Who knows?
I bought a dinky little mixer today, a Phonic MU 502. I justified it to myself on two grounds:
I use Macromedia's Flash quite a lot, mostly for creating animated poems. I even teach a course on Animated Poetry in Flash. This means I have to keep up with the latest versions, so at present, I have Flash MX 2004 installed. This has lots of fine features, and lots of bugs.
So I was initially pleased when Macromedia announced they had a bug fix release. Less pleased when I went to their site and discovered I could download it. All 66.66 MB of it. I don't have a broadband Internet connection, so downloading it via my modem would take about 6 hours, assuming the connection were reliable for that length of time and there were no problems.
I bought the product on CD, so I ought to be offered bug fixes on CD.
I contacted Macromedia about this, but they didn't have anything useful to say:
...Furthermore, for you to be able to acquire the Flash MX 2004 7.2 updater, may we suggest that you refer with your Internet Service Provided. You may request from them, if possible, to have your download bandwidth increased for only a particular period during off-peak hours for you to be able to download the said updater. They may be able to provide you with further assistance on this matter...
That bit of boilerplate just means they've had lots of complaints from broadband users about the amount of time it takes to download the update. As I said, I don't have broadband, so the stuff about increasing my download bandwidth is totally irrelevant.
I suspect this is one of those gestures, intended to please, but done at half-cock and on the cheap, that ends up having the opposite effect. It's certainly disgruntled me!
Oh yes, and that new Blogger NavBar looks really crap, doesn't it.
I came to the conclusion that the one-second delay effect with no feedback didn't really add much. It just sounded like two people reading in canon. And if that's the effect you want, it's probably better to get two people to read in canon. Something that sounded a bit more promising, perhaps, happened when I used a much longer delay (5 seconds) and lots of feedback (98%). And there was lots of acoustic feedback, too. The electronic feedback didn't cause changes in timbre of the echo, but the acoustic feedback did. So I got a gradually changing background sound. It seemed to set up a rather mysterious, sinister mood, so I'm writing a rather theatrical text to go with it. I'll have to try to persuade Joy of Six to try it out.
I wrote another sound poem today. The idea of is that it should be read via the FX unit set to produce a delay of one second. The words should be read at a rate of two per second, so that the the delayed word is heard at the same time as the live word two words later. For example, the live word 'hook' occurs at the same time as the delayed word 'lock'.
light show ground sheet lightning bolt blue sky hook crook lock pick pocket watch glass ware out side bar stool pigeon toed away match sticky back bone meal ticket machine head gear lever arch bishop gate fold up beat eggs act shun t ap ple over t off er g et er ik on ik kle ap ear ie t t
The other effect I'd intended to use was to increase the feedback of the FX unit so that as the text became more and more broken up, there were more repetitions of the sound. I tried this out this evening, but it was hard to read the words, concentrate on getting the rate right and fiddle with the feedback all at the same time. It seemed to be more effective to repeat sections of the poem, rather than reading it straight through, though I have a sneaking feeling that for 'more effective' one should read 'easier'.
I didn't get a chance to show off my Virtualizer to the rest of J6 on Sunday - we just had too much to do in the way of sorting out poems for our CD recording session, and making a start on devising a new set for the autumn.
We'd booked two evening sessions for making the recordings with Zoo Audio, an excellent small studio run by Andy Cross. I won't describe the studio in detail, as you can read about it on the site. The online article from Sound On Sound magazine is particularly informative.
The sessions went much more smoothly than any of us had expected; many of the poems were successfully recorded in just one or two takes. And the combination of Andy's editing skills and SAWStudio ensured that fluffed lines could be corrected without re-doing the whole poem.
Our multi-voice poems were a little more complicated to do, but even those didn't give a lot of trouble. I'd vaguely expected that we'd have a microphone each, but Andy used either a single stereo mic, or a pair. Reading poems in the soundproof booth was a slightly odd experience, and a hot one, especially when all five of us were in there together.
Now we just have to wait for Andy to give us the demo CD, and decide what order to put the poems on for the final version. And design a cover and playlist. And get the CDs made.
I mentioned Cool Edit the other day, but Cool Edit is no more, alas. It's been taken over by Adobe and turned into Adobe Audition. The 'alas' part is because Adobe only do the expensive ($299) 'pro' version and have dropped the cheap Cool Edit 2000 version, which contained everything most people wanted.