Mike O’Connor

I decided to take a picture of the current state of the music workstation.  I wish I'd done this a few times in the past so I could reflect on how it evolves but there you go.  Anyway, here's the first in a series.

List of Stuff

Computer -- home-brew PC (hidden behind a wall so's not to noise-pollute the mic when I'm podcasting)

Software -- SONAR 8.5 Producer, Jamstix

Keyboards

Yamaha PSR-1500 (my favorite for banging around in a jam session)

Yamaha S-08 (the "serious hard-core" keyboard)

Edirol PCR-300 (the little one -- super handy for composition)

Tenori-On -- a gizmo I'm still trying to figure out

Audio -- Crown Powertech 3.1 (500 watts/channel at 8 ohms) into EV Sx300 speakers, couple Behringer mixers, MXL-2001 mics

Update -- about a year later -- June 3rd, 2011

My goodness what a difference a year makes.  Here's the current state of affairs.  I finally switched back to the Mac for music-making after a long time away.  I gave up on the PC -- the platform was just too unstable.  Yes, I changed everything (hardware, software, peripherals, cables) trying to diagnose the repeated-crashing/freezing problems.  Don't want to go there.  The Mac "just works" and it's on a laptop so I can haul it around with me.  I'm now enjoying a much higher ratio of "making music" to "fixing the setup" time.

The new additions:

MacBook Pro

Logic Pro

M-Audio Axiom Pro

The old Roland JV880 (hanging on the music stand down there under the S08)

I'm liking this new rig a lot.

UPDATE: 27-February, 2012

Another Big Rearrangement.  Here's the picture (click on it to get a full-sized version)

The big change is the arrival of an OnStage Stands WS8700 that holds all this stuff up.  I'm still ironing out the kinks, but I really like having all the stuff in one place.  The computer "commutes" from my desk (where all of the "office type stuff" like printers, back up drives, and so forth are plugged into a USB hub) over to this pile o'wires where all the music peripherals are hooked together in a USB hub.  It takes about a minute to move the laptop and I'm all set.

The trouble with this layout is that it doesn't go on the road -- it takes about 4 hours to set it up.  So I'm going to have to come up with a thinner version for gigs, but it's great for working at home.

Gracious.  A fella gets going fixing one little thing on a music-making workstation and the next thing you know a year has gone by and about 42 jillion other things have broken and needed fixing.  Meanwhile, no music has happened.

So today I just pushed through all the crud and said "dang it, today I'm going to produce a tune for the blog, no matter what."

Click HERE to listen to the result.

Complete geek heaven.  Great band.  Great Rube Goldberg device.  4 videos describing the collaboration they put together. Must see, if you're a geek.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ok-go-rube-goldberg/

This is a piece by Jeff Lange in Volume One, Number Three of "Spread the WORT" -- the newsletter of WORT-FM (Madison, WI) just as it was going on the air in 1975.  I've always loved this description of the consensus decision-making process we used to run the station.  All due apologies to Pogo...

The big deal?  The sentence that really catches it for me is "we ad WORT don wanna tred up on the wee miroridy vuponts, so we jus wade undill eberyone am finely agreed."  Still works for me today, some 35 years later.  Thanks Jeff!

Here's my translation, since many of you aren't native-English speakers and might find this pretty tough to read in Jeff's native Pogo-style language.  Apologies to Jeff for any mistranslations.

Yes, it's a curious fact, that nobody is ever able to quite explain, how decisions get made at this particular radio station.  But they do.  This is a grievous hard and ticklesum thing for newcomers to digest.  Take, for example, the familiar caller who, in a fever pitch of excitement, has phoned up the station with his or her (or "it's" for that matter) idea for a program.   Rnnng.  He (let's just say it's a "he") says "My dog can bark heavy metal rock n'roll -- can he have 5 hours on Tuesday nights?"   Well, the person at the station (say it is a person) says "Isn't that the same thing as what's on WBRK every night?"  The caller replies "Yes, but my dog barks badder!"  Then that, says the person, is a question for the Program Committee.

