I’ve spent a bit of time over the last week putting some scripting together to build a new website. The site is morseringtones.com and as you might imagine there are morse code mp3 ringtones available there for download. I’ve put together a list of over 9100 names and there are 4 ringtones available for each name. These are played at 4 different speeds in morse code. For the quicker speeds the names are repeated multiple times to make sure you have a better chance to hear them if you’re using them on a cell phone. I’ve put things up to where you can submit ideas for further names if you like. I may be adding prosigns at some point in the near future and at some point may make it possible for people to go ahead and generate custom morse ringtones from a web interface. So if you want a morse code ringtone for your phone step over and take a look.

I’ve also bundled up the whole collection of them for download via lulu.com, more details can be found on the Purchase morse mp3 ringtones colleciton page.

In the future here I may detail some of the scripts that I’ve used to build this site. It’s all built on a linux server ( the generation of 9100 ringtones at 4 different speeds took about 6 hours.) I’m sure the scripts could have been designed differently but was quite proud of putting together the process for making the whole site so that future maintenance is minimal.

Anyway …-.-

I don’t know where to file this, but it was interesting to me…. this how-to walks you through a cheap way to make good closeup photos… Basically they have you construct a light tent from a card board box (cut large openings in the sides and use white tracing paper to diffuse the light and posterboard for backgrounds.)

The idea here is that for those good closeups of small items being bathed in light is the ideal, but a direct flash usually is not good, diffuse light is the ideal and this setup does nicely.

If you’re interested I’ve got a “first impressions” look at the Zoom H4 over on the ashevillemusiclessons.com site. I couldn’t decide where it would be more appropriate to post…..

I’ve got to say, I’ve almost wondered if the Zoom H4 was true vaporware the last few days. it’s supposed to be received by various vendors (around October 1st-3rd) and I still haven’t seen ONE first hand review. I’ve seen one music site that has 7 people that have rated it on a scale of 1-10, but no written review – for all I know they could have said “Man that looks cool I bet it will be a 9…” There are several posts from a podcasting expo Friday that mention it though this says it’s the “ONLY field recorder worth getting”. The other is basically a “fluff” article with no real substance other than that the device was demo’ed.

I’ve talked about this device before, it’s a field recorder, 4 track digital recorder, audio input device/etc. All digital onto SD media and has two combination XLR 1/4″ inputs. For convenience it carries two onboard condenser microphones in a stereo XY pattern. On paper it looks nice, but on paper I haven’t seen any signal to noise specs either. All I’ve seen are features. (Slightly different from specs.)

Hopefully there’ll be some real reviews out there this week as they should be making their ways into the hands of real users. It’s disappointing that the only promotional video I saw didn’t do much more than wave it around and talk about it’s features – no actual sound sample “device in action” moment. If anyone has any FIRST hand information, I’d be curious to hear.

Of course, my concerns of vaporware are just because I saw some sites promising Mid-September arrivals… when other sites seemed to say October 1st or 3rd… and now I’m seeing some sites claim mid-October (or the beginning of November…..) However this Toms Hardware article about it says that it is released and shipping this week….

–Update 10/09/06–

I’ve finally run across some real reviews of this by some people that have got their hands on an actual working model. First up this forum is a subforum of a larger setup geared at zoom products. There is a review and quick and dirty demo made using the zoom h4. I’ve also been watching this forum fairly closely I’m expecting there may be reviews from a couple of users there within a few days. I did find that there is already a planned firmware update due to a problem with mp3 recording at certain bitrates….

We have spoken with Zoom engineers, and there is apparently a bug in the mp3
encoding software currently used for the DSP unit in the H4. The following
bitrates appear to be affected: 256, 64, 56 and 48. The following bitrates
are error free to the best our knowledge: VBR, 320, 224, 192, 160, 144, 128,
112, 96 and 80.

This dvinfo.net forum thread is also eagerly awaiting more real world reviews.

