How to: Digitalizing records

There are many ways one can digitalize records. The easiest one would be getting an USB turntable that connects straight to your computer via USB interface and it also comes with a software that helps you with the whole process of ripping and editing music from LP records. That approach works great, it’s fast, easy and reliable. In my opinion however, it’s better to get a mixing console and hook up your turntable to it. The price of the analogue mixing console is around $US 200 which is about the same as the USB turntable. In my opinion, it’s better to get a mixing console because it is more versatile and can be used for recording live music, podcasting and live broadcasting of audio over the Internet. A simple 4 channel audio mixer is more then enough for digital re-mastering. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to hook up your turntable to your mixing console, rip and digitalize your music.

Requirements:

- Turntable
- Speakers / Monitors
- Analogue or digital mixing console
- ADC - Analogue to digital converter (optional if using analogue mixing console)
- Hi-Fi stereo receiver / AMP (optional)
- Chinch cables
- Software for digitalizing music (In this tutorial I’ll use CD spin doctor. It’s a part of Roxio Toast suite)

Tip: Computer itself performs analogue to digital conversion. If you want to achieve better quality, use external ADC converter.

Before we begin, please, make sure that you’ve connected everything as shown in the Figure1:

Click to enlarge

And here is how everything looks when it’s connected to a mixing console:

When you have connected everything, you are ready to start setting up your system. In this tutorial I will use CD Spin Doctor software for digitalizing music. If you are not familiar with it, please refer to help files.

When you run CD Spin doctor, click on “Start a new recording” button and set preferences like this:

Input Device -> Built-In Audio
Recording Quality -> CD Audio
Input Source -> Line In

Now, you are ready to start recording. Prepare the record and make sure it plays well on the turntable and that you can hear it plays trough the speakers / monitors. Hit record when you are ready. Digitalizing music is a real-time process so you have to wait until all songs are played. When recording process is done, you will get a new dialog where you will be able to split songs, name each track and fine tune audio quality. You can use “Auto Define” option to split songs, or if it does not work, you can split songs manually.

If you want to additionally tweak your audio, click on “Filters” and play with “Noise Reducer” sliders until you manage to clean your file as much as possible. I don’t usually mess with “Sound Enhancer” and “ EQ10 filters, but If you are not happy with the sound of your files, you can tweak those as well and see what happens. In the end, export your files as AIFF if you want loseless files or mp3 if you need to compress them. For additional questions, drop a comment or contact me.

Download loseless sample (AIFF) 10,9MB

net4mac - Social network service for Mac users

net4mac is a brand new social networking service on the interwebs. Just when you think that there can’t be any more social networking services, a new one comes up and surprises you. net4mac is a bit different and it’s solely for Mac users. If you want to register an account, you can’t do it from the web browser as you usually would. Instead, you have to download standalone Mac OS X application that is kind of like a small web browser and then you will be able to register and use all features. This is good in my opinion because only Mac users can register. The bad thing is that the application works only on Tiger and Leopard but not on Panther.

When you install the application, you will be prompted to fill in your profile on where you will be asked about the Mac hardware you own and some personal info. It’s kind of annoying so you can skip it and finish it later after you explore the whole thing. Upon registration procedure, you should look for some friends and join user groups that interest you. The usual features include: events (which looks like iCal), Chat, and Classified Listings where you can sell or buy mac related things by posting an ad which other people can see.

So what’s good about net4mac? Well, I spent two days testing it and apart from mac os x only application that I really love, I haven’t found anything that would take net4mac out of other social networking services. On the contrary, it has less features then Facebook or Myspace and it can’t be compared to Linkedin. net4mac should be for all Mac only professionals and enthusiasts, but I can’t see a single thing to justify that. There is plenty of room for improvements, and I want to believe that the team behind net4mac will realize that, and add some more features to it’s service.

