Wednesday, March 26, 2008

added streams to Nokia Internet Radio

Nokia Internet Radio directory makes it easy for supported Nokia handset owners to listen to internet radio streams. They sent us an invite, so I've added the five SGH streams to the directory.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Tascam US-1641 digital in problem and solution

The Tascam US-1641 suddenly developed a strange illness - the digital in (SPDIF) was not working. It happened when I tried a different "boot order" instead of my usual Tascam->Yamaha AW4416->Laptop order. Tried many things including changing the cable, checking settings for SPDIF/AES etc, no go.

Finally, today, tried connecting the digital out from the Tascam to the Yamaha's digital in - then the Yamaha started complaining, Dig-St-in Sync Error! Aha! So changed the setting in Clock settings in the Tascam's control panel from "Internal" to "Automatic" - then tried digital input - working! Again closed and opened Cubase, the setting was reverting to the non-working "Internal" setting. Rooting through the help file, went to Transport -> Sync Setup and changed the sync from "Internal" to "ASIO device". Now works fine even after reboots. But the power-up order seems to be important. Probably booting up the computer without the Tascam being powered on changes the Sync option to internal in Cubase.

Sunday, March 09, 2008

configuring a phone for BSNL's GPRS service

Yesterday, NNR asked for help in configuring web browsing on a Samsung SGH X-600 phone - the BSNL sms with the settings had been saved, but the browsing was not going through. Sat and went through the settings using the guide at BSNL and found that the settings sent by sms had the wrong IP Port - 9401 instead of 9201. Changed to 9201, it started working. Still the home page at http://localhost/home.wml shows "Unsupported content type" on the phone, tho' google, rediff etc websites work fine. Just for reference, the settings are:

For general internet:

-> Profile name – BSNL GPRS
Select GPRS Setting and key in the following:
-> Gateway IP address - 10.31.54.2
-> Gateway IP port - 9201
-> APN GPRS: wapsouth.cellone.in
-> Login ID - ppp
-> Password – ppp123
-> Homepage URL - http://localhost/home.wml
-> Bearer - GPRS only

select Current proxy -> BSNL GPRS and then browsing will work.

For BSNL's portal - rintones etc:

-> Profile name – BSNL PORTAL
Select GPRS Setting and key in the following:
-> Gateway IP address - 10.31.54.2
-> Gateway IP port - 9201
-> APN GPRS: portalsouth.cellone.in
-> Login ID - ppp
-> Password – ppp123
-> Homepage URL - http://wap.cellone.in
-> Bearer - GPRS only
select Current proxy -> BSNL PORTAL and then at the WWW service menu, click home to go to BSNL portal.

For MMS:

Under MMS Profiles setting,

- Profile Name: BSNL MMS
- Server URL: http://10.31.53.18/mms/
Select GPRS Setting and key in the following:
-> Gateway IP address - 10.31.54.2
-> Gateway IP port - 9201
-> APN GPRS: bsnlmms
-> Login ID - ppp
-> Password – ppp123
-> Bearer - GPRS only

Now you can go to Message Menu, and then selecting Multimedia Message, send a multimedia message to another number.

More on the Tascam US-1641 and the bundled Cubase

A follow-up to my previous post - got DJ to put in 10k ohm resistors in series and make cables to run from the Spirit 42 to the Tascam - the Direct-Outs were +4 dBu and maybe even a little more with headroom, while the XLR inputs for the Tascam maxed out at +2 dBu. Anyway, even with the resistors, found that the Direct outs were being saturated by KV/BR's practice of increasing input trim till the overload indicator is almost continuously on. So, have reverted to recording with the aux inputs to the Yamaha AW4416: at least 3 inputs are pre-fade, so those at least are less over-driven.

From the AW4416, I can export 8 tracks at once to Cubase LE running on the laptop using the Tascam US-1641 - 4 tracks on omni outs, 2 tracks on stereo outs and 2 tracks on digital stereo outs - any bus can be routed anywhere.

About the recordings on Cubase: one nifty trick is "Bounce selected" in the Audio menu. Supposing I have multiple tracks which have different in and out points. The individual recorded wav files will be Audio01_01.wav, Audio02_01.wav etc which will not be in sync if directly imported into another audio sw since their in/out points are different. But if I select (using the marquee tool) an area with these tracks included, and choose the Bounce selected option, it asks whether to replace existing material, if you choose No, it creates new files like Audio01.wav, Audio02.wav and so on, padded with silence at beginning and end so that all of them are of the same length, can be imported to other sw easily.

Saturday, March 01, 2008

BT site in SaiUniti

Finally BT site is in SaiUniti. Some hiccups faced due to A wanting CNAME instead of A record even for the domain record, not possible with most (or all?) DNS control panels.
on freedns.afraid.org - this type of thing is not possible:

2 errors
# You can't mix CNAME/MX records together using the same hostname.
# Domain root's cannot be CNAME's, however you can web-forward this record to www.sssbpt.org instead for the same effect.

I could have reverted to frame forwarding at nettigritty.

Result:
all saved bookmarks etc with http://sssbpt.org/etc bookmarks will return error 404.

Only if someone directly tries http://sssbpt.org will it go through to the correct site. There, clicking on links will show on the address bar as the same http://sssbpt.org/etc which had earlier returned error 404!
So A allowed A records for the time being, plans to make an ISAPI filter!