Vincent Wehren: Straight-Talk Tech | AI | Music

  • Will we see AI improve DAW workflows in 2025?

    While Generative AI services like Suno, Amper Music, or AIVA are truly AI-first offerings, I am also looking forward to how AI can truly simplify the – to me – painful process of working in a DAW. Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) like Ableton Live, Logic Pro, and Pro Tools have long been the heart of modern music production. But with AI entering the mix, the potential for creativity and efficiency in DAW workflows truly could skyrocket and I look forward especially speed up workflows and tedious tasks.

    For background, I spent a lot of time early in my musical career programming drum tracks and whatnot using tools such as Cubase on an Atari Stacy II (yes, this is early 90s!) to drive sampled drums on my Kurzweil 2000, to the point where I truly got sick of spending time on a laptop keyboard vs. focusing on recording vocals, guitars, and other instruments.

    Picture of an Atari Stacy2 laptop from https://retro-treasures.blogspot.com/2017/01/atari-stacy-2.html
    An Atari Stacy2 as seen on https://retro-treasures.blogspot.com/2017/01/atari-stacy-2.html

    In recent years I’ve been using Logic Pro mostly, and while I can get around, I am far from a pro myself using it (and still dislike spending a lot of time programming things like drum tracks). Logic’s Drummer or using loops usually doesn’t cut it for the songs I am trying to record, so, unfortunately, I can’t always get around putting in the time but find myself stuck in the “how to” stage. Example, I needed a 6/8 blues shuffle with a triplet feel and it took me way too long to figure it out. Lo and behold, asking ChatGPT helped me with the how-to part, but naturally I’d prefer the AI to do not just showing me how, but doing it for me. And this probably applies to many others, too (and I bet the product folks across the various DAW vendors feel similarly).

    So, my wish for 2025 is to be able to voice-direct my drum tracks as well as other tedious tasks that eat into creative time like editing, trimming, mixing and so on. But, of course, AI isn’t just about automation—it’s about inspiration. By collaborating with AI, I am sure there are many more creative avenues that open up, but if there was one thing that could really help me unleash my own and help stop wasting creative time this would be it. 😊

  • 2024: How did it get so late so soon?

    Image of the concept of time slipping away

    2024 turned out to be quite the year. Rapid changes have become the norm, both in work and “regular” life settings. In Tech, AI continued (and continues) to dominate much of what we do both in what we build and how we build. 2024 also marked year 19 at Microsoft since starting in Microsoft Ireland Research in 2005 and year 6 of working on Microsoft Edge, which continued to grab share in the browser market.

    Musically, I continued my study of the guitar and music with the wonderful Zoom sessions with the amazing Robben Ford (via https://www.robbenfordguitardojo.com) which are just such a treat and inspiration. I am looking forward more of that in 2025!

    Meanwhile, at home, apart from my guitar collection mysteriously growing, my two youngest kids are growing up way too fast, and the already grown-up one is making art shine with her work for TEFAF, undoubtedly also with more to come next year.

    2024 was a year full of joy but also of several, complex challenges and most of all, it seems to have come and (almost) gone way too quickly. Or, to quote Dr. Seuss: “How did it get so late so soon?”

    Have a wonderful and prosperous 2025!

  • Colors and how they are perceived in different cultures

    While doing some research on colors and how they can be used and perceived differently in different regions and cultures, I came across an excellent data visualization called ‘Colours and Cultures’, designed by AlwaysWithHonor.com and David McCandless. It’s also used on the cover of  the book ‘Information is Beautiful‘ (Note: the US edition apparently sports a different cover and is called ‘The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World’s Most Consequential Trivia’).

    Image called "Colours In Culture" from "Information Is Beautiful"

    Fascinating stuff and certainly provides some food for thought when designing web pages for global audiences.

  • From Windows to Bing Webmaster Tools

    I realize it’s been seriously quiet on my blog since I first posted last year. Well, things got busy over in Windows shipping Windows 8, and building the next-gen search experiences for Windows.com and optimizing designs, controls, and process for SEO. However, as it turns out I won’t see this exciting release through all the way to RTM: I have finally succumbed to the luring promise of being able to work in the very “warp core” of search at Microsoft and have moved to Bing to work with an exceptional team as Program Manager for the Bing Webmaster Tools.

    So, hope to see you all at SMX Advanced Seattle next week in my new capacity! If you’re visiting, come look me up at the Bing booth!

