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“The stars up there at night are closer than you think.”

Doug Dillon

‘Twas but a mere handful of posts back that I was bemoaning the sad fact that the Chanteuse and I had been unable to get on with recording the seemingly endless (hopefully!) sequence of songs that I am clearly engaged upon writing at the moment. The latest in a line of tragic circumstances (in this case one that affects everyone – the COVID-19 pandemic!) had put a stop to any prospects of two non-isolation-group souls singing with each other – thus rendering recording impossible…

…unless we could come up with some means of so doing that did not require us to be in the same room (or even the same building)! Well – clearly other people are doing just such things, so it must be possible. Indeed there is a plethora of different technical solutions to the problem, but at first glance nothing that met our preferred and exacting requirements.

What we really wanted to be able to do was to record the Chanteuse’s voice exactly the way that we normally do – with the exception of each being in our own homes rather than together in my little studio. This would involve my playing the track from my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) – the Chanteuse listening to it on headphones and singing the vocal part along with it – and my recording the resultant performance back into the DAW. I would then need to be able to play the ‘completed’ track back so that we could both listen critically to it.

Clearly the best way to effect such a seemingly complex technical trick – given that we don’t have the budget of an international broadcaster or major telecommunications company – was to use the InterWebNet. But how might that even be possible?

Well, the solution that I eventually found – after trying just about every alternative that we could reasonably afford – comes from a German company and is called SessionLinkPRO. It is a web application that works – joy of joy – using just Google’s Chrome web browser and has a splendidly simple but effective interface that enables two computers – one running the DAW software and the other equipped with an audio interface and studio microphone – to send and receive simultaneous digital audio streams at studio quality. Sweet!

We had our first online recording session this week, finishing off a track that we had started recording back at the beginning of March. Though SessionLinkPRO also offer video links if required we chose to work simply with audio and we were naturally a little worried at first that not being able to see each other – and the inevitable slight audio delay in the round-trip signal – might make the session awkward. We were, however, rapidly into our stride and in discussion afterwards decided that – since we don’t really look at each other whilst working anyway –  the task at hand was no more taxing than it normally is.

The proof of the pudding is that – having done the first mixes of the track concerned – it is virtually impossible to tell that different parts of the vocal were recorded at different times and in entirely different circumstances.

Kudos again to SessionLinkPRO – and should any gentle reader be interested in the technical details of the setup I would be happy to furnish them.

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Photo by Andy Dawson Reid “The whole digital enchilada – interactive, cable, broadband, 500-channel…”

Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age

One for the nostalgia buffs! I bet that you never thought you’d find yourself face to face with that particular rubric again…

The ever-procacious Urban Dictionary curls its lip at the moniker thus:

“Laughably outdated term for the Internet. Mostly used during the 90s by yuppies who made their own awful-looking web pages.”

…and again:

“A cheesy, ebullient, woefully outdated term from the 90’s, which means ‘Internet’. Coined when all the people were massively wowed by the sheer awesomeness of the Intertubes. Nowadays in disuse unless you use it for comedy.”

Yup – comedy! That’s the effect I was going for… How am I doin’? How ’bout now? etc, etc…

‘Holy moly!’ – you’re thinking – ‘what in the name of Al Gore is he doing raking up this sort of muck in 2014?’

Well – back in the day when it was the Information Superhighway I ordered an upgrade for our broadband connection (yes – the very same that was dead as a dodo for six weeks over Christmas!) to an all-new super-fast fibre (or fiber, as our trans-Atlantic cousins would have it) broadband circuit! And – guess what? It finally came!!!

Ok – I exaggerate the timescale slightly – for effect, you know! But by the time that we actually got to order the thing last October we had already been a target for generic flyers from the mephitic British Telecom – advertising their new fibre service – for at least a couple of years… long before it was actually available anywhere in the surrounding neighbourhood.

When our ISP eventually informed us that fibre was finally available at our local exchange I was, naturally, on the phone immediately – placing an order. The niceties observed, a date was fixed for an engineer to pay us a visit to do the necessary. Splendid!

Except – you’ll be unsurprised to hear – that it didn’t happen. It turned out that though the fibre service had been installed at the exchange it had not actually got as far as the cabinet in the street outside our domicile.

A new date for installation was set… and missed! Then another… and another…

At one point our ISP cruelly raised hopes that something was about to happen by sending us our new high-speed router. When – however – I called excitedly to check, they admitted that they had made a mistake. Bah!

In the end it was five increasingly resigned months before finally – and quite suddenly – an appointment was made and not broken… and we found ourselves on the end of an InterWebNet pipe that is actually fat enough to carry the traffic that the Kickass Canada Girl requires. For now – anyway…

This does all make me realise that we need to start checking now regarding the broadband situation on the Saanich peninsular. Having experienced a whiff of bandwidth freedom I can’t see The Girl settling in future for anything less…

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atlas obscuraWhilst searching the ever wonderful InterWebNet for items on the raven as trickster in North American First Nations cultures I came upon this article. The piece itself is brief, but acted as an introduction to this totally wonderful and unknown – to me at any rate – website… the Atlas Obscura.

Every so often one comes across something so splendid and beautifully executed that one simply has to share it. I have added this to my blogroll so that you can pay repeated visits whenever you so desire… which is exactly what I intend to do myself.

Enjoy!

 

 

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There are days when I feel particularly like the grumpy old man that I fear I am rapidly evolving into. Dour grey November mornings don’t help much with this, even at the weekend when what lies ahead are a pleasant few days of relaxing with the Kickass Canada Girl, eating and drinking well, going for brisk – if damp – walks, and watching the TV coverage of the home nations being beaten to a pulp on the rugger field by the strapping demi-gods of the southern hemisphere.

At my previous school – with just such grim days in mind – they practiced a rather splendid custom. A former member of the teaching staff had left a bequest to the common room with particular instructions for its use. On one grey miserable Monday morning each November – to be chosen on the hoof by the common room secretary – the bequest would pay for Madiera and Bath Oliver biscuits to be served at the daily mid-morning staff meeting held in the school hall. The date was never revealed in advance so each year on one dank Monday morning at least there would be a pleasant surprise.

However, I digress…

My mood this morning was not ameliorated by my running up against one of those irritations that the InterWebNet provides as a counterbalance to the many benefits it extends. Let me be uncharacteristically direct:

I wished to make a risotto. This is something that I do frequently and at which I have acquired a certain skill. However, the last few times that I have done so I have been disappointed with the chicken stock that I have used.

Now – let’s get this straight. I have at the moment neither the time nor the inclination to make stock from scratch. I know that to do so would yield better results, but on this occasion I intended to use a store-bought product. It quickly occured to me that the InterWebNet might be able to assist me in tracking down a superior comestible, so I fired up the Girl’s iThing and Googled (which is clearly now a verb!) “best store-bought chicken stock”.

You can probably imagine the results. Eleventy-gazillion items all advising me that there is no conceivable alternative to doing the job the hard way – that I am somehow lacking as a man if I do not already have to hand a considerable quantity of chicken detritus and that if I think I stand even the remotest chance of making a decent stock with less than two days hard sweat and toil – then I had jolly well better think again!

It is at such times – when the doubtless worthy denizens of the InterWebNet take it upon themselves to decide that I actually needed an answer to a completely different question to the one that I had asked – that I begin to doubt the efficacy of the entire enterprise, and the unconnected world seems like an increasingly good idea after all.

See what I mean? Grumpy old man!

 

It was a very good risotto – even though I did not make the stock…

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