Prep for weekend trip

[catsittingstill]

I'm running around the house trying to print out music and find my _I Promised Eli_ songbook (which I really need to update, darn it) and wishing I'd practiced more this last couple of weeks.

I have packed clothes and toiletries (in a new travelling kit that my brother gave me for my half-birthday, so I have my own soap and shampoo and so on all in one place; chortle) and a sleeping back and a bed (it's inflatable) and now I'm wishing I'd thought to stop in at AAA this afternoon and get a TripTik (except I don't know exactly where I'm going because I'm not sure yet where I'm crashing tomorrow night--but I should know by tomorrow morning). Maybe I'll have time to do it tomorrow; I think I need to go almost to AAA anyway in order to get on 1-75, so why not?

I still need to try to download something from my new Zoom H4 (also a half-birthday present) to make sure I can do it, before I get all the housefilk recordings stuck on its chip in limbo; I'm bringing my old iRiver as a backup and so I can listen to Common Ground on the way up in the hope that if I hear the 2 against 3 rhythm often enough I'll finally be able to play it that way. But if the Zoom works well I may quit bringing all the iRiver stuff.

Trip food; I need trip food. I wonder if I should put new strings on Pearl? Should I bring Lark *and* Pearl? Two instruments would be a bit much, surely? Considering that I also want to bring my music stand and my instrument stand.

I feel like a travelling circus, complete with mimmoths. And I'm sure I have forgotten something.

Comments

[hms42]

Batteries for the recording device? Safe travels.

Harold S.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Got two sets of fresh batteries. :-) I think I'll bring its power cord too.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

They sell strings at Herb David Guitar studio and OZ's music (which just moved closer to my house--thus explaining why I couldn't find them last time I looked) in Ann Arbor, the housefilk doesn't start until 1:00 Saturday, I have two music stands, so you can use the extra.

And your mimmoths are multiplying?

Should I burn some extra I Promised Ely disks?

It's exciting to know that someone else is running around like a chicken with its head cut off preparing to visit here

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I wonder if they have octave mando strings. Hmm.

Regarding the mimmoths--Ozymandias now has a little friend. I have the darkest suspicions about where he/she/it came from. I need to sit down with my credit card statements and see what *else* Ozy has been up to.

Some extra disks would be great if it's not too much trouble. I don't imagine there will be a whole lot of demand but a couple of disks might find a home.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, please bring both instruments! I want to hear your new octave mandolin. This town is big enough for the both of them.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I was planning to bring Pearl (the octave mando), but debating whether to bring Lark as well. If I have too many instruments they build a sort of rampart around my chair and make it hard for me to get in and out :-)

[(Anonymous)]

IIRC the H4 records onto SD cards or CF cards, so if nothing else you can pop the card and copy it onto your computer using the same kind of multi-card reader used for digital camera cards. Anything as recent as Win98SE, MacOS X, or Linux 2.4 (which covers almost everything these days) should do fine.

[mdlbear]

That was me, not realizing that I wasn't logged in on this box. (I'm posting from the ConChord hotel on a Linux laptop that was last seen pretending to be a print server.

[gundo.livejournal.com]

SD. I don't believe I've ever actually used the USB cable to transfer over from the H4 -- I just pop the SD card right into the system.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I do it that way with my camera (which uses XD cards) but I don't have a reader for the SD cards that the H4 uses.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

The H4 records onto SD cards. I don't have an SD card reader at the moment (it's only 25$ or so, but I was feeling impoverished at the time), so I'll have to download from the H4 itself. I don't expect that to be too much of a problem, but I would like to accomplish it with something that doesn't matter before I depend on it too much.

[mdlbear]

With luck it just looks like a USB hard drive, but it's always a good idea to test the toolchain.

Slickest SD card reader I know of just looks like a USB keychain drive with a slot in the back for the card. About $10 -- if you don't need all the other card types it's cheaper.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I checked it out and the H4 looks like a removable drive when hooked up in card reader configuration.

