music, macs and mets ... mostly.
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Yeah, the iPhone changed everything. Now the new Google iPhone application with voice recognition changes the iPhone in a very fundamental and useful way. Google’s voice recognition not only works, it rocks.
Here’s the intro video from Google:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=y3z7Tw1K17A&fmt=18
Have you tried it? Drop a comment.
While I’m at it, here’s a link to the Podcast 101 piece done by Kevin Rose and Dan Huard of Systm. Take notes, there’ll be a quiz tomorrow.
Mark Blevis yesterday announced Podcamp Ottawa to be held Novermber 25 in the Panorama Room of the National Arts Centre (go figure ;-)
The idea here is a back-to-basics “UNconference” day of discussions including an Audacity presentation by Mark’s Canadian Podcast Buffet co-host, Bob Goyetche, and a WordPress session lead by Charles Hodgeson.
Updated: Registration is free. Attendees will be asked to make a $10 donation to the Snowsuit fund. Check out the wiki and register soon; attendance is capped at 80.
At the National Arts Centre we usually record our podcasts in a space we like to call Studio P3. (P3 because it’s in the NAC underground parking garage; level 3). The space, aside from the occasional Harley-Davidson rumbling through the parkade, offers a relatively controllable studio environment.
More and more though, we’re trying out different locations and situations to record our shows to mix things up a bit. For instance, we’ve received great feedback on our NACOcast Live shows, where Chris Millard conducts interviews with guest artist either before or after an NAC Orchestra performance — Recorded in front of a live studio audience, as the pros like to say. A very recent example is the interview show with Pinchas Zukerman and soprano Measha Brueggergosman.
We’ll likely do more of these types of shows as the orchestra programmes more interviews and presentations as part of their audience enrichment initiatives. They’re fun to do and they make for great podcasts, but we’re finding that post-production of live audio can really stretch the boundaries of the time we have for post-production. The problem is that essentially, we’re in a cavernous lobby, using lapel mics, with multiple voice types and levels. We’re also mixing for the live audience through the PA as well as for the recording — Lots of stuff to juggle.
One could spend hours and hours in post-production, compressing, limiting, adjusting EQ and applying a myriad of audio plugins to make listening to 45 minutes of audio enjoyable to the podcast listener. Or, one could use The Levelator.
The Levelator is a free drag and drop application for MacOS, Windows and Linux. Without getting too too geeky, it performs a series of adjustments including gain optimization and RMS normalization. The results are quite surprising and extremely expedient. While we would never use a tool such as The Levelator for a studio recording — and definitely never on anything that included music — for live interviews, Skype conversations, re-purposed or archival audio, The Levelator can be a very effective time-saver.
Have you had experience with The Levelator? Leave a comment with your experiences and thoughts on the subject.
Here’s a really cool application, aptly named Do Something When (’DSW’ to his friends).
‘Ever made a mess of your iTunes library because you didn’t have your external library disk mounted while iTunes was running?
Well, Do Something When should take care of this, and some. DSW is a preference panel that allows you, well, to do something when. For example you can set it to launch iTunes when you mount your external music library disk, or have it quit iTunes when you unmount the drive. Same for VLC and your video library hard drive. Have DSW launch Final Cut Pro when you mount your pristine, totally defragged media drive.
Update: jaywest brought to my attention the fact that there seems to be an issue with the way DSW works under the Mac OSX 10.4.9 update. More soon.
As part of our continuing discussion on media tools for the Mac, Martin Jones, MiFi.ca’s resident Über Geek, offers the following report on HandBrake-MediaFork (ed).
While there are many DVD rippers out there, for a long while HandBrake was the best of the lot for the Mac. HandBrake was more-or-less a front end for a set of command line tools that decrypted the DVD stream and then compressed it into MPEG4 or MPEG4-AVC (advanced video codec, AKA h.264) format in a single shot, ready for playback on a portable device (read iPod).
That was the good part. The bad part was the relatively ancient encoding library it was based on. This made MPEG4 encoding pretty slow and h.264 encoding unbearably slow. The settings were ambiguous, even cryptic, and it took much trial and error to get the desired results. HandBrake’s development stagnated about a year ago and it seemed like there would be no more updates forthcoming.
Then, new developers took it upon themselves to build an application heavily based on HandBrake. They called it MediaFork, and it was Good. MediaFork brought many bug fixes, and leveraged updated libraries. Encoding became reliable and fast. The interface is still ambiguous, even cryptic, but now you can tab through the video preview to see the effect of your settings on the media, and the program won’t crash. Overall, MediaFork is a welcome improvement on the work begun with HandBrake.
Last week the HandBrake developers posted that they had joined forces with the MediaFork development team and that a soon-to-be-released version of the software, the result of their combined effort, will be released as HandBrake 0.9.0.
HandBrake is dead! Long live HandBrake!
– Martin Jones
I had the opportunity to hear Bill Gates address a capacity crowd of 2300 in Southam Hall here at the NAC on Tuesday. I even met him briefly backstage while he was waiting for his (surpsingly small) entourage to sherpa him off to his next appointment on Parliament Hill.
He didn’t impart the gathering with any remarkable bits of insight, which you’d half expect coming from one of the most influential people on the planet. (Well, he did mention that we are currently witnessing a blurring between the desktop application and web applications … gasp!)
That said, he didn’t come off as the devil incarnate either (which I’m fully predisposed to believe). Au contraire, his foundation’s work came up a couple of times in the Q&A session after his presentation. You have to admire the money and effort he has put into his organization’s work in Africa. He got a very long and deserved round of applause for his humanitarian work.
Other than that I really can’t think of anything else to say. It was somewhat of a non-event.
I probably have Steve Jobs’ keynotes to thank for setting my expectations high — It’s almost as if I was expecting Bill to announce the Zune phone, that he thinks Steve Ballmer is a baffoon, or that he checked out the NAC’s podcast offerings on his way over.
As a follow-up to a recent post on how to get video, specifically DVDs, onto your iPod, here’s a tutorial on how to use Handbrake in a one-step process.
HandBrake is a GPL software that can decrypt and convert a DVD into a MPEG-4 video file in .mp4, .avi, or .ogm containers. Originally created for BeOS, it has been created for Mac OS X and Linux. It is very popular for its ease of use, fast encoding, and excellent layout and set of features.
A Windows port was created, but the project was abandoned as the creator, titer, has begun to devote more time to his other project, Transmission. However, a new project has been started to create a real GUI for a Windows version of HandBrake in the official HandBrake for Windows forums. The current working GUI (as of January 2007, version 2.0) converts DVDs well and as it should, but the project is far from the completeness of the Mac OS X or BeOS versions. (wikipedia)
I was in the process of re-theming this blog (thanks, Hugh), when I stumbled across the WordPress podcast (iTunes link). Sure, why not? The first episode is a baby step, but things pick up quickly. It’s now at Episode 18.
‘Back home after an absolutley wonderful trip to Costa Rica with family and friends.
On our way home we had a six hour layover in Atlanta. While Jacinthe was engrossed in her book, and Luca was busy with some rented DVDs, I was reminded what a great travel companion the iPod video can be. Time flew by as I caught up on episodes of 30 Rock, Rome, Studio 60 and the Henry Rollins Show ;-)
Recently, some friends and co-workers asked me about the best way of getting video on the iPod, especially given the Canadian version of the iTunes Store doesn’t sell TV shows or feature length films. So here are a few (Mac) applications I’ve come to depend on to get great looking video onto the iPod: