Improving Your Workflow
OK, where to begin. I’ve already written this once and lost it due to a program crash, but I’ll give it another go. I’ll talk about WordPress plugins, a couple of sites and some programs that I think will save you time and improve your workflow, at least they do for me.
Just to be clear, this is more about all the administrative things you have to do as an artist today and about streamlining your workflow, not about the actual music making process.
Social Networks & Websites
I was looking around for some place that would allow me to update all, or most, of the social networks I’m on, from one place. Since as an artist you don’t really have the luxury of choosing one of them, you have to be on all of them, and keeping it all updated by yourself is more or less a full time job. I wanted to minimize the time I needed to spend updating all those places, and after searching around and testing various services I found ping.fm. It allows you to add networks like facebook, facebook pages (which doesnt seem to be supported in many places yet), twitter, tumblr, myspace and a ton of others, and you can update them all from there, either in one go, or individually.
After I set that up I wanted some way to use it from my desktop so I wouldn’t have to fire up the browser, 
go to the site, login and navigate to the right page every time I wanted to update something. Some more searching ensued and after a while I found MePing, not the prettiest thing around perhaps, but it does what it does very well. Namely import all your networks and custom posting rules from ping.fm and allows you to update, that’s it. Time saved!
OK, then I was thinking, what if I could integrate this site into ping.fm as well, I already had a plugin that updated Twitter every time I made a new post, but what about all the other networks. Once again I went on the hunt and I found WordPress 2 Ping.fm, I’ve been running it a couple of days now and it seems to work flawlessly. It sends an update to ping.fm, which automatically posts it to your configured networks, every time you publish a new post on your blog…
More time saved for important things like actually making music.
Applications
I’ll talk about FARR (Find And Run Robot) and AutoHotkey (AHK).
FARR is an application launcher of sorts, there are others out there like Launcy for instance, but they can’t really compare to the powers of FARR in my opinion. FARR sits in your tray waiting for you to press it’s hotkey, once you do it’s little text-box interface pops up and allows you to type in what you want, simple enough. But it is so much more then just an app launcher, I use it to find out currency exchange rates, translations, to look up definitions of words, do quick web searches and so on. You can even make your own keyword aliases which when typed in gives you a list of applications (for instance), so instead of typing in say “Cubase” to launch Cubase, I could type in “omus” (personal alias of mine) and it will display a preconfigured list of all my music applications and I can choose which one I want. It comes with a bunch of those already built in, like search and dictionary’s for instance.
How does it improve workflow then, well it allows you to quickly fire up applications, do a search or look up a word, without taking your hands off the keyboard, no more grab the mouse, go to start menu and sift through all the applications before you find what you’re looking for. No more opening the browser and navigating to the site you want, just type it into FARR and it takes care of it. It might feel weird at first if you never used one of these things before, but trust me, it’s well worth it in the end.
Now on to AutoHotkey, I admit, it’s a bit on the geeky side of things, and it will require you to read some documentation and maybe even ask some questions on their forum, or irc channel. So what is it? You probably guessed it already, it’s a simple but powerful scripting language for making custom hotkeys. Don’t be discouraged tho, it is really not that hard to get into.
Let me give you an example. Say you have an older computer (like I did up until a couple of months ago), and every time you want to make some music you have to shut down all the other programs you might have running, like a browser, twitter client, MSN/AIM, email, rss reader or what ever it might be, to give the music application as much resources as possible. And once you’re done making music you have to start all those programs up again. That is alot of clicks and not to forget tedious and boring. So I made a little AHK script to take care of it. What it does is wait for a specific process to start, ie cubase.exe or renoise.exe, once it sees that process it closes all the above mentioned programs, goes to the tray and waits there for me to close Cubase or Renoise. Once I do, it fires all those programs up again. All with one double click.
Or you can have it auto-expand email signatures for instance, say you have one for work, one for family & friends and one for something else. You can make a very short script that will put in a specific signature when you type a specific word, say sig01 for instance. Once you type that, the script will replace it with the corresponding signature.
Here’s what that would look like…
::sig01::
(
magOwl
email: my@email.com
phone: my phone number
web: sowl.org
)
I’ve done lots more with it though, a simple backup script and one that moves application windows between my monitors for instance. You can also compile your scripts to exe files, which will allow them to run on a computer that don’t have AHK installed. As I said, it’s a bit on the geeky side, but it can save you a lot of time and eliminate boring, repetitious tasks if you give it a shot.
I’ll stop there for today, but I do have some more tips and tricks up my sleve for another post or two at a later date. I hope someone will find this useful.
