Pant-wettingly-funny audio

Here are a couple of half-hour recordings I came across from years ago - they still make me laugh heartily and so I share them (as MP3 format files) for your pleasure.

• The Quanicles from Michael Biggins - bear in mind that four of the voices are one guy! Even better than the Jerky Boys;
  

  In this epic series of calls that lasted an entire evening, I play 4 different characters; John Dandell (who is once again in action as a police officer who works specifically for a telephone company), the operator - Joana, the ancient ninja master - master Shreddar (known though out these calls as... the voice.), and the 15 year old - Matt Cheddar. Poor Quan has no idea I am doing all the voices and truly believes that all of these people are real (except for the voice of master Sheddar, who he thinks is Matt) and will do anything to convince the cop (John Dandell) that Matt Cheddar (the teenage mutant ninja turtles fan) is crank calling him. To make things even funnier, I even let one of the characters I am doing, Joana (the operator), side with Quan.

  
  Just over half an hour long, download here.


• Robin Williams on Steve Wright (Radio 1 from 10th May 1989) - back them Williams was the king of improv. I've cut the music but left in the bumpers and stings so you can remember how the late eighties sounded! Get it here - listen for the Jimmy Swaggart references.
  

mp3DirectCut

mp3DirectCut is a fast and extensive audio editor and recorder for compressed mp3. You can directly cut, copy, paste or change the volume with no need to decompress your files (e.g. to wav format) for audio editing. This saves encoding time and preserves the original quality, because nothing will be re-encoded.

MP3s, DRM & The Zune

I listened to Paul Thurrot's podcast - Windows Weekly - which is always interesting, especially with Vista upon us. Episode seventeen features an interview with David Caulton of the Microsoft Zune team. Although it isn't yet launched here in the UK there are several retailers that carry it. A couple of the guys who I work with have them and I have to say they are pretty sweet.
I have been pretty negative about iPods in the past and to be honest I don't see any reason to change my view. Apple need competition and I think the Zune is the gadget to do it - as long as they let it connect over 802.11 to a network rather than just peer-to-peer - having to hook something up with a cable to get content onto it seems very 20th century! The screen on the Zune is lovely - definately superior to the video iPod. The GUI is tasty as well (although missing any direct podcasting support!).

So, it got me thinking about buying music etc. and I realised that with the exception of a couple of quite niche music stores (including the splendid BillTunes) I still buy all my music as CDs. It seems that an industry that has spent a quarter of a century selling digital music without DRM (the compast disc) is now bleeting about how users can only use music they've paid for as the industry sees fit. I have several digital music players - car HD player, couple of cheap flash-based players, my PDA/'phone, and PCs running several different OSes - the only format they all support is MP3 and so I'm never going to download DRM-crippled music from an online store who haven't taken the care to compress the music properly. The 128kBit files from iTunes aren't HiFi (and they wouldn't play on ANY of my hardware!) and, in fact, there is no alternative for someone who (a) cares about the music, and (b) cares about how they spend their cash to buying CDs and ripping them yourself - you at least have a chance of making decent sounding MP3s at an acceptable bitrate (192kbits VBR - all the way baby!).

MP3 for podcasts

Rupert asked me about hosting a podcast for a chum of his who is involved in the Pandora music project. In fact he made me a Vigilantes of Love station on there - very cool!
Anyhow with all this in mind I thought I'd summerise some of the steps I use for the perfect sounding speech podcast!

• Record straight to hard disk - don't go via analogue tape or any compressed system. Pay attention to levels - you can't recover clipped levels after the event so it's better to record low rather than high - try and aim for peaks at -10dBfs.
  
• Once in Audition or Audacity you need to remove any DC bias and normalise the signal.
  
• Save it back to disk (keeping it uncompressed) but convert it to mono - stereo does chew up twice as much space/bandwidth - and you don't need it.
  
• The Levelator is a superb post-process compressor for speech.
  
• Re-import the Levelat'ed(!) file back into your DAW software and save the file out as an MP3 with the following specs; 48kBits, CBR, mono. Why CBR Phil? Well, this MP3 might be played on one of hundreds of ancient and new devices. My first MP3 player was a Diamond Rio500 which definately didn't support variable bit rate! For mono speech the difference in quality is not great.
  
• ID3 tags - get them right - for both ID3 v.1 and v.2 flavours. I prefer Tag & Rename for getting that stuff done - it supports all the standard as well as custom frames. It's very cool to imbed an image with your podcast as well as notes, URLs etc. That MP3 file will have a life of it's own once it's running out via an RSS feed and you want to have the best chance of folks being able to find you. You'll be suprised how many aggregator sites scrap your file.
  
• FeedBurner is the best way to make compliant XML for the RSS feed with a multi-media enclosure.
  
