The Mandelbear's Musings

I seem to be easily distracted this morning. I think I've been chasing links for about an hour after starting this post. (I make these posts by copying the "raw notes" from my to.do file.) I see that yesterday I felt "scatterbrained". On the other hand, my mood seems to be trending upward; I actually found myself laughing yesterday. Laughing is good. So is an extra 10mg of cope.

I made two shopping trips: one with the YD to get books she needs for her English class, the other personal. We started out at the DeVry campus in Fremont, where we found that the bookstore was closed. Wonder whether it's open Saturday mornings. Anyway, the campus seemed pretty dead, and out in the middle of nowhere. I think that if she wants a college social experience she's better off at DeAnza, or even City. Given her schedule, the two are not incompatible.

So we went from there to B&N. The YD found one of her two books; I found two: An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales by Oliver Sacks and The Power of Body Language by Tonya Reiman. The latter is the first book about body language I've seen that actually has enough detail about reading and presenting to be useful to me.

The second trip was nominally for coffee and fish, but a stop at Guitar Showcase's consignment shop netted me a CEntrance MicPort Pro for less than half price -- it seems to be the only XLR-to-USB converter out there with 24/96 converters. When I got it home it Just Worked with Audacity on Debian. So now I have a recording studio I can carry in Minnie, at least if I add a suitable small mic. That's not really the point, of course; what it really means is that I can get on a plane and record tracks wherever I'm going. At least if they have a mic stand.

Dinner was a caprese-type salad, broccoli, and two kinds of fish: pan-fried lingcod, and tuna sashimi. I couldn't decide.

I also accepted somebody's offer of a Google+ invite, though it has yet to show up in my email. On the other hand, neither has the test message I sent a few minutes ago. Weird. (Now performing further tests. Hmm. Can't send to either gmail account from either home or work. Silent spam filtering? Greylisting? We'll see.) OK, config on the workstation is just plain WRONG. :( :(

Um... I've been dribbling (driveling?) into this post for at nearly three hours now. Growf.

See the notes for links, while I go fix email on my workstation.

Not a bad day by any means, but a little frustrating in spots. No recording to speak of, but I did manage to upgrade my desktop machine to Ubuntu 10.10, which fixed the problem I've been having (and wasted many hours on) persuading gdm to give me a user-defined (.xsession) session. It wouldn't matter so much if I wasn't trying to save power by turning the machine off when I'm not using it.

A good walk -- three miles by Los Gatos Creek. Along the way I saw a truly marvelous vehicle -- basically a bicycle with a wheelchair replacing the front wheel. Looked hard to pedal, but the kid in the chair was obviously having a blast.

A phone call pointed out once again that I really don't think well on my feet, especially when distracted by driving. It wasn't really much of a success. I did figure out what I should have said, about half an hour later. *shrugs*

Much was made of the fact that 101010 in binary is 42 in decimal. Treehugger pointed out that's it's also the day the Eames Office celebrates the wonderful film Powers of Ten by Ray and Charles Eames.

Other links under the cut.

Good day? Darned if I know; I was too busy to notice, most of the time.

The morning was mostly spent working on a potentially show-stopping bug in one of the external trials, that eventually turned out to be the customer not following instructions. We knew that problem was there. We also knew how to set things up so that the problem couldn't happen. :P

The afternoon was mostly spent fixing real bugs of various sorts in my own code. The evening was spent trying to calibrate the latency correction in Audacity, and finding more things wrong with both it and Ubuntu's audio. Forget about suspend -- audacity gets very flaky afterwards. Grumpy bear.

I made myself a makeshift adjustable ear loop for my BT headset; as predicted, it worked much better than the stock one. So I'll be looking seriously into wire sculpture techniques and supplies for the next iteration.

I tried several times to record a scratch track for Filksong Lullabye; I'm damned if I know why I keep getting out of sync with the click track. It only seems to happen if I'm singing and playing guitar at the same time. Thinking about it now, it seems like my voice is about a half a beat ahead of the guitar. That's going to be tricky. But I do it a lot, so I'm just going to have to figure out how to handle it. Probably by syncing the guitar to the clicks, since pretty much everything has a guitar intro. Actually, the thumb goes on the downbeat, and the strum on the second beat. Idiot bear! I knew that.

