Category: Audio

Stuff for listeners and amateur engineers

Categories
Music

SomaFM: Like a Koala Bear Crapped a Rainbow in my Brain

This is great! I discovered a new radio station yesterday, and I love it. It’s called SomaFM, and they are internet-only, commercial free, and listener supported. They seem to be playing the same kind of music that I get on CJSR Edmonton, which really pleases me. Their main website says that there are currently 3043 people listening to SomaFM now. That’s cool.

While it’s one “station”, they actually offer 7 different channels of music at various audio quality levels, the best being 128 kbps stereo MP3. This is impressive. The channels are:

  1. Groove Salad
  2. Secret Agent
  3. Drone Zone
  4. indie pop rocks
  5. cliqhop idm
  6. Beat Blender
  7. Boot Liquor

You’ll have to visit the SomaFM website to read the channel descriptions. So far, I’ve been listening mostly to “Boot Liquor”, which is described as American Roots music, looking for (and getting) some bluegrass and Johnny Cash. I’ve also listened to “Groove Salad” for a while. I have yet to check out the other channels, but you can be sure that I will.

This sure makes up for the terrible broadcast radio that’s available here in Beijing. I’ll soon be listening enough to SomaFM that I’ll want to contribute (which is voluntary). It’s a good deal.

By the way, the title for today’s post comes from one of their station IDs, in answer to the question, “What does SomaFM feel like to you?.” Cute. Not exactly the answer I would have come up with, though.

Categories
Audio China

Sounds like China…

Yesterday, while looking for audio equipment for sale in China, I came across a very interesting collection of sounds. Most people who travel and explore their world like to put pictures up on the web for others to see, but this is an archive of sounds for you to listen to. There are quite a few recordings of Canada and many of China as well. I recommend the one of the steam locomotive in Kunming, China, but I also liked the recording of a cat chewing on the microphone. You’ll need a fast internet connection (or just plain old patience) as most of these files are greater than 1 MB in size.

Phonography Archive

This archive gives me some ideas of recordings I could make of my experiences in China. I have already recorded myself learning Chinese with friends, and I once made a commentary of my first visit to the Great Wall. So now, I’ll have to keep my ears open and “look” for further interesting sounds to capture.

Categories
Audio

Bonus Bluegrass!

This week I happily discovered some long-lost bluegrass in my minidisc collection. Apparently, right in the middle of my frantic move from Edmonton to Beijing, I recorded two episodes of Prairie Pickin’ without ever listening to them: 14 and 21 March 2002. I then made the mistake of not labelling the discs, so they got lost in my pile of non-blank “blanks”.

Well, I’ve seen these two mystery “blanks” for a long time now, but only this week did I find the time to pop them into my player and see what was on them. The rest is history, as they say. So I’m now listening to and editing these two shows that are a little over a year old. They’re a little rough, actually, as they come from the beginning of Doug Ritchie’s presence on the show.

In one of the shows, I found a real treasure: “A Member of the Blues” by Lonesome and Thensome, my favourite bluegrass band (from Edmonton, even!). I recall that at the time they were working on recording their first album. I wonder if it’s been produced by now?

Prairie Pickin’ is a Thursday night bluegrass show on CJSR, FM 88.5 in Edmonton.

Categories
Antiwar China Speech

The Mad Philosopher gets political

During my year’s time in China, I’ve struggled with how to express myself politically while living in a country where it isn’t safe to do so. For example, people in China generally hate the American government. They talk about the U.S. invasion of Iraq (2003), but are quite isolated from the discussion and dissent going on around the world. Yes, there were anti-war protests in Hong Kong, but it would surprise me if the media in China reported this. Protests are illegal in the rest of China.

So I am left wondering how I can join and contribute to the discussion going on elsewhere in the world. Well, I listen to CJSR, a community-based radio station in Edmonton, the BBC news, and I read some of the independent media columnists on the Internet.

Here, I give the following two audio clips which were taken from the “Jay and Penny Show” on CJSR, and I encourage you to give them a listen as these are things you won’t hear elsewhere in the media.

The Worst President Ever (1.5 MB)

Howard Zinn on Just and Unjust Wars (3.4 MB)

Categories
Audio Tech

mp3 player as a USB key drive

I don’t really have a need or desire for a portable mp3 player. I’m quite happy with my Sharp Minidisc Recorder which I’ve had for over a year now. I’m not intending to go on a rant about the differences between the two devices other than to say that a Minidisc recorder is a portable digital recording studio, whereas an mp3 player, well, just isn’t.

But an mp3 player can be one thing that a Minidisc recorder can never be, thanks to Sony’s unwillingness to open the MD format: a portable file system that holds way more than a floppy disk.

I guess I’ve been in the dark for a while as far as computer hardware and gadgets go. But over the last year I’ve finally noticed and figured out what my colleagues were wearing around their necks. At first I thought these small devices they plugged into their computer’s USB port were wireless network cards. But it turns out they are what are called USB Key drives—tiny, memory-based “hard drives” the size of a key fob or a lipstick stick. What a cool idea. There’s been a need for portable, convenient digital storage that can replace the floppy (and hold more) for quite some time now. I think the USB key drive might be just that. You can even boot your computer off of the filesystem on IBM’s version of the USB key, I’ve heard.

So, when I was trying to find out what these devices were (once I new the function, I still didn’t know the name), I found out rather quickly on the Internet. But I found something better than just a plain old USB key drive in this article:

Creative Labs MuVo: The Singing Diskette.

In the article, you will learn that the people at Creative Labs have built an mp3 player which doubles as a USB key drive. Now that’s a cool idea! So you can store music and data, up to 64 MB or 128 MB. Not bad.