July 17, 2008 @ 01:50
My sound card (a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2) has got lots of inputs, especially with the nice drive bay expansion port.
Unfortunately, the default ALSA device seems to have no way to access the “Line 2/Mic 2” channel on the front drive-bay expansion which I use for recording due to it seemingly being the lowest-noise channel.
If you point JACK’s “Input Device” to “hw:0,2” then it will pick up the 16 channel inputs and you can connect them nicely to be able to access this port (channels 9 and 10) in JACK-enabled applications.
I’m currently working on some voice acting for The Nameless Mod (which is looking like it’s going to be spectacular, check it out) and the best program I’ve found to do this recording in is Audacity. Audacity however seems to stubbornly refuse to let me use it’s JACK support (which is apparently buggy beyond use currently anyway).
I found that if I point Audacity to record 16 channels from “hw:0,2” then I can access all the Audigy’s input channels (as JACK does) but unfortunately this means that every time I record I get all 16 channels (a PortAudio limitation from what I can tell from the source). This isn’t ideal as it means, to record a bunch of lines in rapid succession, I need to spend huge amounts of time deleting the unwanted 15 other channels. As it’s not possible to select the channels to record from Audacity I needed to get a little more creative and ended up with this:
pcm.mic2 {
type plug
slave.pcm "hw:0,2"
slave.channels 16
ttable.0.8 1
ttable.1.9 1
ttable.8.0 1
ttable.9.1 1
}
If you add the above to your “~/.asoundrc” or “/etc/asound.conf” then you will find that in Audacity’s “Recoding” dropdown you will now have the option “ALSA: mic2“. This is simply the same as “hw:0,2” but with the 9th channel swapped with the 1st and the 10th swapped with the second, thus allowing you to select “2: Stereo” or “1: Mono” from the “Channels” dropdown and get the Line/Mic 2 input(s) in Audacity without the need to constantly delete unwanted tracks.
Enjoy!
Note: You probably also want to ensure that Audacity records at the Audigy 2′s native rate or 48000Hz and using a 16-bit sample format.
Posted in Music, Software Development
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March 10, 2008 @ 23:38
Following on from Seele’s post (which I wasn’t tagged on but I don’t care!): List your five favourite artists, your five favourite songs by those artists and tag five other people to do it.
I’m going for my Last.fm top artists and the songs I liked the most at the moment.
Béla Fleck and the Flecktones
- Earth Jam
- Scratch and Sniff
- Off The Top
- The Sinister Minister
- Big Country
Neal Morse
- Colder In The Sun
- Sing It High
- Reunion
- The Conclusion
- In The Fire
Spock’s Beard
- At The End Of The Day
- June
- The Light
- Wind At My Back
- She Is Everything
Dream Theater
- Learning To Live
- Metropolis (Part 1)
- Lines In The Sand
- In The Presence Of Enemies (Part 1)
- A Change Of Seasons
Jamiroquai
- Emergency On Planet Earth
- Runaway
- Soul Education
- Canned Heat
- (Don’t) Give Hate A Chance
I tag Gareth, Jonas, Duncan and Thorsten to do the same.
Posted in Music
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January 5, 2008 @ 20:11
We’re on the 5th day of 2008. It’ll probably take me till the 300th day before I remember to write “2008″ instead of “2007″…
Like most people I’ve made a few New Year’s resolutions this year whilst trying to take on a few bits of advice on how to make them and keep them.
Anyway, here goes:
- Hack more on KDE. I think the combination of starting a new job and not running KDE4 as my desktop (until recently) has made me slack from working on KDE. Once I actually am using it daily then I reckon I’ll be able to do more work and help with KDEPIM for 4.1.
- Practise my bass more. Playing every two weeks with a bunch of music teachers and session musicians is making me feel a little insecure about my playing! I need to practise more, especially working on my soloing and probably buy a Fake book.
- Study rather than just reading my Bible. I’m normally alright about reading my Bible regularly but I’ve just been reading it like a novel rather than actually using commentries and then like to properly study the passages. I’ve done this a few times lately and it is far more beneficial, I need to get up earlier and try and do it more often
- Play less computer games. I do enjoy gaming but it is one of these activities that really benefits no-one except myself so I want to try and divert more time into things like hacking/music where I can benefit others whilst enjoying myself.
- Be a better friend/boyfriend. Just generally take more of my time to try and focus on others and help them with their problems.
- Become a better software engineer. Improve my knowledge of my main languages, maybe try and pick up some more and improving my algorithmic math skills.
- Take more of an interest in politics. Now that Nick Clegg has been elected the leader of the Liberal Democrats I’ve felt myself want to try and get a little more involved and interested in British politics in the gradual run-up to the next UK elections.
I’m sure there are more but that’s all I can think of for now!
Posted in Computer Games, Music, My Life, Politics
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December 21, 2007 @ 03:24
I was out today for our team meal which turned into a team drink which turned into going to Liquid, one of the few clubs in busy Ipswich.
You can see some pictures here.
It was a good night and I enjoyed myself. My KDE t-shirt got a few odd looks earlier on in the evening with people being evenly spread between calling me a huge nerd as a compliment and calling me a huge nerd as an insult 
Anyway, heading to Liquid was pretty good banter, got to dance like a fool with some mates and get high on Red Bull whilst trying not to pass out from the really bad body-odour.
I’m far from easily shocked or a particularly morally conservative but I was pretty disturbed by the majority of videos for the dancey songs being just women dancing insanely suggestively in their underwear. I just don’t really see why they are like that. There tends to be more women than men in clubs and certainly more women than men actually dancing so I’m surprised more women aren’t bothered by how insanely one-dimensionally they are being portrayed by the flashing images above the dance floor. I don’t really know what I think should be done or even if anything should be but I find it a bit odd.
Perhaps I’m just not the target audience but I find absolutely nothing attractive about the videos at all. Looks are important but when they are focused on so soley (as in the videos) it is a massive turn-off to me .
I like going out clubbing and dancing and having a laugh with mates but it really bothers me sometimes. If men (outside of early-era Take-That, Relight My Fire is the gayest video ever) can seem to produce videos where they aren’t mindless sex-objects then why is the role reversed seemingly every time a woman is on screen?
Discuss!
Posted in Music, My Life
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