Sidingsound

It’s a bit of a way down the page, so I thought I’d draw attention to two new additions to my “Elsewhere” list in the sidebar, and one in particular:

First off, I’ve inserted a link to my photos on Twitpic—I tend to use this service for quick shots I take while I’m out and about, and which I feel like sharing as quickly as possible. More ‘considered’ photos will continue to go up on my Flickr page (for the time being, at any rate), but Twitpic works for me more like a “photoblog”, albeit not a heavily-used one.

The other addition looks like it will turn out the answer I was looking for in a post earlier this month, about audioblogging from my Nokia N95. To recap, I talked about searching for a site which would allow uploads and sharing of audio content (mostly speech recordings)—rather like an audio equivalent of YouTube. The nearest I found at that point was AudioBoo (Stephen Fry is a fan), but whilst the concept and execution was right, the site is currently tied to an app on the iPhone, which rules it out for me.

Well, I believe I have now found what I’m looking for, thanks to Pixelpipe’s announcement today that they’ve added it as an upload ‘destination’: chir.ps. Put simply, this service can be thought of as an audio equivalent of Twitpic, including the Twitter integration. You record a sound clip, upload it to chir.ps and add a 140-character-or-less description, and the resulting “chirp” gets added to your chir.ps page, with a tweet sent to your Twitter account to alert your followers to the new arrival.

I was about to try it out, when I hit a snag: the N95’s audio recorder doesn’t appear to be able to record or save to MP3 format. The only choices you have with this application are AMR (a patent-laden low-bandwidth format intended for speech), or uncompressed WAV. The latter is doubly annoying here, as the files are massive (about 1Mb per ten seconds), but they sound like 32Kbps (or less) quality.

Moreover, the AMR format is not supported by chir.ps, so if I want to do audioblogging from the N95, I will either have to stick with WAV (not good for sending over 3G or slow WiFi), or find a cheap or free third-party audio editor/encoder which will work on the N95. I’ll get looking for the latter—if I find there’s an equivalent of Audacity for the S60 platform, I’ll be on it like a starving squirrel on the last peanut on earth (© Scott Adams).

If not, it looks like my chir.ps page is going to remain somewhat dusty for a while—still, at least it looks like that part of my quest is over for now. In the meantime, any serious suggestions for a decent audio editor/recorder for S60 3rd Edition (the OS on the N95), would be gratefully received.

Here’s a ‘poser’ for you for the middle of the week: what do all the following items have in common?

1. Bluetooth keyboard support
2. Support for Flash in the Web browser
3. 5Mp still photos
4. Carl Zeiss lens/optics
5. Video editor, with the capability to add captions and render movies at full VGA resolution

Guessed it yet? Yup, they’re the features which (to the best of my knowledge) the iPhone 3GS doesn’t have, which my two-year-old Nokia N95 does have (and which I actually use), and which Apple are going to have to add to the next iPhone before I will even consider switching.

Now, believe it or not, I’m not trying to be deliberately provocative here. I love my gadgets as much as anyone (if not more), and as a Mac owner, I really would love to like everything about the iPhone. I’m happy to admit, the above list is gradually getting smaller than it used to be—the 3GS now supports cut/copy/paste (as the N95 always did); it now supports Bluetooth headsets (ditto); and you can now use the live video-streaming service Qik with the 3GS (thus joining my N95, which I’ve been using with Qik for the last eighteen months).

It’s hard to believe one still can’t use a Bluetooth keyboard with the iPhone without ‘jailbreaking’ the latter—ironically, it doesn’t even support Apple’s own wireless keyboard (which, to further ladle on the irony, I use perfectly well with my N95). It seems to me that an iPhone or iPod Touch paired with a BT keyboard, would make a brilliant laptop replacement, so I wonder if Apple has deliberately withheld this support so as to avoid cannibalising sales of MacBooks (which wouldn’t make much sense, given the disparity in price between the products).

To top all this off, comes the continuing speculation that Apple is readying an “iTablet”—that is, basically a larger iPod Touch with a bigger screen (and presumably a few more bells and whistles). Sounds interesting, except I’d place a bet that it’ll have an eye-watering price tag, and probably still won’t have Bluetooth keyboard support (again, not to cannibalise sales from the MacBooks).

