Category: Audio

Stuff for listeners and amateur engineers

Categories
Audio Palm

Podcasts to Minidiscs

I’m making another trans-Pacific flight in two weeks’ time, and I’ll want to have a lot of podcasts to listen to for the long trip. The problem is, the 256-MB SD card in my Palm Tungsten E isn’t large enough to hold the all of the mp3s that I need. So, I decided I could record a bunch of them onto minidisc. My minidisc recorder knows nothing about mp3s. It’s just an audio device. So I have to get my computer to play the mp3 files so that the minidisc recorder can record the resulting audio in real time. I do this while I sleep, so it’s not a problem.

The discs hold 74 minutes of audio in stereo mode, or twice that in mono mode. That’s 2 hours and 30 minutes, approximately. (The newer MDLP minidisc standard can hold 2X and 4X in stereo, but my recorder is too old to do that.)

I’ve already prepared the 2-hour long, four-episode series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Future by Douglas Adams from the BBC. I’m not sure what will be next in my backlog of podcasts. But I’ve got about 37 episodes from the back catalogue of Evil Genius Chronicles from September to December 2004, that I haven’t listened to yet. In total, they take up 18 hours of playback time. I’ve been listening to these early shows of Dave’s (from August 2004) to track the evolution of podcasting. Where I’m at in the stack, he still hasn’t used the word “podcast”—it hadn’t been invented yet. I love the Evil Genius.

I’ll close by saying that, even though it’s limited to real-time transfer, I continue to love the minidisc format. It rocks!

Categories
Audio Rant

Please stop trying to be a radio show

To scratch an irritating itch, I sent the following email to Chris Lydon from Radio Open Source, a podcast I often listen to.

Dear Chris and company:

I enjoy listening to your program. It’s entertaining, informative, and compelling. But I have one serious issue that keeps coming up with each episode—Chris keeps cutting off his guests in mid sentence to go to a commercial. This is a tremendous disservice to your listeners, and, for a podcast, this is completely unnecessary. In fact, it strikes this listener as asinine every time I hear it happen. You have all the time in the world so you don’t need to take breaks at pre-determined intervals.

Please, for the sake of your listeners and for your guests, stop trying to be a radio show. It is too limiting, and the quality of your show suffers because of it. You are better off as a podcast.

Thank you.

In case you’re not familiar with the show, the commercials are not actually there in the podcast, but the interruption of the guests still occurs. I’m curious to see what his response will be. Maybe he will think I am just another nut job, but maybe he’ll see my point, even if he isn’t free to act on it.

Categories
Copyright Speech

Why content must be free

Have you ever researched a certain topic on the Internet, gotten a bunch of promising results back from a search engine, and tried to access the links, but ultimately you were blocked from being able to read the articles because the websites hosting the information said a subscription or a fee was required? How did you feel? Pissed off, certainly. What did you do? You opened your wallet and became a subscriber? I highly doubt it. You most certainly moved down the list to the other content you could actually access. What does this mean to a content provider?

When traditional print publishers were introduced to the World Wide Web, they didn’t get it at first. They wanted to charge for their content. Some still don’t get it. In a fascinating interview about his highly influential IT Conversations, Doug Kaye spells it out plainly why content must be free. I’ve never heard anyone explain this before, and so well, even though I’ve always held the belief. And Doug Kaye is not some anti-capitalist quack. He’s a very well known entrepreneur in the IT business, and his IT Conversations, which offers audio recordings of conferences and interviews in IT, science, and technology for free download, is listened to by the most influential people in the industry. Here’s what he has to say, transcribed from the interview:

People are listening to the shows, but more importantly, people are linking to us… This is why the content has to be free… When content can be linked to, the value of that content goes way up… It’s the linking that allows people to essentially participate in the remix culture, as Larry Lessig says… It’s the remix and reuse of the content that actually makes it more valuable. When you do something like The New York Times is doing and put your content behind a toll gate of 49 dollars a year, you’re taking it off the market. You’re saying, “This stuff cannot be reused, it cannot be remixed, nobody can link to it.” And what you’ve done is, you’ve killed it. You’ve taken all the value out of it.

Listen to a 2-minute clip of the above text here:

Doug Kaye on why content must be free (2:18, 814 kB)

The entire interview is actually worth listening to. In it, you’ll learn about Doug Kaye’s business background before and during the dot-com era, how he started IT Conversations, and where he plans to take it in the future. He also throws his support behind BitTorrent, as he intends to use it for distribution in the new project. You can catch the entire interview here:

Categories
Copyright Speech Tech

The Birth of Podcasting, Chocolate and Peanut Butter, and BitTorrent

In his keynote speech at Gnomedex 5.0, podcasting pioneer Adam Curry tells the story of how he and Dave Winer accidentally created podcasting. He uses the analogy of Chocolate and Peanut Butter from the legendary Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups commercial and the analogy of switching places from Tom Hanks’ movie Big (1988). It’s a very entertaining tale of how it all got started, and Curry covers where we are today, the impact that podcasting is having on music producers and music listeners alike, and he gives a call-to-arms regarding things podcasting developers should fix right now.

