Salem Art Fair
Salem Art Fair
Spent some time at the Salem Art Fair. I made this recording with my Apple iPad using an application called Recorder HD. I had the iPad in my backpack and carried it around in my right hand moving through the crowd. You can hear a vendor playing a hand made flute and catch snippets of conversation.
Later I sat down and painted the above image using the Brushes application on the iPad. Several people stopped to watch me paint and ask questions.
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Spring Squall
Spring Rain
Made this recording on our back porch using my new Edirol Wave Recorder. I heard thunder and thought I'd get some storm sounds. It hailed, but no more thunder.
Download (160kbps, 1.3 Mb mp3)
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Website Update
Yesterday I migrated this blog from Blogger.com to my own server and into a Wordpress installation. I'm still tweaking things, but so far I've managed to import all the old posts and chose a new theme.
I was using Feedburner as the feed source for podcasting and for RSS subscriptions. I've given Feedburner the new RSS feed address and it seems to be working in iTunes and in Google Reader.
I still need to add categories and tags to all my old posts. I also plan to modify the theme some.
Ankeny Wildlife Refuge
Ankeny Wildlife Refuge
Last Saturday I went for a walk in the afternoon at the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge south of Salem, Oregon. I wanted to try out my new Edirol R-09 HD recorder. It has a built-in stereo mic and can record in WAVE onto SD cards.
Here's a recording I made at the end of the Rail Trail. It includes geese flying over, ducks, frogs, song birds, crows, and insects. It was difficult to get a clean recording because of nearby road noise, airplane overflights, and wind.
Download (8:22 - 11.5 Mb)
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Ankeny Geese painted on iPod Touch
Christmas Toy Train
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Monster from the 50’s
Can you name this famous monster from the 50's? Here's a hint. He's big and Japanese.
Amazon.com has mp3 downloads for sell and they carry many movie soundtracks.
Download file - (27 seconds, 220K)
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Alien
I discovered Gizmoz which is a web service that creates animated avatars. I needed an alien voice so I used the Mac's built-in Zarvox speech to text voice to create this short clip.
Download - (5 seconds, mp3 file, 23K)
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Crows Before Breakfast
Crows usually don't hang out at our house. This morning when I got up I could hear a mob at the top of our fir trees having an arguement. I threw on a hat and coat and stepped out on our back porch with my mp3 recorder and a stereo lapel mic clipped to the front of my jacket. I made a beautiful 10 minute recording standing in the 30 degree F fresh air, but when I got back inside, I discovered that I had plugged the mic into the headphone jack. Dang. By the time I got back outside, most of the group had departed. So what you hear is a much smaller group. This recording was made at 7:30 am on Sunday, December 3, 2006.
Download - (2 minutes, 128kbps, 22kHz, 1.9 MB)
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Mac Speech Test
Today I was experimenting with my MacBook's built-in text to speech feature and wondered if I could record the speech. I did it by attaching my mp3 recorder to the Mac's headphone jack. I then downloaded the mp3 file, opened it in Audacity, added a music track and saved it as a wav file. I then used iTunes to convert the wav file to mp3 and add the file info.
Download - (30 seconds, 128kbps, 44kHz, 470 KB)
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Audacity for Intel MacBook
I had a hard time finding a version of Audacity (absolutely the best free, open source audio editor) which would work on the new Intel based Macintosh computers. I finally found a link to a zipped file of the application. It's version 1.3 which as of this writing is a beta version. Here's the link to the zip file:
Link to download Audacity 1.3 for Intel MacBook
I've been putting it through its paces and so far so good. I've only found two things that don't work. You can't export as an mp3 file because there is not a Lame encoder which works yet. This is not a big deal. I save out of Audacity as a WAV file and use iTunes to convert to mp3 and add id3 tags. I also discovered that the program crashes when you try to use software based audio play through to listen while recording. This is not nice because you cannot listen to other tracks while recording a new one.
Download - (37 seconds, 595 Kb, 128 kbps, 44.1 kHz)
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