I’m also watching for episode 126 of podsqod.com which I expect will be a review of the zoom h4. (Episode 125 announced they had one and would be featuring it in an upcoming episode – episode 124 was then released out of order with the tease that the zoom h4 feature was on the way…)

So, at the moment those are the places I’ve been watching for “real world” reviews (in addition to the product reviews on sites that have it for sale.) From what I’ve read thus far it sounds VERY nice still, I’ve heard good comments about the built in mic’s…. also the menu toggle wheel may be a bit aggravating, but the “workflow” for stereo field recording sounds fairly easy. Self-noise was measured by one reviewer (using it as an audio interface) at -80dB…. which is pretty good. If I recall 16 bit resolution should give you a theoretical 96dB of dynamic range…. It would still be an improvement on the -60dB noise floor of the portastudio….

So, I mentioned a few weeks back that I was really starting to look again at audio equipment. I have a planned project that I would really like to capture high quality direct to digital audio for and the old tascam portastudio cassette based system from years ago just won’t suit get what I hope for. (And setting up a stereo mic pattern and the tascam as a mixer and a laptop isn’t really something I WANT to have to go through – field recorder is the goal and it would suit a few other purposes as well.) I wouldn’t mind having multitrack capabilities and for all purposes I’ve looked at the Boss BR-600 the last few weeks and thought I had found a suitable device…. 8 tracks, built in condenser mics to make it easy to setup and capture on the spot. And compactflash based (I was hoping for something nice and quiet like a flash/memory card based recorder.) But, there are some things about the Boss that have discouraged me….

Yes, the $399 price may be one, but I notice that it doesn’t come with an ac adapter (yes you’re ready to record the minute you get it because they give you batteries. They also give you an XLR to 1/4 adapter (already got two due to the old tascam portastudio….. thanks….) But they won’t include an AC adapter. (Sorry, that just strikes me as cheap when you’re considering putting down $400 for something.)

There are other things too, first is that it looks like it may be finicky about compatible compactflash cards (there’s a document up on their site listing compatible cards – looks to be compactflash 1 and high speed typically.) Also, there IS a rub about “being compatible with the world” as the video I saw claims. Yes it can give you audio in WAV format, BUT…. you have to export it from Roland’s proprietary format. AND you have to have enough room on the card to do so…. hmmmm… so if I get a 1GB card that would (in theory) hold around say 100 minutes of cd quality audio…. then I could really only fill HALF of the card before running out of the headroom space to export it to WAV format. That’s a bit annoying. (It is suggested to expect that it will take as long to export the audio to WAV as it did to record it…. ouch.) OK – well, let’s see, the other things that gave me pause…. tracks 5/6 are joined stereo no matter what and so are 7/8 (and if I recall correctly they are dedicated for mastering. (So you need to keep them open for mixing if I understand correctly… of course, yes you can mix and bounce tracks and free up others, but…. it doesn’t sound quite as impressive as “8 track digital recorder” did at first.)

No, I haven’t actually got one to play with, but I’ve been reading the manual – yes I research the daylights out of things that I consider buying. That’s one reason the internet is useful to me. If I’m going to put that much $$ towards something, I want to make as sure as reasonably possible that I want hate the day I saw the product advertised. That much said the Boss BR-600 is not the device that I think I’ll settle on.

I’ve spent a lot of time today reading about the Samson Zoom H4 Handy Recorder. As best as I can tell it’s not out until the first bit of October…. but… it looks like it may fit the bill for me. Stereo condensor mics (in a nice xy pattern.) here’s their product page…. It uses SD (Secure Digital) media up to 2GB currently (possible firmware updates for greater capacity cards – doesn’t seem to have too many picky preferences (no data on “supported cards”). In addition to the field record stereo capture mode, it can act as a 4 track recorder and can either record from the built in stereo mic setup, or one of two combination XLR/quarter inch hookups…. (WITH phantom power…) Supposedly 4 hours battery life recording (I guess from the built in condensors) OFF 2 AA batteries…. (I think I’d plugin to AC for phantom powering an external condenser – just a hunch….)

Anyway, it does all this, records directly to WAV format – the multitrack feature lets you capture 4 tracks (4 mono/or 2 stereo pairs, or 1 stereo pair, 2 mono….) Then you can mix all four tracks to a stereo file that can be reloaded onto another 2 out of four tracks, etc…. there are some built in effects, it doesn’t strike me as impressive as the Boss Br600 effects array (that even had built in drum machine…) But, it does have a tuner/metronome built in too.

