Friday, October 16, 2009

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

new warning for right-clicking on zip file on shared drive

Right-clicking on zip files on shared drives now give the message “This page has an unspecified potential security risk. Would you like to continue?” Apparently this is a "feature" MS has added from IE7 onwards. That link, as well as this one and this one, gives workarounds if you do it a lot and are annoyed by the popup.

Monday, October 12, 2009

update to processing audio post

Wanted to add an update to the audio processing post. Found that the search box in the blogger bar at the top of this blog was not working too well. Google site search - the "search hnsws.blogspot.com" option at the top of the page - was working better. I'm not removing the blogger bar just yet, because some time ago the opposite was true, with site search not returning proper results.

Anyway, here is the update. To the info in the earlier post of 2006, this auto-trim-crop tip has to be added. Also, in Sound Forge version 7 (and above?) the normalization has been tweaked a bit, so that -12 dB is almost as loud as -10 dB in the earlier Sound Forge 4.x. So, in batch processing, the processing settings look like this:



One more point to be mentioned is that when processing audio sent for regional language broadcasts, I have to select the regions with similar levels based on visual inspection and normalize them separately - m on Sound Forge drops a marker at current cursor position, and double-click on a region selects it.



Filenames for these (other language broadcasts) are also in a pattern, this can be easily learnt by looking at the older files.

Thursday, October 08, 2009

AOL FBL and finding the relevant subscriber

AOL's Feed Back Loop redacts the aol email id, even redacting the X-Subscriber header. So, we've to dig through the mail server logs to find the subscriber. First we have to find the message id which the mail server reports -
Received: by krishna.radiosai.org (Postfix, from userid 33) id [11 char alphanumeric id]
and use that id for
cat /var/log/mail.log | grep [11 char alphanumeric id]
or
cat /var/log/mail.log.0 | grep [11 char alphanumeric id]

Friday, October 02, 2009

USB mics

C asked about USB mics, the Blue Snowball and the AKG Perception since he was on a budget. I asked him to be careful of hiss as some buyer's comments indicated, and also my bad experience with the M-Audio Mobile Pre. Pointed him to the Tascam US-144, which seems to be not only frame-accurate but also quite low noise and has low latency monitoring. Tested today with inputs trimmed for balanced line level signal output from the Yamaha AW4416, max noise level was a sample value of 3 == better than -80 dB. Of course, the digital SPDIF input is even better, with the max noise sample value being 0! For the time being, C has borrowed A's US-144.