Monday, December 20, 2010

Audiotuts+ Updates - Tuts+ Holiday Quiz – Thousands of Dollars in Prizes, Anyone Can Win!

Audiotuts+ Updates - Tuts+ Holiday Quiz – Thousands of Dollars in Prizes, Anyone Can Win!

Link to Audiotuts+

Tuts+ Holiday Quiz – Thousands of Dollars in Prizes, Anyone Can Win!

Posted: 20 Dec 2010 03:23 PM PST

It’s the holiday season. And to celebrate, we’re launching something special: the Tuts+ Holiday Quiz. Each day for 10 days we’ll publish a quiz question on a different Tuts+ site. Together, the answers will form a secret URL string that will give you access to an equally secret entry form. The prizes we’ve assembled will blow you away!

Read on to learn how to take part in the Tuts+ Holiday Quiz (it’s going to be plenty of fun!) and earn the chance to win a copy of the Adobe CS5 Suite (courtesy of the competition’s lead sponsor, Business Catalyst), a Wacom Intuos 4 tablet, a library of Rockable Press books (13 eBooks) , a library of Smashing Magazine books (5 eBooks), licenses for several popular Mac Apps, and more! The prizes add up to thousands of dollars in value, and only dedicated participants will be able to win.

Day #1 Question
Psdtuts+

According to Skellie, her thoughts worth a dime, Mortal Kombat was the _th best video game cover of all time?

Visit Psdtuts+ to search for the answer, which is a single-digit number.

Important: Please do not post answers in comments or elsewhere in public. Entrants found to have shared answers will be disqualified. By sharing answers, you take the fun out of the competition and lower your own chances of receiving a prize!


TIP Getting started

Many of the answers will require you to use the site’s search function. We use the excellent Relevant Search WordPress plugin by valendesigns to handle search. You should find that you can dig up anything you’re looking for! However, we hope that loyal readers might be able to guess some of the answers instantly.


TOP SECRET Finding the Entry Form URL

Once you have the answer to the above question, note it down. This is the first part of the secret URL, which will be in the format of enva.to/############. Replace the hashes with the 12 character answer string.

We will be releasing questions in the following order, on the following days:

  1. Psdtuts+ / 20th December
  2. Activetuts+ / 21st December
  3. Cgtuts+ / 22nd December
  4. Webdesigntuts+ / 23rd December
  5. Nettuts+ / 24th December
  6. Mobiletuts+ / 25th December
  7. Audiotuts+ / 26th December
  8. Vectortuts+ / 27th December
  9. Phototuts+ / 28th December
  10. Aetuts+ / 29th December (ENTRY FORM UNLOCKED)
  11. This is the same order that you should assemble the answers in order to discover the URL string.

    So, for example, if the first three answers are B, 7 and 10, the URL string would look like this: enva.to/B710######## (with the remaining characters in the string to be uncovered with future quiz questions).

    Make sure to visit Activetuts+ tomorrow for the second question!


    THE GOOD STUFF Prizes!

    We have prizes to appeal to everyone. On the contest entry form, you’ll have the ability to choose your 1st and 2nd preference for which prize you would like to win. This is to make sure that we connect the right people with the right prizes.

    If you select a prize as either your first or second choice, you’ll be entered into the running for that prize. A winner will be chosen using Random.org’s random number generator.


    PROVIDED BY:

    1 x $1799 Adobe Creative Suite 5 – Web Premium

    This prize is provided by the lead sponsor of the Tuts+ Holiday Quiz, Business Catalyst. Our friends at Business Catalyst provide a web service that helps you build powerful Online Businesses for your clients. Because their #1 users are designers, they know a lot about what goes into good design!

    The Adobe CS5 Suite will be available to the winner in either PC or Mac versions. It contains the following software:

    1. Photoshop CS5 Extended
    2. Illustrator CS5
    3. Fireworks CS5
    4. Dreamweaver CS5
    5. Flash Professional CS5
    6. Flash Builder4 Standard
    7. Flash Catalyst CS5
    8. Contribute CS5
    9. Acrobat 9 Pro
    10. Adobe Bridge CS5
    11. Adobe Device Central CS5

    ABOUT BUSINESS CATALYST

    Adobe Business Catalyst is a new hosted service that replaces 5 or more separate tools with one integrated solution. Incorporating web hosting, content management, eCommerce features, email marketing and built in customer management tools, Business Catalyst can help you accelerate your projects and increase your profit margins. Try it out for free at businesscatalyst.com.


