Posts Tagged ‘audio’
Video: Easy Digital Music Recording
February 20th, 2009 • 1 comment
Tags: audacity, audio, audio recording, digital music, Macbook, music, music recording, online music distribution, recording, rifflet
Colin Campbell is my brother, and, more importantly for the purposes of this video, he is a singer/songwriter who records music digitally and distributes it online. He uses a very cheap and simple method. If you want studio-quality recording, this isn’t for you. If you want to continue to gain exposure while you finance your studio gear, or if you simply want to be heard regardless of how it sounds, this may be the simplest and easiest way to do so.
He uses only software and hardware included with his Macbook to record his tunes and distributes them online via rifflet.com. If you have a Macbook, you can follow his exact procedure to record and distribute your tracks. If you have a PC, he suggests the free and open-source audio recording program Audacity. This can really be done with any kind of computer along with a microphone… even if it’s a cheap one! Like I said, the goal is not to build a home studio but to quickly and economically digitize your music and get it heard.
Colin also recorded a screencast showing his recording and uploading process to make things even easier on you.
Be sure to check out Colin’s other tracks on rifflet. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed of his music to see updates in your feed reader when he posts a new song. If you need further information or have questions, you can e-mail him @ appletofu [at] gmail [dot] com.
Download the podcast
Links
Macbook Pro XP/Vista audio stuttering fix
February 5th, 2009 • 12 comments
Tags: audio, audio problems, drivers, Macbook Pro, stuttering, unibody, Windows Vista, Windows XP, wireless, WLAN
My PC has seen less and less of my gaming activity in recent years. It makes me a little sad, but the current generation of consoles is delivering a more cohesive and simple gaming experience than the PC ever could. The PC still has it’s strong suits: games like RTSs and FPSs that demand the fast and accurate control only a mouse can deliver or the modding communities that have sprouted around hit PC games for quite some time now. These things are still unmatched by consoles. Development is much more accessible to basement programmers as well creating a diverse indie game ecosystem.
As such, you can imagine my frustration when I found that my XP-booting Macbook Pro’s audio was stuttering every 15-30 seconds while booted into Windows. When the stuttering occurs, the action in your game slows for a couple of seconds. It may not sound like much, but four times a minute is a little excessive. Rhythm games like Audiosurf become unplayable; all games become frustrating. I set out to find the root of the problem and squelch it for good.
Some extensive Google searching revealed I was not alone in my issue. Tons of others are having the same problems. I went through pages and pages of potential fixes and nothing worked until I ran across a link to an updated WLAN driver for the Broadcom N Wireless adapter (which I have mirrored for you on my server). I installed that, and I now have no stuttering! I can game in peace and harmony once again.
As a service to all of you, I will mirror the driver that I used in this fix. Here are the steps for the fix that worked on my late 2008 unibody Macbook Pro running Windows XP SP3:
- Download and decompress driver
- Right-click “My Computer” and click “Properties”
- Click the “Hardware” tab
- Click on “Device Manager”
- Expand the “Network Adapters” category in the pane on the right
- Right click the Broadcom and click “Update driver”
- Click “Install from a list or specified location” and click “Next”
- Select “Don’t search” and click “Next”
- Click “Have disk”
- Browse to the location of the files you extracted earlier
- Open the folder for your OS
- Click the “Open” button
Once you have completed the process, you should be gaming in bliss. Keep in mind that this will not work for Macbooks with a Wireless NIC other than a Broadcom N NIC and a specific one of those at that. I’m unsure of the model of the NIC, but I would guess all the current unibody Macbook Pros produced after October 2008 have the same wireless adapter. The driver will also work for Vista according to the user who provided the link. (I would credit him, but I can’t even remember where I found it!) I think the procedure is similar for Vista, but, if anyone would like to send me the steps, I will be glad to post it. Good luck!