The capture quality can go as high as 24bit/96khz, (for the stereo recording mode) You’ll have to settle for 16bit/44.1khz if you multitrack… You can also use it as a usb audio device (or usb mass storage for retrieving your files.) It comes with a limited edition of cubase. Let’s see… it can also capture direct to mp3.

The biggest drawbacks I see are twofold…. I haven’t seen ONE firsthand review of this yet… just promotional information from Samson. I’d LOVE to hear how those built in microphones sound (mic modeling is available too by the way..) The second concern is doing most EVERYTHING through that little display. But… it comes with a tripod adapter (not the tripod, just an adapter…), an AC adapter and sells for $299 (a hundred less than the BR600) For me the direct XLR inputs is a plus, but the true XY stereo configuration is nice as well. The biggest plus as I think about it is the lack of a need for time consuming convert to WAV. I think if I felt I could postpone my project for a year, that there would be an even better device just around the corner next year, but time marches on….

So, has ANYONE got one of these and done a review yet? I haven’t even seen any promotional press first hand reviews as of yet. That’s currently the MAIN thing that has me waiting for it’s actual release.

I didn’t mean to “rip” the br600 like it seems like I did, but the more I look at it the less I see it suiting what I’m hoping to use it for.

I’ll leave this one open for comments (just in case) anyone has had any first hand experience with this one….Samson Zoom H4 Handy Recorder… anyone…??

Wow, this is nice – and frankly, something I could probably spend hours with. Search Engine Watch tells us that Google will debut a searchable news archive that takes us back through around 200 years worth of news stories. Yes, folks, google is putting the last 200 years of history online. I remember the newsgroups being google-ized was a big deal and that just took us back to the beginnings of the modern internet…. Well, in actuality the articles aren’t hosted at google, but at either the content providers or their aggregation services….

Here is one direct link to the archive search, this appears to have as sources: Time, The New York Times, Washington Post, and other major papers. For the most part, the free articles are hosted at the content provider (like Time), and the pay articles are hosted at the agregator service (like ProQuest Archiver.)

It’s said that if your Google or Google News search has relevant historical archived news results, then you’ll see some of these articles returned in the search results. Currently the service is English only and it appears to be limited to some of the larger publications…. Given my genealogy hobby…. I’d really love to see this done with some of the smaller local papers as well. (Although I want a text transcript and a pdf or png of the original microfilm for context….) Think Google Books for archived news….

Well, it’s a start and a good one at that.

For most people here in the US, this last weekend was known as Labor Day weekend, for me though… it was more like Audio on Linux weekend. I’ve mentioned before that I use my computer for most EVERYTHING and that’s not far off…. I have watched movies on the PC, I’ve recorded multitrack audio, captured tv shows to disc, and of course, work…. database server, digitial photos/editing, test web sites, word documents, test various hardware, etc. etc. test software, etc…. vmware…. oh the list could keep going and going and going…. Well, sometimes it seems that optimizing the machine for one thing comes at the expense of another. Since I had to swap out the system board on the main machine (massively failing probably due to overheating…. multiple pci slots had failed, etc….) I hadn’t had a chance to see why some things didn’t work the way I used to….

First off, the tvcard would freeze the system promptly on attempting to open xawtv or tvtime. I began to wonder if the card had somehow been damaged in the previous board. But…. that wasn’t my primary goal. I had decided it was time to get my old Ensoniq AudioPCI installed again and bypass the onboard sound because I really wanted to do a bit more audio work on the pc again. (It’s been a while since I’ve had things set for good audio workflow…) Unfortunately, the system froze just after X loaded with the soundcard in… I thought maybe the card was the culprit before, when I realized that I had the same problem with the tvcard. So, I tried multiple slots and no joy. I ran across this hardware stability guide hosted over at IBM which suggested that an IRQ conflict could be part of my problem…. I did a “cat /proc/interrupts” and sure enough, even though I had all PCI devices…. Sound and video were sharing an interrupt and the tv capture was sharing an interrupt with video when the sound card wasn’t present. Why? Shouldn’t pci interrupts be able to share better? I had always thought so…. I went through bios and tried varying settings to no benefit…

I booted up my Ubuntu livecd and things worked, EVERYTHING…. hmmm…. maybe I should finally make the plunge over to KUBUNTU…. no there’s got to be some reason.

