07-07-07 -- my lucky day?

Don't know, but it's going pretty well so far. After some recording, some editing (I'll post about those separately), a stack of mail that included the CD I ordered last week, some lunch, and a nice five-mile walk, the Bear went shopping. The main targets were a a cheap MP3 player (Fry's has several on sale this weekend) and a pennywhistle in A. I started with Guitar Showcase.

GS often has woodwinds in their consignment shop, but no whistles today. What they did have was an M-Audio Delta 1010, for $115. Since this has a list price of $500 and a street price of something like $400, and since I'd been thinking about buying a Delta 44 for a street price of around $150, I snapped it up without thinking twice.

Next stop was Fry's. They did indeed have cheap MP3 players, at prices all the way down to $15, but the one I ended up with was an LG UP3 for $60. It has a sharp-as-a-tack little OLED display, 2GB of flash, plays OGG as well as the more usual formats, and lists Linux on the box under supported systems. When I got it home (getting a little out of order here) I was a little puzzled by the lack of a USB cable until I discovered the knob that slides out the connector that makes it into a USB stick. I was also puzzled by the fact that my box wasn't seeing it, until I traced the USB extension cable back and discovered that it wasn't connected. Duh. Only thing missing is FM, but I can live without that. Especially in these days of ubiquitous podcasts.

The final stop was Starving Musician. They had whistles in C and D; but not A. I bought a cheap little Yamaha descant recorder instead -- I had one, but can't find it. Probably lent out to somebody's kid. For $8.25 I can afford another one.

So all-in-all it's been a pretty good day. Happy Bear.

Tracks in the morning

Spent a couple of hours recording this morning, trying to get suitable percussion tracks for "TEOTW" and "Daddy's World". I started out trying handclaps on "Daddy's World", but quickly discovered that I didn't like the way they came out. I'd picked up a set of nice rosewood claves at GS a couple of weeks ago, so I tried those. Bingo.

Interesting thing: on a couple of songs, "Daddy's World" included, I very consistently shift the beat going into the chorus. Makes it hard as hell to follow, but a double hit on the claves does the trick. Explains why I was having so much trouble with shaker parts, though.

A little more editing is probably in order, especially on "TEOTW" where I know I dropped a beat once or twice.

Tracks and hacks

So now that I have this nifty ogg player, the obvious thing to do is to put the oggs for my album on it so I can listen to them. There are a couple of subtleties to this, since all the soundfiles have uninformative short names that don't sort in proper track order.

The solution was to add a new format to my TrackInfo program that makes symlinks (in a subdirectory) that have proper long names starting with a two-digit track number. Then it's a simple matter of invoking it from the Makefile, and rsync'ing the music player from the subdirectory.

Q.E.F.

BTW, it sounds really good. Clean. Claves don't work in "Daddy's World", though. Sound out of place.