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Techical Questions

1) Would I be better off with WordPress or Radio?
2) Can I make this Movable Type allow people to comment on comments like with the livejournal?
3) Is there a firewire or some kind of audio card for my g4 I can buy that will allow for high quality audio without causing terrible latency problems like with the iMic? CUrrently I use the line-in but the quality suffers.
4) Can someone reccomend an inexepensive mixer that will allow me to have three line inputs, 2 mic inputs, 1 photo input, cross fade, panning, master volume, and especially the ability to listen with the headphones to the cueing chanel or the master output. What I would really love would be one of those old-fashioned boards with the round pots.
5) Can someone please send me an old 3rd gen iPod so I can put linux on it and use it as another audio source for my show? Even if the battery is dead it’s OK.
5) Whose vagina smells worse than mine?

By Madge

Lesbian with food allergies.

22 replies on “Techical Questions”

Regarding question #2: yes, there are actually two things you can do.

The first involves a plugin called MTThreadedComments that you can install. It takes a bit of work, and even though it says that it should work with MT3.x, some people have had some problems. There’s a thread on the MT Support forums with some tips and hints.

The second one is that you can use phpBB as the comment engine. Instructions to do that are here. It’s quite time-consuming, but I’m sure the end results would be fantastic.

Good luck.

Firewire I/O devices will provide the best performance in terms of latency. The cheapest Firewire I/O that I know of is here:
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/FirewireAudiophile-main.html

For your mixer, I’d suggest heading over to a music store that specializes in DJ gear (Guitar Center would be OK) and see what they have. Good luck finding rotary faders, though.

And I’m assuming that, by “LiveJournal comments,” you mean you want people to be able to register in order to leave comments? If that’s the case, then you can try applying Movable Type’s API key function, which would cause users to have to be registered with the Movable Type website in order to log in to your blog and leave comments. You could also add the Tiny Orwell plugin to Movable Type, and that would allow for user authorization:
http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/comment_spam.html#tinyorwell

Madge, I’m living in 1996 but if you ever swing by Lincoln maybe I’ll donate my crusty old 16 channel analog mixing board that I hardly ever use anymore.

I think it weighs 50 pounds.

To fix the latency, try using a seperate device just for recording. I use an old G3 233 Mhz desktop with 64 megs of RAM and a 30 GB 7200 rpm HD running Mac OS 9 to record, that works fine.

If i try AudioHijack on my G4 to play and record at the same time it skips. Do you get any latency using the iRiver?

Question4 – I hear good stories about Behringer mixes, fairly cheap and the Reel Reviews dude uses as does Mike Butler (Behringer Eurorack UB802).

Good Luck Madge.

Here’s what I do, and it works tits:

Use the computer only as a source, running it and all your other sources, mics, turntables, etc, into a mixer. I like my Behringer Eurorack, but I’d love a Mackie if I could afford it. You may need a separate phono pre-amp for the vinyl.

Send the program signal to a CD recorder. I use a Harman/Kardon unit.

Rip the CD to an MP3 via iTunes, and proceed as usual.

No latency problems, no hiccuping bullshit, and you’ll always have an umcompressed 44.1kHz 16-bit physical master of the show on CD. Easy-peezy. Computers are still fickle and unpredictable, and will always find a way to get you shit-flingingly pissed-off. At least this way, you’ll feel more comfortable recording with real audio gear than with a bunch of exotic and esoteric programs.

Don’t get me wrong: I love my computer, my breakout box, and my GarageBand. But only for production pieces and short take stuff, not for hour-long “live” podcasts. Depend solely on the computer and it will eventually break your heart. What we do is essentially radio. The gear and production should resemble that of a economically reasonable studio setup. Maybe I’m way old school, but I think depending on one machine to process vocals, sources, Skype calls, compression, signal routing, EQ, mixing, web browsing, email retrieval, any other computery meshugass, and actually recording the damn thing, is a recipe for profound frustration.

That’s my two cents.

DAGNABBIT!