I even wondered if something like the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 MIDI Digital Recording Interface might help solve the problem…. (although I searched for and found a soundblaster live 5.1 with midi/game port.) But…. I hoped to resolve things without ordering something new.

Finally, I looked at my lilo.conf settings…. for the default boot options I had…. append=”acpi=off mem=nopentium splash=silent resume=/dev/hda6 agp=off” (legacy of troubleshooting the previous boards problems.) I remember distinctly disabling things when the old board was acting up…. so I removed acpi=off and agp=off and everything worked on the next boot. Now, instead of shared IRQ’s…. I get this with cat /proc/interrupts….

cat /proc/interrupts
CPU0
0: 30011895 IO-APIC-edge timer
1: 8594 IO-APIC-edge i8042
8: 0 IO-APIC-edge rtc
9: 0 IO-APIC-level acpi
12: 100306 IO-APIC-edge i8042
14: 297646 IO-APIC-edge ide0
15: 269355 IO-APIC-edge ide1
17: 2615384 IO-APIC-level nvidia
18: 43 IO-APIC-level Ensoniq AudioPCI
19: 16 IO-APIC-level btaudio, bttv0
20: 0 IO-APIC-level ehci_hcd:usb3
21: 0 IO-APIC-level ohci_hcd:usb2
22: 3123744 IO-APIC-level ohci_hcd:usb1, eth0
NMI: 0
LOC: 30012167
ERR: 0
MIS: 0

So… that dragon slayed, I have my nicer sound card in (well it is better than the onboard…) it’s time to look at some audio programs. Now, under linux there are a confusing array of sound choices…. For starters, at the lowest layer, there are OSS and ALSA sound drivers for most cards. (Well, supposedly ALSA support is more limited, but I’ve never run into problems.) OSS is the older driver approach and is usually straightforward. The quality is not as good for audio purposes though (and only one program at a time can use the sound card…) So, I was interested in using ALSA drivers (the ubuntu cd did by default.) The only real problem with ALSA is that some programs don’t recognize ALSA sound devices and either require that there are OSS emulated devices, or that the program is run with an Alsa OSS wrapper program…. “aoss myoldprogram” But… many programs have alsa plugins, and for that matter, the major sound systems (arts/esd and jack) can deal with alsa just fine.

Sound systems?? yes… that’s the next layer. Think of the sound system as “air traffic control” that sits between the audio driver and programs. These systems (arts/esd and jack) provide different approaches to that task. For most recording specific software on linux jack is THE sound system to use. In fact, some audio software doesn’t run without it. (Some does, but would rather not…) Jack is the most sophisticated in many respects surrounding semi-pro/pro audio on linux and “just worked” when I had the alsa driver setup. Now there was a time, when programs that wanted jack to be running would expect you to start it seperately. I recall ardour and rosegarden4 complaining because jack wasn’t available some years back, but these days, they both offer to start jack if it’s not found running.

What’s really neat about jack is it can act as a virtual patch bay in your linux system. Outputs from jack enabled programs can be “plugged in” to inputs of other jack enabled programs (effects software/recordng software/etc.) It seems that talking about it is an abstract concept, USING it – things start to make sense fairly quickly. So, anyway after spending an hour or two troubleshooting my interrupt conflicts and another couple minutes changing to the alsa drivers I was ready to revisit all the audio options on linux.

One of the first things I wanted to do was to test the midi functionality of the card – timidity is a softsynth and was required since the onboard midi isn’t usable with the linux driver. However it should be noted that external midi on the ensoniq audiopci IS supported. I was able to record midi and audio input both from the digital piano that I have hooked in via rosegarden4. There are a lot of things to like about rosegarden. In features it reminds me of powertracks pro audio from pgmusic. (Before the move to linux powertracks was my main audio application.) I updated rosegarden to the latest version and played around with it a while… The biggest frustration I saw with rosegarden right off was no built in wave editor for the audio files (and I didn’t see a way to export audio tracks, but later discovered that rosegarden kept them in wav format.)