Do you believe in Rock n’ Roll…

It’s a well known fact that teenagers have always wanted to learn how to play an instrument, drums, guitar or bass. They are doing that for many different reasons. While some really want to master their instruments and play like their idol musicians, others just want to be popular or impress girls. Girls always liked guys who could play say guitar. Nowadays, we have video games of sorts that simulate guitar or drums playing and it’s quite realistic. Video games such as “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” are ultimate hits on most of the gaming consoles and it’s not only for teenagers. People at Karaoke bars are enjoying it, and also there are competitions held around the world.

Teenagers today are mastering virtual guitars and drums, collect points and publish their scores online for other people to see. No more serenades and playing under the open starry sky. The romance is now in cyberspace. The virtual world of playing instruments and socializing on Facebook,Bebo and Myspace are certainly killing romance the way we know it. Rock on baby!

The PC of the future

It seems that we have entered the final years of using our PC computers the way we used to. Now, in the web 2.0 era things are changing. Advanced web technologies will enable full migration of the software from our hard drives on the Internet. As the Internet speed increases every month, soon we’ll be able to use complex software packages from the remote location online without needing to download and install it on our computers. That way users will be able to easily choose which software they want to use and probably will pay a monthly fee instead of buying a whole package.Another thing is the storage space. The usage of multimedia features(music,photos and video) has increased so now we need terabytes of hard drive space to store all of our favourite photographs, music collection or some hilarious holiday home videos. Services like Flickr and YouTube are making things easier for us by allowing users to upload their photographs and video on their own servers. By doing that, we don’t need as much storage space available locally but also we can share our media with family and friends easily and quickly.

Other hybrid solutions offer users remote desktop systems, backup tools and so much more. The Internet is not a huge database of vast variety of information available on it. More and more software applications that we use in our everyday lives are Internet-dependent so we won’t even know when the Internet transition kicks in. Facebook, Myspace,Twitter and Pownce web 2.0 services that made us forget about using conventional e-mail in day to day communication.What kind of computers we will be buying in the future then? Well, I think that we will be using some sort of terminals that will have ultra-fast internet access, lots of RAM memory and less then 30 GB hard drive built-in.

Configuration like this would be more then enough for many average PC users. Software developers on the other hand will also be more concentrated on developing web-based applications that will be easy to use and access. Our future is online, are you ready?

Christmas tree 2007

Christmas tree 2007 - via Flickr

How to: Creating your own ringtones

Many people online are asking where they can download free ringtones for their mobile phones. Mobile providers are usually charging ringtones and they are getting more and more expensive every day. Did you know that you can make your own ringtones on your mac very easily using the software that is free? In this article I’m going to show you how to do it in a few easy steps.

Software you will need: iTunes (It already comes as a part of iLife app. just check if you have newest version installed- 7.0.1) Audacity (Free open-source audio editor and recorder) iTunes -LAME encoder (The iTunes-LAME Encoder combines the simple interface of iTunes with the high quality of the LAME encoder)

Step 1: Preparing a song: Now when you have all the software that you will need, you are ready to start preparing your music. You can either rip your song (s) from an audio CD using iTunes or you can use an mp3 song that you already have on your computer. If you are ripping songs from your CD’s, I’d recommend you to do it with iTunes Lame encoder rather then using just iTunes app. Your ringtone does not have to be in a full MP3 quality so you can lower the bit-rate to 48Kbps when encoding. If you already have an mp3 song in your iTunes music library, make a copy of the song and re-encode it.

Step 2: Additional Tweaking: When you have prepared your song to be used as a ringtone, you can now use Audacity software to “fine tune” it. In Audacity you can trim the parts of a song that you want to use ( if you don’t want to use a whole song), or you can add echo and other cool effects to your ringtone.

Step 3: Sending ringtones to your phone: Now when you have made your ringtone and if you are happy with how does it sound, you will need to upload it to your mobile phone. Depends on your mobile phone model, you can do it either using Bluetooth or DCC (Direct Cable Connection). For more information’s about your phone features, visit the website of your mobile phone maker.

