Evolving - Analog to Digital

It started with re-organizing the garage. Over the Christmas break, I happened to sell my 1904 Beckwith Reed Organ to a couple of young musicians who are going to put it into a historic house in L.A. along with a lot of other instruments to make a funky space for musicians to gather and play. That happy event opened quite a bit of room in the garage, and so the organizing began.

As part of that, I came across a couple of boxes of old cassette tapes I have been carting around. Occasionally I'd play Pieces of Eight by Styx or whatnot while in the garage since I have a portable radio / tape player on my workbench. But most of these I have not listened to in 2 decades since getting a state-of-the-art JVC CD player in 1982. What to do?

My First CD Player!

I realize digitizing analog is not a new venture, but I had never done it, being a huge fan of vinyl I had not seen the need to convert my records. And I have hundreds of those, so the task was daunting . . . a non-starter.

But the tapes! Sure I had some commercial stuff and a whole row of Windham Hill stuff, but the treasure was the personal recordings. My precocious daughter reading stories at 3, love recording of my playing my folk songs, some lecture I had given on Practical Project Management. This was the irreplaceable stuff that I wanted to save from the ravages of magnetic deterioration.

So I took down the old dusty Kenwood KX77-CW tape deck I got from my brother Greg (RIP - see the guy in the cap!) and set to work figuring out the best and most efficient process for turning lead (er, Chromium) into gold!

Connecting up is straightforward, just get the RCA out into the "line in" of the computer. Here is a lot more about that. Next, a clean tape player is essential so check out this extensive tutorial. Don't drink the isopropyl alcohol! The best software I found was Audacity. It is open source and has tons of features. I wanted to make MP3 files for upload into my Google Play account, so I also got the MP3 plug-in for Audacity which is called LAME. After the hardware is plugged in and the software is setup, I was ready to rip!

Audacity on Windows - Bob Seger Live Album, "Nine Tonight:

It all boils down to opening a new Audacity file, pressing play on your tape deck and clicking record in Audacity. After the tape is copied into the computer you can then make it ready for its digital life which involves a basic clean up, adding metadata, putting labels at the beginning of each song, and then saving the songs off as a batch. Below I have a list of what I did (on Microsoft Windows) for each tape to go from almost obsolete to all-digital awesome!

1. Start Audacity and press play on the tape deck. Turn on monitoring in Audacity so you can hear your cassette playing.
2. Set audio levels to peak just under -6 db so you get all the sound but no distortion.
3. To do a whole album from tape set the player to auto reverse.
4. Press play on tape player and then press record in Audacity.
5. You can listen along or go a do something else until the tape is fully played and recorded.
6. Save basic metadata of the artist name, album title, year, and genre.
7. Save your file as a Project (as an AUP file) to allow editing later. Remember to save the project as you go along!
8. Export the raw audio as a WAV file for an uncompressed backup just in case!
9. Select a few seconds of 'silence' at the beginning and choose Effect > Noise Removal
10. Click the Get Noise Sample button in the Noise Removal dialog box. The dialog will close.
11. Press CTRL + A to select all of the audio.
12. Choose Effect > Noise Removal, accept the defaults, and click OK.
13. Wait for the noise to be removed. This will take a few minutes
14. Press CTRL + A to select all of the audio again.
15. Click Effect > Normalize, accept the defaults and click OK.
16. Wait for the audio to be "normalized". This makes the sound as loud as possible so you don;t have to crank your volume when listening to your new digital file. Normalization will also take a few minutes.
17. Zoom out on timeline and delete and 'silence' you do not want in there. Carefully place you cursor at the beginning of each song, press CTRL + B to add a label.
18. Type in the name of the track. Repeat for each track. If you don't have the details, Wikipedia is great for getting the exact names of tracks and details your old tape might not have.
19. Once you have the file the way you want it, choose File > Export Multiple. This will step through your file and create individual MP3 files for each song, titled with your labels. Make sure you create a folder with the name of the artist first and the album under it (which is what iTunes and Google Music likes) to have you music neatly organized.
20. The final step is to add/upload the folder with your new digital files to your music player like iTunes or Windows Media Player or Google Play.

There can be a lot more you can do and read about, but for me, simply getting a "lost" tape into digital format is perfect. I use Google Play and after upload, I can get in my car, and use my android phone with 3G and Bluetooth connections pulling the music from Google Play I can listen to old "tapes" in my new car. 

And they sound groovy, man!

Leap Motion Review - Practical Impressions - #firstleap

I had ordered the little thing back in Fall of last year . . . did not have to pay for it at the time, so I thought, what the heck! Fast forward 8 months and it arrived by USPS today. I ordered it thinking that since I am a proponent of voice control and dictation, this new way of interacting with the PC would be enlightening.