For quite a while audacity had been my multitrack tool of choice under linux and so I wanted to take a look at that as well. Unfortunately, even after installing a version that supported ALSA devices, it would crash when attempting to play or record anything. I went back to the old release, back to the new, tried the OSS sound device again, etc. but… ultimately I found this was a Mandriva 2006 limitation and found advice to alter the /etc/security/limits.conf file so that the line

@audio – rt_priority 50

should read
@audio – rt_priority 100
instead…. that worked and audacity was able to play back my old sound files (although it refused to work at anything other than 48000 hz sampling.) I also discovered that I couldn’t launch it with jack running (segmentation fault.) So, I did more testing of audacity with jack shut off and was able to record, but got quite a loud crackling in the playback. It’s a shame really, audacity had a nice clean easy to use interface, but this time around the quality was very poor. At first I thought it was hardware noise, but on review it only showed up on an obnoxious scale in audacity. The version of audacity that supports ALSA directly uses portaudio v19 and is still in beta form. I found some suggestions that the noise may be related to that in some of audacities forums. They said that there have been some big improvements in cvs since the latest release of the beta branch, but I didn’t bother to follow up further. (There was talk of a new release hopefully in the early part of September, so maybe in a few days I’ll be able to try out an official new release.)

So, at this point I experimented with vmware and installing powertracks pro audio in a windows xp virtual machine to see how well that worked. VMware doesn’t do alsa… (of course…) so… I had to search and find ways to make it work. The suggestion was along the lines of aoss (which didn’t work.) I did find some other approaches. This did work for me (using vmware server 1.0.1 by the way.) Find vmware-vmx which on my system was in /usr/lib/vmware/bin and I copied it to /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx-working – then I created a wrapper script called vmware-vmx in it’s old location, the contents need to look like this….

#!/bin/sh
export LD_PRELOAD=libaoss.so.0.0.0
exec /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx-working “$@”

Very simple and YES it works. I was able to both play and record audio in a virtual machine with reasonable quality. I tried MIDI functionality and the software synth in XP worked, but the keyboard input didn’t. I did find information suggesting that this isn’t supported in VMware. The most convincing reasoning seemed to be clock speed issues, which would cause problems with MIDI – realistically, even the soft synth had “strange” problems from time to time – speed irregularities. (Fast then slow, then fast again, etc.) So, maybe sometime I’ll revisit powertracks in wine.

But, I wasn’t done yet (not by a long shot.) What I’ve just passed along is what I spent part of Friday evening and a bit of Saturday afternoon with. Just little fragments of time. I spent MOST all of Monday looking at/working with ardour and found myself greatly liking it. I remember looking at ardour once before and not really getting much success from it. Maybe it was the old OSS drivers and JACK (or lack of Jack) that did me in and sent me to the simpler interface of audacity. But this time I was convinced to put it through it’s paces. Now the interface (ardour 0.99 is based on GTK (1)) is a bit different. But the initial screen tells you how to get your project started. (Start a new session via the session menu.) One thing that’s a bit unusual is you start a session, THEN you add tracks to it (by default 0 tracks in a session.) But after a few half starts just to test the recording quality (which was very nice – no extra audio artifacts.) I sat down to do a bit more serious test with a hymn I’ve found myself playing quite a bit lately.

I fired up the trusty old tascam portastudio as my mixer and laid down a piano track directly into ardour. In the process I did hear some distortion, but it could have been from the odd audio setup that I’ve got (no distortion in reviewing the recording.) Let me see if I can explain – the digital piano has line out, which goes to the tascam and then into the pc. The pc speaker out, goes into the in of the piano (yes it uses the piano speakers for output.) I had headphones plugged into the digital piano (so I was monitoring the direct audio and the routed through the pc audio.) I did try adjusting that a bit by muting the track that I was recording and that seemed to help, but I may need to rethink my monitoring setup.

