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I’ve just finished an arrangement of Elgar/Parry’s lovely socialist hymn, ‘Jerusalem’. This somewhat confused adaptation was part of a last minute effort by Steve Wright and myself to provide patriotic material for one of the gigs on LUU Dance Band’s 2011 tour of France — the gig happened to fall on St George’s Day, so the enthusiastic and numerous ex-pat community of Bergerac had requested that Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory be played that night. We forgot about it until a week before the tour, during which Steve was very busy with other things, and fun ensued.

I hope soon to upload an export or recording of Steve’s wonderful jazz-waltz setting (yes) of the latter tune, but for now here is an export of Jerusalem using the Sibelius 7 Sounds library.

Due to a minor bug and the fact that it was made in Sibelius 6 originally (I think), the inbuilt export chopped off a few notes, so I used the terrifying and excellent Audio Hijack Pro, a great Mac application that is able to steal the audio from any program and record it to a file.

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Quite a few people I know who use a Mac like to take advantage of the UNIX-like Terminal from time to time. I use it for remote logins to the computer clusters that do my PhD work for me, but there are all sorts things you can do using the built-in command line utilities, and for certain automated or repetitive tasks it’s often far quicker than using a graphical interface.

I recently found a great application called TotalTerminal which takes control of OS X’s inbuilt Terminal app and allows it to bring up a terminal ‘visor’ just by pressing a shortcut, a bit like the console in iD Software games like Quake, Doom etc. This is very handy if you want quick access to the command line regardless of what else you’re doing at the time, and it’s very customisable too. I use ‘Apple+§’ to bring up a terminal from the bottom of the screen, so that I can quickly use SSH to check on my simulations.