Recently I wanted to record some nature sounds using my laptop (I live on a lake, and the frogs are out). Since there’s a road nearby, I wanted a directional microphone so I wouldn’t pick up incidental noises as cars went by. This meant I needed either a unidirectional or cardioid mike — the former picks up noise from one direction only, while the other has a heart-shaped (hence ‘cardioid’) pickup pattern.

Every generic laptop mike I checked was omidirectional, so I went to a local audio store and picked up a decent semi-pro grade unit for about $40. It used a standard 1/4″ jack, so I snagged an adapter that reduced it to the 1/8″ jack found on all laptops. Then I headed to the lake and tried recording. Absolutely nothing came through, so I tried the same unit on my desktop machine. Still no results. Some additional research was obviously in order.

It turns out larger (usually condenser-style) mikes only put out about 1/1000 of a volt, which is too low for audio cards to pick up. You need a preamplifier between the mike and audio card to boost the signal to the level achieved by cheap PC-style microphones, which have a much higher output level. But adding a preamp to the mix meant lugging a piece of equipment that needs 110V line power out to the lake, which was not what I wanted to do.

There are several options. In some cases pro-grade mikes can use what’s known as “phantom power,” which is a 48V input. You can buy “phantom power” adapters from audio stores. These accept input from a pro-grade mike and boost the output to a level acceptable to a PC audio system. Only certain mikes can deal with phantom power, so don’t hook one of these adapters to your mike without making sure it can handle the 48V input. Otherwise you’ll probably ruin the mike.

The other option is a USB-based preamp. I found a $44 Blue Microphones Icicle unit that adapts directly from the pro mike’s 1/4″ jack to the USB on my laptop, and which claims to require no special drivers.

The unit hasn’t arrived yet, but should be here Monday. If it works as advertised, I’ll be able to record decent quality audio, albeit in mono mode only. Stereo would be a totally different matter, I suspect. So if you’ve ever wondered why you can’t use your studio condenser mike directly with your PC, now you know.

In excellent news for music enthusiasts, not to mention privacy and personal rights advocates, Apple’s very popular iTunes store has changed its policies. The first major change involves pricing. Until now, most songs have been 99 cents each (price breaks came in when users bought whole CDs at a time). The new pricing structure uses differential price points: 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29. Record companies can pick the prices for specific songs.

This makes a whole lot more sense. Why should an obscure song by an equally obscure artist cost as much as something produced by a huge, million-CD selling band with multiple platinum releases? Apparently only a few very popular songs will be priced at $1.29 each. Most will remain at 99 cents, while others will actually drop to the new 69 cent level.

This change accompanies something music enthusiasts have long wanted: the removal of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions from songs purchased on iTunes. Back in the early days, recording company executives insisted the only way they’d allow songs to be sold on iTunes was if they were heavily protected by a DRM scheme. This led to user frustration and difficulty since it was hard (and technically illegal) to back up purchased songs to other media. It also meant you couldn’t legally copy songs from one of your PCs (say a desktop system) to a laptop for traveling purposes, even if only one machine might be active at a given time.

The differential pricing represents a compromise. Record companies agreed to give up DRM in exchange for being allowed to set price levels on a per-song basis. I, for one, applaud the change since it represents a sea change in recording companies’ attitudes. Until recently they’ve (stupidly) resisted the idea of digital music, and blamed declining sales on rampant digital piracy. I and others think this decline was more a combination of changing demographics, the rise of independent online musicians, and really poor offerings from many major labels.

In reality, while some users abused the privilege and pirated songs freely, most simply wanted the ability to manage their media online. For every pirate there are hundreds, maybe thousands of users who just wanted to transfer legitimately owned songs to an online format. This just got easier, and it appears record executives are starting to face reality. Bravo.

I’m not ashamed to admit I was born and raised in the pre-digital era. In fact I still own a turntable, cassette player, and even use them on (rare) occasions. This said, there are times when I want my analog media translated into digital format. I’m still debating over buying one of those “rip all your old albums into WAV format” turntables, but just don’t have time to sit around dubbing albums.

However, last week I stumbled across an old cassette I hadn’t listened to in ages, and really wanted to move it to digital format. Turns out this was a remarkably easy process since I had my handy Technics deck and a spare laptop lying around, along with a 2-RCA plug-to-1/8″ stereo jack patch cable. This, plus a copy of the free Audacity audio application, made ripping the tape into WAV files easy.