During the recording process I did hear the occasional skip and lag as the play head moved through the song and would go to the next “page” in the track window. After observing this on playback I disabled the feature to draw the wave as it records and to follow the play head and that seemed to help (although I DID have other things running in the background that I then closed as well (firefox/akregator (rss reader.)) Really, for best performance you should shut down EVERYTHING not necessary for recording. I did a bit more aggressive shutting down before I went back and added a brief organ track to see if that improved the skipping. It did – I had nice, smooth playback and recording.

Next I added a weak scratch vocal track for the melody and set off to play with the results. For one, it’s easy to import an existing audio clip. It appears as though it needs to be in wav format already (mp3’s were declined.) Also, for best results it ought to be the same bit rate as the project. (I used sndfile-resample for this task.) The only sample I ran into an obvious need to do this was a 22 khz sample that sounded like chipmunks chatting instead of normal voice. One thing that I’ve found fascinating about ardour is the way it deals with audio clips and the non-destructive editing philosophy. Not only do they have the non-destructive idea right they’ve got the implementation right too. When I record audio for track one, it’s considered 1.1, then if I punch in/out a small section (to fix a rough spot..) that layer get’s called 1.2 (both options are still accessible.) I could retake the entire track as 1.3, or import audio into the track as 1.4, these “objects” could then be deleted, changed or moved to another track as needed. It is possible too to purge your unused clips, but I like the layered approach in the user interface – it really makes the process of “picking and choosing” from various takes and punch ins. What had me liking ardour even more is the use of wav files as the storage container – so ALL of the clips are accessible via other software. NICE.

Ardour does not yet have midi sequencer capabilities, which is probably the only thing that has me thinking I’ll be using other software as a compliment to it. As a DAW (digital Audio Workstation) or multitrack recording application it excels though. I’ve just scratched the surface. Things got more interesting as I worked with the mixer. For starters, you get a traditional-looking studio console resembling mixer with a strip for each channel in your project (session) and a strip for each bus as well. Of course, near the top you’ve got the typically solo/mute and record buttons (record selects the track to be recorded to when record/play are pushed.) You can also adjust the speed of a track, or add prefader effects (black box under the record button), add effects postfader (black box underneath fader). Of course, you can adjust the volume with the fader (and nice VU meter btw), or pan your track (left-right slide – typically the small black bar underneath the postfader box.)

Of course, you can adjust inputs and outputs for each track as well and in the effects boxes you can add inserts and sends too. I’ve got to admit it’s been so long since I’ve worked a true mixing board, it took me a bit to brush up on why I would want a send/insert – with the dizzying array of plugins available I’m still a bit overwhelmed at the choices. In contrast to powertracks I’d like to make a couple of comparisons – with powertracks, effects are “applied to a track” which usually meant the entire track was altered, with ardour, effects are applied during playback/mixing and can be bypassed, leaving your original track untouched. (Of course, it would be possible to take track one, apply affects and record the output to track 2 it appears.) Just thinking through it, I would think you could record with effects initially as well. (Although, the audio engineer in me REALLY wants the purest/best signal possible on disk and then tinker later.)

Plugins and effects though are an area I haven’t delved into much detail yet. They don’t “just come” with ardour. Ardour supports ladspa plugins. Ladspa is supported by a large number of linux audio programs (rosegarden). In fact, there is a program called jack-rack that can act as an effects box, using jack to patch from ardour to the effects box, and back (or on to another program.) I do like the possibility of using effects internal within ardour though. The biggest collection of ladspa plugins I’ve found are the cmt-plugins (although I’ve installed just about everything I’ve found, including tap-plugins.) The command listplugins in the console can show what ladspa pluigns are installed.

