Monsters from the Id 怪獣大悪脳

In honor of getting my new phone setup, I present you with some goodies:

The first picture I took with my phone.

In fact I've been playing with Gallery as an online photo album. I've set one up and even got it interfacing with my phone, so now I can send out an email with a picture attached to it and it is instantly posted to my photo moblog album. (That's why I was so interested in getting email to work on my cellphone.) The interface is still pretty ugly on the backend. I need to clean it up more, but it works. These guys will do it for you but it kept bouncing back at me with password errors when I tried to use their service.

[Update: I would recommend not using the scripts at the "interfacing" link above. There's some problems with them. I found a better method. Follow the link in my trackback section below for more information.]

I've been using iPhoto and a .Mac account to setup my photo albums. It's so freakin' easy it's hard to say 'no' to. But it's also a one-trick pony. I can't do that whole moblog thing with it. Plus I have a lot more space on this server.

Now I just need to setup Gallery to interface with Movable Type. I love my job but it would be cool to figure out a way to get paid to tinker as a side thing. :)

Oh, and if you've got a cellphone that plays MP3s, here's a sweet-ass little jingle for your ringtone. Those of you who know me and the cellphones that I've owned over the years, know that there's one particular song that I have always programmed in for my ringer---not the one I'm giving you---I have to stay somewhat unique. I am very excited that now I can actually use a bit of the real song on my phone. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but I will say, "I pity the foo' who don't love my ringtone!"

Posted by Jon at 6:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

As previously mentioned, I have a new Motorola V600 cellphone and I got it setup with all the Wireless Internet fun you could hope for from Cingular Wireless, including getting it to talk to my Mac PowerBook via Bluetooth. It was quite a struggle, let me tell you. I'm going to document the salient points here so maybe others can learn something. If you're a Windows or Linux user, it doesn't mean there isn't good stuff here, it just means not all of it will be applicable. There's probably some useful stuff here for Cingular Wireless customers with other phones too. I should mention that I'm in Los Angeles. The settings should be the same here as in other parts of the country, at least for GPRS, but who knows.

[Update: You need to have some form of Cingular's Wireless Internet Express turned on for this method to work.]

At first let me just say that I couldn't have gotten through this without the help of information from a lot of useful websites. The NSLog(); post about the V600 and iSync is chock full of good information in the comments. And in particular, Ross Barkman's homepage has a lot of great modem scripts. He also has a ton of information about GPRS networks around the world. This MacInTouch page, this page from All The Pages Are My Days, this Unofficial Apple Weblog page, and this MacRumors forum topic all have handy info. (Notice the lack of a mention of the Cingular website.)

Actually that's not entirely true, Cingular has---in my opinion---nothing but fluff on their regular homepage. However, if you notice down at the bottom, there's a link for "Developers Forum". Here's where the strings come in. I actually only discovered it after going through several "customer service" agents on the phone.

"I'm sorry, sir, we don't offer email on the phone you have. Only on the Blackberrys."

"No. You're wrong. Let me talk to someone else."

Finally they put me on with the floor manager of customer service or something like that. He tried to tell me that if I wanted to check my email on my phone, I'd have to get information about that from my Internet Service Provider. I informed him that since I was trying to do it on his phone, he was my ISP. He wasn't buying it though.

Finally I said, "Let's forget the whole email thing. What if I wanted to use the phone as a Bluetooth Modem with my laptop? What settings do I need for that?"

Again we went around with it and he finally suggested I sign up as a developer---no charge---because they could probably give me all the settings I was looking for. And for once he was right.

[Update: Actually those support people were kind of correct. It's not a question of offering, Cingular doesn't officially support setting up email on phone. Basically it works but the tier one staff isn't trained in how to do it, and tier two staff will try to talk you into paying extra for Data Connect services.]

This little treasure of a document I found over at their developer site. All the dial-in phone numbers, APN, Username, and Password information you could ever ask for from Cingular. Some of this information is over at Ross Barkman's site. There basically seems to be two different APNs---WAP.CINGULAR and ISP.CINGULAR---to connect to, and a few different usernames depending on compression---WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM, ISPDA@CINGULARGPRS.COM, and ISP@CINGULARGPRS.COM.

Here's how I got mine to work:

Part 1 --- Setting Up Email On The Motorola V600 Phone

1. Bring up the "Messages" menu on your cellphone.

2. Press the "Menu" button to enter "Msg Center Menu".

3. Select "Email Msg Setup".

4. Change the "ISP Settings" to this:

   Connection Type: GPRS
   APN Address: WAP.CINGULAR
   Username: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
   Password: CINGULAR1
   DNS IP: 66.209.10.201

The rest of the settings, you'll need to supply yourself. As I was informed many times by many different Cingular people, they don't give you an email address. You can use IMAP4 or POP3 to talk to your account. Obviously you'll need to know the Username and Password for your email account. You'll also need what they call a "Sending Host" and a "Receiving Host".

The "Sending Host" is the SMTP server. You'll need access to an open one. Many SMTP servers only offer access from their own domain. Unfortunately, if you need to supply more than a standard address like "smtp.yourhost.com", it won't work with the phone. I first tried to set it up with my .Mac account, but that requires "smtp.mac.com:username" and the phone doesn't like it. Actually Cingular does have an SMTP server you can use "photo.mycingular.com" but be warned that it will stamp a message at the bottom of all your emails:

============================================================

Photo Messaging brought to you by Cingular Wireless http://www.cingular.com. You can send the sender of this email a Text Message by simply replying to this message.

The "Receiving Host" is usually called the "Mail Server" or "Incoming Mail Server" by most email software. Put the appropriate info in that field. And don't forget to fill out the "Return Address" field with your email address. I don't think it derives it from the other fields.

That's it. (Actually there are other settings like whether or not to download attachments, saving copies on the server, etc. but those are up to you.) Once you have that info in, you make a new email under the "Create Message" menu, and you can check your mail under the "Email Msgs" menu. Not too hard. And you have some big benefits. You won't be using up any of your SMS or MMS quotas, and people will see an address that they're used to---not "phonenumber@mms.mycingular.com". (That address works, by the way. You can receive emails as MMS messages on your phone if people send to that address. Well it works if you replace "phonenumber" with your actual 10-digit number. Hopefully that was pretty obvious. Any mail received through that address will count against your quota as an MMS message. But it does support attachments. Plain text email can be sent to the phone through "phonenumber@mobile.mycingular.com". This will count against your SMS quota.)

I should also note that there is that other APN address, ISP.CINGULAR, and a couple different usernames to go with it. Those didn't work on my phone. Only the WAP one did. I called Cingular back after getting it to work and explained everything to them and asked if the connection would be faster if I could use the other APN. The person I talked to couldn't really say. And frankly, I was so happy to have it working, I moved on. If anyone else knows and knows what I should say to the Cingular people, I would appreciate a comment.

[Update: I have since figured out that the ISP.CINGULAR APN address is for their Data Connect service which uses the EGPRS (EDGE) network. This has faster speeds, up to 128kbps, but only for devices that support it. Not the V600. The Data Connect plans are much more expensive than the Wireless Internet Express plans. So if your phone only supports standard GPRS you might as well stick with Wireless Internet Express.]

Part 2 --- Pairing The V600 To Your Mac With Bluetooth

This one is not too difficult either but it's easy to get it mixed up because there are two different ways to do it. The first thing you need to do is delete the pairing with the phone if one already exists. If you've been having trouble with it dropping the connection when you don't want it too, this should fix it. So delete away. You can also delete the pairing on the phone side by going under "Settings" to "Connection", selecting "Bluetooth" and going under "Device History". Select the computer, press the "Menu" button and select "Delete". Now you're ready to begin.

On the Mac, bring up your System Preferences and go into the Bluetooth pane. Make sure that "Support Non-Conforming Phones" is checked in the "Settings" tab. You might also want to check "Show Bluetooth status in the menu bar". That menu will make things easier. That's it with the preferences. You can close up System Preferences.

Under the Bluetooth menu in the menu bar that you justed turned on, select "Set up Bluetooth Device". (You can also run the program "Bluetooth Setup Assistant" in your Utilities folder. Same thing.) Go through this whole assistant doing whatever it asks. Before you move off the first page though, you need to make your cellphone discoverable.

Settings -> Connection -> Bluetooth -> Setup -> Find Me

Now back on the computer, run through the rest of the setup assistant. You'll have to respond to a few things on your computer and on the phone so keep it handy. One of the last things the assistant will ask you is if you want to set up the phone for wireless internet. Go ahead and say "yes". We'll refine this a bit in Part 3. You'll need those WAP settings from Part 1. Make sure you enter the APN, WAP.CINGULAR, where it asks for the "Telephone Number". Select any modem script, you'll change it later.

Now you're paired. You might want to set Bluetooth to "On" on your phone. It's in that same Setup screen that you made the phone discoverable.

So what can you do now that you're paired?

[Update: iSync 1.5 supports the V600 but through a USB cable, not Bluetooth.]

One thing you can't do is iSync. I know. I know. Cry your heart out. I'm sure Apple will add support at some point, but they haven't yet. You'll deal. Trust me. The easiest way to get your addresses into the phone is like this:

1. Create a new group in Address Book and call it "Mobile" or "Cellphone" or whatever.

2. Drag all the addresses on you want on your phone into it. (You can't do much more with this group right now. It's basically just for organization, but in the future when iSync supports the V600, you can sync the whole group.)

3. Select the first address in your group.

4. Under the "Card" menu select "Send This Card".

5. Select your cellphone from the list that pops up.

6. Accept the vCard on your cellphone.

7. Repeat at step 3 as necessary.

You can only do one address at a time. You can select several at once if you want but only the first one will be imported into the phone. If any of your addresses are listed as a Company with the little building icon in Address Book, they won't go over to the phone correctly. The "Name" field on the phone only reads the "Name" field on the vCard---not the "Company" field when the "Name" field is empty. You'll either have to enter these manually or change the way they're named in Address Book.

Another things you can do is send files back and forth to the phone. The easiest way to do this is to select "Browse Device" from the Bluetooth menu in the menu bar. Select your phone from a list. A new "Browsing" window will pop up in which you'll see three folders on your phone---audio, picture and video. Want to guess what goes in each? If you take any pictures with the built-in camera on the phone, you'll find them in the "picture" folder.