Here are the basic steps involved. First, connect the patch cable between your tape deck and a convenient Line In port on your audio card or laptop. Next, download and open Audacity. The first thing you need to do in the application is to change the default input and audio stream settings (they’re set for “microphone” and “mono”). Open the Preferences tab and the “Audio I/O” settings, then change the input device to your machine’s Line In jack. Next, change the recording channels on the same Audio I/O tab to “2 (stereo)” so the default stream will be picked up in stereo. (This, of course, presumes your cassettes are recorded in stereo to begin with).

If you want to hear your music as it’s playing, fire up the “hardware playthrough” setting in the same Audio I/O tab. Note that you’ll probably hear a slight delay or echo in the playback, but this won’t appear in the final product. This setting also puts a higher load on your PC, so older machines might not be able to handle it when recording high bit-rate audio. Experiment.

Now, fire up a track on the cassette and hit the “record” button in Audacity. You should hear the first track on the tape, and you’ll see activity on the waveform screen. You need to start and stop the recording process manually for each song on the tape, otherwise you’ll end up with a huge file containing all the songs. I think of it as a good excuse to listen to the whole tape again, which is pretty pleasant.

Start to finish, I had the tape cut to WAV (96k bit rate) files in about an hour. I decided to save the ripped files in a lossless format first; I can always rip them down into MP3 later on if I want to play them on my iPod. Remember, MP3 is lossy and you can’t recover the lost frequencies once they’re gone. Rip away!

Today Microsoft announced it was finally killing off its encyclopedia product, the old and venerable Encarta. It’s sad to see the product vanish, but it was also inevitable. The encyclopedia is a product set that’s suffered quite a bit as a result of Internet intrusion into its traditional space, after all. It’s hard to sell something that’s so readily available at the press of a few keys or clicks of a mouse.

Witness the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica. For years, its 6+ feet of shelf space was a staple in many homes where there was a need to keep reference works available for kids and adults. I owned an edition in the early 1990s, and used it on a few occasions. I gave away the whole thing when products like Encarta showed up in the marketplace, since it just made sense to recover all that shelf space. Today, Britannica is a shadow of its former self. The company still sells books (32 volumes with DVDs for $1149 on sale) but seems to be concentrating more on its online presence. I wonder how many parents still buy paper copies?

Encarta originally appeared on CD back in, if I recall correctly, 1992 or so. I was working at a university at the time, and was astounded to see that much information packed into a single disc. The user interface was clunky, the content was by no means complete (you’re not getting a full encyclopedia onto a 600MB CD), but it was obviously the way forward. Not only did it include an early form of hyperlinking, but videos as well. Multimedia reference works…what a concept.

Sometime after the Web revolution, Microsoft took the product online and beefed it up considerably. Not only did this make it easier to add and correct content–it removed the need to produce media for shipment to customers. Britannica also offers full online subscription access, and I suppose Redmond decided the product was a dead end due to competition from other sources.

Wikipedia comes to mind. It’s not perfect, but it’s user driven and largely self correcting as more subject matter experts devote time to it. Other Wiki-based solutions that concentrate on specific subject areas are popping up all the time.

Commercial encyclopedias may have met their match in this electronic age. Will Britannica vanish as well? What will happen to all those door-to-door salesfolk?

As if streaming video and audio weren’t using enough network bandwidth already. Various companies are building streaming games that will consume even more capacity. It’s inevitable, and it does make a certain amount of sense from a consumer standpoint.

Think of it this way: you want to try out a game, but don’t want to buy and install a huge (multi GB) game from CD or DVD. Or you don’t feel like downloading the game’s installer via your DSL or cable connection. With a streaming game, you connect to a server and (probably) install a thin client of some type. That’s it. Now you can connect and run the game remotely. It’s the next logical step up the ladder from WoW (World of Warcraft) and other online games, since it removes the “thick” client we’re all used to installing.

Of course, this model also uses a lot of bandwidth since it uses the network for both user-action and game code transmission. In the case of the OnLive application discussed in the article, all the video would be transferred via the Internet. Given the richness of current gaming video applications, this translates to massive bandwidth usage. As the article notes, “it’s uncertain how well OnLive would work in homes — there has been no widespread customer trial. It is clear, though, that it would consume large amounts of bandwidth, far higher than that required for current online games, where most of the content is stored on the computer or console.

Given that ISPs are already starting to add surcharges to monthly bills after a certain amount of data is transmitted (think of the per-minute charges when you exceed your allotted cell plan limit) this could translate into large bills for gamers…or for their parents. Given that the developer estimates usage of “just under a gigabyte per hour of high-definition gaming” a household could exceed its monthly data limit in a few days…or hours.

This could make gaming a very pricey hobby. I suspect it won’t be widely adopted until major bandwidth improvements are made to households across the US, or developers find a way to limit the network traffic consumed by applications like OnLive.