Anyway, it looks like I’ll be sticking with my trusty N95 at least a bit longer, even if it doesn’t look as cool as a laser-engraved Apple product…

For a blog with the word “sound” in the title, there has been a bit of a dearth of music-related posts here in the few weeks since I moved hosting provider and relaunched the blog. So, with that in mind, here is a selection of “news in brief”-type items on a musical theme:

• After a burst of writing and recording activity in the spring (and forgive me if I keep a lid on that topic for a while longer, he says cryptically…), I’ve been comparatively inactive musically for a few weeks, with various life-type activities taking most of the spare time I have outside work. These things tend to come in “fits and starts”, although which of those describes where I’m “at” around this time, I haven’t decided yet.
• Whilst the Christmas CD project which I referred to a couple of weeks back, has not seen any further recording, I have continued to work on selecting the pieces which will (or may) go onto the tracklisting for the album, as well as thinking about and trying out ideas for arrangements.
  I’d like to get the lion’s share of the recording done during August, so that after the summer holidays, the remainder of the recording work could be slotted into our busy schedule where possible. At the very least, I want to get as much of Joy’s keyboard contributions (and definitely all the piano) onto disk in the next month, and hopefully the “core” backing tracks as well, so that I have the autumn to put the finishing touches to the project and mix it. Not entirely sure what we’ll do with the completed recordings when they’re done, but at least our family and friends should have a nice “stocking-filler” out of it…
• I have a “soft spot” for old keyboards (ARPs, Moogs, Mellotrons and so forth), especially if they can be recreated digitally and integrated into my Logic setup at home! I’ve been trying out a demo of AM ProSoloVST, a software recreation of the early 1970s ARP Pro Soloist synthesiser, which Anthony Phillips used on his début album The Geese And The Ghost. (The album name comes from Ant’s nicknames for two synth sounds which he got out of the Pro Soloist, and which can be heard on the album’s title track.)
  The Audio Units version of ProSoloVST integrates nicely with Logic, and the synth plays nicely even when I’m controlling it with my MIDI guitar (which not all software synths do). I’ve only encountered one problem—the sound cuts out after a couple of minutes—but I think this may be part of the limitations on the demo version, so I am querying this with the program’s authors. The ProSoloVST costs about £20 to register, and I think I’ll be doing so before too long, in which case the synth may be making an appearance on the Christmas CD!
• In the midst of all this, I’m still putting money aside for a 12-string acoustic guitar, which if I can reach my target before Christmas, may also arrive just in time to get onto the CD (though I wouldn’t hold my breath for that).

Oh yes, and I haven’t forgotten about setting up the music page(s) with an MP3 player plugin, so you can hear some of my work—it’s coming…

…and so’s Christmas—yes, I know the joke

This evening, we went along to a friend’s housewarming party, and noticed how they had a lot of family photos around – in frames on the wall, on a digital photo frame on the mantelpiece, in a few albums on the shelf, and so on.

As well as getting me thinking that a digital photo frame might be a good idea, it brought me to realise that we have printed very few of our ’snaps’ in the last few years, tending to keep them on hard drives, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs and online photo services. Whilst this is all very well at the moment, it occurred to me that if our visual memories stay in digital form, our descendants may not end up with much to see, if the digital files degrade, are lost, or end up in a format that can’t be read by the computers of 2050 and beyond.

Occasionally, I’ll take the mobile phone to our local supermarket and run off a couple of prints on the ‘instant digital photo’ machine (e.g. for a photo frame), but these are quite expensive for more than, say, three or four prints. The same supermarket has a “24-hour”-type service which is cheaper for fifty or more photos, but I hardly ever get around to choosing the pictures to print this way, let alone doing the dating, labelling and the sort of thing you ought to do with photos.

It’s all too easy to take large amounts of pictures with digital cameras (as distinct from film-based ones), and this can mean that you don’t always give as much thought to the process as you would with a film camera (where every shot ‘counts’). Also, because you don’t have to print digital photos, as you usually do with a film camera (at least at the ‘consumer’ end), it’s often the case that you just don’t get around to it, or at least we don’t.

A relatively recent development is bespoke-printed “photo-books”, which you can produce yourself via services like Flickr and Apple’s iPhoto. The premise is usually simple: you choose the pictures you want to include, select your desired design/layout of book, and once you’ve paid up, the service will send you a printed and bound tome of your snapshots for all to admire. They tend to be rather more expensive per photo than a “traditional” album/prints, but for something a bit more special, the photo-book is something I’d like to try one day.