I went out to REI at lunchtime hoping to buy two pairs of my favorite walking shoes, Keen Brooklin Mid, which were on sale for $75. The store was out (just hours after the sale started), so had to special-order them. But I got them. Last time I waited too long, and they were out of stock for two years.

Quite a few good links; it's easier now that I know what magic parameter to set to make emacs play nice with Chrome's "create link" extension (setq x-select-enable-clipboard t), it can also be set in the "killing" customization group, IIRC.

Lots of fascinating infographics at curetogether.com, though the data points at the low end of the "popularity" scale are probably very noisy due to small sample size. The idea of crowdsourcing medical statistics is a great one, though.

A rather frustrating day; no real walking, though, just in Fry's and a couple of other places. Shopping largely unsuccessful. Got N's package mailed.

I recorded a scratch track for "Eyes Like the Morning", which I think was pretty good. Then when I went to record a clean vocal track with my new microphone I discovered that Audacity hung whenever I hit "record". WTF? The plugin that records scratch tracks is broken, too -- I ended up just running a metronome app (gtick) on the side. And Lenny doesn't appear to have a package for Ardour, which looks like a good alternative. In any case, it looks like an install of 64studio or UbuntuStudio is in order.

Then all hell broke loose during an upgrade: the disk is toast. Or at least crisp around the edges; I'm not going to trust it. So it's a good thing I was planning a clean install anyway.

So tonight I get to upgrade the file server to the new low-power motherboard, then reconfigure the old file server as my new desktop. Which, oddly enough, is where it started out two upgrades ago, when Trantor was dragooned into service to replace a dead MB on Nova.

What goes around comes around? Whatever.

Time to make dinner. A couple of linkies under the cut.

A good day. Put in several orders, including the big one for a pair of hospital beds. Good price at Amazon, and for some reason didn't hold back the way I usually do. About time -- the original idea was that we'd rent for a month or two to see how we liked it, then buy. That was last May.

Some good progress at work, too. Damned good thing, and about time. It looks like a scary, wild ride ahead as $research-project tries to turn into a product on a tight schedule.

A good walk in good (i.e. cool) weather; don't know what happened to the step count. Possibly tilted wrong? Or just lazy the rest of the day. Who knows?

Lots of good links under the cut, as usual.

My toastmaster's concert at ConChord, which happened a week ago last Saturday, is finally split up, properly indexed, and uploaded. You can find it here. For field recordings, the sound quality is remarkably good; they were captured on my H2, just in front of the audience. The performances a little less so, but parts of it are, if not awesome, at least served up with win and a modest amount of awesome sauce. I did tear up at the ending of QV, so that says something.

Spent most of the morning plugging my new recording rig together. This mainly involved clearing off the little tray table I'm using as a desk so as to have enough room for the Delta 1010's rackmounted DAC/ADC box, chasing down patch cables for the two preamps and the headphone amp, plugging all the wall warts into the squid, and routing cables back to the computer.

Work was interrupted by the need to go out to OSH (Orchard Supply Hardware) for a little plastic garden shed they had on sale. [That reminds me: now that there are people in the house I have to assemble an unloading detail. It's all assembled (a major factor in deciding which of the two possible sheds to buy), so the box is bulky but not too heavy.]

There was one nasty moment when I flipped the switch on the squid and the 1010's power light didn't come on. I searched all over for a power switch and finally decided to see if it was waiting for the computer to power up. It was. Dorsai booted up (there are still quite a few configuration tweaks that need doing -- I haven't done serious work in Ubuntu before -- but those can wait) and the meters on envy24control lit up when I snapped my fingers in front of the mics. So it'll all work.

And my Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard arrived this evening shortly before the pizza -- comes with a lovely black leather-looking carrying case, too.

And one of the Wednesday crowd (hellloooonurse) brought along his new radio-controlled dalek.

So I'm a happy geek.

