Tag Archives: Audio

ROCK and ROLL!

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I love to get out and do things. Getting out and doing things is one part of what informs my writing. Just getting to go places and see things that are different from the normal, everyday pace.

Yesterday I got to go and see Rock Lititz studios and wander around a couple of very cool buildings. Yes, I kind of went all geeky on building stuff, but that’s what I do.

The neat thing about Rock Lititz (if you’re not into the music scene) is that it brings internationally known talent and business to what amounts to the middle of a field in Pennsylvania. We drove past a half dozen farms before we saw this shining, modern, crazy cool place.

I don’t work with anything related to the audio field, but even I was excited by the time we were done there and was ready to work on an audio project. VERY cool stuff.

This is the check in desk at the hotel. Those are all speakers with a color changing LED light set behind it:

Not at all what you’d expect to see on the edges of Amish country. This is the outside of the hotel and restaurant:

Some of the coolest stuff was inside. I don’t have a ton of pictures because I was busy wandering and looking on with wonder. For classic rock fans out there – these are set pieces from THE WALL!

Pink Floyd tour props!

As I have stated many times before, get out there and do stuff – there is way too much amazing to sit on the couch! IF you can, go and do these things with passionate people. Those who are most passionate about what they do can make for some of the best conversations and most interesting tours.

Audio Learning Curve

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I’m sure that I’ve mentioned this before in my writing. I don’t remember where, but I’m certain that I have because I was incensed. I once read an article in a newspaper that was by one of the staff reporters. This staff reporter had, and I believe still has, regular space that presumably she’s paid well for. This article that she spent considerable space and time on said, in a nutshell, I have nothing to say but there was a deadline so I typed out all these words and turned it in. I couldn’t believe that a professional would simply put something like that out. If it were a column by a satirist like Dave Barry, then I could much more easily understand why something like that would be “newsworthy” for lack of better term. Notably satirists tend not to waste their column space. This person is nowhere near that sort of level nor is she a satirist. This is also something that always bothered about people who on their blogs or their Vlogs or their audio podcasts do essentially the same thing – putting out a big fat pile of “I have nothing to say”.

I haven’t been on the computer much at all when I’ve been at home lately. I have been on the computer for extended amounts of time at my day job. Between that and other life circumstances it has been very difficult to have something to say that is is worthy of posting, let alone finding the time to actually sit down and be willing to get in front of a screen again. I don’t want to be one of those people that simply puts nothing out there for the sake of putting something on a screen. I hope that I can put something out there that is in some small way either useful to myself or useful to others. Perhaps I’ve been unfair now that I think about it to this other person, if she put forth the article in some form or fashion saying nothing but that was useful to her. Something I hadn’t thought of before but it still makes me angry that she got paid for a number of words that essentially said “I have nothing to say”.

Today I am continuing my experiment in audio. I have set up a way to connect my technology with my technology.

Because I spend so much time at the screen already, one of the things that I attempt to do is keep myself physically healthy. Being healthy really matters for all people, but specifically for people who spend a lot of time in a sedentary position working at a screen. I don’t know that this this post necessarily counts as “something to say”, but I’m putting it out there so that if there are any other authors who feel the time crunch that I do combining family and work and other things with their craft. I have a treadmill in the same room with the computer. It took me awhile to come around to the solution, and once I mentioned it to a friend found out that it is not new or even necessarily uncommon. I have added a shelf over the front end of the treadmill and I have set up my laptop on that shelf. I then hooked my microphone in to my laptop and connected myself to the computer while walking on the treadmill. This gives me the opportunity to simply speak all of the things that I wanted to type well actually being able to walk on the treadmill and try to stay healthy at the same time.

Something else I’ve done while walking on the treadmill actually hook myself into the safety equipment. There’s an emergency stop connected to a string that you can clip to whatever you’re wearing. Normally I bypass that right away and simply use the treadmill. It’s something that I haven’t ever had problems with in the past. Now I’m clipped into the safety piece and because I don’t have a wireless microphone I’m also clipped in to the headset attached to my laptop. I think all I need now is some sort of breathing apparatus like one of those things you always see in science fiction films and I’ll look pretty out there. I went with the safety thing because I could clearly imagine the first time I tried to do this something would go horribly wrong I would fall, then the laptop would drop on my head and the tread portion of this machine would simply continue to run either or both pushing me off to the end and creating some unnecessarily painful friction.

I think I have learned a couple of lessons already this morning. First, it’s hard to type while walking so put your password before starting the walk. Next, I don’t know if there’s a way to move the cursor backwards. If there’s any kind of mistake and what it is that you said, you need to go back and edit it later. Lastly, this does make this post (and anything I’m writing) essentially a pure stream-of-consciousness writing style. I have yet to discover whether or not this will in fact make my writing any easier to read in terms of flow and understandability.

I also find it amusing, but I believe there’s the very real chance that I’ll be speaking to somebody and actually use my punctuation when I’m speaking out loud to them now. I definitely think that would be an entertaining story the first time that happens. “Oops. Sorry, I’m used to speaking this narrative into my computer and I just forgot that I was actually speaking to a person. Good news, you’re in the story now”.

Interestingly enough I’ve actually gone past my normal daily amount of walking on the treadmill while doing the speaking and still been able to knock out all these words. I think this experiment’s going to continue into the future. Hopefully that means that I’ll have more things that I will be able to say in a timely manner and get them out to my blog on a regular basis.

Now I just have to make sure that I always have something to say.

Audio Test

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I was looking for something in a Google doc a few days ago and saw a voice tool listed there. I plugged in my headphone mike and tested it out. This should be interesting. Space I got that wrong I thought I would have to actually put in the spaces but what I have to put in is the punctuation and it spaces those automatically. I’m actually testing out for the first time using a microphone to type out the things that I would normally sit here and type out. If I can talk my way through these sort of entries I think it will really make my ability to get blog post and writing a bunch of other things done far more quickly than I ever could before. I’m hopeful that this will work out and it won’t need a ton of editing but even if it needs editing this is going to be considerably faster than any other method of inputting my stories my words my anything. return paragraph Okay so any word that I’m going to say is just going to be put in there. I don’t think there’s a way to make this change paragraphs or do anything other than put lots of words together as quickly as I say them. I do have to say the word recognition is really fast. I put this paragraph together in seconds and it’s just flowing along with my words. Now what I need to do is gather up my script if you will, or my outline, and start moving forward with my stories. I have a feeling that this is going to be something considerably faster than anything I’ve done and then it’s going to take me twice as long to edit it because I don’t know how the hell to make a

The funniest thing… I said

And then it jumped to a

And I can’t actually type

I wonder if anybody reading this will see the humor in this creating a

every time I try to say

Another line another paragraph thankfully it doesn’t pick up the laughing and the snorting. I keep forgetting to put punctuation at the end of my thoughts. It’s very very odd. This is going to take a massive amount of editing I can see that already but I am very enamored with this test. I think my next piece is going to have to be a timed test to see how many words I can put together in what amount of time. Because I think I could throw down a lot more speaking then I can typing I’ve been at this for far less than 5 minutes I’m certain and I’ve knocked out a whole page without actually typing anything.

Problem that I’m finding in here is that this becomes very stream-of-consciousness very quickly and I’ve lost track of what I was saying and I can see looking back at the page above that I repeat myself and tend to use the same words frequently and these things show up very clearly when someone else is typing for you even if that’s somebody else’s the magic Google computer.

I’m going to have to edit this after my next meeting and post about it. my first foray into the land of somebody else typing for me.