You can put MP3s in the audio folder and use them as ringtones, but let me make a few suggestions. You only have 5MB total memory on the phone. That's for the address book, MP3s and other ringtones, pictures, plus any games or other software you might have downloaded to it. Keep the MP3s small. Use an audio editor to trim your song or sound to 15 to 20 seconds. I would strongly suggest making them mono MP3s at 64kbps (or less). If you're using iTunes to make the MP3s, select "Custom" on the Importing tab of the prefences. Set the Stereo Bit Rate to 128kbps if you want a 64kbps mono file. Make sure VBR is unchecked. And under Channels select Mono.

There are programs that can do things with the phone now that you're paired. OnSync will sync addresses between Address Book and your phone. It didn't work very well for me. Maybe you'll have better luck. I found the "Send This Card" method in the Address Book did what I needed it to. GSM Remote and BluePhoneMenu will also do various things. Maybe something there catches your fancy.

Part 3 --- The V600 As A Bluetooth Modem On The Mac

The moment you've all been waiting for... internet from anywhere with your Mac laptop. First you'll need some new modem scripts. Download these from Ross Barkman's homepage. Copy them into /Library/Modem Scripts.

The rest is a bunch of settings.

1. Bring up "System Preferences" and select the "Network" pane.

2. Select "Bluetooth" from the "Show" menu.

3. Under the "TCP/IP" tab, make sure that Configure IPv4 is set to "Using PPP".

4. Under the "PPP" tab, you'll need to use the WAP settings from Part 1. They're probably already filled in from when you ran the Setup Assistant in Part 2. But double-check anyway:

   Service Provider: Cingular
   Account Name: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
   Password: CINGULAR1
   Telephone Number: WAP.CINGULAR

5. Click the "PPP Options" button.

6. Uncheck "Send PPP echo packets" and "Use TCP header compression".

7. Under the "Proxies" tab, you shouldn't have to change anything. No proxies.

8. Under the "Bluetooth Modem" tab, set the Modem to "Motorola GPRS CID1". This is the one that worked for me. There are several that came with the downloaded scripts that you could try. Some people have also reported success with the "Motorola iR Timeport (7089)"

9. Uncheck "Enable error correction and compression in modem".

10. Uncheck "Wait for dial tone before dialing".

11. Click "Apply Now" and close the System Preferences.

You should be good to go now. Make sure you don't have a current internet connection. Turn off your Airport if you have one. Put the computer to sleep. Unplug your ethernet cable if that's how you are online. Wake the computer back up.

You need to run Internet Connect to dial-in with a modem (Bluetooth or otherwise). You'll find it in your Applications folder. Click on the Bluetooth tab. Select "Cingular" from the Configuration menu. Click the "Connect" button. In a moment you should be online wirelessly.

Obviously this is slower than a broadband connection, infact it's slower than a 56K modem. It's about the speed of a 28.8K modem. You'll probably want to limit the amount of downloading you do. You can tell Safari to not load images by unchecking "Display images when the page opens" in the "Appearance" tab under preferences. If you're using .Mac or another IMAP-based email account, you'll need to select "Synchronize" under the "Mailbox" menu to keep local copies of your email for offline reading.

So there you go. Hopefully some people find this helpful. If anyone has any other comments, suggestions, tips, tricks, questions, etc. please leave a comment below.

Update: July 30, 8:15 PM ---

Ok, I must be foolish or something but I was concerned. After posting this, I went around to some of the websites that I referenced to see if I could add trackbacks or comments to generate a little more traffic. (Hey, we all like to have visitors.) I noticed a comment at the Unofficial Apple Weblog page that I have listed above, that mentioned that the WAP settings I've used are a "pay as you go" service. That person talked to a "tier two tech" at Cingular and had things setup properly using ISP.CINGULAR. I was concerned that even though I signed up for the $20/month unlimited media package, I would get a bill for all these connections through WAP. I spent a lot more time on hold, a lot of explaining what I was trying to do to "tier one" customer service trying to get them to transfer me. They finally did.

I talked to a very, very knowledgable and nice tier two tech who told me about some of their options. It sounds like they're only just now setting up plans to cover this whole idea of outside email through your cellphone and connecting to the internet on your laptop through your phone. The MEdia packages that they're offering right now are just for specific cellphone-based services like shopping at the Cingular Mall and going online through the phone's browser. The data connect plans they have right now are rather expensive for not much data. Basically she said that the WAP settings I'm using right now shouldn't work. It's just a bonus that they are.

"But my understanding is that it's a 'pay as you go' setting. Is there a bunch of data traffic on my bill? Am I going to get billed the $20 for the 'MEdia' package plus extra for this WAP stuff?"

She looked at my bill. "No, none of it has shown up. Because it doesn't work, right?"

"Oh, of course not. I am not able to connect to the internet on my laptop through my phone. Thank you so much for all your help."

So I don't know what the deal is. Everyone who calls up seems to get told something different. I suspect that they will finalize their policy on all of this at some point soon. And at some point my unlimited data connect service for $20 will stop working---or at least I'll have to start paying for it.

[Update: The deal is the Wireless Internet Express versus Data Connect that I've mentioned in my other "Update" boxes throughout this post.]

Anyone have any different stories?

Update: July 31, 3:15PM ---

Another note about things. I was prowling around in the guts of my phone (the software guts, not the hardware ones). I was looking for a way to setup web bookmarks. Let's face it, text entry on a cellphone is not exactly all that fun. Yes, Cingular is nice enough to let you setup bookmarks on the My Wireless Window webpage that are accessible from your phone, but you have to go through a couple pages to get to them from there. Direct access for some of the key ones is preferable in my book.

I noticed that when you go into WebAccess on the V600, there's a option called "Web Sessions". On my phone it was set up with two items: Cingular and MMS. I edited the Cingular setup and lo and behold! It has the same settings that I used for my email and laptop, WAP.CINGULAR and all that. So it seems to me that if the default "Cingular" setup of the internet uses that, it's very likely that they are the correct settings. And even though the nice tier two tech support woman I talked to said I shouldn't be able to do what I was doing, I don't think that's the case. It seems like a proper GPRS setup to me. Not a pay per use at all---unless that's the plan that you have. Since I'm on a $20/month unlimited use plan, I shouldn't have to pay anything extra no matter if I'm surfing the web from my phone, sending email from my phone, or wirelessly connecting my laptop to the internet through the phone.

One advantage that the WebAccess setting had over my email is that it also had settings for CSD dialup---not just the GPRS APN. I'm assuming the advantage would be if I were not in a GPRS zone like LA, and just in a standard digital zone, I could still go online. I would have to change my email settings manually to switch it over to CSD. Those CSD settings are clearly spelled out in that PDF file I linked to above.

And of course I was able to setup my bookmark as well---the actual reason I was poking around at things. All I did was highlight the "Cingular" Web Session, press the "Menu" button, select "Copy Entry" from the menu, give it a new name, and finally go in and edit the setting, giving it the new URL I wanted it to go to. Not too hard.

Update: July 31, 4:15PM ---

Ok, I swear this'll will might be the last update. I think I've deciphered the whole network connection methods vs. pricing plan deal at least as far as Cingular goes.

Cingular offers three different types of internet access:

• Wireless Internet
• Wireless Internet Express
• Data Connect

Wireless Internet is their term for the older CSD method of connecting. It runs at about 9kbps and you pay for the access time. Hopefully you don't have to use this method.

Wireless Internet Express is GPRS running at up to 30kbps. This is the method that most phones now will support. This uses the WAP.CINGULAR APN. On these plans you pay for the amount of data transferred not the amount of time spent. They also offer their MEdia Works package which gives you an unlimited amount of transfers for $20/month.

Data Connect is a EGRPS network, also known as EDGE. This is that extra fast wireless that supports up to about 128kbps. It will of course run at the slower standard GPRS speed if your phone doesn't support it. This is method uses the ISP.CINGULAR APN. The data connect packages also are billed by the amount of data transferred. Their low-end package is $20/month for 5MB all the way up to their high end of $80/month for unlimited.

Cingular only "officially" supports connecting laptops to the internet through their Data Connect program---which also means you have to be running their software which is Windows only. Yes, it supports that fast EDGE speed but only if your phone supports it. The Motorola V600 does not. So if you have convinced a Cingular tech support person to turn on Data Connect access for you and you don't have to pay those fees for it, I congratulate you. However if you're using a V600 phone, you're not getting any more speed out if it than if you were using the WAP settings.

But as I've shown if you use the settings above, you can get still get your laptop online---though in an "unsupported" method---and do it at the rates that they offer on their Wireless Internet Express service. Basically the only advantage in going with Data Connect would be if you had a phone that supported EDGE. Phone Scoop is a good place to look for stats on phones.

Update: August 10, 3:30PM ---

Apple has released iSync 1.5 which supports the V600 with a USB data cable---part number SKN6311 from Motorola. I have a post about it here.

Update: August 15, 7:15AM ---

A recent reader was looking for Cingular internet settings for his V600. He had the phone with AT&T but had switched to Cingular. He thought others might find it useful so I'm adding it:

Name: Cingular
Homepage: http://device.home
Service Type1: WAP
Gateway IP1: 066.209.011.061
Port1: 9201
Domain1:
Service Type2: WAP
Gateway IP2:
Port2: 0
Domain2:
DNS1:
DNS2:
TimeOut: 10 minutes
CSD No.1: +14152441012
User Name1: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM 
Password1: CINGULAR1
Speed(Bps)1: 9600
Line Type1: ISDN
CSD No.2:
User Name2:
Password2:
Speed(Bps)2:
Line Type2:
GPRS APN: wap.cingular
User Name: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
Password: CINGULAR1

These settings are all available in the "Device Settings" document from Cingular that I linked to near the beginning of this page. But here it's all spelled out for people with V600s. The setup menu for other phones will probably be a bit different. The settings are the same.

Posted by Jon at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (42) | TrackBacks (6)

Wow! What a wacky couple of days. And it's not quite over yet. I've been in super-geek tech mode for a while now. I succumbed to temptation and decided to get a new cellphone. Motorola's überfon, the V600.

The "talking on the phone" part of it was easy. Pop the SIM out of my old phone into the new and it's all good. It's all the other goodies---the Bluetooth and the Wireless Internet that took forever. It's all working now. I'll compile all my info into a post later. I'm sure that others will find it helpful.

And now of course I'm having trouble with my ISP. That's the other thing that's been driving me nuts. Charter Pipeline has some bizarro routing bug that's popped up. Most websites work fine. However .Mac does not. In fact everything under the mac.com domain is not working for me which means I can't check my email, I can't mount my iDisk, I can't get to my mac.com website. Nothing. When I talked to Charter tech support, they could get to it fine, so something weird is going on.