Dave- I am not really able to monitor the iriver while recording because the volume is too low. I would record directly to the iRiver but I couldn’t get the levels right and there’s no level meter on the iRiver.

Jason- that sounds like a good solution except I don’t have the CD recorder. My current mixer already has a phono in, so I’ll just stick with it. Also, I already use two machines. I use one for itunes, quicktime, skype (source material) and the other one for recording only.

Latency issues are pretty much solved by throwing money at the problem. The higher-dollar professional products are used primarily for live recording to playback of other tracks in sync, and for live performance using virtual synths that exist right in the machine.

So high dollar firewire products have drivers that are written in assembly and optimized for the lowest latency possible. Consumer products are more often optimized with larger buffers for no stuttering even when other apps are stealing machine cycles, and aren’t troubled about taking a while to do their work, because the video they sync to is concurrently undergoing a far more complex decoding process that takes far longer.

MOTU (Mark of the Unicorn) stuff is pretty good, and very Apple-friendly.

I’m not sure if this is worth anything (you already have so many portable music players), but the iAudio M3 (and presumably their other devices) have line in recording, a level meter on the screen, and the you can hear the recording signal though the device (and turn up the volume). This is what I use to record Skype calls (because its a bitch to mess around with the PC Skype recording solution), and because it saves to MP3 automatically, its a great solution for me.

Madge,

I’d stay away from the Behringer stuff. They tend to break. I think you should call a company called Sweetwater Sound (800-222-4700). I’ve been doing business with them since ’93 and they really know their stuff. You can speak with one of their sales people (and you don’t have to buy anything) about the gear you’re looking for.

It sounds to me like there is no single product solution for what you’re doing. You might need a few things to get the job done right. When I podcast, I don’t use headphones, so I don’t have to deal with the latency issue, but I do a bit of post production, too. I’m using a Digidesign Mbox (and you might like that name cuz it’s got ‘box’ in it) with Pro Tools LE.

You can email me if you want to chat more about audio issues. I don’t have a vagina, but if I did, I’d make sure that it smelled.

Looking forward to hearing your next podcast…..

Michael Oster
F7 Sound and Vision
http://www.michaeloster.com

I bought a great mixer with four MXR inputs, a zillion line inputs, but it’s just plain line in to the computer. The thing is the MXR inputs are so amazing for reducing noise. Now my noisy computer is the only prob. Go to a Pawnshop. I got my mixer for half price.

Hi Madge,

I think I know the answer to question 5: Whose vagina smells worse than Madge’s?

Katie Couric’s. She’s been paying so much attention to her colon, her pussy stinks of neglect.

At any rate, may I suggest you stop changing the channel title of your RSS feed? Here’s why:

Everytime you change the name of your RSS feed, new podcasts get put in a different playlist by iPodder and iPodderX. And some of us have our iPods set up to only grab new shows from specific playlists (we don’t sync all of iTunes with our iPod, only specific feeds). When your podcasts get placed in a new playlists, we don’t have any new Madge podcasts to listen to.

I like the new site slogan, it’s really funny, but changing it messed up my listening (and I’m probably not the only listener that has set up their iPod this way).

No hard feelings, just a suggestion.

Love ya, Madge! Keep up the great fun work!

Madge,
I agree with the comment about the rss feed name, and website name.

in my recording days, i would monitor everything from the mixer.. no latency at all. If you buy a decent Mackie mixer, you should beable to feed all inputs into the mixer, and monitor everything realtime, and send the master out to the computer to record.. unless i am missing something here.

amber

In regards to Michael Oster’s comments a few comments above, has anyone listened to this guys podcast “The Mushroom Accelarator” (www.michaeloster.com) f*cking awesome !!!! anyway Madge we’re all anxiously awaiting to hear about your purchases, we miss ya madge, we need you 7days a week…….

Michael W. Geoghegan of the Reel Reviews podcast did two stories on his kit. He has pics at http://mwgblog.com/ His story was clear and enlightening, although it is continually evolving. There ought to be a nice trade-off point between mobility and quality. Have you ever used a Griffin iTalk to digitally into your iPod?

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