What if my phone does not support MP3 format?: In that case, you’d need some ringtone converters which enable you to converting your rintones into various formats ( polyphonic - midi ) that are supported by your phone. “Coding Workshop Ringtone Converter” is a good one. ($US 18,95).

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Are you ready for the Holiday season? [The geek edition]

It’s the Holiday season! We are busy buying presents and putting up Christmas decorations. If you are a geek, there is so much more to it. Here is the quick list of what every geek should do to make sure that has everything prepared for the upcoming holidays. Ho, ho, ho!

1. Make sure to update software. There is a software we don’t use every day and thus forget to update when the new version becomes available. You can use versiontracker.com to see if the new versions are available. Some software has “check for updates” option, so use that instead.

2. Redeem your wii points and if you are an XBOX fan, don’t forget to extend xbox live subscription. You will be playing more over the holidays with your friends and family.

3. Check your local TV guide and make sure you have your TiVo’s and PVR’s ready. There will be a lot of holiday specials that you might want to record.

4. Hand-make holiday cards for your geek friends. You can even use old computer parts to do it.

5. If you can, organize pre-Christmas LAN party. Geeks like those.

Drink and eat responsibly and enjoy the holidays. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Vinyl [photo]

Do you still like vinyl records? Some of my favorite ones… Via Flickr.

Kill -myspace

I wish there was a command like this! I really hate Myspace social networking service. I have an account on myspace which I created ages ago because I had some friends on it at the time. I have never really used it because it wasn’t fun at all, but if you want to view other people profiles, you have to be logged in. Over the years, myspace has become more popular with teenagers who were enjoying (and still do) decorating their myspace profiles with all the things that are considered a big no-no in the world of web design. That includes bulky animated backgrounds of 2+ MB photos, background music that plays automatically when the page loads up, unreadable fonts and screaming colours. Apart from the fact that a page looks incredibly ugly for the eyes that are sore from all the colours and flashing, it also takes ages for a page like that to load even on the high-speed Internet connection.Finally, I’ve decided to delete my myspace account. I did not want to use the service anymore and I wanted to remove all the profile information that I had on it. Every social networking site that allows you to create an account on it also has an option for a user to delete it if one do not want to use it anymore. The procedure is very simple. All that has to be done is to enter an e-mail address that the account was registered with and when you get a return e-mail, you need to click on the link to confirm account termination. Guess what, myspace has it too! Does it work? No! I have gone through the procedure of terminating the account over and over, but I can still log in to myspace with my username or password. Here is how myspace describes the whole procedure of how to delete your account:

How do I delete my account?If you wish to permanently terminate your MySpace account, start by clicking “Home” in the top navigation menu from any MySpace web page. From your personal home page, click the “Account Settings” next to your default picture. From your “Change Account Settings” page, click the “Cancel Account” link, found just above the “My Account Settings”. On the “Cancel My Account” page, click the “Cancel My Account” button. Check the email account that you used to create your account. Follow the instructions in that email to delete your account. Keep in mind, cancelling your MySpace account will PERMANENTLY REMOVE all of your profile information from MySpace, including your photographs, comments, blogs, and your personal network of friends. This information cannot be restored. You may re-register with your current email address after canceling, but you will need to rebuild your personal network from scratch.

It looks straightforward when you read it but in reality it wont work. I did everything as written above not once but more then ten times, and I still have an active myspace account. I thought maybe I need to give it some time (say 48 hrs.) for the system to terminate my account, but that hasn’t happened. Some services would automatically delete your account if you are not using it for a long time. As I am a Mac user, I thought that I might try the same procedure on my Windows PC. I’ve tried it from Firefox and IE 7 but no avail.Considering all this, it turns out that myspace is abusing their own users by not allowing them to cancel their account in any way. How legal is this I wonder? If you have any workaround of how to delete myspace account, please, post a comment. For the record, News corp. sucks!

Magazines & manuals

 Magazines and manuals on the bed. via Flickr  -  I was powncing about geek magazines nowadays and decided to take a photo of some of my magazines and manuals. What kind of magazines do you read?