So, maybe I should print a few more photos from now on, at least so there’ll be some for our grandchildren to look at…

Posted by Wordmobi

Musician Bing Futch has just posted a blog entry, marking fifteen years since he first went online at home, which got me thinking about a few of my own “Internet milestones”. Set the time machine going…

• I don’t know the exact date, but I am sure that I got my first Internet connection from home in 1996. My PC at the time was running OS/2 (long story), and the internal 28.8k modem cost around £200—this was relatively cutting-edge technology in the UK at that time (with a price tag to match), and the 28.8k standard was still relatively new.
  (As an aside, the Web server space I was given by my ISP was a disk-stretching 500Kb. Many single Web pages I visit these days weigh in at more than that alone.)
• We think of data services via mobile phone networks as a fairly recent phenomenon, but by 2001 I was getting online via my Nokia 6210i (and shortly afterwards, a 6310i, which gave me GPRS speeds) and my Psion Series 5mx, over an infrared link. I vividly recall spending Christmas 2001 with family at a cottage in the wilds of Dorset, sending festive greeting e-mails from the Psion over a shaky GPRS/GSM data link, to my then fiancée in South Korea—we would marry in Seoul just over two months later.
• Thanks to the positively mediaeval cable network in the town I was living in from 1996, I didn’t get broadband Internet at home until we moved to our current home town in late 2003. (This was despite seeing my first “always-on” cable modem connection on a visit to a US colleague’s California home in 1998, and coveting it massively (the cable modem, that is).) We finally got a cable modem in our first house here, switching to ADSL in 2006 when we moved to where we now live (there’s no cable TV in this new part of the town yet).

Now, of course, in 2009 I take ADSL and 3/3.5G mobile data more or less for granted, and it’s hard to believe that I didn’t even own a PC until 1993 (and didn’t get a ‘modern’ one until after Easter 1994). I can only imagine what I’ll be using by my fiftieth birthday, but I’m pretty sure it will be as unremarkable by then as a telephone or TV set is today.

A quick note while I have a few moments, just to remind readers not to be too ‘thrown’ at this point in time, if they see links, sidebar items, even colour schemes (maybe) moving around, changing, disappearing, etc. The blog is still new, and I haven’t quite got everything exactly as I want it yet, though you’ll be glad to hear that I feel like I’m “close”…

In particular, I’ve set up the beginnings of a “Contact” page (at this moment, it’s just a basic e-mail form), but I’ll add a few more items there as and when I feel reasonably sure I’m not going to get “spammed” from them!

I’m also hoping within the next couple of weeks, to start the “Music” page, which may well become a section in its own right, depending on how it grows. I’ve installed an MP3 player plugin, and am looking forward to trying it out—hopefully before long, you’ll get the chance as well.

Fear not—at some stage, things will settle down a bit more here

Posted by Wordmobi

It’s an overcast Monday lunchtime (with the sun making heroic, and occasionally successful, attempts to pierce the gloom), and I might actually pluck up the courage in a few minutes to take a constitutional round the block.

Until then, I’m sat in a corner of the canteen with my N95 and Apple keyboard, to bring you a couple of updates and thoughts (which I’ll try and keep brief):

• Yesterday evening, I recorded the very first parts for the Christmas CD project I referred to a few days ago (and this is the last time I’ll say this: yes, I know it’s late July, but if I don’t start now, we’ll never get this done for December!). It wasn’t much in the end: just some basic electric dulcimer parts for “Joy To The World” and ” It Came Upon The Midnight Clear”, but enough to build upon over the coming weeks.
  The CD is likely to be a “mini-album”, with six or possibly seven tracks, but some of the tracks themselves may well run to well over 3-4 minutes, so the runtime may not be that far short of some “full” albums out there. Watch my Twitter feed (as well as this blog) for further details as they come.
• Just in passing: I am trying hard to give Stephen Moffatt and the new Doctor Who team the benefit of the doubt. Stephen is responsible for some of the finest moments of the regenerated (!) series, and I know he and his team realise how high the bar has been raised, and has to stay. I can just about trust the casting of 26-year-old Matt Smith, and again am willing to give him a chance as the Doctor.
  But whose idea was it to give Matt a costume as the Doctor, which makes him look like Bertie Wooster??!?!?!! I thought the outfit in his initial publicity photo looked rather more like what a 900-year-old Gallifreyan should be sporting, but isn’t he going to look a bit daft in slicked-back hair and a 1920s suit and bow tie when he next pays a visit to a 52nd-century space station?

