My copy All Mankind’s new album Simple Desire came in the post a couple of weeks ago. I love it more and more every time I listen to it!

I love the energy of Can You Hear Me? and Break the Spell, and I really enjoyed the peaceful vibe of Lay Me Down while I was driving this morning.

You can:

• Listen to Simple Desire
• Buy a signed copy
• Buy it on iTunes
• Check out their music videos on YouTube

Have you seen the new Apple products? They look pretty sweet – widescreen iPod nano, iPod classic and the iPod touch (like an iPhone without the phone).

You can watch a high resolution version of the new iPod nano advert on the Apple website or this one from YouTube.

Perhaps if I ever have some money I could get one. ;)

I’ve had this song in my head since Tuesday night!

I made a small film using Inkscape and iMovie last week. The only method I could find to share it was YouTube, which seems to have reduced the size and quality. All the same, here it is:

Quick!
Today only, Tuesday 10 July, Richard Beeston CDs are only $10!
Rich is an Australian Christian musician. He just returned from a UK tour, he did a tour in the US last year, and being such a lovely guy he played at the weddings of our good friends. :grin:
Check out the Richard Beeston Band website to listen to songs, buy CDs, see photos and find links to other good stuff.

While studying for exams I’ve found it really useful to listen to the recordings that are made of our university lectures. They make the lectures available to download as mp3s for students enrolled in the course. Very handy, especially for the lectures I wasn’t able to get to; it’s quite difficult to learn anything if I just sit down an stare at the handouts, or at someone else’s notes.

In listening to these lectures I’ve discovered that when you’re not watching the person speak and you’re not able to see their actions and facial expressions, people actually speak very slowly. I was hoping that since iTunes is my default player it would be able to play tracks a bit faster. Sadly after much searching I only found a script that would pause iTunes and open the track with Quicktime to play it faster. This wasn’t ideal, it didn’t seem like it could be paused or stopped and started again from Quicktime.

So I turned to my friend, open source software. Audacity is a free, open source program that can record and edit sounds. It can import and export WAV, mp3 (with LAME encoder installed) and Ogg Vorbis, among others. It can work with up to 16 tracks and it has a large range of features. For this exercise I used the change speed, change pitch and amplify effects.

To start, I opened the mp3 file in Audacity. In the above image I’ve already selected the part of the file that I wanted by dragging the mouse across it, and removed the rest with the trim outside selection button.

To change the speed you need to select the whole file (represented as wav peaks) and go to Effect > Change Speed…. That will give you a window (as shown in the image). I dragged the blue cursor up so that I was changing the speed by about 50%. I find that to be a reasonable increase while still being able to understand the words. You could play with the speed to see how fast your file needs to go.

If you play back your file as is, you’ll find it fairly difficult to understand because of the the chipmunk element, it also sounds pretty funny. Go to Effect > Change Pitch…. Drag the blue cursor like for the speed, but this time take it down about 30%. I find with a 50% increase in speed, a 30% decrease in pitch makes the speaker sounds fairly normal.

It can also be handy to use Effect > Amplify to make the file a bit louder; some lecturers are softly spoken. ;)

Hazar for Audacity and for open source software! Also kudos to the uni for recording the lectures and making them downloadable!

I just watched the episode of Alias in season two where Vaughn gets sick and Sydney sets Sloane up to be murdered by Sark so that Sark will give her the antidote to Vaughn’s disease. There’s a great song at the end by Sheryl Crow called I Shall Believe. I always think “Aww, I want that song.” when I watch that episode. So I looked it up on iTunes (not that I can buy it because they only take credit card or even if you have an iTunes card they need a credit card to activate the account). It happens to be on The Very Best of Sheryl Crow album, which I own! I haven’t listened to it in so long, I’m ripping it now!

Found some interesting things that may be very boring to some but I thought I’d share them anyway.
Thoughts On Music
ESV Bible RSS Feeds
Uninspiring Vista – I thought this article was kind of funny, from an ex-die-hard-Windows-fan. I think many of the bugs described in the article are fixed, but Jun from work says Vista still sucks RAM like there’s no tomorrow – actually he would never say that, those are my words, but he said the memory gets used up quickly.

My little brother was asking if you turn off the search suggestions in Firefox’s Google Search Bar. I was looking through the about:config to see whether you could change it and what you change it to. Then I just right-clicked the search bar and discovered the option to show suggestions right there. Duh! xP

I popped into JB Hifi yesterday to get a Christmas present for my Grandma and ended up getting a couple for myself. Not Christmas presents I guess but just CDs. Maybe I shouldn’t buy myself stuff around this time of year but no one has asked me what I want so I’m assuming they have their own ideas. I bought The Idea of North‘s newest CD The Gospel Project. I think I’m a bit weird with CDs, I don’t rush to listen to them immediately, that one is still in the plastic. Normally I would have ripped it to mp3s by now but I think I feel a little guilty for sending more money on myself. I was considering handing it over to someone who was going to buy me a present and saying “here, you can give me this”.

The other CD, which I didn’t even know existed until I was perusing the shelves for Jars of Clay was a new Christmas album by Aimee Mann (M is close to J on the shelves). I was pretty excited, you all know I like Aimee Mann, or you would if you were there for that phase I went through when I discovered her music. The CD is called One More Drifter In The Snow. I like it more the more I listen to it. So far I’m not loving the first song, Whatever Happened To Christmas written by Jimmy Webb. Aimee has the sort of voice that can sound melancholy, so with a slow and sad song like that one it’s not really in the Christmas Spirit. The mood picks up slightly in the rest of the album. Still at a cruising pace the music is pleasantly relaxing and doesn’t have that loud bell ringing tone that one gets bombarded with in the shopping centre. There is a cool rendition of You’re a Mean One Mr Grinch that I can see myself dancing, or creeping, or stomping around the unit to while preparing for Christmas. Overall I’d say it’s alright, I like it.

I bought a couple of CDs today, Recurring Dream: The Best of Crowded House and She Will Have Her Way: The Songs of Tim & Neil Finn. I was hoping to get the 2 disc set of She Will Have Her Way because it has the female artists singing the Finns’ songs on the first dsc and then the original Tim Finn/Crowded House songs on the second album. Alas, that 2 disc set has been baleeted. On the up side though, the two CDs that I bought were reduced to $8.99 each and of the nineteen songs on the Crowded House album, it has six of the sixteen songs on She Will Have Her Way. I think there’s a good amount of diversity and double up there.

I popped Crowded House into my computer, completely unaware as to what program I’d use to rip the songs. Tangent: You know you live in the 21st century when the first thing you do after buying an album is rip it to mp3s. Immediately, Sound Juicer popped open. This program looks nice and simple. It also looked like it worked well after following instructions on how to set up mp3 encoding. Alas, I couldn’t import the songs into Rhythmbox or play them on any of my players. I guess I’ll just have to listen to the CD itself… later because I’m tired of sitting at the computer.