Category > Audioblog
Aquarion Speaks.
The Problem With Audioblogs
Why audioblogs haven't caught on much. Unedited.
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Those who spoke on this:
Those who spoke on this:
Kevin:
One of us has screwy MIME settings. In IE your Audioblogs play fine. In any of my Gecko based browsers they act as though you’ve sent text/plain. As I make this post in Mozilla (Build 2002121215) I have tried loading to no avail, I went to preferences and specifically added a .ogg setting (application/x-ogg) and a player (although I think other people’s ogg files work okay), yet no luck. I restarted the browser just to check, and no luck.
I feel very cheated that IE works. Am I the only Win/Gecko user suffering this?
Itai:
Mozilla!
And yes, I’m suffering this. You have admit, however, that Mozilla more than makes up for such hindrances. Well, you dont HAVE to admit. Id appreciate it if you did.
dearg:
Dare I mention the Audigy 2? Don’t know if it has a remote control, but you could always build your own :)
It’s PCI and has 6.1 surround sound, as opposed to the Extigy’s 5.1.
Myself, I’m making do with an SB Live!. Until I find huge heaps of money.
dearg:
It’s £50 cheaper at dabs.com than at Comet – be careful where you go. Maybe there’s some kind soul will buy you a present or late Xmas gift…
Fastest Bun
Today I:
Fixed the broken DNS settings for aquarionics.com (www.aquarionics.com and variousotherthings.aquarionics.com were fine, but aquarionics.com (as in “aquarion@aquarionics.com”) was – and is – broken. As if I hadn’t had enough DNS errors over the last week)
Started the process of rewriting my CV from the ground up.
Did more work on geekstuff.co.uk
Started mentally planning bits for a proper (as in, paid for project)
Listened to a lot of music.
Attempted to teach Dragon Simply Speaking to listen to me by spending most of the morning reading Dave Barry monologues into it.
Made fresh scones, put clotted cream on them (because Sainsbury’s were selling it cheap as the budgie) and ate them with jam.
Me: 5. World: Nil.
Also, Last night I recorded (after various requests to do so. People are odd) The Shipping Forcast, a programme with almost mystical significance. General conclusion: I need a better microphone.
Those who spoke on this:
Stuart Langridge:
You could at least put some clotted cream in the post, man. I didn’t know they sold it outside Devon.
Off down the supermarket for me :)
Performance Art
Today is apparently Perfomance Art day in the Neighbourhood. Mike has a whole load of links to people taking part, saving me the effort.
For my part, I’ve decided to read the thing that I enjoyed most this week into a microphone. It’s David Salo’s Cave Linguistica, and it’s in the attachment below.
I should point out that that MP3 is about seven minutes long, and 3mb in size
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Dorothea Salo:
OMG. Sending link to David posthaste. Too cool.
Watching You
Okay, so the referer tracking stuff is now in, along with an implimentation of Phil’s suggestion of a most popular list (currently only doing Journal entries, the more generic version will be a little more complicated). It also outputs as an RSS/ESF feed, which is my solution to the output problem (Generic tag based output is complicated, so I prefer to tell people to grab the internally generated RSS/ESF feed and process it instead) (Not that I tell people anything, being the only person running Epistula).
So, you can click the “Refererals” button below each post for logs of how people got to it, and in addition each post tracks people going to it and crossreferences sites and searches that lead to it. The benifits of one-page-per-post archives. Also, each entry now links to the day, month and year archive it resides in via the date, and I’m now able to delete comments. Go Me.
I’ve also finished 75% of the project I was going to finish today, the rest is background processing whilst I do all this lot, so I’ll have a blinding flash of inspiration over dinner of how I’m going to leap the next hurdle.
So basically, I’ve been high on PHP for most of the day.
Yay me
Wibble
More audiobloggery.
Oh, and I finally got around to blogrolling Cathy, despite having been reading the blog for months. You can’t tell (The blogroll not being on this design, must…not..redesign…) but it’s there on my start page for all to see.
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Cathy:
So is the URL in the link a subtle hint that you’re offering to host my blog? ;)
Watch the birdy
Draft One of the Aquarionic Production of Burningbird’s Mockingbird’s Wish (as requested) has been recorded. This is something like a fifteen minute edit, including the First Mother’s Lengthly Digression into Why Aquarion Can’t Read The Words Right, and thus won’t be released.
The problem I’m having is sound effects. The chances are I’ll release the first version into the blogsphere and then see if someone with more sound-fu than me can add the effects.
Those who spoke on this:
Burningbird:
Now that is a terrific bit of news! I didn’t think you’d grab it. The sound effects, you know.
I can’t wait to hear it. I wouldn’t mind hearing the unedited version, too, which sounds like a lot of fun.
StageLight
At CCDE, and I will stop going on about this soon, I fucked up on stage.
I don’t often fuck up live on stage. Twice, in fact, have I completely lost it on stage. The second was Friday night when I not only forgot the words to “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion”, but promptly lost the band and the tune as well. The first was a pantomime scene in which I – as a Buttons type – had to do a scene with the Dame, whose name was Barry Smith. Later that night, we got a joint award for “The scene with no known lines”, which summed it all up nicely.
