Archive for August, 2008

Portable Recording Devices

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Ran across some interesting news yesterday. Alesis is touting a soon-to-be-released product called the ProTrack, which makes an iPod into a portable field recorder. Supports 5G and Classic iPods and 2G/3G Nanos. Sounds exciting, key is $$$ ?
Here’s a good thread on Macintouch on the subject as well.
Alesis also has the IMM8USB 8 channel mixer with integrated iPod Dock, using the iPod as the final destination for the mixer.
IMM8USB

Here’s another, taking a very unique approach to the matter – integrating it into a hand held mic. Way too rich for my blood though.
The HHB DRM85.
HHB

And I’ve enjoyed the Belkin TuneTalk Stereo as well.
TuneTalk Stereo
Using this mic for direct speech recording, the AT ATR35S.
I concur with IHR’s analysis that the flash-based Nano’s provide much better results in regards to disk fragmentation (as it causes ’skipping’) with hard disk based iPods. I experienced the same with my 5G Video iPod. Also, for sound effects recording, or recording ambiance, you can hear the hard drive spin-up, so the Nano rules. And the processor feels faster on the (3G) Nano, more quickly going in and out of the dialogs for the voice recording screens.
Here are some recordings of thunder and ambiance using the TuneTalk Stereo on a 3G Nano. One, two, three, four.

Photography Fun

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

I saw an image on the web today that gave me the idea to use this very short tripod I have, try about 3 inches tall, to place my camera places I can’t get, or capture unusual angles.

Rocks

Rocks

DIY Speakers For The Wise

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Bill Fitzmaurice is the maestro when it comes to DIY horn-loaded speaker systems. He’s got designs large and small, wedge, sub and tall. I’m seriously considering one of his designs for our new church location (I’m entertaining a single copy of the dual 12 version.)
Omni 12 Top

My last DIY project served us well, but I’m looking for something with a little more projection and defined dispersion. The high SPL of all his designs are an added bonus. I’ll probably recycle my existing sub, after that I think a couple of these loaded with dual 12’s would do nicely.
Tuba 24 Sub

Our previous PA “tops” (times 4). Those are dual Vifa 8’s (same as used in one of the older Mackie self-powered studio monitors), Audax Pro (PR series) 6 inch mid (used by EAW for eons), and Audax PR series tweet.

Vifa/Audax Cabinets

Vifa/Audax Cabinets

The sub, those are the venerable Swan 305 woofer from Madisound, now “out of print.”

Swan 305 X 4 Cabinet

Swan 305 X 4 Cabinet

Bear in mind, this is all in a 40 X 40 room with 10 foot ceilings.

Adobe Lightroom It Is

Monday, August 18th, 2008

Lightroom made a believer out of me. There are a couple factors in its favor that don’t entirely have to do with its feature set, one is the $99 educational buy I qualify for as a homeschooler, the other is it’s performance on less-than-bleeding-edge hardware. For right now my MDD 1.25 dually has to do the job, and Lightroom officially runs on it and can get the job done. Beyond that the loupe is the only thing from Aperture that I’m jealous of, but at least the RGB values are displayed and dynamically follow the cursor in Lightroom. The main selling point beyond that is that it seems to be a more transparent and less demanding front-end to Photoshop, it’s just easier to relegate it to being a “pro” RAW converter to replace the Camera RAW plug-in, and skip all the library features. “Fill light” rules! (UPDATE 3/18/10) I take back my narrow-minded view of the product and will say that I use the library features as much as the rest of it.

Lightroom

Do Hard Things – Another Excellent Book

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

I haven’t gotten to this one yet but my pastor is reading it and is very impressed with the book, not just for teens! Do Hard Things. Their brother is the author of another excellent book, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”.

Do Hard Things

Raising A Modern-Day Knight

Monday, August 11th, 2008

Many of the fathers in our church finished reading the book “Raising a Modern Day Knight” (and related materials – including the videos) recently.

RMDK

I highly recommend this course (or just the book) to any father, whether young or old, there’s something in here for you.