Under windows there are vst plugins. You might be surprised to know that a number of these can be used via wine and a package called dssi-vst. After a vst plugin is run by vsthost it seems to be added to the list of options rosegarden (type vst) – although to work with ardour it appears that you need to launch it standalone with vsthost and then use jack to patch in/out. (Page dedicated to listing compatible vst plugins) Just playing with the effects possibilities and patching sends and inserts into busses to tinker took hours Monday. I think I could probably waste a whole week trying different effects on the scratch vocal that I put down looking for something to make it sound less like a scratch vocal. (We’ll fix it in the mix…)

So, now you know how I spent most of my weekend. (And what I may be playing with the rest of the week.) Hopefully though, now that I’m more familiar with ardour, I’ll feel like I can sit down and do some recording a bit at a time.

Just realized that ardour can support vst plugins via fst (freest), it needs to be compile with that support. Also, I have halfway mentioned another plugin standard DSSI – (large listing of free vst plugins might be found here).

A few things I didn’t mention Powertracks is available from PGMusic for Windows/Mac and it does have some good features ($49). (Sequencing/Audio Recording/notation). Also Audacity is available for Windows/Mac/Linux (Audio recording only).

BTW – I think this last look at ardour really has me seeing a good way to put a dual-monitor setup to use.

I’m such a sucker for technology sometimes…. I’m into too many things it seems. I do computer repair which can keep things fairly busy, I keep up with this and a slew of other websites which is another job in itself. (Not to mention the genealogy hobby (or addiction/affliction?)) We’re fairly involved at Church… and then there is piano and music. I’ve been teaching piano now for about 9 years which is hard to believe in itself and over that time other obligations have taken their share of time, but now the pendulum is swinging back where I’m really getting in more time to try to improve my playing in one particular area. Towards that end I wanted to get some recordings of a few other pianists to dissect their approaches….. well, that’s taken me to another place – audio hardware.

One of my majors in College was a Bachelors of Science in Music with Recording Arts. So… audio/recording equipment is something I’ve spent some time with. I have only been able to have a small tascam portastudio (cassette tape based) that I’ve used for my own for about 10 years now. I typically hook it up to the pc and just use it as a mixer choosing to record to hard drive in audacity or the like. Well…. there are a lot of problems with that… One – cassette tapes – hiss, degrading media, etc.etc. etc. AND I was not eager to think about doing the portastudio + mic stands + mics plus extra tapes, etc…. and then – mix tape output to the computer to work my way to cd.

A little side note here…. the computer is probably not yet the best for recording directly to. I’ve run into problems with “bus noise” or hearing the hard drive activity out of the sound card and probably to do a computer audio setup like I’d REALLY like would take a serious system redesign for quiet running (and no AC hum….) etc. etc. etc. For what I am hoping to do, I really would like something that I could use out and about and the ideal would be that it records to compactflash. I’ve got the little NexIA which can record – but the quality isn’t what I would hope for. MP3 64 kbps and 16 khz….. NO

Wav would be nice, REAL nice…. in fact as I thought about it, really that would be a must so that I get clean uncompressed samples to work with. I’m not sure, this project could turn into something else at some point and I want to leave myself options by getting the best possible sound to media (Used to say “tape” there…). SO, I’ve spent a while looking and here are what’s out there now and looking quite tempting to me.

First off, there are the wav/mp3 recorders that just focus on stereo capture…. Edirol-R09 is one such device…. I found a lot of variation though in the battery style (custom lithium ion vs. easily found AA) Marantz PMD6770 (The Marantz-PMD660 seemed promising too (at just under $500))…. really impressive in this area (and expensive) was the Sony-PCMD1-Digital-Field-Recorder ($1900)

Another thing to look at here is the type of media used – I wanted to stick to compactflash and some used sandisk or memory stick pro…

Then I started thinking (usually a dangerous thing I guess…..) Hm… that looked like a portastudio in the results and so I started looking…. the one that LOOKS most impressive thus far is the Boss BR600 Digital Recorder it is an 8 track portastudio (2 inputs 1/4″ (NO XLR)) and each track has 8 “Virtual tracks” that you can essentially save takes to. It has some built in effects, on-board drum machine and built in stereo microphones. Hmmmm… records to compact flash. (The biggest drawback I can see is the lack of XLR inputs (no phantom power), but I have 1/4″ inputs on the current portastudio – so no big loss there, just a missed opportunity to upgrade.

