The Ethical Company

Recognisable features of the ethical company, in the literature and discussion of business ethics, involve these attributes:

Transparency
Straightforwardness
Accountability
Owning-up
Honesty
Fairness
Common decency
Distributive justice

Recognisable features of a company whose base is ethically challenged are these:

dissembling,
use of threats,
unkindness to employees,
a widespread use of gagging orders,
an inequitable distribution of company income.

On the contrary, a company which would rather conduct its business:

– verbally (particularly with regard to disputed issues) instead of committing its views to writing;
– commonly resorts to litigation, or employs the frequent threat of such; employs gagging clauses as standard policy;
– pays its directors highly disproportionate sums in comparison with its employees;

…this company is suspect and should be avoided wherever possible.

It is a sad commentary on current business and public life that this needs to be written, or debated, says Fripp.

His thoughts can be summed up as follows:

transparency + straightforwardness = honesty
accountability + owning-up = responsibility
distributive justice + fairness = equity
common decency = goodwill

And the Four Pillars of The Ethical Company are:

Honesty
Responsibility
Equity
Goodwill

GUITAR RIG 3 is the ultimate all-in-one guitar and bass solution. Simply connect your guitar with your computer via the enhanced Rig Kontrol 3 foot pedal and you are ready to go. The on-board studio-quality soundcard routes the signal to your speakers, while the software grants you access to an incredible number of perfectly modeled classic amps, cabinets, mics and effects – all arranged in a super-simple drag-and-drop rack format. Any style, any time – the perfect solution for professional studio and live setups.

From the Native Instrument site you can download a demo version, so I did and set off to have some fun with my guitar.. obviously I didn’t have the Rig Kontrol 3 foot pedal, but the instructions said it was possible to use the software just as a virtual instrument – that is by plugging your guitar directly into the line-in of the mac (as I don’t have an external audio interface yet).

Unfortunately it wasn’t that easy – the audio controls of Guitar Rig didn’t allow me to choose my mac’s LineIn, so no sound at all !!!

I googled the issue quite a bit, found out that other people run into the same problem.

Thus I emailed directly the guys at Native Instruments, and (I wasnt expecting this) they got back to me after a couple of days!!! Thanks Nadine!

Here’s their feedback – thought it could have been useful to other mac users:

In order to fix this problem, please create an “Aggregate Device”.

An Aggregate Device is an audio interface that virtually exists in your

computer. It uses audio inputs and outputs of one or more real audio

interfaces which are connected to your computer.

How to setup a generated device:

– Open the OS X “Audio and MIDI setup” (MacHD/Applications/Utilities) and

click on Audio -> Open aggregate device editor.

– By clicking on the “+” button you can add a new device. Below you should see

a list of real audio interfaces currently connected to your computer. Click on

the check box to enable interfaces as needed for this aggregate device. Close

the editor when done.

– In the Audio settings window of the audio application you can now choose

this “aggregate device” as your output device.

– For Native Instruments standalone applications also setup the inputs and

outputs as necessary under the Audio settings window/tab Routing.

Nadine, Native Instruments Support Team

I didn’t know anything about Aggregate Audio, it’s really really nice. For example it lets you manage your audio-input ports in such a way that you can use more than one at the same time, e.g. recording more than one instrument at the same time with Garage Band.

So I tried to create a ‘virtual’ audio device using the Aggregate Device menu-option in the Audio-Midi-Setup utility (update 22/11/09: if you’re on SnowLeopard the Audio-Midi-Setup app looks a bit different, but what follows is till valid!).
Unfortunately it didn’t let me do that – every time I was making some changes to these settings they were not stored properly (on SnowLeopard the newly created device flashes and disappears every time).
Some more googling, got an answer here. It’s an issue with unix privileges on the .GlobalSettings.plist file (in /Library/Preferences). Even if I’m an admin user, for some reasons the system doens’t let me change that file, so I can’t change the Aggregate Device options too.

After trying various options suggested in this apple forum, I discovered that the only solution that worked for me was changing the privileges on the Preferences folder.

I know, it’s not really advisable to allow any user to change those prefs – but I took he risk.. I’m usually the only one using this mac. So if this is not the case for you, better look for another option..

That’s it – now all you have to do is change the settings in GuitarRig:

GUITAR RIG ROCKS!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously thinking about buying the whole package!!!

The Hot Handâ„¢ system is a patent pending technology that uses micro-machined motion sensors to translate movement and position into control signals for use in guitar effects. The system provides an unprecedented level of control and expressiveness and offers the artist a new way of manipulating effects.