Or at least an attempt to record that made me say, “Whoa…”
The last few days there’s been some construction on the road behind my apartment. This has, of course, made it impossible to record anything for the audio version of Murder Most Fowl. So, when I awoke this morning to a blissful silence, I decided to make the best of it. However, mere minutes after the *ding* of the toaster, a territorial bird decided to make his presence known.
This was not a beautiful, warbling mating call. This was a simple call to announce his territory. Territory that seemed to be right outside my window. And the call was a single note, repeated every half second, for more than an hour. I couldn’t see the bird. But I could sure as hell hear it. Clear as a bell. In every room in the apartment.
When the bird finally stopped, I thought I was going to be able to record.
It turned out that the bird stopped because the construction workers had shown up and scared it into silence.
Luckily, they seemed to be close to completed with their work, and their work abated a couple of hours before I had to leave for my job.
And that’s when the cricket started.
It was louder than the bird. Much louder. I could have sword that had it not been for the direction of the sound, I would have thought that the cricket was in my apartment.
Finally, an hour before I had to leave, there was finally a true, blessed silence. So I recorded. I took a few takes, fixed it up as best I could.
It turns out that the mediocre microphone in my laptop is actually far worse than I had originally thought. I suspect there was some kind of odd driver error, because certain sounds would trigger it to go into what I called ‘underwater mode’, where the sound would go from cheap and fuzzy to suddenly sounding like the computer had gotten water in its ears. And since I was recording straight, uncompressed sound, it must have been a problem with some kind of data compression that runs between the microphone and the computer itself. It was, in a word, unusable.
Needless to say, I started looking for alternatives. Cheap but good quality USB microphones. A working computer fan to get my desktop computer working so I could use my professional quality microphone. (A few years back I spent a decent chunk of money on a good soundcard that had various audio in/outs for actual recording. About a year ago, literally two days after I had gotten the laptop I am currently using, my desktop computer’s processor started randomly overheating and it became relatively unusable.) Then an idea occurred to me. I grabbed my iPod touch and opened up the ‘Voice Memos’ app that came with it. No bells. No whistles. Just a simple way to record what it hears. I pressed the record button, turned it over (since the microphone is on the back next to the back facing camera) and started reading.
And viola, a large violin.
… I mean, voila, clear, usable sound.
When I was done, I emailed myself the sound file. Since I had already done several (now dry, ironically due to the ‘underwater mode’) runs already, I did it practically flawlessly, and the file required very little in terms of editing. It was clunky, took several steps to do, but worked. Perfectly. And this bothers me. A lot.
Because I hate macs.
Yes, I’m an artsy type who has more wine, language, beer and music snobbery in three minutes of time in my pinky toe than most people have in their entire bodies and over the course of their entire lives. And I’m a mac hater.
When they’re used for advertising purposes, stereotypes are usually bullshit.
There’s no fundamental difference between a Mac and a ‘PC’ in this era. I put PC in quotes because technically a Mac is a PC. It is simply a PC that is put sold by the Apple corporation and uses the proprietary Apple OS. Mac is a subset of PC. PC does not mean Windows. Windows is just the dominant operating system used nowadays. Mac is just a competitor.
No, what I hate is the closed system. I may be an artsy type, but I’m the type of artsy type who likes to make things on my own, from the smallest bits possible. The only computers I’ve ever owned that I didn’t build myself were the two laptops I’ve owned in my lifetime and one hand-me-down desktop. The fact that you need to pay a hundred dollar license to Apple just to be allowed to become a ‘developer’ for either their computers or their iDevices baffles me. How in the nine hells do you expect to be able to cater to the needs of all the users if you make it so that small, independent programmers can’t make and distribute the little handy apps that can fill in the gaps that users need, but aren’t always big enough to be addressed by larger companies? The answer is: they don’t want those gaps filled. Their design culture for the last decade or so has been to make devices, then tell the user what they can do with them. The entire premise of an Apple device is just alien to the way I use technology. I am a human being. I use whatever tool I need to accomplish my goal.
Which, in this case, means that in order to accomplish the goal I have at the moment, I use the expensive Apple device that I bought a few years back with the intent of becoming a developer for it, because my love of creating stuff and hopefully making a few bucks doing it outweighs my moral outrage at their design culture. The device that I didn’t end up actually developing for, but instead used it as a portable email device when I went back to school, then as a portable music composition device when I discovered Music Studio, (highly recommended for the musician on the go, BTW. Or if you prefer synths to orchestral instruments, NanoStudio is also awesome. But I digress.) and now I use it as a portable, wireless microphone for my audiobook.
… maybe I should see if my phone has a voice notation app. It would save a few steps, instead of emailing it to myself I could just plug it in and transfer the files.
Wait, that’s another reason why I hate Apple.
Because with iDevices, you can’t do that. And there’s no reason for it. It’s just a design choice.