AtmoSphere CDs back in stock !

A while ago I reported that there were only 3 AtmoSphere CDs left. Those ones were sold quite quickly as well. My record label Groove Unlimited was so kind to do a reprint of AtmoSphere, because there were more people interested. So I have good news. There are another 300 copies of the physical CD available. You can buy them directly from Groove Unlimited. AtmoSphere was my second solo album and was originally released in 2008. You can find more information about the album and the sales links on http://www.synth.nl/AtmoSphere. You can also listen to some clips there. It is also available as mp3 download from Itunes, Amazon and CDBaby by the way if you prefer that format.

Eventide H8000 Back from USA

My H8000 was broken a while ago and I have tried to repair it myself, but didn't really succeed. Eventually I decided to sent it to Eventide in the USA to let them have a look and they found that the socket for the main processor was loose. This seems to be a common problem, so they desoldered the socket from the PCB and soldered the SMD mounted main processor directly on the PCB. Besides that they also repaired the big dial knob on the front panel. Last week I got it back and I started playing around with it. Man what a machine this is. I wouldn't want to miss it again. I bought an Eventide H4000DSP in the mean to fill in the gap. It has a couple of the same presets. Now that the H8000 is back I'm going to sell the H4000DSP again.

Apple IIe Enhanced + IDE + TCP/IP!

Last week I did a major change on my Apple IIe computer. It actually got a new mother board from the US that I found on E-bay. It is an so called 'enhanced' version. It was sold back then as an upgrade kit that contained some ROMs and a new CPU. They are hard to find now a days and you need the exact type. The ROMs of this motherboard for example didn't fit in my own old motherboard. You need this upgrade for a lot of software and also hardware. It improved the Apple IIe a lot.

The first project I needed the enhanced ROMs for was this card. It is an IDE interface for the Apple IIe and it has a Compact Flash inserted in stead of an IDE drive as you can see. I already got it running in the mean time, so now I can install and start software on a CF in an Apple IIe. How cool is that? :) It should be possible to boot from it as well, but I haven't got that working yet. I still need a floppy to boot ProDOS first, but I'll try to figure that out as well.

But there is more. Even cooler is that I installed an Ethernet card in the Apple IIe. It is so great that people are still developing hardware like this for these old machines. I also needed the enhanced ROMs to get this running, but as you can see it works! I hooked it up to the internet this morning and started the IRC client from the Contiki package. If you click the picture you can see a little conversation I had this morning with MiVo on the #JMJ channel. Really cool that this actually works :)

Here is another picture of the Apple IIe back on its spot. The only thing I still need to find out is how the CP/M card works that was in the machine when I got it. I didn't get any software with it though so I'll have to go on the internet and look for it. It should be fun because I also have CP/M on the Commodore 128d and it would be cool to exchange files in this way I guess. Well not useful in any way, but fun for sure to get it working.

Apollo Promo Video to Thank you Voters!

Because I'm so happy that Apollo won the 'Best international CD 2011' price at the German Schallwelle Awards I made this video to thank you all who voted for me! I made this video originally for a lecture my oldest daughter. Enjoy :)

Apollo Best International CD of 2011 at Schallwelle!

I just recovered from a very long and exciting day yesterday at the Schallwelle electronic music award ceremony in Bochum Germany. I knew I was nominated with 4 other artists, but since the competition was very fierce I didn't expect to win at all. Then when the category 'best international CD' came up I suddenly heard my name with my Apollo album as the winner. I was in total shock since I had to go up front to the podium and a microphone was put under my nose. I had a total blackout and no idea what I said. Ah well nobody looked weird at me afterwards so I guess it was OK. I was (and still am) very happy of course to win this award. An honor to be picked by both the audience and jury from a long list of albums. Another nice thing was that my friend Eric van der Heijden won the 'best artist international' category. And Ron Boots our label owner and good friend was sitting right in between us. He had a good day too :) He was so happy that he announced a 10% discount in the Groove Unlimited webshop for our music the coming week.  I want to thank you all for voting, because that got me nominated in the first place and helped with the final result for sure! Thank you, thank you, thank you :) Well this certainly motivates me to go and make some new music to thank you all. You can read more about the price/event and all the other winners on this website: http://schallwelle-preis.de/. When I have more pictures I will post some nice ones as well. More information on the album here: http://www.synth.nl/apollo (in case you don't know it yet).