The web is packed with video content, and sometimes you want to save it to your PC. A few sites (like the excellent educational TED.com) actually offer their videos as ZIP files so you can grab them at will, but others discourage the practice. In some cases it’s that pesky copyright issue, while in others I suspect they just don’t want to lose control of the media.

Many applications are available to help you grab video from these sites. One of the easiest to obtain is Download Helper, which is a free Firefox tool that can capture from many well known sites. It’s aware of many URLs and basically knows where it’ll work. Once installed, an icon in the Firefox toolbar will highlight itself whenever you’re visiting a site with grabbable (is that a word?) video.

A friend tells me he found a batch file that will allow the use of another free tool known as ffmpeg to capture a number of video formats. Sometimes it works well, but in other cases the captured video is full of artifacts (i.e. bits of the frame that are missing data or incorrectly rendered).

In other cases (Hulu is a good example) it’s very difficult to capture video. It also may be illegal, since the material on this and various TV network websites is copyrighted. If they wanted you to capture it, they’d provide a mechanism on the site itself. This said, you can apparently grab at least Hulu content using the commercial package Replay Media Catcher ($39.95 from Applian Software).

As you can see, many options are available and I’m sure there are many more I’ve not mentioned. Capture away. Just remember to be aware of legal and ethical issues around this sort of activity — recall that it’s illegal to sit in a movie theater capturing a film using a hand-held video camera, for instance. Capturing for personal use probably won’t cause a problem, but don’t be stupid or you might find humorless people in black suits standing at your door. A free copy of the latest episode of “House” just isn’t worth spending time in jail.

I know a number of people who enjoy ripping their DVDs into MP4 or some other format so they can store them on their PC hard drives. One of the ongoing complaints I hear from them is the amount of time required to re-encode a movie into a format they can actually store on disk. Another is that they really don’t care about many of the DVD “extras” (language options, etc.) and hate the fact that they’re stuck with storing this info on disk as well.

Happily, one just stumbled across a package called DVD2One, which allows users to “make a movie-only or full disk copy of your DVD for personal use on a single DVD-Recordable.” It does so without requiring the intermediate re-encoding everyone hates, and is available both for Windows and Mac.

If the company’s promotional material is accurate, this little package is a user’s dream come true. Not only can it make movie-only copies, but also provides a “join mode” that lets you stitch (for example) multiple episodes of a TV show together, or even parts of a movie that were split between multiple DVDs in the original packaging.

It also provides the ability to make full-disk (e.g. bit-by-bit) copies of a DVD, so you can copy your masters to cheap DVD-R discs and store the masters away for safekeeping. Obviously no one should use this software to make illegal copies (pirates certainly use commercial grade multi-disc duplicators anyway since they’re in a high-volume business), but having a duplicate is handy if you’re traveling or just don’t want to risk your pristine commercial copy of some prized movie.

As a handy plus, you can use it to copy your audio collection to DVD media.

The package is apparently composed of all new code — the developers say it’s not based on old software or existing open-source libraries. It’s also relatively fast, and is “multi-processor, multi-core and multi-computer (grid) compatible” so apparently it’s able to use multithreading to speed up processing. Not a bad deal overall at 40 Euros (about $50 at the exchange rate in place when this was written).

As I wrote a few days ago, Apple’s iTunes library is (finally) dropping its DRM, or Digital Rights Management requirement in response to user pressure. This is a trend that seems to be accelerating, with Amazon and other digital music vendors removing overly restrictive copying covenants from their user agreements. What’s going on here?

One part of the equation might be artists like Nine Inch Nails, who have embraced the digital music revolution rather than treating it as a threat. Back in 1999 or so, artists like Metallica and Cheryl Crow actually participated in the RIAA’s lobbying against Napster and other services. They loudly complained about lost profits, artists being cheated out of their livelihood, and other perceived offenses.

At the same time, “NiN” and Motley Crue actively supported the movement. The latter band released several free-of-charge songs on the Internet, and NiN artist Trent Reznor actually “let fans tinker with his musical creations as far back as the 1999 release of his two-disc album, ‘The Fragile,’ two years before the sharing and remixing licensing arrangements of the non-profit organization Creative Commons even existed.” That’s forward thinking. In fact, many NiN songs are available as remixes and can be freely tinkered with. It’s all free. Yes, that’s right, totally free.

Initially, music companies felt threatened by the idea that musicians had direct access to the bandwidth and capability to interact directly with their fan base, since it meant a lot less control by RIAA and other organizations over the mechanism of music distribution. They’d controlled music since the gramophone was invented and wanted to preserve that revenue stream. In the late 90s they loudly complained about lost profits, blaming that nasty Internet and evil pirates for their woes.

