{"id":161,"date":"2008-05-25T14:06:44","date_gmt":"2008-05-25T19:06:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/technologists.com\/notes\/?p=47"},"modified":"2008-05-25T14:06:44","modified_gmt":"2008-05-25T19:06:44","slug":"another-field-recording-audiomac-miscellany-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/2008\/05\/25\/another-field-recording-audiomac-miscellany-2\/","title":{"rendered":"another "field recording"; audio\/Mac miscellany"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thursday, Caroline and I traveled to Richardson (heart of the Dallas “telecom corridor”) to see her father and record his bi-weekly gig. I hadn’t done much with the equipment<\/a> or Cubase since the trip last year. Setting up the equipment and the actual recording seemed to go smoothly, but I should have been better prepared, for monitoring the recording and better framing the video with the camera.<\/p>\n

Yesterday I mixed the audio, used it in place of the camera’s audio track, and broke it up into segments for YouTube: Charlie Abbitt – Live at The Wellington May 22, 2008<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’d hardly touched Cubase LE<\/span><\/a>\u00a0since August, and didn’t really remember much of what I had learned back then. What I did remember was sending analog output from the iO|14<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to the audio input of another computer for mixdown. Though that memory was correct, that was not the best approach.<\/p>\n

Fortuanately, I have been using Audacity<\/a>\u00a0frequently\u00a0for simpler recording and sound processing.\u00a0I routinely export processed audio from Audacity\u00a0without involving a second system.\u00a0My main learning yesterday was that Cubase does have export facilities (D’oh<\/a>!), whch are quite usable and useful, such that a separate computer for mixdown was unnecessary (and potentially would have compromised audio quality).<\/p>\n

Before the realization that a second computer was wrong headed, I thought about using the\u00a0recently acquired<\/a>\u00a0iMac G4 pedestal. I thought I spied an analog input on the back next to the (“headphone”) analog output, but I was wrong — that connector is an Apple proprietary “Apple speaker minijack\u00a0 for connection to Apple Pro Speakers”. OS X System Profiler and System Preferences tell me the only built-in audio input is the mic. Determining that was not easy, with only minimal info readily available from both apple.com & Google, but one of my Mac expert friends confirmed my determination. Even he had to stare at the back of one of his pedestals to be sure.<\/p>\n

To try to end this rambling, but finish the story, this morning I wondered more about the 1\/8″ combined analog\/digital audio jacks on more recent Macs. The iO|14 has S\/PDIF<\/a> coaxial RCA digital input\/output. The Mac jacks are S\/PDIF optical, but not the typical TOSLINK<\/a>, since those are different size\/shape from the ubiquitous 1\/8″ analog jacks. I finally found the explanation<\/a>\u00a0that the Mac jacks are “mini-TOSLINK”, that optical\u00a0adapters<\/a> are\u00a0inexpensive, and that bi-directional coaxial\/optical converters<\/a> are not expensive.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thursday, Caroline and I traveled to Richardson (heart of the Dallas “telecom corridor”) to see her father and record his bi-weekly gig. I hadn’t done much with the equipment or Cubase since the trip last year. Setting up the equipment and the actual recording seemed to go smoothly, but I should have been better prepared, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hardware","category-music","category-video"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8c9uP-2B","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}