My main line of geekiness this weekend centered around getting my former workstation, Trantor, ready to serve as a new recording machine (under the nodename Dorsai). Not as much progress as I'd hoped -- I spent quite a lot of time chasing my tail because the gigabit ethernet card on my former recording machine, Harmony, suddenly decided to be referred to as eth3 instead of eth0. WTF?

(Aside: since my internal domain is thestarport.org, all my node names are stars or planets, mostly from science fiction. Machines used primarily for audio, naturally, get names mentioned in filksongs. The laptop is Argo; you've already met Harmony and Dorsai. Most of my early workstations had names from Star Wars; Dantooine is currently being used as a print server. Tatooine, Moseisley, and Hoth are long out of service.)

Anyway, Trantor finally got renamed, and has a shiny new GigE card, and both it and Harmony have eSATA headers installed in case I want to use external hard drives recording media. Only thing left is the software, which will initially be 64studio.com (an easy upgrade from Etch). At some point I mean to try the 64-bit version on Dorsai, and also UbuntuStudio. One way or another, I'll have Dorsai in the bedroom studio and ready to record with sometime this week.

Meanwhile, I did quite a lot of uncluttering. Moved most of my inventory of CDs -- 5 boxes worth -- into the front closet (now that chaoswolf has much, though not all, of her stuff out of it), and did quite a lot of re-arranging, consolidating, and uncluttering in the office. This included moving two defunct computers (Algol and Flare) up to the attic, recycling two empty boxes that had somehow gotten stored in the attic right where I wanted to put the computers, and moving a mostly-empty shelf up two inches so I could slide a computer under it. I also got Dorsai out from under the desk to where I could work on it. Which in turn required consolidating some of the CD-shipping stuff into a file box.

I'm still left with a couple of items sitting out on chairs, including a storage drawer full of old floppy disks that no longer fits on the shelf I moved, and the box of CD-shipping stuff that was originally in the spot where I moved Dorsai.

Oh, and I finished ripping the last of the pile of CDs that's been hanging around in the office waiting to be ripped.

So although I didn't quite reach my goal of an operational recording set-up, I got quite a lot done. Not complaining.

Having determined that my favorite local store, Guitar Showcase, doesn't have the Zoom H2, I went and ordered one from AMS. (GS did have several fascinating instruments in their consignment shop, but I've been assured by the flower_cat that she'll divorce me if I bring another home. Besides, I'm out of closet space.)

I also ordered a Rolls PM50S personal monitor. This is basically a headphone amplifier (which I need for the Delta 1010 I bought at GS's consignment shop a month and a half ago) with the ability to mix in the signal from a microphone, which it taps off without interfering with either the signal from the mic to the preamp, or the phantom power going the other way. (I checked the schematic, which was in the two-page manual AMS links to from the product page.) I'll probably get another eventually, though I'd like to find the one mentioned in the manual as having a battery compartment. Or maybe I'll just cobble one together from parts.

See this post for technical trade-offs. I don't expect to ever use it as a USB microphone or interface, or to multitrack with it. That's what the UA-25 is for. The H2 looks ideal for recording concerts, circles, and rehearsal sessions.

That reminds me: I have concert recordings from Baycon, Westercon and ConChord that I still have to split up and upload. Oops.

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.

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.

Recorded unison and low harmony vocals for "Someplace in the Net". I think it'll work this time. I'll go solo on the verses (where I was having massive trouble with the harmony before) and two or three parts on the choruses.

Put down a new shaker part for "TEOTW" now that the horrible sync problems are fixed, and put down new vocals for "Someplace in the Net" I also tried, with mixed success, to put down a low harmony part. I'm not very good at harmony, I'm afraid, but I'm going to keep at it for a while.

Discovered fairly early that Robin's harmony part was fighting with me on pitch; I muted it during the recording and will probably end up dropping it. I also tried whistling a high harmony -- that has promise, but I don't think I can carry it off consistently through the whole song.

Also did a little more toward the tray card and insert booklet layout.