Wonderfully, Curry makes the announcement that he is going to embrace BitTorrent as a distribution mechanism for his Daily Source Code podcast. This is important because, politically, as a peer-to-peer technology, BitTorrent needs some high-profile examples of legitimate, non-infringing use. Through its peer-to-peer design, BitTorrent is able to reduce the bandwidth costs for the podcast producers and increase the download speed and efficiency for podcast listeners. Curry’s announcement parallels Doug Kaye’s intention to adopt BitTorrent for his new IT Conversations venture.

If you are at all interested in podcasting, or just curious about this new medium (by the people!), I encourage you to go download and listen to Adam Curry’s speech.

Categories
Antiwar China Speech

Radio Open Source on the Great Firewall of China

If you are interested in China and the Internet and censorship—all that’s been in the news lately—Radio Open Source has put together a panel of people discussing the issues in amazing depth and clarity. I highly recommend listening to this one. They do a much better job than I could ever do at explaining the intricacies of the Chinese modern culture and present political situation.

Categories
Audio Tech

A backup solution for my mp3 collection

Finally, I’ve found an optimal solution to backup my large mp3 collection (15.6 GB, 3775 songs, 10.25 days total playback time).

The problem: I continually update the mp3 tags, add new mp3 files, and move the directories around, etc., in the original collection. I keep a backup of the collection on a removable USB hard drive, and it takes forever to transfer the files over the USB1.1 link. These two copies of the collection, therefore, get out of sync, and it would be faster just to copy over the changed files rather than the entire collection to the backup device.

The solution:

rsync -av --modify-window=1 --delete /media/AAA-music/ /removable-drive/AAA-music/

rsync compares the files in the first directory path with those in the second and determines which files need to be updated. Note that the trailing slash for the first directory path is necessary. The switch --delete removes any files in the second path that are not found in the first. Thus you get an identical copy in the second location. The switch --modify-window=1 gives a 1-second fudge factor in the comparison of the file modification dates, which is necessary because the dates in the VFAT file system in the second path aren’t as precise as in the first. Use the switch -n for a dry-run of the command to test it out. No files will actually be written or deleted with this switch.

Also, note that since I am using rsync to synchronize two directory paths on the same machine (as opposed to on two different machines over the network), it doesn’t use its synchronization algorithm to determine changes within a given file. It operates on whole files instead (comparing timestamps and file sizes). This is what I want here, because it would be very slow to read all the files on the USB drive, something I’m intending to avoid.

Categories
Audio Copyright

One podcaster’s letter to the Canadian Copyright Board (I Love Radio .org)

A nice short essay on the way things should be for an amateur producer of podcasts: One podcaster’s letter to the Canadian Copyright Board (I Love Radio .org)

Categories
Audio Copyright Tech

An iPod plugin for Winamp

The iPod is pretty cool because it is so well designed, but it has some disadvantages. The prominent disadvantage is that it is completely tied to Apple’s iTunes software, and iTunes doesn’t work with older versions of Windows, such as Win98. According to this Wired article entitled “IPod Plug-In Sets Music Free”, iTunes is a 40-MB download, but Winamp is only 4 MB and the plugin only takes up 130 kB of space. So you can manage the iPod with an older version of Windows using Winamp. That’s cool. And furthermore, the plugin allows you to copy music from the iPod back onto a computer, a functionality that is missing (on purpose) from the iTunes software. The ml_iPod plugin has the following motto: “Your iPod just became useful.” Great!

Categories
Speech

Habemus Papam! Podcast

An amazing piece of audio history was captured by the Catholic Insider Podcast during the final moments when the most recent pope was announced. Father Roderick Vonhögen takes you into the middle of St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican on the evening of April 19, 2005, amidst the excited crowd, with people from almost every country expectantly waiting to see the white smoke and hear the bells proclaiming the new pope. The audio you hear is very real and it places you right in the midst of the action. Close your eyes as you listen and be taken to this special moment in history. It’s very personal and compelling.

Habemus Papam! – Catholic Insider, April 19, 2005 (54:14, 24.8 MB)

Note that the Catholic Insider site doesn’t provide a link to the show notes for this episode, so I have to link you to the mp3 file directly
(http://www.rorate.com/podcasts/ci20050419b.mp3).

Categories
Astro Audio China General Tech

Cool Websites – Random Links

Here’s a list of some cool websites I’ve come across lately:

  • ctrip. com — A very comprehensive site on booking hotels and tickets for travelling in China. I’m using this for my upcoming Shanghai trip.
  • slooh.com — A subscription-based online telescope. For $50 US a year, you can have unlimited access to their group missions, plus 15 minutes of solo time, where you get to direct the telescope to your object of choice. Cool!
  • Article: How to get the best sound out of your PC — A technical prescription on how to optimize your Windows audio chain. For audio geeks only.
  • madphilosopher del.icio.us bookmarks — An online bookmark storage and sharing service. This link is my account, but you can get one too. The cool thing about shared bookmarks is that you can see how many other people around the world are bookmarking the same sites. And since it’s online, I can access my bookmarks from any machine. Check it out!