Just a quick rant, and perhaps this is all a big wind-up by Moffatt and co, where we’ll find out that this was merely Matt’s Doctor attending a 1920s fancy-dress party in the first episode, whereupon he will soon revert to something which doesn’t leave me wishing nostalgically for Colin Baker’s mid-80s get-up.

Now for that constitutional…

Posted by Wordmobi

sitedark

Originally uploaded by engraveyourtech

Like it says: I just set up my Flickr account so that I can post worthy pics to Sidingsound when I find them, and this one really caught my eye. It comes from Engrave Your Tech, a US-based outfit which uses a laser engraver to etch designs onto customers’ items, such as Apple hardware (MacBooks, iPods, iPhones, etc.). I especially liked this iPhone design, and thought it would be interesting to have my beloved N95 similarly tarted up…

It’s coming up for two weeks since I migrated my blog site across to a new host, and to a new blog ‘platform’ (WordPress). So far, I’d say I’ve managed to realise most of my early aims, which to a great extent revolved around creating a blog with tie-ins to the various multimedia services I send stuff to, and which as far as possible I could maintain from my Nokia N95 without needing a desktop or laptop.

Whilst I’ve got a fair amount of the ‘auto-update’ functionality working (insofar as I can send something to YouTube, Qik, Flickr, etc. and it’ll appear somewhere on this site automatically), there are still a couple of ‘holes’ which I hope I can work out how to fix:

• I haven’t yet found whether it’s possible for YouTube to post automatically to WordPress, when I upload a new video. YT can update Twitter and Facebook automatically, and you can set up a WordPress blog on your YouTube account, which gives you a “blog this” feature on a video’s page. However, I have yet to try YT’s mobile site to see if the “blog this” feature is present there; if not, it’s not easy to access the “full-fat” YT pages from a Nokia N95, so some kind of totally automatic feature for posting new YT videos to a WP blog upon upload, would be useful. I’m guessing it already exists, but just haven’t tracked it down yet.
• In a previous post, I referred to my search for an audio equivalent of YouTube—i.e. a Web service where I could upload short, impromptu voice recordings which would then be cross-posted to this blog. After I posted this here and on Twitter, someone from ipadio dropped me a line—this is the service which allows you to make a voice phone call, and have the audio from that call uploaded straight to the Web (they call this “phlogging”). Apparently, ipadio is working on allowing users to upload pre-recorded MP3 audio clips, which may address my primary concern with ipadio (the limited audio quality of a phone call), so I may well be giving their service a try shortly.

Otherwise, I feel I have more or less got the whole infrastructure to where I wanted it at this stage. Other future developments I have in mind are:

• a “music” section, where you’ll be able to listen to some of my recordings (probably via an embedded Flash music player at first);
• an expansion of the “lifestream” feature, so that each day on the main blog page will carry a summary of the day’s content from the lifestream;
• the “contact” page, which I know I haven’t implemented yet, but I have to make as sure as possible that I won’t expose myself to any more spam than I already get (no offence meant, incidentally )

Anyway, I think that’s enough to be going on with for the moment, wouldn’t you agree…?

Posted by Wordmobi

You may have noticed a new page link in the list at the top (next to “About me” and the others), named “Lifestream”. It’s something of a work in progress, but basically the page is an “at-a-glance” aggregation of the various contributions I make to other Web services—my Twitter feed, Flickr photos, YouTube videos and others—all arranged in chronological order.

I’ve tried setting up a ” lifestream” before, via my page at Tumblr, but for some reason I was never really satisfied with the results—probably largely due to the Tumblr template system, which I found quite hard to customise to my satisfaction.

Thankfully, I find the WordPress template system rather easier to work with, and even better, David Cramer has taken most of the “donkey-work” out of setting up a “lifestream” on a WordPress blog, thanks to his WP Lifestream plugin, which I have used to set up the new page here.

The Sidingsound lifestream is currently set up to display the most recent 200 items it collects from the various services I contribute to. The majority of the items there will most likely be Twitter posts, but there will be others if you keep reading

I’d like to figure out how to do more with the WP Lifestream plugin—and top of my list would be a daily summary of the lifestream on the main page of the blog (as on David Cramer’s own site)—but for now I think the separate page is a good start. Thanks David for a great piece of work!

Posted by Wordmobi