• Finally, make sure you subscribe to your own feed (in Juice or iTunes etc.) - you should be the first to know if your feed gets broken.

That's it - go forth and podcast!

More Mellotron nonsense

Radio 4 had a great documentary on the the fabulous keyboard instrement made so famous by Genesis et al.
Sampledelica, History of the Mellotron.mp3

mp3DirectCut

mp3DirectCut is a fast and extensive audio editor and recorder for MP3. You can directly cut, copy, paste or change the volume with no need to decompress your files for audio editing. This saves encoding time and preserves the original quality, because nothing will be re-encoded.

Podzinger - cleverest technology so far THIS CENTURY!

I heard about Podzinger on the Inside the Net podcast and thought it sounds neat but I couldn't believe it did what they suggested - a Google-like service that trawls mp3 podcasts (NOT iTunes ACC encoded content - Ha!) does speech recognition and then builds a hash-table based on timecode so that when you do a text-search of what was said and then you can play the file from a few seconds before the utterance right there - in the browser!
Now my interest comes from the fact that in the mid-80's I was doing a degree in maths & programming and I spent my final year doing a thesis on speech-recognition. I did build a system that could reliably recognize about two-dozen words spoken by one person - all coded in native x86 and Pascal! I was aware of multiple-speaker / large vocabulary recognizers but this system is something else. I notice that BBN are the company behind it and since they built the original nodes of ARPAnet they clearly have a long technical pedigree.
Anyhow - give it a go - type in a word like "Media Portal" and see what podcasts are talking about homebrewed PVRs (for example).

Podcasting and all that - I'm amazed by how much I like Adam Curry's Daily Source Code given it had quite a Mac emphasis and also seems to have no post-production. He does it live like a trad radio show which seems to fly in the face of podcasting and it's anti-radio paradigm. It is a good listen though.
I did reflect on my MP3 listening habits over the last couple of years that really started in 2001 with Chris Parillo's radio show "Call for help" that used to come out of a station in Des Moine. Someone (I don't recall who) who lived in the area used to snag the audio and make it available as an MP3. He put me onto Total Recorder that I've been using ever since to grab internet radio streams (in effect creating PodCasts from anything that streams).
In closing I'm also really enjoying my friend Kevin Cade's cast First Person Show - he interviews interesting people - that's it!

Jackass JoeJoe's RenameMaster utilities was a utility I came across when I had to selectively rename about six hundred HTML files within several thousand - no leading zeros on files numbers below ten. This made it a breeze and I normally pride myself on being able to do anything through a command prompt! It also has great rename options for MP3 and JPEGs (can stick in all the metadata you can discover) - a must for webmasters and folks with big music collections everywhere - and it's free!.

You gotta love open source!
I have a Neo35 car MP3 disk system - thirty gigs of MP3s in the boot and a wired remote on the dash - very nice - all my CDs in the car! Anyhow - about a year ago (and a few days outside the warranty period!) it developed an annoying fault whereby the back key would randomly press itself (sending the song back to the start). Once this started it was like it until you reset and sometimes you had a few minutes grace, sometimes half an hour. I was is a logic issue as it does it whether the wired remote is attached or even if the disk is in the USB caddy you use to download into it on the PC. Ho hum - then, along comes the Open Neo Project where the company has opened the firmware to the wider programming community and they've produced a version that allows you to re-map the keys - nuff said! I'm back in-car-MP3-nirvana!

I use my SmartPhone to listen to MP3 content every day - music and spoken. My beefs with the Microsoft Media Player are:
1. Takes an age to fire up - I presume it scans my entire 256meg SD card for content every time it runs.
2. It often stutters during playback (doesn't seem bitrate related - 32kbit spoken content or 160kbit music is equally effected),
3. It doesn't save the playback position when you leave the application - half way through an hour long radio programme and you're stuffed!
4. No jog/shuttle within a file (see note 3!)
5. If you receive a 'phone call when listening it quits the application (see note 3 and 4!),
6. No eq.
7. No playlists.
8. It slows the 'phone down so that other functions are unusable while it is running - can't compose emails etc.
PocketMusic suffers none of these inadequacies and is free! get it here.
Oh, it also supports WinAmp skins (hmm - not top of my agenda! I'd rather a command line interface!).
That URL was wrong - now it's right!

Results of 64kbit/s Listening Test

Interestingly venerable MP3 codecs fair better than more recent Windows Media and Quicktime.

1. No codec at 64 kbit/s can claim to be as good as mp3 at 128 kbit/s.
2. High efficiency AAC (AAC with spectral band replication, similar to mp3 with SBR, aka mp3pro) makes a good first showing, being the first among equals (he-aac, mp3pro, and ogg vorbis).
3. WMA9, Real, and Quicktime AAC make poor showings. While better than the hoary mp3 at 64 kbit/s, they are definitely worse than the top three 64 kbit/s contenders.