Why did profits start dropping? There are several reasons, but the way I see it, there are three major factors. First, commercial music was, and continues to be, largely devoid of originality. It’s mainly pop for the masses who want to appear trendy and cool. Second, the demographic was changing in sync with aging Baby Boomers. Teen-oriented music is likely to be less popular in a country where more people than ever are over 60. Last, the Internet arrived, and in fairly short order lots of artists figured out they didn’t need big companies for music distribution anymore. Instead, they can publish it themselves and interact directly with their fans.

I suspect that, eventually, large recording labels will vanish or diminish into obscurity. If any artist can publish their own music via the ‘Net, who needs big middlemen (which is what the major labels are) who take massive percentages of an artist’s profits while maintaining a stranglehold over the distribution channels? Instead, artists can interact directly with their fan bases. I suspect this will produce a far more participatory environment that both will enjoy.

This is no different from movie producers like Peter Jackson embracing the Internet as a direct channel for fan interaction. It’s creating a far more congenial, active relationship between artist and audience. And there’s nothing negative about that, no matter what the RIAA or movie studios may think.

In a move that’s sure to increase its market share even further, Apple announced today that all 10 million songs in its immensely popular iTunes library will be offered free of DRM (Digital Rights Management) by the end of the first quarter of 2009. That’s quite a New Year present for music fans, and seems to mark a welcome shift in the attitude of media companies.

Everyone probably remembers the great Napster debate in the late 1990s. The original software, it was claimed, was responsible for widespread music piracy and an associated loss of revenue among music vendors (obviously they weren’t listening to some of the total rubbish being produced by various artists). As a result, these vendors launched major legal assaults against online services like Napster.

These companies often sued their own listeners, many of whom were just trying to take advantage of the availability of online music by ripping their CD collection into MP3 files. Napster was shut down. Other song-sharing services went underground or vanished. Vicious and badly thought-out DRM legislation was passed. Recording industry executives hated online music, since all they could think about was selling CDs and other hard media. Everything was about control — over the artists, production, distribution, and other aspects of the business.

When iTunes first appeared, everything on it was subject to DRM. Recording companies were paranoid that users would break the management algorithm and start sending songs to anyone who wanted them. They seemed to envision some Faustian nightmare of totally unregulated music-sharing that would deprive them of their livelihood.

Now, half a decade later, DRM seems to be on the wane. Amazon and other companies are selling more DRM-free music. This latest announcement frees up the whole iTunes song library. Have record executives seen the light? Have they realized that customers are generally willing to pay for a quality product, while the few who insist on “sticking it to the man” by stealing will never be defeated by DRM or any other technological barrier?

I can’t answer that right now, but this is really good news. It means your iTunes library will be easier to manage and back up. You’ll probably be able to move it more easily from one machine to another without worrying the RIAA police will descend on your house. So sit back, relax, and listen. You might be able to hear the tiny sound of market forces at work.

The end of the year brought an unpleasant surprise to users of Microsoft’s Zune MP3 player. Many of a particular model (the Zune 30 (30GB) units manufactured in 2006, apparently) simply froze up at midnight on Wednesday and refused to function. The incident, which is still under investigation, is being dubbed “Zunicide” and “The December 31st 2008 Zune 30 Meltdown” by various annoyed users.

Right now no one seems to know whether this is a virus, a software defect, or something completely different. If it’s a virus, it wouldn’t be the first time one had shipped on an MP3 player or other user device. Even iPods have been used as accidental virus propagation devices when some were shipped with Windows viruses aboard.

The happy thing is that Microsoft has already published a workaround that involves letting the device discharge, then waiting until after 12 Noon (GMT) on January 1 2009 before re-connecting the failed beast to its USB adapter. It’s annoying, but at least no recall or other drastic action is required.

What’s interesting is that the freeze apparently only affects Zunes that were connected to an external device (i.e. a PC) when the date changed over. Those that were disconnected at the time apparently were unaffected.

According to the Microsoft advisory, “if you connect your player to a computer before noon GMT on January 1, 2009, you’ll experience the freeze mentioned above.” This is true even if that machine isn’t running the Zune sync software. This seems to indicate the freeze is somehow related to the Zune device’s attempts to sync to a PC. Maybe there’s a clock error in the firmware that triggers the freeze. Apparently this didn’t happen on past New Years events…so what’s different about the switch to 2009?

One user said that “I looked up just in time to see it restarting itself at exactly 12:00 midnight, watched the loading bar, and then, the freeze.” That’s one heck of a New Years present.

I hope Microsoft resolves this soon, since I’m curious to find out what the root cause might be.