Have you wondered whether you can call tell the difference? After listening to the samples on this page (at high volume, through studio headphones)…
256 vs. 128 kbps: Can You Tell the Difference?
… I believe that I can. I am surprised by this.
And that’s yet another blog link that is now gone.
Like many of the first generation of G5s, the line out on my server is very noisy. Because of this, I have been looking for a decent external audio interface for it for a while now.
Initially, I tried using an Edirol UA-5, but at the time the Mac OS X drivers were quite immature, causing frequent crashes and lockups. I did, eventually, find a successful way to use the device by taking the digital optical out from the Mac and feeding it to the optical in on the UA-5, effectively turning it into an external DA converter. This worked, but waisted a lot of the functionality (i.e. it was audio out only).
Even if I could solve the driver problems, the UA-5 has three other significant drawbacks:
Despite these issues, the UA-5 was working well enough that I had avoided doing anything more about audio interfaces until a couple of weeks ago, when Gordon Slater from the Divertimento Orchestra asked me about ways to improve the sound quality of the recordings he made of our rehearsals. He has been using using a Sony stereo mic plugged into a Griffin iMic connected to his MacBook. Theoretically, the microphone is reasonably high quality, which would seem to imply that the quality of the DACs in the iMic was the culprit, so once again I started looking at what was available.
A friend of mine, Terry Mask from the Digital Music Center in Ottawa, helped out with the following suggestions for low cost interfaces:
How about these options?:
Edirol UA25 (USB)
Edirol FA66 (Firewire)
EMU 0404 (USB2)
Presonus Inspire 1394 (Firewire)
Presonus Firebox (Firewire)
All the interfaces listed feature:
If he’s interested in some inexpensive mics, the Behringer C2’s would probably be decent for this application.
In addition to the above, Terry mentioned that he had recently used a Yamaha GO46 on a recording session he had done and been very satisfied with the results. This box is a bit more expensive than some of the above ones, but has several nice attributes:
Did you spot the pattern? 🙂 Yup, I picked one up last week, and have been playing with it ever since. So far, the results have been good, but not completely without issue:
Despite these problems, I’m happy so far. I still need to do some test recordings, particularly of the cello. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Pros:
Cons:
Of the Cons, the only one that really bugs me is the remote. It means that if you want to use this as your main media center, then you can’t use the same remote you use for everything else. Or at least, I can’t, since I’m hooked on my Harmony. Time will tell how much that pisses me off.
I “solved” the problem of it being too expensive by turning in my old PS2. They gave me $100 in trade for something I only paid $169 for — not bad. The rest was just the little bit of “mad money” I got for my year end bonus.
The noise problem I solved by mounting it in a small end unit that faces away from the viewing area. That’s one good thing about the BT remote: no need to point the front of the PS3 in the same direction as the TV. On a related note, since the controllers are all just USB devices, I could use one of the 10′ USB extension cables I had to reach to my favourite spot on the couch.
You can’t, of course, enclose the unit since it would cook itself. It definitely runs warm to the touch, even with lots of ventilation. Oh well.
As to the games, well I picked up Resistance:FoM, which seemed most like something I would play, given the available titles. It’s a good, if not particularly inspired, FPS. I’m having enough fun that I’ll probably continue to play it, which is all that counts. I must say that on the HDTV, the graphics are almost as good as I could get out of my PC, which given the box I run, is quite a compliment.
I also got Underworld:Evolution on BlueRay. I’m very pleased with the resulting image quality. I guess those of you who borrow from my video collection are going to have to start upgrading too; I’ll probably be buying BlueRay versions of anything new that comes out, from now on.
[Long post warning: Read if you want to record internet audio streams on the Macintosh]
I’m a big fan of the CBC Radio1 show Ideas. Over the years, I have found that it provides some of the most consistently thought-provoking content available on radio. My only problem is that the broadcast time for Ideas is weekdays from 21h05 until 22h00, a period when I am almost always busy. To circumvent this, I need a way to time-shift the program so that I can listen to it later (typically, either when I go to bed or on the way into work the next morning).
As most of you know, I am a Mac-weenie. This website lives on my G5 server/DAW, as does my iTunes library. I sync my iPod to that library, so the easiest way to access the Ideas content is using the iPod. Given this, the problem statement becomes: How do I record CBC Radio1 (weekdays from 21h05 to 22h00) and convert the result into something I can listen to on my iPod?
Like all forward-thinking broadcasters (:-P), CBC Radio is available on the web, which means that I ought to be able to record it, without needing to physically hook up an FM tuner. Unfortunately, they have standardized on Windows Media Player, which they tell me is the “most commonly used” format. They would, of course, have been better off standardizing on the most compatible format, rather than the most popular one, but at least they make the content available.
The CBC online listening page explains that Mac users should use the Flip4Mac Windows Media plugin to play WMA content. I have this plug-in, but for me at least, if I follow the Ottawa Radio1 link, I get dubious results. There is something wrong with one or more of…
… that causes the resulting embedded Quicktime player to play the same 10 minute clip whenever I go there. That is, it will only play 10 minutes of audio before the “thumb” on the player reaches the end of the scrollbar, and returning to the same page at a later time will cause it to play the same 10 minutes of audio as last time — not very useful.