Plus FTP to pair.com, the kind people who host this website, is being wonky. I can connect to the server and download anything I like off my website but I can't upload a thing. It keeps timing out. I noticed something rather suspicious in the Transmit log:

Cmd: PASV
227: Entering Passive Mode (209,68,1,138,239,245)
Cmd: STOR SciFi and Fantasy Books to Read.txt
150: Data connection accepted from 68.190.214.52:49772; transfer starting.
Could not read reply from control connection -- timed out.

Am I crazy or is the FTP port supposed to be 21? Not 49772. That's what makes me think there's a routing problem at Charter. But hey, what do I know.

I just checked again, and now everything seems to be working correctly. (knock wood) So it's only been like 17 hours of downtime for me.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot... I've also started teaching myself Perl with the help of this excellent book.

Posted by Jon at 3:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I just finished reading "A Game Of Thrones" by George R.R. Martin. What a great fantasy novel! Or maybe I should say, what a great medieval novel. There's definitely a touch of fantasy in there but it's not full of wizards and goblins like many fantasy books. This one sets up a mysterious and possibly supernatural event right from the start and proceeds into the tangled web of politics.

It's more of a high middle ages book with knights defending the honor of ladies, and the thought that dragons, and giants, and the Others are fairy tales told to scare children. Much of the book focuses on the intrigues and machinations of the various families all vying for power in the kingdom. In fact at one point I was despairing because it seemed that everyone was so evil and deceitful. "Where is the hero?" I asked myself. But then I realized that the Stark family represented those ideals of "truth, liberty and justice" that we look for in our heroes. Everyone's bound to screw up at times of course, but they still hold to those ideals.

But don't worry there's fantasy in there too. Fairy tales must have some basis in fact, right? Late in the book when many of the diverse story lines developed into enjoyably unexpected areas, we start start to see that maybe dragons are real after all. Maybe there are giants out beyond the wall. And just who are these mysterious Others that everyone keep exclaiming oaths against?

Towards the end I was experiencing that delicious combination of anxiety---badly wanting to know what happens---and heart-ache over the looming end. Thankfully there are at least 3 more books in this series. I will definitely pick them up!

Posted by Jon at 3:30 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Xeni, the author of the "Wired" article about spatial sound, wrote me a nice letter this morning about yesterday's post. She basically said I should go read Iosono's website and my technical questions would be answered. I was a bit abashed at first. Here I was proclaiming the problems I thought I saw with this new technology and I hadn't even read their website. (Hey, our president has fully admitted that he doesn't watch the news or read the paper because he doesn't want to be exposed to those lies and biases. Can I use the same excuse?)

So I read it. I still have questions. Just more of them.

The one thing I noticed was that their theater system supports all the standard sound formats. You can feed it Dolby Digital, DTS, SDDS---even stereo---and it'll happily play it back. You won't get its super-bonus positioning features but you will get its "every seat in the theater sounds as good as every other" feature. That's certainly nice. I have my doubts that theater chains will be willing to fork over cash for that feature alone. "We gave them their stadium seating. What do they want from us, blood?" People care about good sound to a certain extent. The "sweet spot" in every chair might be too much to ask. But maybe I'm wrong.

The workings of the "spatial sound" part of this new Iosono system sounds like it is basically audio files plus metadata---the master track plus information about where to place it and move it and whatnot. That makes sense. Their website says that their workstation can take up to 64 sound files and place them or move them through the theater sound space.

I have to admit I'm still confused. What is their master sound format? Is there a master sound format? Is it simply an open-ended thing? Up to 64 tracks plus meta data and that's it? No built-in hard speaker assignments? So let's assume that it's something like that. How do you turn it over for encoding? Eight 8-track hard drives off the Tascam MMR-8 recorder? A firewire drive from Pro Tools with all 64 tracks on it? Maybe most people don't care about these things but this is the nitty-gritty tech stuff that I like to understand. Now after it's encoded, what gets shipped to theaters with the prints?

When you're dealing with a 5.1 master sound track it's pretty simple---6 channels of audio. That easily fits onto a hard drive. Since many stages make use of MMR-8 recorders, the drive from that machine will usually be sent to the NT Audio or one of the other facilities around Los Angeles that will encode the soundtrack on to the film. Dolby shows up on the dub stage with their own encoding gear and they'll generate a couple of MOs (Magneto-Optical Disks) with their Dolby-encoded master audio. These disks get shipped to the lab facility as well.

With a 5.1 master sound track, each channel of audio contains all the audio that is played from one speaker in a theater. Usually the layout is like this:

1. Left
2. Left Surround
3. Center
4. Right Surround
5. Right
6. Sub

That's what I'm wondering about with my questions. How does that process work for the Iosono system?

You need to have at least the 5.1 covered with this new system so you can fill up the space with sound. Pretty much all the dialogue comes out the center channel along with some of the sound effects and foley. Most of the sound effects and music are in the left and right speakers. The surrounds are used for reverb returns on music to give it more presence, backgrounds to create the environment, and sound effects for movement (i.e. bullet bys past the camera into the surrounds). At a minimum you need to recreate that in Iosono. Everything else is bonus.

But here's a problem that I see: predubbing. When the sound editors on a film show up on the stage for predubbing they have lots and lots of tracks of sound with them. This might be a typical breakdown:

• Dialogue --- 16 tracks
• ADR --- 24 to 32 tracks
• Group ADR --- 24 to 32 tracks
• Foley (Footsteps and Props) --- 32 tracks
• Backgrounds --- 96 tracks
• Sound Effects --- 32 to 200+ tracks

Sound Effects of course is the difficult one. If the film is a talkie, light romantic comedy, then you're probably closer to the 32 tracks. If you're dealing with an action movie you can easily go well beyond 200 tracks of effects. Foley could be similar. If you're dealing with a sci-fi or a period piece with lots of objects that are not "standard" to our world there might be many, many more tracks of props.

Now these cut tracks need to be predubbed to manageable amounts for the final mix. We usually deal with 8-track predubs or at least think of them in groups of 8-tracks. So you might wind up with something like this:

• Dialogue --- 1 8-track predub
• ADR --- 1 8-track predub
• Group ADR --- 1 or 2 8-track predubs
• Foley --- 2 8-track predubs
• Backgrounds --- 4 8-track predubs
• Sound Effects --- 4 to 15 8-track predubs

So even on a light show you can be looking at 104 tracks of sound after predubbing---and we still need to add music in there. That's more than the Iosono system can handle. You almost need to do a second predub to get that down to the 64 tracks.

It's not an impossible workflow to manage but it would take more time. And that is one of the critical points from my previous post. How much is a studio willing to spend on this?

I don't want anyone to misunderstand me on this---it sounds like a very cool system. I just wonder how it can fit it our existing time frame to accomplish our goals and will studios and theater chains be willing to shell out the cash for it?

Posted by Jon at 11:01 AM | Permalink

Wired has this article about a new "super" surround sound which uses more than 300 speakers in a theater to truly recreate an environment and place sounds anywhere within the room. Three hundred speakers is a couple more than the 6 that most theaters have today. (Actually theaters usually have more than 6 speakers. You'll often see many along the sides and in the back corners but they broadcast the same sound. There's still only 6 individual channels of source material that get played through those speakers.)

It's an interesting idea and those of us in the sound industry have often joked about the fact that eventually there will be speakers covering every single inch of space in theaters. (Obviously there was a bit of truth in that humor.) However without having actually seen the demo myself---someone please add me to the list next time :) ---I have to say that I have some doubts about this system.

I don't have doubts about the fact that we will have more than 6 channels of audio in a theater in the future. That's a given. In fact it's the present. There is actually a 6.1 system (7 channels) from Dolby called Dolby Digital Surround EX which adds a center surround speaker directly behind the audience. Often only the "high end" first run rooms in a movie complex are setup for EX. Plus not all soundtracks are mixed to support that. But all that aside, we will probably see other additional speakers added in the future. (If I had my way we'd have a high center speaker on the ceiling of the theater in the front. IMAX makes use of it because the screens are so large but for regular theaters it would allow sounds to not just go side-to-side but also up and down. Try to imagine a jet fly by with a high center speaker. It could be awesome.)

There are a couple of things that confuse me about this system. The first is how many channels of sound do you actually have? Ok, sure it has over 300 speakers. Does that mean there are 300 channels of sound? When we finish our final mix on a movie we wind up with a 6 track master. Dolby encodes that into data that sits between the sprockets of the 35mm print for Dolby Digital. DTS writes those tracks onto a CD-ROM which gets shipped with the print for theaters that support that standard. And SDDS writes it to both edges of the film---outside the sprockets. (Actually SDDS is a 7.1 system with 5 speakers up front instead of 3, but very, very few theaters have it anymore. Yet another proprietary format that Sony botched.) What do you do with a 300 track master?

Three hundred channels of sound is a completely unreasonable amount of material to turn over at the end of the mix. I'm certain that they actually use fewer but the question remains: how many?

Another big problem I see is their current interface. I have been on the stage with pretty much every big-name mixer in town and I cannot imagine any of them wanting to play with a light pen to place sounds around the room. It seems like it would take way too much time. Even though movie budgets are balooning to huge numbers, the vast majority of that goes to actors' salaries and special effects. Sound budgets are often smaller today then they were 10 years ago. You no longer have 30 sound editors on a crew cutting film and 5 assistants helping them. More often than not it's 10 editors and 1 or 2 assistants. And it's a similar thing on the dub stage. Typical films today predub in 3 or 4 weeks and final in 2 or 3. That's it. Seven or eight weeks on the final dub stage to create the master track.

Again, I wasn't actually at the demo so I don't know how easy it really is to use. But when I think of the time it can take on a stage just to pan a bunch of stereo car bys through the center speaker because an editor didn't turn it over as an LCR---not to mention the time involved to create a large action sequence like a gunfight bullets and debris flying all over the room---it seems that the light pen positioning would be awkward and slow. The pictures included with the article show a Pro Tools system sending what appears to be a single sound into their positioning system. That's not a realistic test for time, ease and usability. They should try it with the hundreds and hundreds of tracks that get turned over for your typical action sequence. How long does it take to do it then?

A final problem I see is the home theater market. DVDs are huge business for the movie industry. Lots of people have little 5.1 systems in their living rooms. How do you take a 300 channel mix and bring it down to a 5.1 for the DVD release? How many weeks are you willing to spend on that? And I do mean "spend". How much money will a studio pay for that down-mix? That's what it will really come down to. Your typical home theater cannot possible recreate the same range of frequencies that a good theater can, but at least the speaker assignments are the same. Now try to untangle a mess of sounds spread out over 300 channels and focus it down to 6. It seems to me that it would take weeks to do that.