  • Robots.txt, UTF-8 and the UTF-8 Signature

    In today’s post I wanted to talk a little bit about a specific issue I came across for one of the sites I work on, hoping that you might find it useful. In this particular case, I was surprised to see the first line in one of our sites’ robots.txt files being marked as “invalid” in Google Webmaster Tools. Looking at the Site Configuration > Crawler Access section, Google’s test tool showed a question mark at the beginning of the sitemap. I immediately had the feeling this had something to do with the encoding of the file and the possible presence of a UTF-8 signature. But wait, that doesn’t make sense:

    Looking at http://code.google.com/web/controlcrawlindex/docs/robots_txt.html Google clearly states the following (the highlight is mine):

    File format

    The expected file format is plain text encoded in UTF-8. The file consists of records (lines) separated by CR, CR/LF or LF.

    Only valid records will be considered; all other content will be ignored. For example, if the resulting document is a HTML page, only valid text lines will be taken into account, the rest will be discarded without warning or error.

    If a character encoding is used that results in characters being used which are not a subset of UTF-8, this may result in the contents of the file being parsed incorrectly.

    An optional Unicode BOM (byte order mark) at the beginning of the robots.txt file is ignored.

    So, clearly Google supports UTF-8 encoded robots.txt. Also, the highlighted section clearly states that they will ignore the Unicode “byte order mark” (BOM) at the beginning of the file, if present. (The reason I quote “byte order mark” here is that there really is no such thing as byte order in the case of UTF-8. “UTF-8 signature” is probably a more accurate name for the byte-sequence 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF -- more at this link about UTF-8 on Wikipedia which Google includes above). So what gives?

    In this particular case, I didn’t have immediate access to the published robots.txt but at the same time did not want my assessment that the UTF-8 signature was causing this to just be an “educated guess”. So, I needed another way to demonstrate that:

    1. The robots.txt file in question was in fact UTF-8 encoded
    2. There was a UTF-8 signature present in the file

    Fiddler to the Rescue

    Of all tools that I use in SEO day-to-day, Fiddler, the free network debugging tool written by the illustrious Eric Lawrence on the Internet Explorer team, is probably the one that I use most. I could spend a whole post on the benefits of Fiddler to the more technically inclined SEO (and I’m sure someday I will), but if you are interested in its capabilities, check out the video Getting Started with Fiddler (8 min; 9MB WMV).

    In any case, using Fiddler, I was able to at least one of the things called out above quickly. Let’s take a look.

    Fiddler Hex View

    Fiddler has a HexView tab that shows the response headers and body as a string of hexadecimal values alongside a textual representation. This makes it easy to spot the UTF-8 signature byte-sequence (sorry folks, but I’ve hidden the actual file name from view, no need to expose that poor robots.txt file’s bits and make it feel uncomfortable in public). Click to enlarge:

    fiddler-robots-screen-hex-utf-8-issue

    That’s it, EF BB EF (or ) at the beginning of the response body which is proof that the file used the UTF-8 signature. But given Google’s guidance alluded to above, why would Google Webmaster Tools be thrown off by this byte sequence? Google’s engineers are a smart bunch, so might there be more out of whack?

    What I also noticed in Fiddler us that the server response did not include the content encoding. I would have expected something like: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8. Instead, the server returned: Content-Type: text/plain

    Could it be that the combination of not having Content-Encoding in the header plus having the UFT-8 signature byte sequence is what is throwing off Google Webmaster Tools in this case? At this point this is pure speculation until I find (or publish) a robots.txt with both the signature present and a correct Content-Encoding in the header. I will update the post if I do find one in the wild.

    Mitigating the Issue

    Since I take it that Google processes robots.txt line-by-line and only ignores lines that are invalid, adding an empty first line or a comment (starting with #) in the first line may be sufficient to fix this particular issue. That said it’s probably a good idea to simply not use the UTF-8 signature and save your robot.txt file without it (a versatile editors like Notepad++ for Windows makes this easy). Also, it makes sense to ensure sure the server response emits the Content-Encoding header correctly.

    On the other hand, if you are not using really using any extended characters, you could also consider just saving your robots.txt in ANSI. A good, comprehensive post is Robots Speaking Many Languages over at the Bing Webmaster Central blog. It also discusses how to percent-encode entries that use extended characters – good examples of which can be found in http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt.

    What are your experiences with robots.txt and UTF-8? Do you any examples of robots.txt that use the UTF-8 signature that work just fine for Google WM tools?