Tried the new talk browser on NMC last night – and it works 🙂 I had a conversation with Anya Ixchel.
First impressions – this is pushing the technology to its limits. The browser is quite unstable, causing me to crash a couple of times. The voice is clear, but then breaks up in segments with buffer over-runs as the processing power of the computer gets a bit overwhelmed.
I was able to play some fiddle into SL for the first time, using this medium which was great. But in the end Anya and I reverted to typing as the voice eventually became too broken up for clear communication.
It is certainly a good start, but I doubt if can be used if there are several people on the sim at any one time.
Separately, it was good to catch up with Radhika the other night – it’s amazing where former cyberminders are turning up 🙂 As she points out, it’s almost like the old MOO days.
I’ve never quite been able to get CD-standard recordings out of my computer – until now! Yes it’s a new toy, a TASCAM US-122L – and I really wasn’t sure how it would go when I bought it based on internet reviews – via eBay. So what is this thing? It’s a device to plug your musical instrument or microphone into your computer via USB and it converts your analogue input into MIDI input.
Until now, I had been using a small four channel mixer into the mic input of the iMac. Previously, there has always been a bit of hiss or noise from the desk and effects pedal – always low, but present. This is the first time I have had truly clean signal input via the USB port with a two-channel midi interface.
In the box is the TASCAM US-122L unit, a USB cable (which powers the device as well as provides input-output) three CDs – one to install the driver, one to install Cubase lite and one to install GigaStudio3.0 – for windows machines. I was mainly interested to see how it would perform with Tracktion studio recording software – having just upgraded to Tracktion3.0.
After installing the driver on the mac, I plugged the TASCAM unit in and it lit up straight away. The device can take two inputs – and it has both jack and canon sockets. It also has a switch to provide phantom power for mics that would otherwise need a pre-amp.
There is also a headphone socket so you can hear either the input or the output to the computer – or a mix of the two. The device has almost zero lag or latency, and the sound is very clean – no noise or hiss at all!
The Tracktion studio recording software was able to take the midi input without difficulty and I was quickly able to get some nice clean recordings – so perhaps a CD is not out of the question now. Here is the whole recording studio!
Overall, the device is compact, and it performs its fairly simple function of taking your analogue instrument input and turning it into clean digital signal very well indeed.
Okay, don’t take my word for it – have a listen to my fairly average playing of Ashokan Farewell. I thoroughly recommend this device if you are thinking of recording sound on your computer.
Cheers
Jerry
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It’s amazing what can be done with a couple of macs and three years of extraordinary creative thinking! “We are the strange” is a new-media movie – part game scene part Donnie Darko and part AI – that draws on the mash-up/remix culture to produce a loud colourful and quite hypnotic piece. This is a movie by M-dot-Strange – and it has gained official selection for the Sundance Film Festival.
You can see a preview of it on YouTube – a very appropriate space for it
Google Apps has brought Office software (docs and spreadsheets) into Web 2.0 with its browser-based editing suites. And Picasa offers photo editing and sharing. SecondLife has 3D modelling tools. Even YouTube has online video editing software, but there is still a gap.
We seem to live in such a visual society that the audio side is deeply neglected – Where is the YouTube or Picasa for musicians or podcasters? Surely the soundtrack to our lives is just as important as the visual!
Sure there are free downloadable software (such as Audacity, MutliTrackStudio, Anvil Studio and GarageBand which comes with the new Macs) for specific platforms for sound editing, but the current crop is neither browser-based nor platform-indpendent.
As the 3D web takes off I can see increasing demand for people to be able to record music, and ambient soundscapes for SecondLife and to be able to stream those sounds straight into these virtual worlds.
So here is my challenge to Google – how about developing the browser-based GarageBand [tm] for the masses?
In London recently I visited one of my favourite haunts – the London Science Museum, where they have an excellent collection of steam engines, among other things. On a previous visit I managed to coincide with a live steam day when they had several of the engines operating under steam.
On that day I was spellbound by the awesome ‘breathy’ sound of the engine and the impressive sight of the huge flywheel spun up to around 300 revolutions per minute. The sensation of speed and fury was palpable – a really immersive way to come to grips with the impact these engines would have made on a public unused to artificial power on such a scale.
I was disappointed on the most recent visit to find that there was no sign these engines had been recently operated under steam, so they were relegated to static displays that most people hurried past to get to other parts of the museum. Even the reorganisation into themes – which may be fine for a half-hour glance at the highlights – meant there wasn’t a good sense of how these machines evolved from fairly basic low-pressure engines to highly sophisticated efficient and high-power engines that drove the industrial revolution until well into the middle of last century.
While museum practice has changed markedly over the past decade, and mostly for the better, I certainly hope that future museum-goers will have the opportunity to see these machines in action so the sights are enriched by the sounds of the great beam engine – or the almost silence of the huge red mine lifting engine.
In the meantime – Australia’s Powerhouse Museum in Sydney actually has the world’s oldest Boulton and Watt rotative engine – built in 1785 and used for 102 years in the Whitbread Brewery in London.