I imagine others have had problems using the WMA streams as well, since despite the claim that they were going to standardize on one format, it turns out that you can also listen to an Ogg Vorbis stream of (at least) Toronto’s Radio1 feed. I would have prefered getting the stream from Ottawa, but given that Ideas is available on both, I am set.
Or am I?
It turns out that iTunes is not able to play the “.m3u” wrapped Ogg Vorbis stream, but it at least recognizes that it is continuous (i.e. not just 10 minutes long). As usual, when faced with an audio or video file that I cannot play with the standard tools, I then pull out VLC, which is a very nice freeware audio/video player available for all major operating systems. I can’t say enough good things about VLC; if it wasn’t for some un-Mac’ish GUI choices, it would always be my first choice.
VLC happily connects and starts playing the OV stream, but wouldn’t you know it, it too stops after 10 minutes. Very odd. It has worked fine for other streaming content I have tried, which seemingly adds credence to the theory that there is something wrong with the way the feeds are being created, but who knows?
After trolling around on the web for a while, I discover that some problematic audio will play correctly from the command line VLC player, even though it will not play in the GUI application. Sure enough,…
/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC \
http://www.cbc.ca/livemedia/cbcr1-toronto.m3u
… works perfectly, so I finally have something that I can use to listen to CBC. Whew!
The next step is actually recording it.
I believe the best application for recording the audio output of arbitrary programs on the Mac is Audio Hijack Pro. I purchased the Pro version because it has some nice features that I use more for digital audio work. There is also a non-Pro version, which seems like it would be perfectly fine if all you want to do is record something at a scheduled time. As of the time of this posting, it costs 16 $US (it’s a whopping $32 for the Pro version).
You can configure Audio Hijack to:
As you can see, this is perfect for the task at hand. There is a wide range of format options for the recordings, including both MP3 and AAC at many bitrates. I use 48kbps AAC to record Ideas, which produces a listenable recording in an approximately 20Meg file (for 55 minutes).
The program I run is just a shell script that has the above command line in it, and that’s all there is to it.
It would not surprise me at all to find out that there are simpler ways to get this process going. What I ended up with is largely a result of trial-and-error. It works, but it’s not pretty. If you have found a better answer, feel free to leave a comment.
After travelling last week, I felt the need to just sit around and decompress on the weekend. To that end, I picked up Jade Empire Special Edition for the PC on Friday night. After about 25 hours of playing between Friday and Sunday night, I finished it, and I have to say it was a very satisfying experience.
The engine the game is built on is basically the same as the one used for the Star Wars: Knights of the old Republic games (also from BioWare), which many of you know I thoroughly enjoyed. The graphics for Jade Empire are, as you would expect, an improvement on the earlier games, but they’re not in the same class as Oblivion. You still get the feeling that the world is a series of path’s that you can follow, rather than a wide-open sandbox. Somehow though, this doesn’t detract from the experience.
What really makes these games work for me is the combination of epic story telling, deep meaningful characters, and a strong sense that your moral choices (and not just your speed on the gamepad or mouse buttons) actually effect the outcome of the story. I have always said that the first KotoR game was a better Star Wars movie than all of Episodes 1, 2 and 3. To me, Jade Empire is like a cross between a martial arts movie and Chinese opera where you get to play the action hero, the tragic anti-hero, or anything in between. Love, loss, triumph, sacrifice, humour, all there with you at the center.
A strong recommendation to any RPG gamer who wants to know just how good the stories told by games can be.
If you decide to play, let me know whether you follow the way of the open palm or the closed fist. I’m thinking of playing through it again (yes, right away) to see how some of the other choices would turned out.
Caveat: One thing to watch out for with Jade Empire is that it does require a certain non-trivial amount of manual dexterity. You can definitely feel the console roots of the game — it was originally an xbox360 title — both in the player reaction time requirements and in the inclusion of flying “mini games” that are (thankfully) skippable.
I’m closing in on my third night in Boston, and this is the first time I’ve had the combination of enough time and energy to post. I’m here for the annual managers meeting which was pretty much the same mix of sessions as last year. The company wide part of the program ended today at 3pm, so I went out for a bit of a walk.
The GPS definitely helps on the streets of Boston, which are not laid out in a grid. It’s a beautiful old city with lots of cool places to see like this…
That’s the only picture I took, but I couldn’t resist it — Deblits, that one’s for you. 🙂
I’ve got one more day of sessions, specifically with my organization, and then I’m heading home. See you tomorrow, Wilsons!
From the latest Apple Java Update:
This release improves reliability of the SWT_AWT bridge implementation first released in the SWT Compatibility Libraries for Release 4, and is now installed as a standard part of J2SE 5.0.
I was trolling around the web last night and I found this page:
VNC over ssh on OS X Tiger Server (link is dead)
I set up a slight variation of this and, lo and behold, it works. Here’s a snapshot of me connected from work to my server at home.
Of course, it’s too painfully slow to do anything real, but it’s nice to know that I can drive the box remotely in a pinch.
A quick link-of-the-day to a new, free application from Freeverse.
Freeverse : Think
Basically, the idea is that even though it’s good to be able to keep multiple applications running at once, there are times when you want to actually focus on one of them (i.e. so you can Think about it). Think puts up a backdrop between the front application and everything else you have running allowing you to ignore all those SameTime messages ;-). Neat.
A bonus link-of-the-day for this week: words from Courtney Love about how the record industry works + some thoughts on how it needs to change.