Monica

I have book lust that I can't immediately satisfy. Imrei Madrich is a copy of the torah text that shows the root of every word. Because it's not always obvious, and it would be a big help. Google found me someone who wrote about it on a mailing list, but I haven't found anyone who's selling it yet. I guess I'll call the local Jewish bookstore and see what they can do for me. (Do any of you know this book? Should I be looking for it under a different name?)

Apropos of that, I love studying with both of my rabbis. It is so cool that I get to do this. With one (known as "my rabbi") I'm studying talmud (and occasional other stuff), and with the other I'm reading midrash in Hebrew and not completely sucking at translation. :-) (Though I still have a long way to go.)

Speaking of my congregation (sort of), we are having a talent show in January, and the song I'm writing/arranging for it seems to be going well. kayre rocks for giving me some really great feedback on the piano part. I was also trying to get a quartet together for a Salamone Rossi piece (the organizer encouraged me even though I'm doing the other thing), but altos (among congregants) seem to be particularly elusive at the moment, so that might not work out.

Also speaking of my congregation, we sell Giant Eagle gift cards at face value and get a cut. (I know other congregations do this too.) If you're local and inclined to help us out in this, and we see each other frequently enough for it to work out, I would be happy to turn your check made out to the congregation into gift cards. Just ask.

Speaking not at all about my congregation now, a question for the "Stargate: SG-1" fans out there: do we eventually get an explanation for why almost everyone on various distant worlds speaks English, or am I supposed to just ignore that? The conceit is that many of these folks are humans who were taken from Earth, but that was thousands of years ago. Just wondering, since this show doesn't bother with the conceit of a universal translator. (Which is fine, since the show that did didn't always use it correctly. :-) )

Thanks to mrpeck for pointing out that the just-released 10.6.1 OS patch fixes my printer problem. Yay! This patch rewrote my network settings (resulting in no Internet), so if you get it, be careful. In order to fix it I had to set a manually-configured IP address on our home network; I hope machines getting addresses via DHCP don't bump into me.

I have a few Windows-only applications, and earlier this summer a friend of ralphmelton's pointed me to CrossOver, which is a less-expensive way than Parallels to run such applications. Their list of supported apps runs largely to games and Microsoft products, but you can try your luck with unsupported apps. So I downloaded the free 30-day evaluation copy.

Trope Trainer works, which removes my need to move the printer back and forth between the Windows machine and the Mac. (I use it to print out nice large copies of torah portions that I'm learning.) The UI is a little garbled, but I can manage. I also succeeded in installing and running Tag & Renamer, the tool I was using on Windows to tag newly-minted MP3s. (I hadn't found anything comparable on the Mac, other than working directly in iTunes.)

The big failure for me, alas, is WavePad, the program I have been using to edit WAV files as part of the music-digitizing project. There exists a Mac version of this program, but it sucks mightily -- among things, the keyboard shortcuts are mostly absent, and the program is just too hard on my wrist if I have to do everything with a mouse. It's also the only Mac program so far that I have had to shoot down by process kill because it locked up badly. Repeatedly. So the Mac version of WavePad just doesn't cut it.

I also have Logic Express on my Mac, which I understand I could use to do this, but I'm finding no joy in the documentation, Google, or just exploring the UI there. I bought what seems to be a pretty good tutorial and am working through it, but that's going to take a while. Editing WAV files isn't Logic Express's core feature, so it's not a focus of any of the documentation. But I'm told I can do it, and maybe someday I will. But I want to be back to editing WAV files sooner than that.

I tried Audacity, which was also very mouse-intensive and slow for me. Basic, essential functionality seemed not to be there, which presumably means I'm using it wrong. I'd like some reason to believe that this really is the best candidate before I spend much more time on it. I tried running the DAK package under CrossOver (no Mac version); it installs fine but fails at runtime with a cryptic error code. I've even tried running WavePad on the PC over VNC; you can probably predict the results of that. I don't have a spare LCD monitor, nor really the desk real-estate to support it, a keyboard, and a mouse, so continuing to do this on the PC doesn't seem promising.

Anyone have other suggestions? This sure feels like it ought to be a solved problem; what clues am I missing? 95% of my editing is: load WAV file representing an entire side of a tape or album, split into tracks, smooth out the edges, and convert to MP3. (For cassettes in particular it's important to fade in/out because of the tape hiss.) I decide where to cut by listening while watching the wave pattern; at the magic moment I stop the playback and cut from the cursor position. (This is what Audacity doesn't do for me; the edit cursor and playback cursor are different! I'm willing to go to a menu for the commands to fade in/out or to do any other adjustments (like volume), but I don't want to have to do everything via mouse, most especially routine playback. It's slow and it hurts too much.

It's been a few weeks since the kallah ended and there are things I'd meant to have written about by now. Well, better late than never.

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A first round of hints has been added to the musical parlor game.

I've been surprised in both directions. One that I thought would be hard was the first one identified (19 minutes in); one that I thought was easy hasn't received any guesses yet. 11 of the 26 have been completely solved (and one more is close).