I know the kind of SD reader you're talking about; I have an XD reader that works just like that. Except, oddly enough, it seems to require more power than the thumb drive it resembles.

I will probably get one at some point, but right now hooking up the H4 works okay.

One thing I did notice about the H4 is that in continuous use it sucks down batteries. Mine was going through a pair of AAs every 4 to 4 1/2 hours.

On the other hand, I recorded a multipart song for Peter Alway (the Earworm Song--if he likes the result it will be going up as an mp3 in the next day or two) using 4-track mode, and I am just absolutely psyched about that.

[mdlbear]

Rechargeable batteries would probably be a good thing to look into, then.

One of the things that kept me from getting an H4 was that, at least according to what I could find on the web, one can't record 24 bits in 4-track mode. I ended up spending about the same amount of money on a USB audio interface (Edirol UA-25) and a couple of small, cheap condenser mics (Behringer C2). Great for concerts, though I'm starting to feel a little cramped with only two inputs...

I recommend Audacity for multipart recording. You don't have to worry about how many tracks you're using, so you can make multiple takes and pick the best version of every verse. I'm pretty sloppy at both singing and guitar-playing, but I'm not consistently sloppy, so I can usually find a good clean version of each verse out of two three tries.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Um. Me just dumb musician, not know bits. But I do remember there are limitations to 4 track mode; one can record only using 44.1kHz sampling, which I gather is not as good as the 48 kHz and 96 kHz sampling one can use in stereo recording mode. Also, one can only record 1 or 2 tracks at a time, which does not bother me as I am normally not recording 4 people at a time, but which some folks find a serious limitation.

I am perhaps seduced partly by the fact that until the H4 came along, I had no overdubbing capability; I could record what I could sing and play in one pass and that was it. So I'm quite charmed by the prospect of recording multiple parts, and while I kind of wish I could do it in mp3 format to save space, I got the 2GB chip, which ought to be enough for most outings.

For what it's worth, the H4 in 4 track mode sounds fine to my uneducated ears, on the 40$ earphones I use, and is easy to take along on a car ride or a plane flight to a con or song circle, or someone else's house to record :-)

One feature of 4 track mode that I like is the internal mixer for recording that lets me set pan and volume on the recorded tracks, which is helpful sometimes for recording the last track or two, and for evaluating the final product so far; for real mixing I'm probably going to use GarageBand, which came free with my Mac. I tried Audacity once and couldn't get it to work for some reason (don't remember what the problem was) and GarageBand has been doing what I need, with the only downside being that it writes the final file to iTunes as AIFF, and I then have to convert to mp3 in iTunes. But I can do that.

I'm kind of surprised you didn't end up with an H4--I remember your post about it; that was part of what got me looking at it in the first place. I guess I got the impression from that that you were actually planning to get one.

[mdlbear]

In musician-speak, recording at 24 bits rather than 16 gives you more dynamic range, so it's less tricky to set levels. Higher speeds are good, but not as good for a code monkey like me as more bits.

I'm even more tempted now by the new one (H2) -- it's less capable, but looks a little better for field recording. It doesn't look like it will multitrack, but I do that on a computer in Audacity. I discovered a couple of years ago that I prefer using a computer with a trackball and a big screen to multitracking on a dedicated box, no matter how good its interface is.

It was mostly the fact that I couldn't use the H4 as a 24-bit USB interface that made me decide not to get it. I'm *really* glad I decided to get the UA-25 instead of the H4, because it saved my butt when the hard drive on my recording machine died two days after Baycon. I was able to copy the Audacity projects that needed tracks over onto my laptop, plug in my mic and preamp, and record Callie before she had to go catch her plane.

Older versions of Audacity didn't work on the new Intel Mac; the latest version does, but it's still a bit flaky compared with Linux, where it's rock solid. Of course, that may be the Mac rather than Audacity; I've had a lot of problems with it freezing. Fortunately it hasn't happened while I was recording, but it's only a matter of time.