The best thing then is if the caller hangs up, thinking all is well for the Program Committee will do its duty.  But if the caller says "Oh, what's the Program Committee?" then the person has to explain: The Program Committee are all the people that come to the Program Committee Meeting.  You can come.  So can your mother.  It's Friday at 8pm.  No, they never vote on anything.  Voting is against the rules.  So is parliamentary procedure. They just talk about things until everyone is agreed, and that is consensus -- the highest form of unanimity.

Then the caller says "oh."

Then the person at the radio station should continue: "Yes, it's a curious fact, but it seems to work.  So far, at least.  We at WORT don't want to tread on the wee minority viewpoints, so we just wait until everyone is finally agreed.  Nope, it's never failed yet...  which just goes to prove: you can make some of the decisions all of the time, and all of the decisions some of the time..."

Then the caller says, "can you put me through to the general manager?"

"No, there isn't a general manager.  Would you like to talk to Sarah-Gene?"

"She the owner?"

"Nope.  She's just another volunteer."

Ah, the joys of moving. Old things rediscovered after years of sitting lonely and forlorn in the Center Hall Closet. One item that's made it back out into the glory of the light of day is the wedding-gift Porto Baradio that we got from our bestest Madison friends. It was a centerpiece in the place-before-last, got demoted to the closet when we bought Mom and Dad's mid-century modern house and returns to its proper place now that I've got room to see all the radios again.

Is this a cool thing or what? A bar... A radio... All portable... Take that, you iPod weenies.

One of the joys of moving is that you find old stuff that folks have been wondering about. Our move didn't find some photos that Dad is looking for, but it did turn up the disks for Gracie's old music box.

We pulled the music box out today and fired it up. It still works, although the the workings sound like they need cleaning and oiling -- no wonder, it's been in our closet for at least 25 years and probably hasn't been used in 75.

Here's the music box, all closed up.

Here's the nameplate -- J. Werner of Hamburg, a "Musikwaaren Fabrik" made in Hamburg. My guess would be late 1800's, but it's hard to tell. Not much comes up when I do a search on those terms.

Here's the box all opened up. Dang, I wish Mom hadn't used masking tape to hold that glass lid in place. I'm going to have to find some magic goo to get that stuff off without lifting the finish.

Here's a picture of the combs -- looks like 2 combs t'me. Some more cool goo, plus some gentle work with the Dremel tool, required to clean those up.

Here's the first of two name-stickers on the inside of the music box. It's interesting that both this one and the other one (see below) have had a corner cut out of them. Since it's the same corner, and it's clearly on purpose, one wonders what was going on here.

See? They really went after this one with their razor knife. Strange

Here's a detail shot of the combs. There are little dampers off to the right side of each comb that quiet the note before it's plucked again. Some of those dampers look pretty narly.

Here's a disk (we have about 20 in the stack). Some are just rusty like this one, some are covered with some kind of weird moldy varnish-like stuff.

And here's a detail shot of one of the side handles.

I think I may peck away at restoring this a little bit. I view this as a connection back to Mom and Gracie which would be nice to bring back at least to operating condition. I'll post progress notes to the blog as things unfold. There are folks who are interested in these music boxes, they call themselves the Music Box Society International. I think I'll hook up with my local chapter and see what kind of resources they have. There's also Nancy Fratti, who is really into restoring music boxes like these and runs classes in how to do it. It would be fun to go out and take her class.

I recorded one of the disks. Click HERE to listen to the recording. It's got lots of whirring noises in it -- that's the gizmo that needs oiling and cleaning. But the sound is really neat nonetheless. A great old thing -- hopefully a little TLC will bring it back.

Sheesh, this one is a slap yourself in the forehead idea.

If you, like me, have a cable connection to the internet and you, like me, haven't thought about your cable modem since the day you bought it and you, like me, bought the durn thing more than a couple years ago -- go buy a new one that's compliant with DOCSIS 2.0. It'll be way faster.

Ralph pointed this out at lunch on Thursday. By Thursday afternoon I had me a brand new Motorola SurfBoard (which, with all the rebates from CompUSA, turned out to be free).

I'm talking way faster... Ralph's getting over a megaBYTE per second sometimes. I haven't formally tested mine. But it's...