    2 x $467 Wacom Intuos 4 – Large Graphics Tablet

    We have two large tablets to give away, provided by Wacom. The large Intuos4 tablet is perfect for creative professionals who work in large format or who are trained to work from the shoulder or elbow. With 102.5 square inches of working area, this tablet provides a generous workspace. The large has eight ExpressKeys with illuminated displays that provide easy reference for your assigned functions.

    Like all Intuos4 tablets, the Intuos4 large features Wacom's new tip sensor technology to deliver an even finer level of control. You can initiate pen pressure control with only a single gram of pressure and a feather-light touch. With 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity and 60 degrees of tilt recognition, the Intuos4 pen simulates like never before the natural feel and accuracy of working with traditional brushes, pens, and markers.

    Professional photographers, designers and artists agree: Intuos4 pen tablets speed production time for photo editing, design and art creation. When working with digital assets, there isn't a more natural tool than a pen for increased comfort and control.

    Included in the large Intuos4 package:

    1. Intuos4 large pen tablet
    2. Intuos4 Grip Pen
    3. Intuos4 mouse
    4. Pen stand
    5. Ten replacement nibs (five standard nibs, one flex nib, one stroke nib, and three hard felt nibs)
    6. Nib extractor
    7. 2.5m USB cable
    8. Quick Start Guide
    9. Installation CD (includes tablet driver software and electronic user manual)

    1 x $259 Rockable Library – 12 eBooks

    Get a copy of every eBook ever released by Rockable Press.

    1. How to Take Great Photos – $9
    2. Getting Good With Git – $19
    3. iPhone App Entrepreneur – $19
    4. Theme Tumblr Like a Pro – $29
    5. How to Build a Successful Blog Business – $39
    6. Rockstar WordPress Designer – $29
    7. Rockstar Presentations – $15
    8. Photoshop to HTML – $29
    9. How to Write Great Copy for the Web – $15
    10. Twitter Up Your Business – $8
    11. How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer – $29
    12. Freelancer Statistics Report – $19

    3 x $60 Smashing Library – 5 eBooks

    Get a copy of every eBook ever released by Smashing Magazine on the Tuts+ Marketplace.

    1. How to Create Selling E-Commerce Websites – $10
    2. Mobile Design for iPhone and iPad – $10
    3. Professional Web Design – $10
    4. Successful Freelancing – $10
    5. Mastering Photoshop – $20

    1 x $199 Trapcode Form

    Our friends at Red Giant Software have provided a copy of industry standard After Effects plug-in Trapcode Form for one lucky winner!

    Words dissolve into sand, logos catch fire, and water droplets ripple to bass guitar. All of this is possible with a single powerful plug-in that generates animated 3D shapes to mesmerize and entice viewers. Choose from 61 customizable presets, or tweak your own to get just the look you want. Full integration with After Effects’ 3D environment allows you to fly cameras through and around your animated forms.


    1 x $399 Magic Bullet Looks 1.4

    Red Giant Software have also provided a copy of the much-loved Magic Bullet Looks plug-in for After Effects!

    Desert sunrise, Arctic tundra, nighttime urban streets: the look of your footage defines the mood. Now you can define the style of your video or film, regardless of on-set conditions, with powerful imaging tools. Choose from 100+ Look presets, to help set the mood for everything from a wedding to the next Sundance original. You also get the standalone Magic Bullet LooksBuilder, for pre-visualizing looks on set or anywhere. Portable presets load into any editing hosts, so the same Looks you create on set are the ones you finish with in the editorial suite: no need for an expensive finishing system.


    3 x $49.95 Billings 3

    Billings 3 is a powerful invoicing app, and we’ve got three copies to give away.

    Image is everything.
    Your invoices should reflect your professionalism. Billings combines powerful features with stylish designs so you can send elegant invoices right out of the box. Choose from any of the customizable templates, or create your own with the built-in WYSIWYG designer. Either way you’ll send polished professional invoices in seconds.

