Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

iTunes no more!

I never really did like running iTunes as my music player, instead I have been running MediaMonkey. iTunes is rather resource intensive (powering all the eyecandy), does not have the organizational tools that other media players have, and just is not available on linux (niether is MediaMonkey, but I digress). The only merit that iTunes has is its store and podcast content. And as of last month a new web application has solved this codundrium. Via app-store.appspot.com, you can now browse the iTunes media content without the iTunes media player. Props to the guys who wrote this web application and props to Google for making public the Google App Engine.

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php and ajax adventures

Today started out with a woeful surprise. Snow!?!? Yeah I know I’ve lived here in Minnesota for almost five years now, and I’ve never seen snow this late in April. I hadn’t coded in awhile, not for about two weeks. Desayuné, me lavé los dientes y me puse mis ropas en el cuerpo. After that I started up my laptop.

I had recieved an email from Scott VanderVeer Thursday night, asking me about The Source. The Source is an early scripting job that I did for the youth group at Trinity Presbyterian Church that I was more actively a part of in the past. This was before I become a more regular attendee and member of Emmanuel Mennonite Church. The Source kind of died out about 5-6 months ago. Maybe Scott can give it the new blood it needs to take off again. So the first half of the day was spent interspersed between giving Scott assistance on the finer points of DNS issues and PHP scripting, interspersed with various household chores.

After lunch was spent working on a contract coding job for these guys that call themselves, “Tribal Shaman” and “Zerja Sone”. They are working this upstart cracking/hacking network called XSSLink and Prohacks.org. I got called in to write the backend PHP/MySQL data processing and arrange the hosting, as they have other tasks at hand. Something about affiliates and investment return. I would have to say that the XSSLink backend is my craziest undertaking to date. “Tribal Shaman” wanted a completely Plug ‘n Play tracking method in Javascript as well as a monetized linking system at minimal cost. So I will be attempting to load balance across a couple free hosts. It will be risky but worth the payout.

And now as I write this at almost half past 11pm I feel my body asking to sleep. Which then got me thinking about this interesting venture called, Rockabye Baby!. The go by the logo, “Transform your favorite rock music into baby music.” They Green Day riff on the front page certainly sounds calming. Just imagine a couple years down the road, “Daddy … why do you have a different version of my lullaby music on your computer?” Which could turn into a valuable teaching moment about the world in general and what the artists are getting at when they offer up their work to the world.

Line In cookbook (Windows + Audacity)

Ingredients:

  1. Windows 98 or newer
  2. Audacity 1.2.6 stable version which you can download from the Audacity website
  3. An amplifier and turntable setup
  4. A line-in input
  5. If you wish to convert your recordings to MP3 you are going to need the Lame Encoder DLL. You can download zip package locally.

Start by getting your amplifier and turntable set up to play. Make sure all appropriate connections are as they would be for normal playback.

turntableamp.png   adapter.png
My turntable and amp setup   Converter from RCA output to headphone jack output
     
headphone_cable.png   line-in-edit.png
adapter to a 3.5mm audio extension cable   extension cable into line-in port on pc sound card
     

After you have finished plugging in and setting up everything, run the Audacity installer, and boot into Audacity. Refer to the attached video for an overview of how to setup Audacity for the recording process. If you have trouble viewing the video download and run the XviD codec installer for viewing AVI files.

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