WAY FASTER!

I came across some whiz-bang writeup about a guitar tuner program you could download to your iPod. Richard and I agreed that a simpler approach would be to record MP3 files of notes that you could put on your player -- just play the file when you need to tune your instrument.

So here is a collection of files you are welcome to download and share. No ding dang rippin frippin copyright -- all I ask is that you put a link to this page from your blog, tell your friends to do the same, etc. That way, maybe these files will work their way high enough in the Google ranking that people will actually find them.

Feel free to offer suggestions by commenting to this post -- I'm not sure I've got the right notes when it comes to the orchestral tuning files (having never played in an orchestra). If they're wrong, let me know and I'll change them.

Here are the files;

Tuning -- A -- Bass Violin Sound
Tuning -- A -- Oboe Sound
Tuning -- A -- Violin Sound

Tuning -- D -- Guitar Sound
Tuning -- D -- Jazz Organ Sound
Tuning -- D -- Piano Sound

Tuning -- E -- Guitar Sound
Tuning -- E -- Jazz Organ Sound
Tuning -- E -- Piano Sound

Poor old Safe Haven... This poor blog has been sorely neglected while I've been off fooling around with podcasting (at www.SexAndPodcasting.com).

But I'm starting a series of "how to" podcasts and they need some backup info and I've decided to post those notes here.

The first show is about all the things that you might want to put in your bag when you go out to record something as a "remote" (not in your comfy studio, but actually out there with da peepul). I decided to start with this one because I'm heading up to the Winnipeg Folk Festival tomorrow and needed to make this list anyway. (more...)

I loved this New York Times piece called "Fade-out, how the new rock is passe on radio."

Here's the punchline quote at the end;

Quote:

Another tidbit from the article. Turns out the big programmers (Cox, Clear Channel) dropped women from their ratings target in 2003! And here's another gem.

Quote:

Dumb rock. Red-state rock. I love that...

Here's a tip to the broadcasters. Figure out what podcasts the "cool kids" are listening to. Do something like that on your radio station. You'll be fine.

Update...

Hm, later the same day, Clear Channel (biggest oinker multi-radio-station owner in the land) posted declines in radio revenue. Here's a relevant quote;

Quote:

And here's a link to the story.

Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing posted this great voicemail message from a very angry young woman who accidentally left the message on a wrong number. Here's the link to her post. I'm goofing around with some new audio gear this afternoon and decided to do a little fooling around with it. I hope she hears it some day, and uses it to direct her anger -- she's been done wrong!

This is a take off on a great Steve Reich piece called "It's gonna rain" - here's a link to get you started on that one.

And here's a link to my little MP3 -- it's about 3 minutes long, 2.5 mBytes.

Listen...

Ah. A completely satisfactory geek experience. Now that I've rassled most of the basic podcasting stuff into shape, I wanted to move on to doing interviews and conference calls and recording them -- Ralph pointed out that Skype was the way to go.

Doug Kaye (the maestro of IT Conversations) put together this definitive post on how to record Skype calls. There are other ways, but this is definitely the industrial-strength approach.

I'm going to start doing "conversation" podcasts, but before that I'm going to use this to record an interview for a consulting project I'm working on -- tomorrow. I have a little rant n'record that's going up on Sex and Podcasting about how you could use podcasting as an organizing tool for work (the show will go up in a day or two).

Safe Haven's not getting much attention these days because I'm still getting my sea legs with the podcasting stuff. Sex and Podcasting is gonna be getting a new post a day, at least for the next week.

But I ran into a cool thought while listening to The Gilmore Gang yesterday (what happened to them by the way -- a great series of podcasts that seem to have trickled off to nothing back in February).

Here's the idea -- why not use RSS on a manufacturing shop floor to let machines and work-centers tell each other (and us) what they're up to. Machines could "subscribe" to upstream machines, and "publish" for downstream machines and let each other know what's going on -- feeds could talk about what came into (and left) the machine/work-center.

I spoze this could be expanded to anything that has stuff moving through stages -- paperwork processes, hospitals, etc. All kinds of real-time applications come to mind.