    Track time and expenses easily

    Easily track time from any application using the convenient menubar timer. Or use global hot keys to start/stop timers. Any way you look at it, Billings makes it easy to track those valuable minutes.

    One click invoicing

    Sending your client an invoice is as easy as a click of a button. You can send an invoice for specific projects or send a consolidated invoice for any or all completed work.

    … and lots more!


    3 x $59 Pixelmator

    Pixelmator, the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for Mac OS X has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images. Perfect for when Photoshop is too much horsepower for what you need to do. The makers of Pixelmator have provided us with three licenses to give away.

    Precise selection tools
    Someone who is editing images must be able to select the right shapes, portions or objects in images. With Pixelmator's powerful, pixel-accurate collection of selection tools you can quickly and easily select any part of your images. That means you can edit and apply special effects to portions of your pictures, remove unwanted objects or even cut out objects from one picture to put on another. Thanks to the masks palette in Pixelmator, you can even save your selections for later. Now, that's handy.

    Full assortment of painting tools
    Another bunch of tools in Pixelmator are painting tools. The real greatness of these tools is the ability to use different brush sizes, shapes, hardness, even blending modes when painting. You can paint with Pixelmator as you would traditionally, play with beautiful gradients or even fill colors with other ones. There has never been a more satisfying way to paint. What's more, Pixelmator's painting tools can be used not only for any style of painting, but also for improving your selections with masks or even retouching.

    Retouching tools
    It is a snap to perfect your aging or buggy photos with Pixelmator. With its advanced retouching tools you can easily blur hard edges or sharpen fuzzy areas of your image. Or paint with a sample of an image to remove wrinkles from faces or scratches in your photos. In fact, you can use any of the adjustment or painting tools to polish or to refine your images.

    … and much more!


    5 x $39.95 Little Snapper

    Real Mac Software have provided us with 5 copies of Little Snapper to give away. The app is perfect for people who regularly need to take, edit and organize screenshots. If you have trouble organizing your visual inspiration, Little Snapper can help.

    Snap
    Built for people who love to capture webpages or their desktop, LittleSnapper is full of great snapping tools. There’s full webpage capture that lets you save a page to your library straight from your browser of choice and the powerful built-in browser that lets you snap specific page elements using the DOM element capture.

    Thanks to LittleSnapper’s all-new screen-capture engine you can capture your entire desktop – multiple displays included – and the powerful area and window-snapping tools make it super-simple to capture any area of the screen you require.

    Edit

    LittleSnapper’s beautiful vector-based annotation tools allow you to mark up your images with text, callouts, shapes, lines, arrows, blurs and highlighting. Best of all, the annotations are all non-destructive allowing you to hide and show them at a moment’s notice.

    Marking up images for technical documents, blog posts and customers has never been easier with the useful callout tool that allows you to link text annotations to numbered badges on the page.

    … and more!


    5 x $19.95 Courier

    Real Mac Software have also provided us with 5 copies of Courier to give away. Courier allows you to share files, images, photos, movies, and more with all your favourite online services – including Flickr and Facebook. Create an Envelope; drag on the stamps for the services you want to send files to; then just drag and drop on the files you want to deliver! Whether you’re uploading files to one destination or three, Courier can handle it.

    Courier has a stunningly simple interface that hides all the unnecessary complexities of uploading your files to the internet, and has been built from the ground-up for Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

    Anything Goes

    Our seven built-in plugins mean you’ll be able to start sharing in under 30 seconds – and with Amazon S3, Ember, Flickr, Facebook, FTP / SFTP, Vimeo and YouTube support, we’ve got the most-requested services in the bag!

    Simply drag on the stamps for each service you want to upload files to, and Courier will upload all the items you’ve dropped onto it – whether they’re a photo, movie, document or something else.

    Destination Known

    Have you ever wondered where your files physically end up in the world? While designing Courier we thought it’d be far more fun to show where your files are actually going – so each upload is plotted on a map with the route showing a progress bar that fills as the files are uploaded.

    Once everything’s been uploaded, Courier ensures handy links to the published files are ready for use and we even keep the history of all uploads so you can easily retrieve links to each file.

    … and more!