From this post by eleccham comes a link to this article in The Times titled "Why music really is getting louder". Basically it's about the current practice of mastering music so damned loud that it clips.

The article has a few inaccuracies: for example, it confuses the kind of dynamic range compression done at mastering time with the kind of data compression done by codecs like MP3. But the fact remains, a lot of popular music these days is compressed to within a fraction of an inch of its life, destroying any dynamic range it might originally have had.

Fortunately, I don't listen to that kind of music, nor do I intend to subject my listeners to it. I do a minimum of compression on my CD tracks, and I do it by hand in Audacity using the Envelope tool. That lets me bring down the notes where I whack a chord too hard, or the verses where I lean to close to the mic, or the spots where I pop a "P", without affecting the overall dynamic range of the music.

Not that I have a whole lot of dynamic range when I'm singing. The main challenge in the final phases of the mixing will be making sure that the songs where it's just me and the guitar don't have me sounding louder than the ones where I have backup. That will require overriding the standard normalization parameters for just those songs during the build, so as not to maximize their volume.

I've also decided not to throw money at Oasis to have my CD professionally mastered. Maybe next time, if I can find an engineer I can trust who's local and who has done folk music before. For the moment I think I can do fairly well in Audacity, which also gives me the opportunity to correct my problems at the track level before they get mixed down.

A major string of annoyances in the recording/editing workflow:

1. The hard drive in my recording machine (harmony) died.
2. I've had the devil's own time getting it up and running with the old 40GB drive it used to have, in part because I stupidly tried to add a third memory stick to it. Turns out it can only handle two of whatever I already had in it.
3. The soundcard in my main workstation (trantor) doesn't have the bass response I need to detect excessive booming in my guitar.
4. The Linux sound system (ALSA) appears to get massively confused when I try to log in simultaneously on two different machines with different sound configurations. Which means I can't easily use harmony for editing the way I was a few weeks ago when it still had its old disk.
5. Harmony doesn't have enough compute power and RAM anyway, and it's a little too noisy to keep in the studio bedroom in any case.
6. Although I could swear that I had my USB audio interface (an Edirol UA-25) working on Linux at one point, it doesn't seem to be working now. So I can't use it on the workstation. (It's possible that I could use it if I could figure out the right magic config stuff to use with ALSA.)
7. I've wasted much of yesterday evening and all of this morning finding all this out.

For now I'll record on harmony, edit on trantor and use dead reckoning on the EQ, but it will probably be worth my while to either move the good sound card to trantor, or get another like it. And right now the office is almost quiet enough to record in, so that may actually work.

The pre-printed disks for About Bleeding Time are in process. I found out when the proof came back that I'd sent them an older version of the artwork, minus the cool HyperSpace Express logo and link to the (currently nonexistent) HyperSpace Express website. Approved it anyway -- I'll put the logo on the insert, and the site isn't up yet anyway. One less thing to do before Baycon.

Spent wasted the entire rest of the day trying to make a cd-extra -- that's a two-session disk with audio in the first session and a CD-ROM data file in the second session. Doing it the documented way from the command line gives me a CD-ROM that appears to be empty. (See my post in linux for details if you think you can help.)

Nero for Linux writes a CD-ROM with directories but no file contents. I was pretty impressed that it even existed, but it's clearly seriously broken. Just as well -- you can only use it from the GUI, so it would be a major disruption of my script-heavy workflow. Not only that, the GUI is annoying and clumsy -- there aren't any keyboard shortcuts for adding a file to the disk, there's no way to get CD text from a file, and the audio tracks all default to copy-protected. Blerg.

Tomorrow I may make an attempt to use k3b; otherwise I'll just fall back to a CD-ROM with audio tracks, which I know works.

This is not a happy bear.

In hopes of getting back into the groove of recording, I went over the current versions of "Daddy's World", "Little Computing Machine", and "I Wanna be a Webmaster", which I had identified as having .wav files that were older than the corresponding audacity projects. The first two were in pretty decent shape after a bit of clean-up; the latter still needs plenty of work.

