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Audio Levels and 15 Minutes of Fame
–by Andrew McCaskey
Thanks to Kyle Nishioka and William Kempthorne for their continued underwriting support for SDR.
Good to hear from several folks today – Patrick Boyle got in touch with me by phone with some good words and a good question: Why are the garageband songs so loud ? I apologized to him and to listeners in general, since that’s a problem that I’ve been grappling with for a number of months. The short answer is that the levels are normalized to the same level between the music track and the material that I read. The difference is that almost all of the garageband material is heavily compressed while the audio material is uncompressed. I’ve been reluctant to make the entire podcast sound like this, but as you know the energy has to go somewhere, and the apparent loudness is how it manifests itself. The solution is introduction of RMS normalization of the program instead of the peak normalization – and I am hoping to bring that on line later this month. Meantime, I will pull the track volume down even more.A related issue is the file size. Long term listeners will remember some experimentation reducing the encode rate, but a few days of listening to the the artifacts from that process ended the experiment. I suspect that as I clean up the audio path that I can try that approach again, so the SDR foot print will be reduced.
The other event today was a conversation/interview with Sebastian Prooth in Leeds, UK. – producer of From The Director’s Chair Podcast. Part of the Tech Podcast Network, FTDC is produced by Sebastian Prooth, an American who is currently living and studying in England. The podcast focuses mainly on Video, Audio and Technology, produced by a student of media for those interested in media. I expect that Sebastian will edit things down to about 15 minutes – and so it looks like I will have burned my entire allocation of fame in one interview.
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Interactive Touchscreen Demo: a video of a really cool touchscreen interface – about ten times better than the Bill Gates demo at CES. Hard to describe, about three minutes long.
Hope that you will be able to have a look at the Wombat Page at the SDR site The WOM Badge is a new way for bloggers to tag and display a badge of other blogs or podcasts. Ranging in size from the discrete Podcast411 to the Bumper Sticker from Libsyn, they are are kind of fun -and if you have a badge from WordofBlog.net let me know and I’ll be glad to add it.
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Now a really useful guide to Fixing Windows with Knoppix has appeared online, a reprint of a chapter in the book Hacking Knoppix from Scott Granneman . You might want to plan ahead, print out the chapter and put it alongside a fresh burn of Knoppix STD when you get the call.
I came across Google SMS again today- a way to pull all sorts of useful stuff from Google with the fast SMS from your cellphone.
Be sure to sign up for our upcoming roundtable. We will be using GoToMeeting. Also, be sure to check out GoToMeeting. Why? Because you can hold meetings right over the Net — from anywhere. Plus, you can hold all the meetings you want for one flat rate. To get your free 30-day trial , visit www.gotomeeting.com/techroundtable.
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