The Bass Geek

I’m still recovering from both the schadenfreude of watching the Patriots lose yesterday and the chili contest that accompanied said viewing - an excellent cap for the weekend. All is right with the football world (minus a Steelers Super Bowl win), and life can continue on a positive course. Since the Pro Bowl means nothing, that’ll be the end of football talk for a bit.

The new hard drive is in my system, and I’ve got both an OS X and a Vista partition running without incident. The only hassle so far has been reloading data (not major, as I could just copy data over from the old drive) and programs (slightly more, ’cause I have to hunt down old serial numbers from upgrades). The upshot of it is that I now have more space on the Mac side for music projects, and the Vista side is ready for work on my upcoming laptop book.

I saw the U2 3-D movie over the weekend, and it was an interesting experience. The music was overall decent to this casual listener (aside from a seemingly flat section in “Beautiful Day”), and there were no overwhelming “COMING RIGHT AT YOU!” moments (again, aside from an obligatory Bono reaching out towards the camera - what did you expect?). The drum set stood out particularly well, as did some of the crowd shots, and there were some drawn-in and composited special effects that were interesting as well. It did carry a “layered” look to it - the effects at times appeared on very flat panes that seemed stacked on each other. Still, a decent spectacle.

Alright, so I refreshed my browser a couple of times during the MacWorld keynote speech to see what Apple was coming out with.  I’m not concerned so much with the new laptop or iPhone stuff - it was the improvements to the AppleTV unit and iTunes that interested me.  Apple getting into video-on-demand is interesting, as are the capabilities of the new AppleTV unit (for those of you with digital cable boxes, it’s pretty much like the on-demand services you have right now - one step forward towards a la carte cable viewing as opposed to subscription?).  It’s also cool that some hi-def DVDs are going to include iTunes-ready digital files on the disc.  This fulfills a pet peeve of mine - being able to get a digital backup of your media.  With this, you can have a copy on your computer and your disc at the same time without technically violating the DMCA (even though I’d regard copying that media as well within your rights).  The only drawback is the DRM on the iTunes files.  Even if it’s less restrictive than other DRM, it’s still there.  Baby steps?

It’s also telling to me that iTunes skipped right over music this time around.  Except for mentioning that it’s offered wirelessly through AppleTV and such, there were no new announcements.  Given that record companies are making the move towards Amazon (at least the majors), I’m curious to see if more music offerings at better bitrates and without DRM are in the cards.  And don’t forget, there’s always Tunecore and CD Baby to get your music on these services.

In mentioning the Playboy Psychonauts show last night, I forgot to note that this was the first show where I used the laptop that had been upgraded to Reason 4 AND Leopard. I pleasantly experienced no issues live, although I had to recreate the files I used - for some Reason (sorry), I couldn’t get the keyboard in the Sequencer view, and the audio wasn’t coming across properly. It was no big deal, as the files were just one synth and a loop. I noticed it occuring before the OS upgrade, too, so I’m assuming it’s a Reason problem. It does mean that I’ll have to go digging through my other old files and see if that’s a problem for everything. The physical setup went smoothly - since I tossed the audio and MIDI interfaces in a rack with a direct box and the appropriate cords, it’s been no problem. It also means I don’t have to travel with an amp.

At this time, the next Psychonauts show comes up in February, so I’m looking forward to getting some new songs and sounds ready.

You can download the latest IMN Podcast from this link right here, or you can get it from the Flash player on the main site.

With Expert Podcasting Practices For Dummies on the shelves right now, and since I already brought up podcasts, I thought I’d shed a little light on the dark, troubled way the IMN podcast comes together. In this post, I’ll detail the tools we use and have used in the past, and I’ll look at the actual process next Monday.

In the two years, we’ve tried a variety of methods in hopes of finding one that produced the best quality of audio in the shortest amount of time (co-host Steve Hayes and I have lives to get back to, after all). We’ve tried recording directly to a PC using Sonar Home Studio, recording directly to my Mac laptop using Garageband 4, recording to a hard-drive-based music workstation, and a flash memory recorder. We alternate at this point between recording to my laptop or the flash recorder, depending on which one is easier to grab at the time. Both have proven to be fairly stable solutions, barring user error (yes, that user would be me).

Post-production stuff like editing and file conversion is done on the Mac using Soundtrack Pro and a couple of freeware programs: Switch converts the AIFF file to a 128kbps mp3 file, and Musorg helps me edit the ID3 tag for each file. I used to use iTunes for both purposes, but I didn’t care for the fact that I had to clear out the library each time I edited an episode. From there, I just SFTP the episode and the XML file for our RSS feed to the server, where it lies in wait for unsuspecting listeners.

In a perfect world, I’d have already upgraded to Logic Studio and use the new version of Soundtrack Pro 2 (my current version comes from the Final Cut Pro bundle), but that’s dependent on the budget. And the budget is slowly shaking its head at new carpet and an upcoming trip to New Orleans, so I don’t think I’ll slide this by for awhile.

So that’s the techie side. The planning and scripting part comes next week.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that we’ve used Shure, AKG and Blue Snowball mics. We’ve achieved great results with all three, although getting two Snowballs working at the same time required a little tweating in the Audio/MIDI section of the Mac OS - I had to create an aggregate device out of both mic and route the audio through there.

I’ve been playing with the new version of Quicksilver a bit (the site is down at the moment, and it’s only useful to Apple users in any case - have I eliminated everybody yet?). It’s supposed to improve the speed and productivity of your Mac by using keyboard shortcuts and triggers to speed up launching programs and automating tasks. I haven’t gotten fully into it yet, but it seems handy. I’m having a hard time getting used to making it run, though - I don’t like a lot of actions happening automatically at startup, and I’m already geared towards using the native OS functions. Lifehacker seems to have dedicated an entire server towards articles on this program, though, so somebody likes it.

Also, there’s a beta site for the new version of IMN at our testblog site. Let us know how we can improve your local music experience.

Finally, the badass bassline of today is taken from P.O.S.’s “Kidney Thief,” courtesy of a Fugazi sample, I believe. Seek and enjoy.