After a day to do the printmaster on the final stage we usually spend 2 or 3 days making all the versions---Dolby Stereo, Dolby Surround, Mono, plus the M&E (music and effects) for the foreign versions. Now you need to extend that by what? A week? Two weeks? Just to get a 5.1 for DVD release? And what about the theaters that can't afford the "super" surround system? You're still going to need a 5.1 version for them.

It's a pretty cool idea. I'm not sure how soon we'll actually see it in action. Or if we'll ever see it in this incarnation. (I'm telling you, they should have invited me to the demo. I'd tell those Germans what they need to focus on. ;) )

Thanks (once again) to Boing Boing for making me aware of this. (It's kind of like the old "Are you a Beatles person or a Stones person?" question. Only this one is "Are you a Boing Boing person or a Fark person?" I'm a Boing Boing person.)

Posted by Jon at 8:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

No, this is not another Star Trek post. Nor a reference to the choice of Dave or Sammy in the new Van Halen greatest hits album. (We're all desparately trying to forget the fact that for a brief time there was a third.)

This is actually heralding the newly announced Movable Type 3.1 coming to a weblog near you on August 31. Many have critiqued Six Apart, particularly with the recent change in licensing, for continuing to provide weblog software that natively only supports static pages, while many other weblog and CMS systems are PHP based.

No longer. (Wait for it.) Movable Type 3.1 will offer the best of both worlds where publishers can decide on a per-template basis whether to offer a dynamic or static page. (We have titular line.) This is a huge step forward. There are distict advantages to both methods. Static pages offer a much lower server load while dynamic pages can generate information on the fly, instantly incorporating new content.

Other improvements include post scheduling, a subcategory management system, and new hooks for plug-in developers. Not to mention all the winning plug-ins from the recent contest.

I personally am anxious for this new software. It should certainly add whole new levels to what you can accomplish with your weblog.

Posted by Jon at 8:40 PM | Permalink

I watch a lot of Star Trek. I love that show---in all of its forms. I know I've said it before that I'd rather watch an episode of Star Trek then pretty much any other TV show out there. That's why I was glad when "Star Trek: Enterprise" was renewed for a fourth season. It's also why I love the fact that you can get every episode of every show (nearly) on DVD now. Ok, so they're about half-way through the "Voyager" release schedule and "Enterprise" hasn't started to show up yet. Still it's pretty awesome for Trek fans.

I've been making my way through season 3 of "The Next Generation" recently, and tonight I hit the episode. There are many good ones from that season and of course many would point to the Borg-intensive season finale "The Best of Both Worlds" as the point at which the series got really good. But for me, the episode is "Yesterday's Enterprise".

Yes, it is a "reset switch" episode where the hackneyed "it was all just a dream" story point is resolved through time travel, but it still stands out as one of the truly great episodes of any Trek series.

The Enterprise-D encounters a spacial anomaly and the Enterprise-C, thought lost 22 years before, appears through the rift. Suddenly everything is different. The Enterprise-D is no longer a ship of exploration. It is a battleship. The families are gone replaced by troops. And the Federation has been in a bloody war with the Klingons for 20 years.

This is one of those episodes where strong characters, a tight script and good acting evoke an emotional impact that is not often seen on television. Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes both display a subtly different Picard and Riker on the batteship, both with stronger personalities, more opinionated, which clash more often.

The true gem of course is the return of Tasha Yar. "Star Trek: The Next Generation" took a big step forward in world of television when it premiered in 1987. Sure there was a female doctor and ship's counselor but that wasn't stretching things particularly far. Tasha though was a different matter. She was the security officer and martial arts expert. How many TV shows or movies for that matter had a female action hero in 1987? It's too bad that Denise Crosby decided to leave the show by the end of the first season so Tasha had to be killed off by an evil black ooze.

Seeing Tasha Yar back on the bridge, if only in an alternate reality, is a real joy in "Yesterday's Enterprise". Seeing all the characters deal with the decision to send the Enterprise-C back through the anomaly and face certain death is probably the strongest point of the entire show---particularly with Tasha. Her decision to go with them so that she wouldn't have a meaningless death (via evil black ooze) is one of those times where even the strongest viewer gets a little misty-eyed.

If you haven't seen this episode before, I would strongly encourage you to take a look. It's truly a fine piece of television. And if you have, maybe it's been a while. Maybe it's time to enjoy it once again.

Posted by Jon at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

I have been getting hit pretty hardcore with the Trackback Spam today. It seems that every time a take a look at my email there's another 50 messages from MT saying that I have new trackbacks. And they're not real trackbacks of people writing about something I wrote---they're links to sex sites. So every couple of hours I've been going in and clearing them out. It's not terribly difficult under MT3, but it is annoying. I sure hope that Blacklist 2.0 is released soon. (Hell, I'd even go for a beta! hint hint.)

For those who have been experiencing the annoying Trackback Spam under MT2.6.x, Jay has some easy instructions for getting rid of it with Blacklist 1.6.4.

Posted by Jon at 3:36 PM | Permalink

I've been listening to a ton of Pink Floyd recently. You know how you get in those "moods"---there's that one album or maybe a particular genre is really speaking to you at the moment? I'm going through that with Pink Floyd. I'm not sure what sparked this. I've always been a fan, but I've only had the big four albums on CD. Ok, maybe the big 3 plus a smaller 4th: "Dark Side Of The Moon", "Wish You Were Here", "The Wall", and "Meddle". Oh yeah, I did have "Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" for a long time too. Oh, and "Momentary Lapse Of Reason" and "The Division Bell". Oh well. So I had a few of the very well known ones and some others.

I never owned a copy of "Animals". Not sure why. I just never did. I had many other albums on cassette when I was in high school. "Final Cut", "Atom Heart Mother", etc. But something spurred this Pink Floyd kick in me so I went out and picked up pretty much all the CDs I didn't have, and for about the past month now I've been listening to them a lot. Man! What good stuff. Of course those classic albums are amazing, but there are so many good songs on their other albums. They may not be a strong on whole but there are several great tunes from "Obscured By Clouds" and that live disk of "Ummagumma" is fantastic.

My buddy Ben gave the the "Live At Pompeii: Director's Cut" DVD a while back and I hadn't gotten around to checking it out. So that's gone into heavy rotation too. I have to say, the original concert film is great. Sure, it's pretty dated with its special effects, but it all fits with the time period. And the performances are awesome. It's actually pretty similar to the "Ummagumma" live disk plus 3 songs from "Meddle"---"Echoes", "One Of These Days", and "Mademoiselle Nobs" (an early version of "Seamus" ).

I'm very disappointed with the Director's Cut of the film however. Adrian Maben did himself a big disservice by releasing that cut. He had this great concert film, and he shot a lot of interesting stuff of Pink Floyd in the studio while they were making "Dark Side". He should have simply released a separate documentary of that material. Instead he combines the two together and adds in a bunch of extra new b-roll---NASA space archive footage, newly shot footage at various Ancient Rome museum exhibits, and some really cheesy CGI outerspace planet fly-by stuff. What he winds up with is a bizarre hodge-podge of seemingly unrelated material.

If there is one thing that's bummed me out about my recent music kick, it's that I wish I'd had these albums in my collection years ago, particularly "Animals". I don't know what I was thinking. One of the best parts is when Dave Gilmour's solo kicks in right around 3:30 in "Dogs". I might just have to do another Cool Song Parts with Pink Floyd tunes.

Posted by Jon at 4:59 PM | Permalink

This is a good article from the UK's Guardian about a study of illegal music downloads versus music sales. (Of course I found it because of Boing Boing. Those guys have everything.)

Previously I wrote about another study, this one done by professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago that showed the same thing. It is interesting to note that two independent studies obtained the same results. And of course in both instances they were dismissed by the RIAA as inaccurate.

This latest study brings up the point that between 1999 and 2003, the price of DVD players has dropped from nearly $1000 to "next to nothing" and that DVD discs have dropped 25% in price. And during the same time the price of CDs has risen by 10%. One of their explanations for a decrease in sales is that they've moved elsewhere from CDs to DVDs.

There is also this significant quote from the article:

Some even question whether the fall in sales the RIAA quotes is real, or a product of a creative redefinition of the word "sale". Even if it is real, there is one final fly in the ointment that can't easily be explained away: during the past nine months, CD sales in America have increased by 7%, despite continued growth in file sharing.

As Strumpf says: "If file sharing is killing record sales, why are records starting to sell better?"

As I said before, it doesn't seem that downloading MP3s from Kazaa and other illegal services can truly explain the claims made by the RIAA.

Posted by Jon at 9:23 PM | Permalink

Jay Allen creator of the amazing Movable Type plug-in, Blacklist, that helps greatly reduce the amount of comment and trackback spam on your website, just won the Grand Prize in the MT Plug-In Developer's Contest.

Congratulations, Jay! It couldn't happen to a more deserving guy.

Now maybe with the extra speed on that new G5 he'll be getting, he can hurry up get the 2.0 version out to us plebians. ;)

Posted by Jon at 8:11 PM | Permalink

Last night I decided to update the templates for my website. Movable Type basically uses webpages with custom variables to generate the pages on the website. MT3.01D was released a couple weeks ago. I upgraded the server software then but nothing else. There were several fixes to the way comments worked so I knew that I was going to have to update my templates if I wanted to use those. Plus they were supposedly truly XHTML 1.0 Transitional which the 3.0 versions were not.

I was a little nervous about it but it actually turned out to be quite easy. My templates are not much different from the ones that it ships with. Of course what tool made it so easy? BBEdit. What else? :)

I went through each template saving the original 3.01 version and my version as text files on my computer. Then I used BBEdit's "Find Differences" command from the Search menu. After selecting the original and my version, the two documents where displayed side-by-side with a third window at the bottom listing the lines numbers with the differences. By clicking on the line numbers, the effected areas where highlighted in each document. With that it was quite easy to make the necessary changes.

Of course I being who I am, was not quite satisfied with that easy step. I needed to make sure that my documents were XHTML 1.0 Strict. Which took a lot of debugging and running through W3C's page validator. That part took a bit longer. But now I am. Or at least I am with all of my recent posts. I still need to check some of the early ones. Plus it's not necessarily that easy to check all the comment pages that can be generated---preview and error and whatnot---since they are generated on the fly. I'll still have to look at those at some point.