As we've been digitizing our music from albums and cassettes (replacing if we can, ripping if we can't), I've been listening for the first time to some of Dani's music. One of his tapes never jumped off the shelf at me: it has a hand-written label and was recorded by someone he corresponded with via email some years back. She plays hammer dulcimer and sent him a tape of her stuff. Everything about the appearance of this tape screamed "living-room recording" to me. Nothing wrong with that (I've made those too), but I just never got that far down in the queue.

It is not a dub of a commercial recording -- or if it is, it's a commercial recording we have been unable to find via Google. Dani sent email to his best guess at a valid address; no reply. Probably stale.

So I was pleasantly surprised when "Ellen Eades: The First Thirty Years" turned out to be quite high quality, both musically and technically. (Dani, it turned out, already knew that but didn't know I didn't.) If this was made in a living room, it was made in an accoustically-adjusted living room with good equipment. And it's not just one track! There are rich arrangements on a variety of instruments here. Very pleasant listening. (Alas, a couple glitches that seem to be the media, not the recording, so I can't do anything about that.)

Google tells me that Ellen Eades plays a bunch of different instruments. The sparse label on this tape doesn't identify any other musicians. I wonder if they're all her. :-) I also wonder if this was a demo tape or a draft that never made it to publication, or if it did get commercially published but has since gone out of print, or what. This is good stuff; I'd like to hear more from her.

Dear LazyWeb,

I have one -- count it, one -- DVD from which I would like to extract the audio. Google leads me to many, many software offerings, some trustworthy; alas, the half-dozen I've tried so far all have built-in limits of 3 to 5 minutes for the free trial. If I were going to be doing this a lot I'd buy the software (as I have for other pieces of the great digitization project), but I really just want to do this once. I'd pay a small one-time-use fee if that were available. Because I only want to do this once, I'm not fussy about user interface and features -- if it does DVD in and WAV out without quality loss, I really don't care about anything else. Any suggestions?

(Clam Chowder, "Kosher", in case you're wondering. I want to be able to listen to it on my non-video-enabled iPod.)


Update: I ended up with a two-pass approach. HandBrake (recommended by some of you) turns DVDs into several other video formats, including AVI and MP4, but no audio-only formats (as documented). However, this free tool converts MP4 to MP3. Both of these have a batch mode, so I can just set 'em loose in turn. A small trial worked just fine, so now I've got the big job running. Thanks, everyone.

Notes to self (and any interested onlookers):
( technology, processes, playback options )

I have a bootleg cassette tape of the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat made by, at the latest, 1989 (probably a few years earlier). I am now trying to replace this recording, or at least come close.

I believe it is a London recording. The narrator is male and this is important to me; it's the reason I have always preferred this one to the Broadway version. (Look, I'm not chauvinist; I just think the part works better with the lower pitches.) It is not this one despite the timing; I don't recognize Peter Reeves. It is possible that it could be this one, but I can find no samples to listen to. And, finally, it is not an earlier edition of this one, though if I can't find "mine" this is probably the one I'll buy. (The most important roles are the narrator and Joseph, both of whom I like in the samples here. The rest of the sampled ensemble is weaker than I'd like.)

So I turn to you, oh diverse and helpful friends. Do any of you share my affection for this musical, and if so, do you have any clue what edition I might have or where I could find samples of #2 above?

Thanks!

Usually mail addressed to "resident" is a write-off, but yesterday we got a letter in a small envelope with a handwritten address to "current resident", which is unusual. Inside was a postcard/photo of our house from circa 1930. The accompanying letter explained that the writer had found it in a scrapbook and since it actually had an address written on the back, she wanted to send it to us, whomever we were, assuming the house was still standing. Neat! So we're going to send back a current picture, along with one of its near-twin two houses up. (Ours and the other house are mirror images of each other.)

The South Side, where I work, has been devoid of Indian food -- until now. Sree's, of CMU lunch-cart fame, has set up a satellite in a kiosk at the end of our block. Yay! An actual restaurant would be better, but I'll take "surprise vegetarian combo of the day" in steamer trays if necessary. It's still pretty good. Qdoba, let's just be friends, ok? :-) (I actually bring my lunch almost all the time, eating out maybe once every couple weeks, but when I do go out it's usually for the pseudo-Mexican salad.)

Quote of the day: "See, in Java, they force you to hack your way through the jungle with a machete. In perl they give you a flamethrower, and afterward you root around in the ashes for the data you wanted. The styles are somewhat different." - dvarin, here.

You can get almost anything at Amazon (link from merle_). Be sure to read the reviews.

The digitize-our-albums-and-tapes-before-they-rot project is still mainly in analysis mode (figuring out where to acquire what), though we're grabbing the low-hanging fruit as we see it. This will take some time. Meanwhile, we learned tonight that while you can nominally share your iTunes library with other machines on the local network, you can't actually do much with that -- you can't add non-local files to playlists or iPods, which sort of defeats the purpose, no? (And iTunes has to be running on both machines to even listen.) Just copying the files from one iTunes directory to another doesn't seem to do the trick, either. Sigh. Are we really going to have to import everything CD by CD and track by track (for the downloads) in order to share everything?