Conchord: finale, and the journey home

Slept badly last night; a mixture of the flower_cat's also sleeping badly, and the hotel beds being too squishy. Spent an hour or two cleaning up my recording of the concert. With the mics in the very back of the room, the sound was excellent but the audience reaction tended to be significantly louder than the performance (9-12 dB on the applause). Needs more work, but I was able to start transferring a 1.1GB .tar.bz2 file of the Audacity project to my spare USB keychain drive. The Mac said it would take 11 minutes, so I trundled down to breakfast.

Breakfast with cflute, who wanted to show off some lovely batik quilt fabric to the Cat. Afterward we went up to the room and I handed her the keychain drive and had her sign her recording contract, which I had finally gotten around to throwing together sometime Thursday evening.

I managed to pack things down to five loads: the two rollycrates (mine with the file box of undistributed pre-orders, the box of unsold CDs, and the coffeepot piggybacked on it), two rolling suitcases with the Travelpro rolling briefcases piggybacked on them (plus the backpack and the gig bag), and the Y.D.'s rolling suitacase and backpack. The small rolling suitcase (originally presents, now dirty laundry) was light enough to hand-carry with one of the rollycrates. So that was a win.

The drive home (via US 101, as usual) was uneventful, which is just the way I like it. Not as sleepy as usual, mainly I think because we stopped more often than usual. On one of the stops the restroom in question was in a Charbucks, so I had an iced mocha. I'm sure the caffeine and sugar helped.

Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to mnemex!! Have a good one!

Gadget lust

Discussing the Zoom H4 in comments to this post by catsittingstill, I realized that the soon-to-be-shipped H2 was a lot closer to what I really need for field recording.

( I want this. [image] )

( Technical trade-offs )

The fact that it's $100 cheaper than the H4 doesn't hurt. I'll probably wait for reviews, but I strongly suspect that there's a Zoom H2 in my future.

Aug. 22 14:38 It can only send 2 channels x 16 bits over USB, but it can be powered from USB, meaning you can use a MintyBoost to extend your battery life.

Grump!!

Just verified that k3b, the program I used to burn the master for CC&S, doesn't put in pregaps by default. In fact, it basically doesn't know about them at all: you have to (explicitly, manually) add 2 seconds of silence at the end of every damned track. IDIOTS!!

My own damned fault for not listening to the master carefully enough. Too late now.