Nevertheless, Friday night is bothering me since it made me acutely aware that I haven’t been on stage properly (as in, complete with script) for almost three years now, a stretch even by “Out of work actor” standards.
How do I get around this? Not sure. With the hour 1/2 commute each day to and from work I don’t really have time for anything like singing/voice lessons. Hmm. And indeed Hoom. I intend to fix this – and indeed my voice – sometime before the con where I have to sing again (Have to? Want to) but I don’t want this – like so many other things at the moment – to be “When I have time”, because I know I never shall.
So I have a plan. I got paid on Tuesday (Sing Yay for the first Tuesday of the month) so my master plan currently consists of buying a decent microphone and speaking into it, bringing AudioBlog back to Aquarionics, Project Alice back to the world, and finally (as in Eventually, since I’ll probably do this as soon as I’m happy with the quality) record Burningbird’s Mockingbird’s Wish as I promised back in May.
Until then, the warm up begins with something else BB wrote. The infamous Parable of the Languages.
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[Download the original file]
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Those who spoke on this:
Jehanneton:
Hey, you’re in Reading, right? A very good friend of mine moved to Reading in 2000. She and her husband are both singers- Domi has a beautiful voice and was a professional opera singer with Opera Queensland when she left Australia. She may be able to give you some lessons if you’re interested, just let me know. Don’t be worried about the opera stuff- good vocal production is the same no matter what you sing, it’s the placement that varies with style.
Promisebound
I promised Burningbird almost a year ago that I would read her story, “The Mockingbird’s Wish” and publish the reading.
I’ve done so.
Well, I’ve read it, and edited half of it, and as soon as I stop hateing the sound of my own voice, I’ll edit the other half too. Meanwhile, some outtakes.
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Marco:
I still think you should do the Discworld Companion. :-)
Any time now, someone on Isis will be pointed to your audioblogs. And then you’ll be very sorry. And then I’ll be sorry I opened my big yap.
Best to run away pre-emptively.
Mockingbird's Wish
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…
No, hang on a sec. That’s Star Wars.
It was a dark and stor…
No, that’s not right either.
I made a promise to Shelley ‘Burningbird’ Powers over a year ago that I would read her magical parable The Mockingbird’s Wish and post it.
I recorded it once then deleted it, because it was crap. Then I eventually Recorded it properly
and have been in the process of editing it since then.
Now it’s finished, read the tale and listen to the file.
The Mockingbird’s Wish (MP3, 5mb)
Oh, and it appears Shelley likes it too, which is aways nice
Stream of Consciousness
So, my new phone has the ability to do text recordings, a feature I was playing with on the walk home from the station. Some bits don't make sense, sometimes because I'm talking bollocks, sometimes because you can't actually hear what I'm saying. Next time I should really have a point before I shoot off at the microphone, but anyway. Stream of Consciousness. All MP3s are exactly 1 minute long.
Stream of Consciousness parts 1 - 10
- Part 1 - Test
- Part 2 - Too Damn hot - Explaination
- Part 3 - Going Home - Work - Heat -
- Part 4 - Why - Being insane
- Part 5 - Downsides of being insane
- Part 6 - The one minute thing again
- Part 7 - Time - Crossing the road - Lack of entries
- Part 8 - Media format - Being pointed at and laughed at
- Part 9 - Hyperlinks in voiceblog - Flash presentations & being lynched
- Part 10 - More hyperlinks in voice blogs - transcriptions within MP3s - running out of time
Violence in Videogames
Those who spoke on this:
stephen:
a thought: the fact that one is listening to Aquarion rather than reading him does mean that one is free to type addresses as he mentions them. flash presentations are thankfully unnecessary!
Nice to know Aq’s thought process is as scattered as the rest of us- Blogs to tend to present people asw more together and articulate than they really are…
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dearg:
I know this is rather missing the point somewhat, but how about text-to-speech? Or writing the blog entry and then reading it so you kind of know what you’re going to say?
Oh, btw, the field labels are missing from the comments page. I think I’ve got them in the right order…
Paul Freeman:
I did think of mentioning speech recognition, but my experiences of such software is that it is not very good (yet). Maybe it has or will get better … anyone with any experience of using it?
sil:
Yeah, it’s not all that good. I’ve used the Festival system a bit, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. Frankly, my testbed for this is Stephen Hawking; as the most famous computer-speech example around, I’d expect him to have something approaching the best available software. While he sounds like a robot, we’re still miles from a real solution.
Marco:
One way to get around the links problem, could be to concede this being not in fact an audio-blog, but an audio-log.
Though I don’t know how useful that is.
FWIW, it’s still a nice/fun/cool(/geeky) thing, so keep doing it! I’ll listen.
Laurabelle:
I for one have downloaded and listened to all of your sound clips. Even the 7-minute poetry reading.
I’m probably not a fangirl though, or at least one who’s conserving all her saliva.