Still need to look at "Someplace in the Net" -- I'll do that tonight -- and retake vocals on "Daddy's World", guitar on "TEOTWAWKI", and both parts on "Wannabe". After that it's just mixing, finally.

And did I mention taxes? Taxes. And system administration for the new DSL setup. Busy week ahead.

As of this morning there's an enormous green dumpster looming in our driveway. The name "$99 Dumpster" is somewhat misleading -- delivery and pickup is $99, but that doesn't cover roughly $200 in dump fees. Doesn't matter -- we still need it. The amount of junk in the kids' rooms was simply amazing, and we can use the opportunity to clean out the back yard and garage as well.

I'm going to have to get some work gloves, aren't I?

I'm also pretty sleepy (though a lot less so than an hour ago before I got up and put away the dishes). I don't think I slept very well last night.

And for some reason a couple of health care receipts have gone missing. Probably at work.

(Aside to the chaoswolf, who finally figured out that a company going rapidly down the tubes, with a pair of bosses arguing with one another in front of the employees, is causing a large part of her stress at the moment: congratulations and good luck. This will let you get your AA at least a quarter earlier, so the next job should be a lot better.)

I think tomorrow I can get get started on the taxes, and hopefully finish recording over the weekend. Along with everything else. That means I have to go through the piles of paper that have accumulated on my desk. Again. Had to get done anyway.

It's pretty clear that I'm not likely to get much more done today. If I persist, I'm likely to do something stupid. Still, the day hasn't been entirely unproductive.

Thanks to a little experimentation with compression, it looks as though "Paper Pings", "Stuck Here", and "Uncle Ernie's" won't have to be re-recorded. Stick a fork in 'em. I've done preliminary merging on "Little Computing Machine" and "Mushrooms" -- they just need a little volume adjustment and reverb.

Spent a lot of time -- too much, really -- beating on "I Wanna Be a Webmaster". It's not salvageable, but the experimentation was worthwhile. So that's six tracks worked on today.

Spent about half an hour organizing tax stuff. Not done, but it helps; I think I have almost all of the 2006 receipts filed now, and ready for data entry.

Worked on "Little Computing Machine", "Silk & Steel", "TEOTWAWKI", and "I Wanna Be a Webmaster". That last may have to be scrapped, though. That would leave me with 5 tracks that need to have both guitar and vocals redone (separately). Fortunately I have nice clean scratch tracks to work from, so it'll be quick. He says.

Part of the problem is that a lot of the older tracks have a very bass-heavy guitar track; my fancy finger-work on the treble strings ends up totally swamped. But if I filter out the low frequency and pull it up, I end up amplifying the bleed-through from the vocals that was picked up at the same time. Since there's roughly a 2ms delay, it sounds like I'm singing in a sewer. So it has to be fixed.

Was going to do some actual recording, but the Y.D. is having a birthday party (one day early), and they've been playing just outside the bedroom studio window. This evening and tomorrow.

At least it's now feasible for me to edit in the office without moving the recording machine back and forth. Yay for Linux and X, which make it possible to have a program (Audacity, in this case) running on one machine while displaying on another. It actually improves the performance because the work is split between the two CPUs.

Why do I have the feeling that Hackers' Heaven might end up being a Tres Gique album rather than a solo? How did it get to be so close to tax day? Where am I going, and what am I doing in this handbasket?

Everything takes longer and costs more.

Today it was mostly "takes longer". It took much longer than I expected to put the mic stands back where they belong, clear a space for the computer, shut down and disconnect the computer in the office, and bring it back up in the bedroom studio.

Then it took a lot longer than I would have liked to get the Cat6 cable run back in operation. It didn't work when I installed it -- I figured (correctly, as it turned out) that the problem was screwed-up plugs. I ended up cutting off both ends' plugs and connecting them to a patch panel on the office end, and a modular jack in the garage attic. Naturally this required several tests, each of which meant a round trip up and down the garage stairs. Par for the course.