BBEdit saves the day, yet again. You are using it yourself, aren't you?

Posted by Jon at 7:39 PM | Permalink

Since I've already started out the day with a political stance, I might as well continue. Paul Krugman wrote a fascinating editorial in the "New York Times" yesterday called "The Arabian Candidate" where he puts forth the idea that despite all the bumper stickers to the contrary, Al Qaeda would probably much prefer a second term Bush to Kerry.

Mr. Bush's "war on terror" has, however, played with eerie perfection into Osama bin Laden's hands - while Mr. Bush's supporters, impressed by his tough talk, see him as America's champion against the evildoers.

(The New York Times requires registration to read their online paper. With all the weblogs linking to articles from this paper and others, it's probably a good idea to start setting up accounts for yourself. However, I completely understand if you're miffed by this. Bug Me Not will help you out by giving you a username and password. Actually Cory Doctorow has an nice little blurb about the evils of registration.)

Thanks to Boing Boing (again) for leading me to Aaron Schwartz's site which lead me to the editorial.

Posted by Jon at 3:46 PM | Permalink

I found this quote at the top of the Download for Democracy website:

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

---Theodore Roosevelt

What a fantastic quote! Of course this fits perfectly with my sensibilities. This whole "love it or leave it" attitude that has been so pervasive in the American public, particularly during the George W. Bush administration and his war on terror, has really rubbed me the wrong way. In my mind it always seemed that criticism is very American. That our country was founded on the ideals of open discussion of ideas.

Aren't we the country who on July 4, 1776 said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Who decided that we would break our ties with the British monarchy because we were tired of the crown making unilateral decisions for us without regard for our own opinions.

Aren't we the same country who said on December 15, 1791, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

It says it all right there in the final clause, the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." That says to me that we can criticize the President. Before we abolished slavery, before we gave women the right to vote, we felt it was important that people could speak their mind about our government and our leaders.

So I decided to research the Roosevelt quote further. It sounds great but what was its context? We have unfortunately turned into a nation (and perhaps a world) of sound-bites. That quote seems to support an idea that I feel is important. But does it really?

America entered World War I on April 6, 1917. In September 1917, the Kansas City Star started running editorials by Theodore Roosevelt about the war. He probably seemed like a good choice. Not only was he a veteran of the Spanish-American War, but during his presidency he started to change America's tendency towards isolationism with his semi-imperial policies towards Central and South America. In fact after the Germans destroyed a field hospital on September 7, 1917, Roosevelt wrote a biting column in the paper about Germany's "calculated brutality" and their "deliberate policy of wickedness".

But if the paper was hoping to only get hawkish war cries from the ex-President they were out of luck. On May 7, 1918, he wrote the editorial which the quote above is from. The war in Europe was still raging. The armistice was not declared until November 11. And yet even during this, during wartime, Roosevelt felt it was important that we not forget that it is ok to speak out against the President and his policies. This is a longer version of the quote I found at The Theodore Roosevelt Association:

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.

I definitely need to learn more about Theodore Roosevelt. He sounds like he was a good man.

Posted by Jon at 12:59 PM | Permalink

Thirty-five years ago today Neil Armstrong stepped on to the surface of the moon. He was the first human to walk on the ground of something other than our own planet.

It's pretty remarkable to think that on May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard was the first American to leave the Earth's atmosphere. In 8 years, 2 months, and 15 days we went from our first manned flight in space to walking on the moon. What happened in the intervening years?

I'll fully admit that I'm a sci-fi fan and a space enthusiast. Sure, I'm biased. Sure, I think that sending a team of scientists to Mars would be a far greater accomplishment for humanity than overthrowing the dictator of a Middle-Eastern country. But I still ask the question, what happened to those 35 years?

How come in that time we've gone from a computer that would fill an entire building to the one that is currently sitting on my lap and has who knows how many thousands of times more computational power than its predecessor, and yet we haven't walked on Mars yet? How come we are only now just starting to explore the majestic rings of Saturn but it's only with a robotic spacecraft? How come we haven't gone to check out the oceans on Jovian moon, Europa, to see if there's life beneath the ice?

This anniversary leaves me torn. I celebrate the accomplishments of those remarkable men and women who showed us that no dream is out of reach. And I mourn the time that was squandered after our remarkable achievement.

Posted by Jon at 9:14 PM | Permalink

Yesterday I read an interesting article from Reuters by way of Boing Boing.

Fifty years after it was first released in the United States, Elvis Presley's "That's All Right" is a hit in Great Britain...

If there are no changes in European copyright law, the track will fall into public domain Jan. 1, 2005. Anyone will be able to release it without paying royalties to the owners of the master or the performer's heirs.

Copyright is a topic that I've been thinking about a lot recently. This article put a lot of things in focus for me. People are really interested in what will happen in Europe because 1955 is considered the start of the rock 'n' roll era. Every year more and more recordings will go into public domain.

January 1, 2005 will also see "Rock Around The Clock" by Bill Haley & The Comets and "Only You" by The Platters enter public domain in much of Europe. In 1956, a whole slew of Elvis songs: "Heartbreak Hotel", "Don't Be Cruel", "Hound Dog", "Love Me Tender" and others. Plus Carl Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes" and Gene Vincent's "Be-Bop-A-Lula" and it keeps going.

How about The Beatles? "Twist and Shout" is public domain in Europe in 2013. The Rolling Stones' "Time Is On My Side" in 2014, and "My Generation" by The Who in 2015.

Here in America, our rules are a little more strict. The single that started this off "That's All RIght" won't be public domain until 2051. Recordings that were made prior to 1977 enter public domain 95 years after they were recorded. Recordings made in 1977 or later are covered under copyright until 70 years after the artist's death.

Under that second provision of the law, the first recordings that will enter public domain in the U.S. will be in 2048 for artists that recorded songs in 1977 and died that same year. Interestingly enough, since Elvis died in 1977 his last recording, "Unchained Melody", will be public domain 3 years prior to his first.

I have actually been looking into U.S. copyright laws because of this interest I've taken in recording audiobooks. The rules for literature are a little bit different. Since Project Gutenberg is all about bringing public domain literature to the masses, they have a nice overview of U.S. copyright law.

The easy one is that anything published prior to January 1, 1923 is public domain. It quickly goes downhill from there, and gets fairly complex. Anything published prior to 1978 is under copyright for 95 years, minus some exceptions. Literature created after January 1, 1978 enters public domain 70 years after the death of the author. Literature written prior to January 1, 1978 but not published until after then falls under that same 70 year guideline so it will not enter public domain until 2048. And there are couple even crazier rules about 1989 and 1964. You can read it over at the Gutenberg site.

I would be surprised if European copyright law doesn't change this year or the next to fall more into line with the U.S. version. There are too many corporate entities that stand to lose too much money if they don't.

Posted by Jon at 9:22 PM | Permalink

You know those commercials where they say, "What can you get for a buck?" and then some ex-athlete proceeds to inform the public of benefits of dialing 7 extra digits for long distance phone calls? Well I often feel like, "What can you get for 5 bucks?"

And then I found Synergy. (Ok, so it's actually 5 euros---something like $6.32 with the exchange rate.)

You listen to iTunes while you're working / reading / hanging out / living, right? Of course you do. We all do. That little shrunk down iTunes window is pretty handy. It's small. Gives you the song information. Let's you play/pause and move forward and back. Everything you need, but it still takes up space. You need to position all your applications so that you can use it. And it can easily disappear behind a window if you're not careful.

Synergy is the perfect iTunes remote. It gives you all the same functionality and it doesn't take up the space. The control buttons wind up in the menu bar next to things like your clock and volume control.

And the track information? It shows up as an overlay over all your windows when the song starts.

It includes a Pref Pane where you can set everything from the position of the overlay to hot keys for switching tracks to the look of the buttons. And a ton of other things as well.

Clean. Simple. Easy. And just 5 bucks. (Or it would be $5 if our economy wasn't in the toilet.)

Posted by Jon at 4:58 PM | Permalink

I picked up another week of work assembling and phasing dialogue tracks for a friend. She likes the fact that I'm willing to start on Saturday so I can turn over things to her Sunday night for the editors to work on Monday. It's been taking up my time and focus but at some point I'll take a break and offer up some more insights into things.

Posted by Jon at 9:11 AM | Permalink

I find it interesting to see what others consider interesting articles on my site---or at least which ones are popular. A few a pretty obvious. In one post I listed all the links Avid Quicktime Codecs. Avid does not have a very well orgainzed site and they're extremely difficult to find. After the second or third time of spending an hour and finally finding them, I put together the page so that if I ever forgot, I could go there. Of course I'm not the only one who's had that trouble so it gets a lot of visitors.

I have written a couple of things about the controversy surround the release of Movable Type 3.0. I don't think they were particularly interesting articles but in the case of one of them. I was literally the first person to respond to a post by Mena. So I hold that prime position of the very first trackback listed on that page. That draws a lot of traffic.

There are several others. Ones that happen to have that right combination of keywords that trigger it in Google. Ones that hold key positions on other pages---usually having nothing to do with the actual quality of the content of the article.

I've been running this weblog for nearly 6 months now. That's pretty short compared to a lot of other weblogs out there. My posts have changed over time. I've found certain things that interest me and I tend to write about them more than I write about others. Ideas that seemed important at first are less important now. Or in some cases are no less important in my mind but I know that others can handle it much better than I.

Recently my posts have been mostly one of 4 types: educational---here's something I figured out, let me show you how it's done, audio---since sound is my job it makes sense that it's on my mind a lot, life stories---these tend to be along the lines of "when I was a kid" though sometimes they relate current events too, things found on the net---I don't send out those chain letter emails and I don't post lots and lots of "oh I read this online". I read lots of things online. It's only a certain few things that tickle me a certain way that I decide to include in my weblog.

There are definitely a few posts that I'm particularly proud of---ones that I've thought I did a really good job on. Those aren't necessarily ones that are all that popular. In fact because this weblog is the tiniest reflection of my life, sometimes there are posts that I hold in high regard---not because of the words themselves but because of the ideas behind them. I recently had that with the audiobook I recorded. It means a lot to me. And even though I solicited for feedback I only got it from two people. And I asked them for their opinion through a separate email.

So I guess what I'm saying is that it's all a bit of a mystery to me. I try not to let it get me down when I'm really excited about something and no one else is. I also try not to dwell too much in the other direction either. I have had a couple of posts that have been hugely popular (at least for the amount of traffic that my site tends to get).