One thing that would be neat is that we'd get away from the huge central database notion and so adding a workcenter, or rearranging them, would be easy. Simply a matter of changing who subscribed to what. Sortof an object-oriented model that us regular people could understand...

It could be really visual too -- lots of cool UI possibilities there. Not to mention fitting in better with the notion of lean manufacturing, and visual management.

Now, back to podcasting.

I'm late into the game -- podcasting's 5 months old, but I'm there now.

This blog has been neglected for the last couple weeks while I've been getting things pulled together, but I'm there now and this is an entry to record what I've learned. It's going to be another really long one, so I'll put topic headers and keywords (for Google) "above the fold" and leave the gory details for the "read more" section...

Sex and Podcasting -- what it's about, why I'm doing it, why I transmogrified Lorenzo's "Sex and Broadcasting" book title into my site's name, plus some of the interesting current developments in the podcast world like Adam Curry's Podshow.com.

Licensing -- I'm going to play RIAA licensed music. At least I think so... This section is where I'll explore the differences between ASCAP/BMI performance rights licenses, Harry Fox Agency mechanical rights licenses and SoundExchange federal copyright licenses and how I've decided to proceed -- the short version is; I've got a BMI license for the performance rights, and will work with Harry Fox on mechanical rights when they decide what to do.

Equipment -- hardware/software plus construction. I got a couple cool new toys -- some nice mics plus a really neat Marantz PMD660 digital recorder (which i wound up getting in preference to the Edirol R1).

To learn more... (more...)

Julio's been writing about podcasting for (seemingly) ever -- and i didn't read any of the posts until today when he pointed folks at this great 4 Minutes About Podcasting movie.

NOW I get it!

Amazing -- all of the "tell your own story" ethic of community radio, combined with all the cool "build your own feed" capability of RSS feeds, which results in "radio" that's going to show up in Google.. If you're a community-radio type person who hasn't messed around with podcasting, go watch that movie -- and then let your imagination run wild. I'm sitting here thunderstruck, realizing what the possibilities are...

What an amazing community technology. For example; you're an organizer of (fill in the blank), laboring away in your local community. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to hear an occasional "show" about your cause, direct from the mouth of your inspirational mentor? If you're an inspirational-mentor type person, wouldn't it be great to periodically share your "show" with others?

Or, if you're more like the typical community-radio programmer, wouldn't it be great to reach the .0003% of the population of the planet who shares your passion about (fill in the blank)? Conversely, wouldn't it be great to listen to shows produced by people who exactly share your tastes and views?

Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be broadcasters. Their days of being in any way relevant are numbered.

This one totally nifty technology. Thanks Julio for pointing me at the link that finally turned the light bulb on. I'm going to add useful links "below the fold" as I explore -- to see that stuff, hit the "read more" button.

Bandwidth -- A puzzler

The community radio movement was all about access to limited bandwidth (in our case, noncommercial FM channels). Podcasting is going to present an interesting bandwidth problem for the person with a really popular podcast -- it's going to slurp up a lot of bandwidth to deliver a 50 mByte file to thousands (millions?) of fans that are hungry for your stuff. Looks to me like we'll need to marry BitTorrent with podcasting pretty soon now.

I'm really interested in the "how do you do it?" part of podcasting right now, so that's what this first collection of links reflects.

Engadget provided a great starting point on this page about podcasting.

Creating podcasts is pretty straightforward -- make a radio show, but pipe it off to an MP3 file when you're done. I was Googling for "make a podcast" and got zillions of articles about how to make digital radio shows -- lots of talk about mixers, and line-inputs-to-the-computer, and like that.

What I'm interested in right now is the RSS feed part -- and the very last part of that Engaget article is what tipped me over to understanding. It all revolves around the notion of an "enclosure" in an RSS feed -- something that most blog-creating software doesn't grok yet, but I bet all off them will soon.

I think for now I'll try just editing up my own RSS feed by hand rather than trying to force-feed Xoops (the software I'm using to create this blog). I'm going to use the XML file in the Engadget article as a template, build me a little "hello world" podcast and see how I do. But not right away. First I gotta finish helping Marcie lay down flooring in the upstairs room at the farm.