This freed up the the old Cat5 run I'd been using, leaving me free to use it as I'd originally intended: to run audio for editing, so I don't have to waste two hours moving the box the next time. It took longer than I expected. Surprise. And I wasn't expecting the sound quality to be particularly good, but I wasn't expecting nearly as much 60Hz hum as I ended up getting, either. Not nice

(A few minutes later) An isolation transformer (Furman ISOpatch) helps a lot. And I'll be the rest of the problem is caused by the fact that there are two independent paths for what is really the same ground. (A few minutes later) Maybe not: shorting the two grounds at this end doesn't seem to help, and I know they're shorted at the other end. I may just be stuck with it for now.

If I had real differential signals this probably wouldn't be a problem. At least now it's down to the point where it's not really noticable when I'm actually editng. So I could edit now, except that I'll need to go to bed soon.

It's progress, but not necessarily on the album. Spent most of the morning and a good chunk of the afternoon splitting up last week's Consonance concert. The Tres Gique part is done; I still have to do the bits of cflute and tibicina's concert that I was able to record from the slot before, and fix up the indexing which seems to be having problems with my perl scripting at the moment. Seems to have come out pretty well; I'll probably use at least one track on the preorder bonus disk.

Also took a three-mile walk, went to Fry's with selkit and chaoswolf, went out for Chinese food at Jasmine, and Kanef's housefilk (sang "Like a Lamb to the Slaughter" and "Close Your Eyes"). Sleepy bear. Go fall over now.

I am not going to be recording with a laptop anymore if I can avoid it. Having to fuss with mic and power cables, recording software that doesn't remember what input device you prefer, filenames, folders and all the rest, I'm going to go simple. Not entirely clear whether I can get away with just a text UI, 4-line LCD, and an ARM-based SBC, but it should be possible.

It's also not entirely clear how long I can run the UA25 and a laptop hard drive on a battery; I'll see what I can do with a 7.2V drill battery. For air travel... Probably ok if I don't carry it on. The whole thing should fit in a 1U rack-mountable box, or pretty nearly depending on how thick the UA25 is..

Took my usual three-mile weekend walk today. Today was almost perfect weather. It was raining as I was getting ready to go out (I had shopping to do anyway), then suddenly cleared. I decided to chance it and quickly changed back into my hiking boots. The air was cool and had that lovely, clean, just-after-a-rain smell; everything was moist and sparkly, and by the time I was done the sun was out.

Got a fair amount done toward Consonance and the albums: printed business cards (after buying more card stock at Fry's along with another power squid), wrote the intro page for the super-deluxe preorder package for the Interfilk auction, and recorded a new, clean vocal track for "Mushrooms".

The amount of work still needed for both the CD and Consonance is pretty daunting, and unlike GAFilk I don't think I'll be able to take an extra day off to do it. We'll see. Recording session with Joyce tomorrow: chorus vocals for "Mushrooms", "High Barratry", and "Little Computing Machine".

Spent most of the day trying to figure out why I couldn't burn a working second session (with a CDROM image) onto the bonus disk, making a CD-Extra. A little before dinner I found that it worked on my fileserver, which is running Debian Sarge rather than the newer Etch. Whether the problem is in the software or the drive, and which piece of software it might be in, remains to be seen. But now that I know it works, I can deal with other things.

Well, the flower_cat has gone to bed -- not feeling well at all -- so I think my best course is to do some more debugging, work on the booklet text for CC&S, and start on the set list for my concert at Consonance. Recording will wait until tomorrow afternoon.

Update: oddly, it seems to be working now. It does seem to require writing the whole disk in track-at-once mode using wodim.

Spent a couple of hours this morning being photographed by artbeco, who's doing the album cover for Coffee, Computers, and Song. She found a shipping container, just exactly the right coffee-and-cream color, to serve as a background. It'll work, I think.

Got in a good hour-long walk, then spent most of the rest of the afternoon and early evening improving my TrackInfo tool. It will now do the right thing with CD-TEXT and multi-session CDs, and it puts decimal equivalents in parentheses after hex track numbers.

Spent the rest of the evening re-mixing and adding a little reverb to "Cicero" and "Daddy's World". The latter could maybe use new vocals -- they're a little shaky. But it'll do, I think, if I don't have time to fix it.