Dija miss me? didja, didja?
I got home in the middle of yesterday evening which was just right for buying some essentials, a quick meal, unpack then off to bed.
Oh, yes, you probably want to hear about the event. Well, it was fantastic
The keynote speech was quite unusual, starting with "What's wrong with Linux audio?", then a long list of
commercial audio kit with Linux based engines to "Where the f@@@ is everyone?" a show of hands revealing precisely one chip manufacturer with a representative there. After this it was a well researched and mostly positive speech. The conference proper spanned 3 days, and covered a huge range of topics, with a number of hands-on workshops in parallel.
The evening concerts were in two sessions, the early ones being audio rather than music, featuring mostly weird and wonderful surround sound stuff - not really my scene. The later sessions were less formal and definitely music, whether that be computer generated (under real-time programming), beatboxing, dj mixing and mashups, along with 'normal' instrument playing.
I drooled over all the nice toys, both software and hardware - one guy even 3d printing the case for his project. I learned a great deal about the current state of a whole host of Linux based projects, and had the chance to chat with the developers. I was also able to talk about the work on the Yoshimi soft synth I'm getting involved with, and got a lot of support and helpful suggestions. I became seriously chuffed to be identified as "The Yoshimi guy", and absolutely delighted by the comments on my voice patch sets.
I was able to put lots of faces to names, and was impressed with the wide age range, and the number of "Non men" (as the keynote speaker called them). The crowd were really friendly, and it seemed that each time I went for lunch or dinner it was with different groups of people!
On the Sunday (for for those that wanted to stay over) there was a trip to a mechanical musical instrument museum, ranging from simple music boxes to full-blown fairground automatons. I was surprised to see one of the flat disk players very like one I dimly remember my grandmother had.
After this there was a lunch where we took over most of a local restaurant
I stayed an extra day, and took a train to Heidelberg, becoming a good, money spending tourist. An absolute must was to go up to the castle. Let me tell you, Heidelberg castle is big, very
big 
While I was there I came across a musician trio playing on the 'old' bridge. They were clarinet, sax, and guitar. Intitally I was going to chuck some 'shrapnel' in their pot, but quickly changed to feeling around for a Euro - that was until the sax player did his solo spot, and I upgraded to 2 Euro. He was really, really good. As well as taking, and improvising on the melody he put in some positively rippling arpeggios, but not in a 'look how clever I am way'.
Well there you go...
Now I have a lot of catching-up to do