My post yesterday falls into that category. I had 183 visitors just to that post because someone felt it interesting enough that they posted it to MacSurfer. It really surprised me. They even listed it under "Editorial and Opinion". And I guess that's true. But pretty much my entire site falls in that category. If you're going to speak in your own voice (or even one that you've created) on your own website, it's actually fairly hard not to enfuse that voice with your opinions.

Is that my best post on this site? I don't think so. I won't call it filler but it was definitely just some things that were floating around in the back of my mind. Not something I would consider a major post. But then why did someone take notice of it enough that they put on MacSurfer? I have no idea.

And like I said, I try not to dwell too much on being popular. It would probably drive me crazy if I worked and worked at trying to duplicate the success of yesterday. Or especially the prior time I was posted to MacSurfer and I wound up with over 800 visitors in a day.

So I just keep on keeping on. Writing about the things I find interesting. Or passing on bits of information that I think others will find helpful. I hope a few people find it interesting and helpful.

Posted by Jon at 8:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A few notes of interest for the audio pros in the house:

Marathon has released a horizontal rackmount for G5s. When Apple unveiled the G5 at WWDC 2003, several sound editors were gathered in my office, watching the streaming Quicktime and drooling. But as soon as the specs came out we saw two big problems: only 3 PCI slots---4 slots is really optimal for Pro Tools systems, and a height of 20". The standard size for rackmount gear is 19". The new computers were an 1" too tall. You couldn't secure them in a rack with all your other gear. And all over 1 stupid inch! It seemed so ridiculous. Doesn't Apple realize that the music and film industries are some of their biggest clients? Lots and lots of people in these industries like to rackmount their gear.

Well Marathon has finally released a solution. I figured they eventually would. Unfortunately the installation instructions include the use of a hacksaw.

This isn't new but I just recently stumbled on to it:

Fxpansion makes a few audio wrapper applications including a VST to RTAS Adapter. This software allows Pro Tools and Pro Tools LE, software which only supports its own native audio plug-ins---Audiosuite, Real-Time Audiosuite, and TDM, to run VST plug-ins as RTAS plug-ins. What a great idea! And for under $100.

They also make a VST to AudioUnit Adapter which is nice for Logic users who might have been annoyed by Apple's decision to drop support for VST and only support the native OS X plug-ins standard AudioUnits. (Of course in fairness to Apple, they have offered a VST to AU SDK. And I've read stories of the conversion only taking a couple of hours to clean up code.)

And they have a third adapter which is VST to Rewire. This one sounds very interesting. Rewire is an inter-audio app bussing standard. It allows you do do things like design some techno masterpiece in Reason and send the sound directly into Pro Tools for recording. All internal. All digital. In Pro Tools Rewire is a plug-in that gets activated on a track. So in essence its VST to Rewire might be very similar to VST to RTAS. However, Soundminer allows you to audition 5.1 audio straight from Pro Tools by running 4 Rewire plug-ins---2 stereo and 2 mono. Maybe you can do similar things with this adapter. It would interesting to check out.

Posted by Jon at 7:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've started listening to my next audiobook, "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card. I first read this book about 10 years ago and loved it. Enough time has passed since then, that I remember that I loved the book, and I remember the basic story but most of the specifics were gone. So experiencing it again but in a different format, audio, is a real pleasure.

Obviously the whole "children playing video games become the soldiers of tomorrow" is the primary focus of the book and part that I remembered from years ago. I don't know who first came up with this idea. There was a speech that Reagan made when he was president which had the same basic idea. I'm not sure when that speech was. Did one of Reagan's speech-writers read the book and appropriate the idea? Did Mr. Card use that as a basis for his book? Or was it some kind of convergent evolution?

The part that has struck me this time---and I should mention that I have not finished the book yet---is the story of Peter and Valentine, Ender's siblings. This book was written 20 years ago. The Macintosh was just released. Personal computers were gaining in popularity but many homes did not have one. Modems existed but they certainly were only owned by a fraction of the computer-owning population which in turn was a fraction of the whole population. ARPA net existed and even though it connected many universities together, it wasn't in use by the general college population. Usenet had been around for about 5 years or so but it relied on ARPA which meant again that there weren't that many people using it.

The point is that some of the ideas computer-based communication were in place but they weren't in widespread use nor probably even known about it by the majority. And yet in this culture, Mr. Card came with the ideas of the Nets. A communal posting area where all people can talk about their ideas. Peter and Valentine use it for specifically political purposes. And it dawned on me that's really only now, 20 years later, that something like this exists. Ten years ago the internet was just learning to walk as far as the general public was concerned. The first image-based web browsers were just beginning to show up. The first large web entities like Yahoo were still a year or two off. Five years ago everybody knew about the internet and a large percentage of people were on it. Today it's nearly universal. With the advent of cheap computers everyone has a TV, a phone and a computer in their home.

And now weblog software is easy enough to use and public awareness is large enough in the media that many, many people are finding their own voice on the internet. Not just being consumers of information but also providers. We've now entered the era of Mr. Card's Nets.

Posted by Jon at 8:32 AM | Permalink

This was posted over at Boing Boing:

One of the funnier things I've read recently. I almost wet myself. From Midaregami. So where do those of us who just think ninjas are totally sweet fit in?

Posted by Jon at 1:41 PM | Permalink

I ordered a pizza for a little nourishment this evening and it was just delivered. Thin crust. I've decided it's really the only way to go. I went to college in Chicago so I know how thick pizzas can really get but I have to say that thin is better. Thin and crispy.

But that wasn't actually the point of this little anecdote. The point was the woman who delivered my pizza asked me, "Are you a writer for television?"

I was momentarily caught off-guard.

"What?"

"Are you a writer for television?"

"Oh! Uh, no."

"Ah. Well, you look like a writer. See ya."

"Bye."

So there you go. The pizza delivery person says so.

Posted by Jon at 8:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I have talked about how cool I think BBEdit is. Bare Bones Software, the makers of BBEdit, is offering a discount on the software from now through Thursday, July 15. It's $150 instead of the usual $180. Plus you get a free t-shirt.

Now's your chance to pick up a great piece of software and save a little cash.

Posted by Jon at 2:34 PM | Permalink

I need your help. As you may know, I'm an avid listener to audiobooks. During the 2 hours of commuting I do every day, I typically spend my time listening to others read books to me. When I do get into the office, I'm a sound guy. I, along with the other people on my crew, make the movies you go and watch sound good. To do this I have all kinds of gear (boys' toys) in my room.

You may remember when I mentioned an effort by Telltale Weekly to make audiobooks of the public domain works from Project Gutenberg. This got me thinking. Audiobooks---I like audiobooks. Sound---I'm a sound guy. I've got microphones and computers and whatnot. These guys are looking to record audiobooks. Hmmm...

So here's where you come in. Today I recorded my first audiobook. (Did I ever mention that I used to be a radio DJ in college?) I haven't played it for anyone yet. In fact I literally just finished the final mix on it. I haven't submitted it to Telltale Weekly. I'm actually not sure if I can---the public domain status on this particular work is a bit tricky. I need some constructive criticism from everyone. I'd love for you to post comments or send me email letting me know what you think. I'd would like to emphasize the constructive part of that prior sentence. If you think I read too fast or my diction is bad or my voice is too nasaly, I'd like to know. Of course I wouldn't mind a few "good job" emails either. It would be great for some opinions on the sound quality too. Not just the tone of my voice, but how is the recording? Too loud? Too bright? Too noisy? (I'm really glad that Telltale Weekly exists, but I do have to say that some of their recordings are a bit on the poor side.)

So without further delay, I present to you, "The War Prayer" by Mark Twain. (We can fight about my politics too if you like.)

Posted by Jon at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As I said before, I recently bought a Mackie 1604 mixer and added it to my Pro Tools workstation. I came up with what I consider to be the ultimate layout for the mixer. Obviously everyone has their own needs and their own gear so this won't work for all. But it might give you a few ideas of how you can improve your own audio monitoring.

Ins

:

1/2     (Open)
3/4     Video Deck Out
5/6     DAT Out
7/8     (Open)
9-16    Pro Tools Out 1-8

Aux Returns

:

1       Computer
2       Ipod
3       Laptop
4       DVD

Outs

:

Main    L/R
Sub1/2  LS/RS
Sub3/4  C/LFE

Direct Outs

:

1-6     Pro Tools In 1-6

Aux Sends

:

1/2     Pro Tools In 7/8
3/4     Video Deck In
5/6     DAT In

Tape

:

In      VCR Out
Out     VCR In

There are a few key ideas behind this layout. The first is the use of Inputs 9-16 for the Pro Tools. This came straight from the 1604 manual itself. It has a layout for an 8-channel multi-track recorder that does the same thing. Typical post-production sound thought is to put your Pro Tools on 1-8 since it's the single most important piece of gear. However, by moving it down to 9-16, it opens up the Direct Outs 1-8. These take the signal coming in on Inputs 1-8 and pass them out, post-fader, through the Direct Outs. This way you can send those into your Pro Tools and not use up your sub-outs.

The second key idea is Aux Returns and Aux Sends as additional Ins and Outs. Often these are thought of as paths to send signals for effects processing that then returning them to mixer. A channel insert will run an effect on a single channel like a compressor on a microphone. But an Aux Send and Return can be used to add reverb to many channels at once.

That's all very cool for working with a band but not very useful for a digital audio workstation. So forget it. The Aux Returns are 4 additional stereo inputs. You can see that I used them to patch in my computers and what not. It's mostly about listening to music. You can put anything you want here. It doesn't have to be stereo. In some cases, especially Aux Return 1 and 2, they can be sent into a "record" path were they would go back into your Pro Tools. But for the most part use it for gear that you simple want to listen to on your speakers.

The Aux Sends give you 6 mono channels out to whatever you patch. They are accessed on the Input channels themselves. This is an easy way to do something like send a stereo pair from Pro Tools to be recorded on a DAT or a Video Deck. I also put Pro Tools itself on a pair of Sends. It's for greater flexibility. I can't see myself using it much but it would allow me to loop a sound out a Pro Tools through the board and back in. Maybe I wind up with some amazing analog reverb unit. It could be patched into a channel insert and sent right back into Pro Tools for recording. That's the idea. As I said before about Direct Outs, it also frees up sub-outs.

You need the sub-outs for speakers. This is the third key idea. Typically I've set up 5.1 surround sound on mixers with 8 sub-out busses. Six for the speakers and 2 to go back into Pro Tools. But with this setup we've already handled all the paths back into to Pro Tools---and other gear for that matter. Put your left and right speakers on Main Out. Most other inputs like Aux Returns and Tape In all monitor by default on Main Out. Then use the four sub-outs for your 4 additional speakers, Left Surround--Right Surround and Center--Sub.