    1 x $315 SymmetryShop

    Artlandia SymmetryShop is all you need to do professional pattern design in Photoshop. This plug-in lets you create patterns quickly and imaginatively, with the full power of an automatic pattern builder behind you. Create interlocking patterns, use natural blends, and let your design elements overlap as if in a hand-painted design. Pick up right where you finished when you need to make changes down the road. Here is what comes in your package:

    1. Artlandia SymmetryShop plug-in
    2. A comprehensive User Guide
    3. Installation instructions
    4. Quick Reference Card file
    5. SymmetryShop Sampler (patterns created with SymmetryShops—learn by example)

    1 x $399 SymmetryWorks

    Artlandia SymmetryWorks, the exciting, powerful, easy-to-use, and most affordable software for pattern design, is just a few clicks away. This Illustrator plug-in is best for working with vector objects, but it lets you use raster images in your patterns too. SymmetryWorks will save you hours on each pattern you make. And it will enable you to create designs that you simply cannot do by any other means. Here is what comes in your package:

    1. Artlandia SymmetryWorks 5 plug-in
    2. A comprehensive User Guide
    3. Installation instructions
    4. Quick Reference Card file
    5. SymmetryWorks Sampler (patterns created with SymmetryWorks—learn by example)

    NEXT Solve the Next Question

    One you have answered today’s question and have the first character in the URL string, make sure to visit Activetuts+ tomorrow for question #2.


    READ FIRST Entry Terms

    1. This competition is not open to Envato employees.
    2. Entries will be accepted worldwide.
    3. If you do not respond within 7 days to a notification that you have won a prize, we reserve the right to select another winner.
    4. All prices quoted are in USD.


Quick Tip: Syncing Ableton Live & Traktor Pro

Posted: 20 Dec 2010 12:00 AM PST

In this quick tip, I am going to show you a neat and simple way of running Ableton Live and Traktor on the same computer by using external MIDI software. This scenario would be useful if you wish to add extra loops on top of your Traktor set by triggering Live clips that stay in sync with the Traktor’s master tempo. I am using Ableton Live 8.0.9 and Traktor Pro 1.2.5.


Setting Up

First of all we need to download a free software called MIDI YOKE. MIDI YOKE is a MIDI Patch Cable driver. It’s a Windows multimedia driver that allows you to connect the MIDI output from one program to the MIDI input of a different program. Mac users already have this functionality in the form of the IAC driver.

Once downloaded and installed fire up Traktor, then Live. Go to Preferences by hitting the appropriate icon at the top right next to the magnifying glass. From the MIDI Clock tab check the box with the “Send MIDI Clock” text next to it to activate it. Leave MIDI Clock Sending Offset as it is at 0 ms. Hit Close.

Notice at the top right of the Traktor Pro window under the Traktor Pro logo. You should be in FX view. If that’s the case, click the metronome icon to switch view to Master Clock Panel and activate MIDI-Clock for external synchronization by hitting the button with the Play and the Pause icons just underneath the Sync button. Load a track into any of Traktor’s decks.

In Live’s Preferences now, in the MIDI Sync tab under MIDI Ports activate Sync for the Input: Out to MIDI Yoke: 1 port. Make sure Sync Type is set to MIDI Clock. Notice how the Sync In indicator at the top left of Live’s windows starts flashing. It’s receiving the signal from Traktor’s MIDI Clock. If you activate Traktor’s Master Clock Tick, you can hear a metronome clicking in sync with Live’s Sync In indicator.

For Live to receive the sync information, we need to activate the External Sync Switch next to the Sync In indicator.


In Action

Start playing the loaded track in Traktor’s deck. Load up an audio or MIDI clip in Live and hit play. Now, almost always, the loop will sound either delayed or ahead of time. In my case it was slightly ahead of time. In this case, Live’s Input Clock Sync Delay needs to be adjusted at the Preferences. I had to set mine at -100 ms.

You might also have to select 1/4 or a smaller value at the quantization menu at the top to get the loop syncing with your set’s beat value. Now, if your audio clip is properly warped, it should play in sync with Traktor’s Master Tempo. You can, then, apply effects and combine various clips to enrich your Traktor set.

I hope you found the tip useful. Let me know if you have any questions and thank you for your time!


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