The software took a very long time to download, possible because of the Leap Motion servers being very busy this week for launch. The apps from Airspace take a while to download, too, so I had to be patient. Four basic utilities are installed: the device driver, the visualizer which helps you learn basic hand movements, the Control Panel, and Airspace, which is the app store and special launcher for your Leap Motion enabled apps.

After waiting again for a download (I had to switch to a different laptop because while the driver did load on the first one, the Leap Motion did not respond) I was able to run the orientation. This worked OK and gave me insight into how this was really going to work. It sees your fingers and hands, but you have to know how they will be recognized. Many times I was not skilled at operating the apps because the controller would only "see" three out of five fingers or my thumb got in the way.

Hands in the air!

While I think this is a ground-breaking device, using the Leap is harder than I imagined. Sort of like starting out using voice recognition. Practice is required. I loaded a few of the free apps to try it out. Touchless has the most potential and after 20 minutes I could navigate where I wanted, but it was certainly a lot more difficult than using a mouse. But then, 20 years ago, formatting a document in WordPerfect for DOS with Reveal Codes was faster than mousing around in MS Word! Playing a few of the games, like the simple "Cut the Rope" is fun and it seems like it is built for this type of handwaving in air interaction.

The 7 apps I have installed. Lotus crashed three times on load so I did not use that one yet.

The hardest part to get used to is that you have no touch feedback doing gestures in the air. With a mouse or a pen or even a touch screen you have contact with some tool or device and can learn quickly how to compensate your movements. With the Leap and the airspace you are called to gesture in, it is difficult to calibrate your brain for where your fingers will be the most effective. This input device is indeed a brand new paradigm.

Learning it reminds me of my work teaching people in the late 1980s and early 1990s how to use a mouse. Believe it our not, many very smart people in my classes took days to get used to that input device. I think the Leap Motion is going to be the same.

Google Glass Development For Windows - Beginner Tips

As an update to my last post, I am happy tonight because I have finally had success in getting the the Glass Quickstart for Python running on my instance of the Google App Engine for Windows 7. If you have read my previous post you know I was not doing well. My plea netting several kind messages that gave me hints at what I might be doing wrong, but I thought I'd start over, armed with new knowledge from failure and the kindness of the community.

Yay! The Glass Quickstart is finally running!

After much reading, I confirmed that the Python path was best for me and what I really needed to do is to have my environment setup correctly and carefully follow the steps outlined on the quickstart pages. So, I began fresh and took my time. Here is what I learned about setting up the development environment for Glass with Python and Google App Engine on Windows.

1. Install Python 2.7.x (not 3.x) before GAE. If you do this, GAE will know Python is there and set itself up to use it.
2. You have to install and then configure, so the best resource (at the time of this writing) to install Python on Windows 7 is this video from Michael Herman.
3. Do not use the 64 bit install, even if your machine is 64 bit. Some Python modules do not install or work correctly on Win64. Use the file on this page that is called:
   "Python 2.7.5 Windows Installer (Windows binary -- does not include source)" for best results.
4. The best educational instruction for configuration is the Google Python Course. Make sure you use 
5. To make Python easier to use from any location on your system, you have to set your PATH. Use this string in Windows PowerShell to set your PATH, which has all of the directories in it. The instructions at Google or Python.org or python-guide.org are OK, but this PATH from the video from Michael Herman is the best: [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", "$env:Path;C:\Python27\;C:\Python27\Scripts\;C:\PYTHON27\DLLs;C:\PYTHON27\LIB;", "User")
6. After you have tested Python by itself, then follow these instructions from Google to install the GAE.
7. In that set of instructions, there is a step-by-step tutorial which, if you are careful, will get you a running application called 'Guestbook'. It was helpful to do this before the Glass Quickstart to ensure my environment was working fine.
8. As Google recommends, to edit the example files and your own code, install and the free text editor Notepad++ (not the Notepad app that comes with Windows). I had issues with incorrectly encoded characters from the cut&paste code using plain old Notepad.
9. After that is all installed, I went through the Python Tutorial for GAE and built the app. Here is my running example. 
10. Because the Glass Quickstart code is downloaded from the code versioning website, GitHub, I signed up for and installed GitHub for Windows. I can see how it will be useful but it is not needed to just get the Quickstart up and running. You could just download the ZIP file and extract it.
11. While working with the GAE, make use of the Google App Engine Launcher. Yes, yes, I know you can type command lines, but for we who like a GUI this tool is helpful in getting your environment and application code running on local and then deployed on your instance of GAE.
12. My main advice: pay close attention to setting up Python and your development tools properly, use the installers and GUIs, and you will be successful.

The elusive 'deployment successful' message in the GAE Launcher deployment log window!