By using this setup I was able to extend the 1604 (16 ins, 4 sub-outs) to 22 Ins and 14 Outs. And I didn't touch the Control Room Outs which could probably be used for something else. Plus I have 4 open Ins right on faders on my mixer.

Now if only my video path were so easy.

Posted by Jon at 2:14 PM | Permalink

Recently I've been adding some new audio gear to my Pro Tools system. A couple weeks ago, I upgraded my speakers. I won't tell you what I was using before---it's a bit embarassing, and I'm supposed to be a "professional"---but my new Blue Sky speakers are awesome. (In all fairness to myself, prior to this recent purchase if I had to do really critical listening, I would do it on headphones.)

I spent last weekend and a couple days this week assembling a phasing dialogue tracks for a show that's just starting up. My friend needed a little extra help and I don't mind picking up a little extra cash now and again. Phasing dialogue tracks---especially after a fairly good assembly with a program like Titan---is pretty much just hours and hours of zooming in close on waveforms and nudging production into sync. If you want to get it done fast, there's not much actual listening going on. It's all done visually. That means you can listen to music to keep your mind active. So I've spent several days listening to my favorite albums on the Blue Sky ProDesk speakers in my room and I can honestly say they sound fantastic.

I got the 2.1 setup---two 5" speakers (that's the size of the woofer) and an 8" sub. They're powered so there's no need for a amplifier. Shielded so they won't distort your video monitors. (I'm using flat panels so this isn't an issue for me.) They aren't full-range speakers. They shelve-off pretty steeply below 80 Hz but that's what the subwoofer is for. They're designed to work together, and they're matched so well that I can't tell that the really low frequencies are coming from under my desk. In the future, I can upgrade it to a 5.1 by adding 3 more speakers and Blue Sky's own Bass Management system. The price is great too. Right around $1000 for the 2.1.

For years I've been using a little Mackie 1202 for monitoring. The ultra compact size was really nice. It didn't take up much desk space. But it also didn't have a lot of inputs and I kind of felt like I was sacrificing ease of use for a small size. With the new speakers and the potential of 5.1 in the future, I knew it was time to upgrade to the Mackie 1604. This is definitely the work horse of the digital audio workstation world, and I can see why. I spent nearly half a day plotting out my new audio setup with all the extra inputs and outputs. I think I came up with the ultimate setup. I'll post information on it a little later.

Of course after coming up with this great new audio setup, I had to patch it all through my new mixer. So I called up my buddy Sheldon at The Wired Kingdom to make me some custom audio snakes. His stuff isn't cheap but the work is impeccable and the quality is outstanding.

About a month ago or so, I stumbled across a little blurb on a microphone that caught my attention---the Studio Projects C1. I started doing some research. I read lots and lots of reviews from people raving about this mic. Not every review was glowing---but you also have to understand audio people---everything they use is great and everything else sucks. There is very little middle ground. (You'll get the same kind of responses when you talk to sound editors about the tracks on movies.) But at $200 it was pretty hard to say "no" to, especially since the microphone that most people compared it with, the Neumann U87, is a $2000 mic.

This just came in and I haven't used it much. Just some test recordings of myself. I'm also not a record producer or engineer. I'm not laying down vocal tracks all day long. We mostly use mics to record sound effects. Every mic has different characteristics and very few are "bad". Ok, maybe that's not true. There are a lot of cheap and crappy mics. But the point is when you're recording sound effects using different mics give you different sounds. And sound for film is all about have lots and lots of different kinds of sounds.

I made up an album of some of the pictures I took of my new gear and posted it to my .Mac account.

Posted by Jon at 8:15 AM | Permalink

It's been quite a busy week for me, in fact it seems to have slipped right by me.

I read Terry Pratchett's "The Thief Of Time" recently. (Or more accurately, listened to it.) A couple of the main characters of the story are History Monks. They're responsible for taking care of time. The make use of devices called Spinners to adjust the flow of time. When someone is stuck in a boring lecture and time seems to crawl by, they can siphon some of that time off and use it areas where it's needed.

Thinking back on this past week made me think of that. I could have used that extra time. Or maybe one of those monks siphoned it away from me and that's why I can't seem to remember it. Actually that's not true. I remember what I did every single day this week. I'm just finding it remarkable that it passed so quickly.

When I was a kid I used to have this feeling that time passed so slowly. It seemed like forever until Christmas came around again or my next birthday. I thought it would take an eternity until I was finally able to get my driver's license.

Now I'm afraid that time slips through my fingers like water. You cup your hands. Squeeze your fingers together as tight as possible hoping to seal all the cracks but it's no use. The water still drains away. Still slides through spaces that might even been too small for you to see.

It is strange that the older we get the faster time passes before us. You blink and weeks have gone by. Stop and stretch and a year has passed.

I have spent 30 years on this planet and with any luck I'll spend another 30 here---and hopefully another 30 after that. I just wonder how long it'll actually take for those next 30 to pass me by.

Posted by Jon at 8:33 PM | Permalink

I'm looking to hire a good Macintosh programmer to help me develop a Carbon application that would run in both OS 9 and OS X. Interested people should send me an email by clicking the link in the sidebar. Include a resume and your desired salary. I'll get in touch with you with all the details. You don't have to live in Los Angeles, but I think you would have to live in the US. I don't know how the whole international employee thing would work out. I'll have to check on that.

Posted by Jon at 3:38 PM | Permalink

This from AP:

James M. Doohan, the actor who played Scotty on the '60s "Star Trek" TV series, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, his agent confirmed Tuesday...

Doohan, who lives in the Seattle suburb of Redmond, also has suffered for some time with Parkinson's disease, diabetes and fibrosis, the latter due to chemical exposure during World War II when he was a soldier in the Canadian military....

That is so sad.

Years ago when I found out that Ronald Reagan had Alzheimer's, it didn't really make an impression on me. And when he died a few weeks back, I have to admit I didn't really care.

But this is Scotty! Who's going to keep the Enterprise running?

There's a great episode from Season 6 of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" called "Relics" where the Enterprise D (Picard's Enterprise) finds Scotty trapped in a transporter buffer on a Federation ship that crashed into a Dyson Sphere 75 year earlier. Scotty comes to grips with the idea that his time is past and he has to leave the adventuring to the younger folks, but not before he has a chance to save the Enterprise from certain disaster one last time.

There's also a wonderful story that James tells in the "Trekkies" documentary about how he helped a suicidal fan work through her emotional problems.

James, we're all pulling for you.

Posted by Jon at 10:54 AM | Permalink

Now's the chance for the people of Los Angeles to see a bit about what those of us in the sound industry do:

Los Angeles moviegoers will have an unusual treat this summer!  The Motion Picture Sound Editors and American Cinematheque will co-present "Big Movie Sound Effects: Behind the Scenes and Out of the Speakers."

Here's your chance to see - and hear - how those cool sounds for big science fiction movies are made.  Dane A. Davis, MPSE, and Gary Rydstrom, MPSE, will present excerpts from their Oscar and Golden Reel Award-winning work as supervising sound editors/designers/re-recording mixers on THE MATRIX and JURASSIC PARK.  In addition to discussing the processes they used to create the unique aural effects, our guests will also play sequences from both films with the sound effects only in order to give a clear and rare demonstration of the craft of motion picture sound.

So come and give a listen to what remains in these classic movie soundtracks after the dialogue and music are removed.  Experience the rippling waves from slowed-down bullets, the roar of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and every little detail that gets lost in the final mix; as well as the stories behind them.

"Big Movie Sound Effects: Behind the Scenes and Out of the Speakers" will be presented in the Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre in the Egyptian Theatre at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, July 14.  The theater is located at 6712 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood, California. 

General Admission:  $9
Seniors 65+ & Students w/valid ID: $8
MPEG and other guild & craft organization members w/valid ID: $6

You can find out more about the Motion Picture Sound Editors at our web site: www.MPSE.org and the American Cinematheque at www.americancinematheque.com.

Made possible with support from Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, Worldlink Digital, DTS, and Dolby Laboratories, Inc.

Program subject to change.

Posted by Jon at 11:29 AM | Permalink

Oh come on. You know you've done it. Everyone does it. At some point, no matter how many times you tell yourself that you're not going to give in, you type your own name into the search field at Google. Just to see what pops up.

I have discovered that there are several versions of "not me" out there. Many others who---though they share my appellation---are not I.

I discovered that there is Jon Michaels, country music star. In fact you'll find the most stuff on Google about him. I think he wins the award for being the most famous of all of us.

And of course, Jon Michaels, student of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois. He's even built his own arcade game cabinet for MAME.

Don't forget Jon Michaels, the hottest DJ in South Dakota, serving all your wedding, graduation, and other party needs. There are pictures of someone with my name hanging out with Wolfman Jack on that website!

One of my favorite movie critics, Joe Bob Briggs, did a bit nearly 15 years ago about how most radio guys are named Michaels. There are a few Jon's in that list.

And would you look at that! I just found one at 93 KKNU. Jon Michaels, country radio DJ plays all the hits to relax you on your drive home from work.

There is also Jon Michaels, professional wrestler, who doesn't sound like he's very good. I quote: "Justin then mercilessly beat the hell out of Jon with a steel chair, repeatedly."

And of course this list couldn't possibly be complete unless there was a gay pornstar with my name. Thankfully he doesn't have his own website. But he did wind up on the back cover of a movie called "Mass Appeal". You'll have to click the "continue reading" link below to experience that one.

Hi, to all the other Jon Michaels' in the world! It looks like I'm in good company... I think... I guess... uh--- Someone get my parents on the phone---we need to have a few words!

Posted by Jon at 8:48 PM | Permalink

This one is for all you fans of the "Angel" telelvision show.

There's a room on the Fox Studios lot that has the ATM and some vending machines for employees. There is also a glass case where they set up a mini-museum dedicated to Fox produced TV shows and movies. Every few months they change out the items that are in the case.

Right now it is featuring props from "Angel" including the infamous Angel Muppet.

I posted more pictures on my .Mac website. And if you missed it, there's also the story about the Buffy postcards.

Posted by Jon at 2:07 PM | Permalink

You call yourself an Assistant Sound Editor and you don't use BBEdit for EDLs and change notes? If you say that you're still using Vantage, I'm going to smack you. Microsoft Word is what you're using? Well, I guess I understand. We've all kind of grown up with that whole "Word is the program you use for typing things". But seriously, yuck. Maybe you just don't realize what you're missing.

