Doc Skala's Old-Time Variety Hour, episode 1

Axel (Axel) at Sun, 03 Jan 2010 17:26:27 +0000:
Atypically, your voice is almost exactly what I imagined it would be (I am usually surprised when I meet a radio person).

The essential trouble with audio is that the listener has no control over the rate of input. I think there is an unspoken agreement in the post-mediaeval literate culture that the recipient of prepared communication may control the conditions under which the communication is perceived; modern media have smashed that agreement. I'm not sure this is a good thing (and am rather allergic to McLuhanry). Besides, I spend too much time online as it is. Btw, is there a command that will halt MPG321 and park the file so the listening can resume later from where it was interrupted?

Your problem with the Japanese letters is an example of the relationship between eyesight on one hand and culture, habit, and training on the other. Go to the Typophile Forums (http://typophile.com/), which is a website for people who design typefaces, and read some posts where they criticize each others' fonts: they notice things which you and I would practically need a microscope to notice. Obviously their eyes are not mechanically different from other human eyes; it's a matter of how the brain has grown up. Some anthropologists have conjectured that people can't become good shots with a rifle until they have learned to read. Still, it's not so simple. I knew other anthropologists who spent a winter on the trapline with a James Bay Cree family. One day some adults in the group noticed a pair of foxes far, far away in the snow - so far that to the anthropologists they just looked like two gnats moving slowly on a white background. The Cree grownups pointed out the dots to a three-year-old and explained to him why one of them was a fox and the other a vixen. Education in action. On the same expedition someone saw a moose and the family elder went out with his rifle. "Have you got enough bullets?" asked one of the eager anthropologists, who had contributed several boxes of ammo as part of the deal for being on board. "Yes, I put a bullet in my pocket," answered the Cree, who presently returned asking for help to haul the moose to the camp. He was illiterate.

Geoffrey Sampson's Writing Systems is a good read (try to get the 1987 edition which corrects earlier errors), although I think we are still waiting for the great book which will open up the study of how writing systems influence culture - a field at the juncture of anthropology, neurology, optics, and graphic design.

Btw you have severely simplified the history of European writing and ignored the pre-Latin source of our alphabet, which did not involve architectural carving. But you knew that.

Matt (mskala) at Mon, 04 Jan 2010 01:15:09 +0000:
It's true, I didn't go into all the detail I might have on the history of this alphabet of ours. I think my point there remains valid, though: that any brush strokes in Latin are buried a lot more deeply in the past than with Japanese script.

The thing about marksmanship reminds me of a claim I've encountered that true art (I feel like that should be capitalized, True Art) cannot be created by members of a society that doesn't have written language - noting that that's a statement about the society, not about individuals (so that an illiterate person in a society that has writing, could still be an Artist). I'm unconvinced, but it's an interesting kind of claim.

On my installation I can hit Ctrl-Z to suspend mpg123, and start it up again with "fg", but that's not exactly a real "bookmark" facility. Most MP3-playing software supports some form of pausing. It's seldom intended for long-term use. For instance, with XMMS if you "pause" it remains connected to the sound device and you can't run other things, whereas if you "stop" it disconnects but loses its place. With mplayer it's the space bar.

I would think that there must be players with a proper bookmark facility (saved to disk so you can really shut down the player and start again from there later) because lots of people want that for audio books. I don't know of an example, though.

Axel (Axel) at Mon, 04 Jan 2010 01:50:14 +0000:
Thanks! Ctrl-Z and fg work with mpg321, but this is nowhere in the man page.

It strikes me that the most common writing material in ancient Rome was probably the wax tablet, no examples of which survive for obvious reasons. Makes you wonder about the survival of electronic text.

The Wikipedia article "History of the alphabet" needs serious tweaking but I'm on a deadline and haven't time, damn!

Matt (mskala) at Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:06:09 +0000:
It wouldn't be on the mpg123 man page because it's a general feature of Unix. Most processes, unless they take steps to disable or change this behaviour, can be suspended by the SIGTSTP "signal" and restarted by SIGCONT, and Ctrl-Z/fg send those signals in a typical setup. So you can do the same sort of thing with most other programs on a Unix machine also, not just mpg123.

Daniel (Daniel) at Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:06:15 +0000:
Wow, there's a bad crackle on mine that is making it hard to listen to (because it's annoying). I'm getting it in both Quicktime Player and iTunes 8. Hope it's not in the original.

Matt (mskala) at Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:41:42 +0000:
See if you can hear it in the musical segments and the Hawai'ian tape. If it's consistent through the entire recording, it's probably your playback setup. If it doesn't appear in those segments, well, there is a lot of background noise in my apartment, and there's unfortunately not much that can be done about that as long as I record from here. However, I wouldn't describe the background noise I hear in the recorded-from-apartment segments as a "crackle," so I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing.

Daniel from 67.55.14.62 at Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:30:09 +0000:
Don't hear it in the musical segments. And it's a real distinct snap-crackle-pop, fairly loud relative to your voice (thought quieter).

On the advice of the people at librivox, I bought a Logitech 250 USB noise cancelling headset microphone , and that seems to sound very good to people I''m talking to on skype.

Matt (mskala) at Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:04:03 +0000:
Do you hear it in the part recorded in Hawaii? What I hear - on the part recorded from my desktop machine *only* - is a continuous tinny-sounding mixture of tones in the background, interrupted by periodic clicks. There's also some sound of the fan in my computer and the compressor in my refrigerator, but both of those seem to be pretty well rejected by the microphone. Nothing I would describe as a "crackle".

I suspect what I'm hearing is electrical noise from the power supply in my computer, and if so, using another microphone won't change anything. The part recorded in Hawaii was done with a battery-powered handheld device and should be completely free of power supply noise.

I can try recording from my other computer, which may have a better power supply and sound hardware, or even recording everything with the handheld recorder, but those possibilities raise other issues.

I took a look on the Net and found a lot of comments about iTunes 7 (much less so 8) having trouble playing back some MP3s, notably variable-rate MP3s like mine, and introducing what people described as "crackling" noises. If you have the opportunity to try a really different decoder, such as mpg123 (I suspect QuickTime Player may use the same libraries as iTunes, under the covers) that might be worth doing.

Daniel from 67.55.14.62 at Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:42:41 +0000:
I don't hear it on the hawaii bit. Seems likely it's the VBR aspect - you might try posting a version in 64 kbps or something for the benefit of the iTunes folks. Of course I haven't upgraded mine in a while, I think it's on 9 now.

Daniel from 67.55.14.62 at Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:53:40 +0000:
Also your description of "continuous tinny-sounding mixture of tones in the background, interrupted by periodic clicks" doesn't describe what I'm hearing (had another listen).

Somewhat weirded out by seeing my ip there alongside my permanent posting.

Matt (mskala) at Thu, 07 Jan 2010 01:03:45 +0000:
If you hear it on the "apartment" voice segments but not the Hawaiian voice segment nor the music, it seems to me that's strong evidence it must *not* be the VBR... because the whole works is VBR and so VBR problems would presumably appear on all segments. More likely it's something about my recording setup for the segments where you do hear it; and that's something I can try to fix by using the other computer. Let's see how next episode turns out.