Yesterday, while still out from partying with Björg and Jonnie, I stumbled across a site saying there will be a new version of Native Instruments Traktor DJ Studio out in November. Here's the post about it.

While reading that, my eye caught a mention on how to connect a sequencer together with Native Instrument's Reaktor, to make music. That turned out to be a tutorial, available here.

By following it, you download demo versions of what's the most well-known sequencer: Cubase SE3, from Steinberg. Then you download a demo of Reaktor, and you're off with the tutorial, detailing 13 steps on how to make your own music.

So now I'm off, eh? We'll see. I know how easy I find love for software, only to ditch it a few days later when the flames have gone down. That happened to me while using Reason, despite its wonderfulness.

A little thing that's disturbing me is the advent of latency. Latency, you ask? From said step-by-step-tutorial courtesy of Native Instruments:

Without a professional audio card you will probably have a noticeable delay between pressing a key and hearing the sound. This is known as “latency“ and is related to the drivers on your sound card and your audio settings (not Cubase or the NI software). By using a high-quality audio card with ASIO 2.0 drivers you can reduce this latency to an inaudible level for real time playing.

So, my audio-card isn't good enough. It's got latency, I'll tell you that. But I'll tell you something else: if I get hold of a good card with perfect drivers, it might as well be this one. Creative have just released a bunch of new audio-cards, that they (and many reviewers with them) claim are heaven-sent. Read more about the different types of cards here. If I get the "Elite Pro-version" of these cards, I have next-to-nil latency to worry about and every game I play, every film I see and every strip of music I listen to through the computer will sound like bliss. And I will be able to plug my guitar straight into the little box, which enables me recording facilities (even though my POD_xt_ already does that).

Enough. I'll see what happens.

Dreams? Oh, yes. Last night I had a very weird dream, and I'll tell you about it.

First, Kristin turned up in Sweden. A friend from the USA, showed up with no baggage except for a very hideous indian-style papoose-carrier, ugly frills and all. Very disturbing, but not as disturbing as finding out that Mikaela and I were living in an 80's apartment, that looked like something out of Xmi Vice; I remember the bed, made of black wood with shiny metal frames encasing its edges and bottom sides. Horrific. A book-shelf was also visible, designed in the very same horrible style. The walls were clad with a most vile wallpaper; imagine painting light-green wallpapers with sick, using a sponge. That's what it looked like.

So we went out. I asked Kristin what she wanted to see while in Stockholm, but she wasn't interested in anything other than her icky bag, so I gathered her bag contained some sort of secret; had she started using drugs? Was she possessed by demons? Before I could even ask her what was up, I was thrown into another dream-scene.

I found myself in one of the northern parts of Stockholm, called Kungsholmen. While there, I noticed everything and everybody were from the fifties. I found myself walking by the side of a huge wall, on the other side of which there were apartments. On my side, however, was a field of grass. At the end of it was a long line of trees, a gravel road and another line of trees, cornering the road. And there were approximately fifty men all wearing masks and tuxedos, getting ready to throw egg-like objects at me.

I knew I had been found guilty of something, which, incidentally, nobody would explain to me, so these men would have to throw the egg-like objects at me. The catch: if they hit any other part of my body than my arms, I'd be executed there and then. Fair enough, I thought, and started ducking and flailing the best I could. There was a good 50 meters from me to said men, but I was still scared. Any egg-like object could hit me. After they missed me, though, they vanished into oblivion.

Suddenly they all stopped their attack, and one man in the middle took a few steps forward. He was wearing a top hat and was fat, hence his tuxedo and his mask rendered him looking like Danny DeVito's Penguin-character out of "Batman Returns". He spoke about what a scoundrel I was for a minute, and then four of his hench-people produced an enormous, bruised tumor that he picked up single-handedly, and threw at me.

Instead of getting hit by it, I dodged it, picked it up and ran away with it. This infuriated the man, who shouted "Get him!" while pointing at me while making ak-ak-ak-penguin sounds. That's when I woke up.