks I used come all from a CD which could have undergone additional mastering to make all songs sound good together in terms of dB level. But also the conversion from Wav to Mp3 produces different results which might be not audible for me but are of impact on the algorithm used by the software.
I think I can conclude that also the data from Beatport is far from valid and that it looks like they use one of the commercial available software programs.

So the data from the software can’t be trusted at all. But the software isn’t a complete waste of money. For example, I use the software for initial key analysis. After that I check the results by hand with my Ableton Project. I use the song key found by the analyzing software as start point. Most of the times the key is nearby or there is only a Major Minor mismatch.

When looking at time required by software and manual key detection there is a big gap. First of you have to actually attend to manual key detection as where the software could be analyzing songs while you are away. But say you have to wait for the software too. Then there is still this large gap. People with high musical skills probably can do this a lot faster. I have already experienced with this before and I’m getting better in it, so over time I will probably be able to do this also much faster.

If I would need to recommend a software package I would nominate both Rapid Evolution 3 Beta and Mixed In Key 5. First of all, they both give bad results although Rapid Evolution seems to be a little bit better. Although this test set is too small to draw any conclusions in there. The pro for Rapid Evolution is that it is free and Mixed In Key isn’t. Rapid Evolution however, is a lot more work to configure and set-up. The GUI is not very user friendly and the application is slow. Mixed In Key has a very intuitive user interface and with version 5 it is very fast on a multi core system.

So if you have the money and want to do things quick, go with Mixed In Key 5. If you don’t have the money or want to experiment with the harmonic mixing concept, go with Rapid Evolution 3 beta.