Now my first thought was that the built in microphones would be pretty lousy and I suspect they’re not the best mikes on earth, however…. there is a bit of convenience and the thought that they’d probably be “good enough” for the project I had in mind. All of this for $400. There are other portastudios out there of course, there are several hard drive based workstations which all come in around 40GB for the disc. I really think I want to aim for flash based for better power consumption and quieter station activity.

I guess I’m thinking now that I might be looking at an improved portastudio and just move the audio capture off the pc completely. It’s really impressive where the prices are for the features these days. I was most interested to see the Tascam-2488-24Track-Digital-Recording-Workstation… when I was in College the studio board was a 24 track board – probably $10,000 – this digital recording workstation is just under $1000. Now, I know there are some other technical differences

And back to the digital audio workstation idea here’s another entry from Korm (D888 8-track digital recording studio). This one has a 40GB hard drive, lots of built in effects, 8 simultaneous tracks record (and virtual tracks for a total of 64). By the way… here’s Musician’s Friends review of the D888.

Well, I don’t know – I may not upgrade my portastudio for a while, but it sure looks like the price/features are still heading the right direction. $400 now get’s a portastudio with built in stereo microphones, 2 track simultaneous record and 8 track playback (with a total of 64 including virtual tracks.) all onto compactflash which should mean better signal to noise – captured digitally (plus the effects and drum machine)….. ~10 years ago it got me a 4 track cassette based portastudio with eq and 2 simultaneous input recording. I remember that one of my hopes was to someday have a little home studio and the recording to computer setup had disappointed me a bit (mostly from the background noise). I do SO many things with my pc, it’s become impractical in many ways to use it for recording (not to mention it’s hard to keep the place tidied enough to turn my monitor around to the keyboard and have the mouse within reach of the piano to click record.

Well – anyway – thought I’d share some of my “low end” audio equipment research.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before here, but languages are one of the things that fascinate me. I’ve studied Spanish, German and French. Although right now I would barely be able to recognize a handful of words in German and French. Of late, spanish has been the language I’ve focused on *(3 1/2 years at this point.) My goal was to spend at least 5 years reading/listening to *just* one language (in addition to my native English…) anyway, I’m at a point where I feel like I have a very good understanding of written spanish, pretty good understanding of much spoken spanish (depends on the accent/pace/pronunciation of the speaker, but in some cases I feel that way with English as well…….) From time to time though, I’ve used web tools to automatically translate a page or a bit of text to see how well I’m understanding….

For years, Babelfish has been a site I visit quite frequently. Unfortunately I’ve seen it give some pretty hideous translations, maybe where it chose the wrong meaning of a word where the context would imply otherwise, or maybe it just worded things EXTREMELY awkwardly (spelling?)…

Anyway, I was reminded recently of Google’s Language tools and in fact had run across a study claiming that they were among the best of the automated translation engines out there. I gave it a test run with a few bits of text and found the results surprisingly readable and coherent. There were maybe a few awkward phrases here or there, but I’m sure I probably say a few things awkwardly in English….

Of course, I also saw a recent study that suggested 18-25 year olds do poorly with geography and although many could find China on a map, many think that English is their primary language…… I’m hoping the visitors to this site are a bit more clued in than that… but it’s one of the lesser known services at google and a good way to get a web page translated with fairly good reliability.

I’ve posted several things over at the onlineradiotv.com site. For starters I’ve got links to a few international (shortwave) broadcasters live audio streams and where available their “latest” english news update (and in some cases spanish and other languages.) I’ve also started posting some bash scripts there that can directly start mplayer streaming a feed.

For the most part the scripts aren’t much other than a command, but they make nice shortcuts to launch an audio stream. Some of them may be of interest to other linux users. At this point I just have copies of the contents of the scripts, eventually I plan to just archive an archive of the scripts I use there. I find it fairly convenient as, currently, I’ve been copying things back and forth from desktop to laptop or laptop to desktop, depending on where I’ve been editing them….

Anyway, they pretty much make use of mplayer + codecs for mplayer. So, you linux users might find them useful. I guess they could be adapted to Windows pretty easily. I seem to recall seeing mplayer available for windows…