[hms42]

Older versions of Audacity didn't work on the new Intel Mac; the latest version does, but it's still a bit flaky compared with Linux, where it's rock solid. Of course, that may be the Mac rather than Audacity; I've had a lot of problems with it freezing. Fortunately it hasn't happened while I was recording, but it's only a matter of time.

I have used Audacity 1.32 and 1.33 with no problems on my MacBook Pro. Which version of OS X are you running?? I have all available downloads and have not had problems doing over 5 hours of recording in a block.

I have not had a problem with Audacity since 1.26 had a crashing habit on me after about 30 minnutes of recording. (Switched to 1.32 and problems disappeared.)

Harold

[mdlbear]

I was thinking of the 1.2 series.

I'm currently using 1.33; I'm not sure whether the problems are with Audacity or the OS; probably the latter: I get a hard freeze every day or three if I run non-Apple apps like Audacity or Firefox. Two instances of Firefox under different users will kill it in a matter of hours. The most recent was less than five minutes after saving an hour-long concert recording; no Firefox and not even a net connection.

In contrast, my Linux router has been up for 465 days now, and even my current desktop (same CPU and RAM as the MacBook Pro) has been up for 65 days under significantly heavier use than the laptop gets.

Even under Linux, Audacity 1.33 is slightly flaky when applying effects, but at least it will record and save with total reliability. I don't trust it to even do that on the Mac.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

In musician-speak, recording at 24 bits rather than 16 gives you more dynamic range, so it's less tricky to set levels. Higher speeds are good, but not as good for a code monkey like me as more bits.

Oh, okay. Now I understand. I'll have to see what the manual has to say about setting bits in stereo mode for filk circle recording. It would be very helpful if I didn't have to worry as much about clipping.

Regarding problems with the Mac freezing--that sounds kind of strange to me; I haven't had any problems with mine (well, okay, sometimes Safari just up and quits, but the system is unaffected). Could there be something wrong with your particular Mac? Of course, I'm not a power user, so perhaps my Mac doesn't freeze because I'm not pushing it very hard...

[mdlbear]

I suspect it may be a memory-management issue, and I do push the Mac pretty hard in directions it doesn't like to go. I often have two users logged in: "steve" for work stuff, and "mdlbear" for home. If they're both running Firefox the machine is guaranteed to freeze up within a few hours.

I should probably also stop running the X window system by default -- it's standard on all other Unix systems, but very much a second-class citizen on the Mac.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's just having two users logged in; I do that all the time. I'm doing it right now, as a matter of fact.

I suppose it could be Firefox, or X-windows or the combination.

(I'm not sure I know what X windows is, but it sounds like you don't mean the Mac default GUI, which is all I ever use.)

I've thought about using Firefox, but haven't got around to trying it yet.

[mdlbear]

X is the display technology underneath the GUI on almost all other Unix systems; you need it for many Unix programs ported to the Mac.

On the Mac it sits uncomfortably on top of the Mac's GUI, behaving oddly and occasionally causing trouble.

[mdlbear]

Firefox is usually faster and more standards-compliant than Safari; it also behaves more-or-less the same on all operating systems. Since I occasionally have to use Windows or MacOS, this is a Good Thing.

Other cross-platform software I use a lot are Emacs, OpenOffice, and Audacity.

[mdlbear]

BTW, I put your pre-ordered CDs in the mail yesterday; you should have them shortly.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Hooray!! I'm looking forward to it. :-)

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Ah, those sneaky mimmoths!

I think you're right, that the AAA office is not too far from where you'd follow the split northbound to get on 75...

Safe journey to you. And happy filking!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your good wishes. I'm looking forward to it!

[hms42]

I still need to try to download something from my new Zoom H4 (also a half-birthday present) to make sure I can do it, before I get all the housefilk recordings stuck on its chip in limbo; I'm bringing my old iRiver as a backup and so I can listen to Common Ground on the way up in the hope that if I hear the 2 against 3 rhythm often enough I'll finally be able to play it that way. But if the Zoom works well I may quit bringing all the iRiver stuff.

How did the H4 work out for the house filk?? I am thinking about getting either that or the H2 for housefilk recording

Harold