How about this spiffy little header it puts at the top of all printed pages? Pretty nice, huh? Ever dropped a stack of Vantage change notes and then tried to figure out the correct order again?

I barely know where to start with all the great text-fixing features it has built-in. Just take a look at all the options on this menu. Pretty great stuff.

But it's real strength is in it's support for Regular Expressions and AppleScript. Regular Expressions are complex find and replace searches that are much more powerful than a simple "Find 'cat' and Replace with 'dog'". In my last post I gave an example of a Regular Expression that could be used in Soundminer to split apart text with the format of "Title Description" into two individual "Title" and "Description" fields.

Just today I was trying to assemble some reels of dialogue using Titan. The source DATs were loaded with the filenames like "001 004/05.L.wav"---meaning Sound Roll 1, Scene 4, Take 5. Unfortunately the EDLs listed the sound rolls without leading zeros. So it would say "1" not "001". Titan needs the EDL and filename to match so that things can be linked properly.

No problem with BBEdit and Regular Expressions.

Bring up the Find window. Make sure that "Use Grep" is checked. That's what will turn on Regular Expressions.

Type this in the Find field without quotes: "^(\d{3}\s{2})(\d{1}\s+)"

And type this in the Replace field without quotes: "\010\2"

Click the Replace All button.

In English you just told BBEdit: Starting at the beginning of a line (^) look for a group of characters, 3 digits followed by 2 spaces (\d{3}\s{2}), then look for a second group of characters, 1 digit followed by 1 or more spaces (\d{1}\s+). Return the first group (\01), add a "0" and then return the second group (\2).

This will find any single digit sound rolls in an EDL and add a zero to the head. Now you need to turn 2 digit sound rolls into 3 digit ones.

Type this in the Find field without quotes: "^(\d{3}\s{2})(\d{2}\s+)"

And type this in the Replace field without quotes: "\010\2"

Click the Replace All button.

Now all of your sound rolls have 3 digits, leading zeros as necessary. All in about a minute. Try typing all those zeros in by hand and see how long it takes you. Plus the Find window allows you to save those Regular Expressions as Patterns that you can call up any time you need them.

I said that the second strength of BBEdit is AppleScript. Nearly all of its functions can be called from simple AppleScripts, including Find and Replace with Regular Expressions. That means you can make a simple "Add Leading Zeros To Sound Rolls In EDLs" Droplet. Drag your EDLs on to it and they'll all be fixed in seconds.

Other ideas for BBEdit, Regular Expressions and AppleScript are removing those ugly boxes that show up at the end of every line of change notes made by the new Avid Meridien systems. Or splitting Picture and Track changes notes into two files. Or even interacting with other programs like Word, Excel or Filemaker. How about searching a change note for the new LFOA and entering it into a chart in Excel? All kinds of things can be done if you just take a little time to learn.

Posted by Jon at 2:06 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (3)

This is based on a little tip I posted on the Soundminer beta tester message boards:

How To Clean Up A Sound Effects Library Ripped In MTools And Imported Into Soundminer

Anyone who has ripped the sound effects from a commercial CD library with Soundminer's Ripper program knows how great their data is. Anyone who has moved to Soundminer from MTools knows that the MTools data isn't anywhere near as cool looking. Don't worry, you can get things looking nice without too much trouble.

Make sure that you're displaying the following fields: Filename, Description, Source, Category, Notes, Designer, Library, and possibly RecMedium.

Make a new database and scan a folder to work with. If you screw it up, you want to be able to go back to your original stuff.

Bring up the Admin window from the Misc menu. Set the Designer field to the creator of the CD library---most likely either Sound Ideas or Hollywood Edge. Set the Library field to the name of the CD library---Citi Trax or Impact Effects or whatever it is.

Copy Filename to Source. If the CD library is from Sound Ideas the filenames probably all start with "SI-" and end with ".L". If they are from Hollywood Edge they probably start with "HE-" and end with ".L". Remove these from the Source field. You can either Remove 3 Characters From The Start and Remove 2 Characters From The End. Or do a Find and Replace with nothing. The remaining data though not identical to what Ripper writes will be very similar. For example, a file from Impact Effects that was ripped with MTools will probably be named something like "SI-IE01_04_01.L". After removing the extra characters the Source field would be "IE01_04_01".

I also like to note which files were done by MTools for future reference. I set the RecMedium field to "MTools" for that reason. (A good-sized chunk of Cameron's library was converted from Waveframe over to Pro Tools. I put "waveframe" in the RecMedium field of those files for the same reason. You never know when that information might be useful.)

If the description is all uppercase you can use the change case to Title Case function to make it much more readable.

With these few simple steps. You'll be very close to what a Ripper ripped sound file looks like. It's definitely a good idea to backup your data to the files themselves.

There's one other thing you can do to make things look even better. Most of the CD libraries from Sound Ideas use the format "Title [Lots of spaces] Description" in the Description field of their database. All of this information including all those spaces---which make the printed catalog look nice but which are messy in a digital database---wind up in the Description field when the CD is ripped by MTools. You can put the "Title" into the Category field and the "Description" into the Description field (and dump all those extra spaces) by following these simple steps.

This process will give you about a 95% success rate. The biggest problem you will encounter is data that is not consistantly formatted. I found that the Audio Pro library is a big offender in this area. This process looks for 2 or more spaces in a row. If there aren't 2 or more spaces between the Title and Description, it won't work correctly.

Again from the Admin window, copy the Description into the Notes field. (Or another long field that you're not using for anything else.)

In the Find / Replace box, check the RegEx box.

Type this into the Find field "(.+?)\s\s+?(.*)" without quotes.

Type this into the Replace field "\1" without quotes, and click Ok.

This will return just the "Title" part of the of the Description. Take a second and check to make sure it worked. Like I said, if there aren't more than 2 spaces or tabs in a row, this won't work. You might have to fix some by hand. When you're satisfied, continue.

Copy Notes into Category. Copy Description into Notes.

Type this into the Find field "(.+?)\s\s+?(.*)" without quotes, again.

Type this into the Replace field "\2" without quotes, and click Ok.

This will return the Description part. Again, check it to make sure that it returned everything correct. (You might wind up with extra spaces at the head of this new description. You can use the Remove Characters From Start function to get rid of them quickly.) When you're satisfied, copy Notes to Description and erase the Notes field.

That's it. Definitely back up all this data to the sound files.

Those funky looking things you typed into the Find and Replace fields are called Regular Expressions. They can be a bit tricky to learn but they are amazingly powerful. Definitely worth a bit of study. You have a great command-line Unix version installed with OS X called "grep". If you fire up your terminal and type "man grep" at the prompt you can read all about it. Google would be another great place to look for information. There's also a book by O'Reilly "Mastering Regular Expressions" that might be useful.

Posted by Jon at 10:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Yesterday, Boing Boing posted a link to an article about surround sound research at UC Davis.

This new technology is a very interesting extension of binaural recording. Binaural is a two channel format that mimics the pick-up pattern of the human ears.

Stereo is two channel as well but it recreates a "wall of sound". To record in stereo, you take to two mono microphones and position them in a "v" shape. The point is the head of the microphones. They should be at a 90 degree angle to each other. The heads should (obviously) be pointed at the sound source.

When played back from stereo speakers, a stereo recording creates, as I said, a "wall of sound" that is projected out from those speakers. Closing your eyes and facing the speakers, you could imagine the sounds happening just in front of you. Listening to a stereo recording on headphones places that plane of sound in your head. Put on a record that features a lot of stereo panning like Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon". On headphones, you'd swear the sound was moving right through the center of your head. Here's a little bit of "On The Run" from that album so you can see what I mean.

Binaural recording, as the article points out, typically uses a dummy head with microphones placed in the ears and positioned at the same angle as human ears. There are also "stealth" binaural recording rigs that put tiny microphones in what appears to be walkman-style headphones. Wearing the "headphones" puts them in the proper location for binaural recording.

The biggest difference between stereo and binaural recording is that binaural can only be played back on headphones. Listening to binaural recordings is like really being there with sounds going on all around you. It records in 360 degrees, so recording a sound of someone walking behind the dummy head would sound exactly like someone was walking behind you when listening on headphones. If you play a binaural recording back on stereo speakers it sounds really strange. It's hard to exactly put your finger on what's wrong but you can tell that something isn't right with it.

This new technology from UC Davis records 8 or 16 microphones positioned in a circle, and during playback mixes the relative strength of each signal in real time based on the positional data from a worn sensor. With normal binaural, the previously mentioned sound of walking behind you would always be behind you no matter where you turned your head. This new technology would allow you to turn your head around to "see" who was behind you and you would then hear the sound of walking as if you were looking at it.

Fascinating stuff.

I worked on an IMAX movie called "T-Rex: Back To The Cretaceous" that had a limited amount of binaural sound in it. Being a 3-D IMAX movie, you were given goggles to wear which would make the 3-D images look correct when you sat in the theater. These goggles were much larger than the standard red and green paper ones that you often get for these kinds of things. There were actually tiny speakers in them that were positioned directly over your ears when properly worn.

When we were on the dub stage mixing the movie, we would actually have to wear these goggles (minus the 3-D lenses) so that we could properly mix the sound for that channel. For those who are curious, it was actually wirelessly beamed to the headset via an infrared signal. The idea was that 3-D visuals plus binaural sound should really place you in the movie. However I found that the soundtrack was so loud with the music and the dinosaurs stomping around that even with the speakers right next to your ears, they were easily drowned out by main speakers in the theater. It was an interesting concept that wasn't quite realized.

In March 1999 I recorded a rock show at a little club in Los Angeles called Dragonfly. A band I knew said it was ok and I was very excited about the prospect so I showed up with 2 different DAT rigs and a video camera. Two of my friends came along to help me manage it all. One of the DATs included a stealth binuaral headphone setup. During one of the opening bands, I had my friend who was going to use the stealth rig, go practice using it. He didn't quite understand the concept and he moved around alot. Put on some headphones and you can hear the vocals and instruments move from ear to ear in this recording as he looked around from side to side. (One of the best reasons to use a dummy head instead of a live body.) You'll notice two things from the recording of Candy Ass covering The Runaways' "Queens Of Noise". First, unlike the Pink Floyd song above, when the sound moves it doesn't pass through your head---it "rotates" around you. Second, if you listen on speakers, it doesn't sound right.

It's not a very good example of binaural recording. I know. But it's the best I could come up with easily.

Posted by Jon at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)