Page composed
using
 1
|
|
Sunday 1st
March 2020
|
09:37 GMT
Yesterday was neither one thing or another
- except rather cool. There was some rain, and
there was some sunshine. Most, but not all the
rain was in the morning, and most, but not all of
the sunshine was in the afternoon. The early
afternoon temperature was 8° C, but by mid
afternoon it started falling, and by midnight it
was supposed to be just 5° C, but I think it might
have been lower than that - maybe 4° C.
We begin March with sunshine (the rain
forecast for 7am was replaced by sunshine - as far
as I am aware). The latest revision to the
forecast now shows just sunshine all the way
through to sunset. It should take the temperature
up to 10° C. Sadly this nice start to March will
not last. After midnight the temperature will have
dropped to just 5° C, and by 6am tomorrow it will
be as low as 4° C. That is cold enough for some
early morning showers to fall as sleet. It would
only take a drop of another degree and that sleet
could be snow, and it would be falling on
dry ground (maybe). By mid morning things get a
bit less sure. The rain/sleet/snow may finish by
9am, and then it will will probably be dry for the
rest of the day except for a light shower or two.
I was very busy yesterday, although as yet
I have nothing to show for most of it. I do have
some freshly laundered clothes to show for a bit
of my being busy. Much of my time was working on a
project to transfer some old cassette recordings
to wave files on my PC. They will be stored as mp3
files, but also burnt to CD. The thing about
transferring old analogue tapes, whether
reel-to-reel or cassette, video or audio, is that
they can only be transferred in real time. In
theory the process can be left to get on with it
by itself, but it is safer to keep an eye on it in
case something goes wrong.
Before I could start the process I had to
find a decent working cassette player. The easiest
one I could get at didn't appear to work, and I
had to fight my way into the cupboard at the top
of the stairs. The problem here is that most of my
t-shirts, of which I seem to have an awful lot of
them, are hung on the outside of the
cupboard. Sometime in the past a tradition was
started that the cupboard would end up stuffed
with electric/electronic stuff, and not clothes,
or bedding, as would probably be more traditional.
Having found a good working cassette player
I then had to find a working PC. The PC I am
writing this on works, but maybe not perfectly. It
has two problems. Firstly it has one of those
soundcards that uses a chip that appears not to be
fully supported by Linux. Secondly, the version of
Linux Mint I am using was from a time when sound
support was not well done. For instance, try as I
might, I can't stream music via bluetooth to my
bluetooth headphones. It is a connection that is
just not supported. In later versions of Linux
Mint "it just works". There are Linux
distributions specifically for audio work, but
mine isn't !
My PC plays audio perfectly, but trying to
convince it to record can be a pain. Trying to
convince the Linux sound editing application
"Audacity" (also available for Mac and Windows) to
both record, and get a monitoring signal through
to the speakers seems to be impossible. I gave up
using my main PC, and fell back on another little
PC. That has a sound card that is supported, and
selecting the correct input, and controlling the
level was easy, but I still couldn't get any real
time monitoring as it recorded - I just had to
rely on watching the audio waveform being written
on the screen to have some confidence that the
recording was taking place OK.
I have several tapes I want to transfer,
and for later tapes I will probably boot my laptop
into Windows, and use Cool Edit as my audio
editor. It is far more versatile than Audacity
when doing complex restoration tasks. One such
task is dubbing part of the left (or right)
channel over the over when a fault has caused one
channel to record nothing. I have a specific need
for that. As I mentioned yesterday, the first tape
I am working on was recorded by Jodie at an Atom
Heart Mother gig. She used her normal headphones
as microphones, and at a good gig the sound
quality could be quite good.
This particular tape was recorded at The
George Roby pub in Finsbury Park (I think the pub
closed years ago), and the quality is not very
good. The worst thing is that one channel kept
cutting out (mostly) during the first two songs. I
have quite a task coming up to try and reconstruct
the missing bits from the working channel -
something that doesn't seem possible using
Audacity, but is easy, if slightly tedious, in
Cool Edit.
Having transferred the entire tape (just
under 45 minutes) to a wave file I started editing
it. First of all I tried, and failed to repair the
bits where one channel cut out, and then just
resorted to cutting the recording into separate
songs. Even that felt a bit clumsy. I am
definitely going to resort to using Windows for
the rest of this task. One positive thing is that
when I checked the other side of the tape I found
another bootleg of an Atom Heart Mother gig. It
sound much better, and there is no trouble with
one of the channels cutting out. I probably ought
to ignore the first recording, and concentrate on
this second recording. The only trouble is that
the date and place of the gig is not written on
the cassette.
I also transferred an old 2 hour radio show
tape to wave files, and that should need no more
than the silence at the beginning and end trimmed
off, and the two halves (one hour on each side of
a C120 tape) stitched together. That is the sort
of job that Audacity does easily. Apart from the
tape transferring, and some audio editing, plus
doing some laundry, I did almost nothing else
yesterday. Much of the spare time was taken up by
reading, eating and watching TV.
I am almost forgetting one other thing that
took up a little bit or time. Much to my surprise
the spare batteries I had ordered for my Kenwood
portable mini disc player/recorder arrived in the
morning, 2 or 3 days earlier than expected ! The
original battery was as dead as a dodo. Once I had
got one of the new batteries half charged I
decided to test out the machine. I am happy to say
that it appeared to work perfectly for playback,
but I have yet to try it's record function. The
only slight problem is that the new batteries seem
to have double the capacity of the old one
(lithium battery technology has improved a lot in
the last 20 years !). I think that extra capacity
may be confusing the charging indicator in as much
as it shows as still charging long after battery
may, or may not be 100% full. It is something I
might have to be careful of.
I was going to eat very carefully
yesterday, but things did not really go as
planned. My lunch was chicken wings that I had
ordered with my kebabs the night before. I thought
I had ordered grilled wings, but these came in
almost a thin batter, and had obviously been
cooked in a deep fat fryer. I was not going to
waste them, and ate them regardless. Later on, at
dinner time, I concocted a dinner that ended up
being put together regardless of consequences. It
started off as grilled/oven cooked chicken with
leeks and a few other bits of vegetables. Once it
was cooked I drained off most of the fat, and then
came the naughty bit - I emptied a sachet of
flavoured beans on top, before putting it back in
the oven for almost 10 minutes. The result was
strange, but in a nice way !
I didn't get any silly phone calls last
night, and was able to get to bed, and to sleep
easily. It was quite good sleep too. I remember
having some dreams, but I don't think I can
remember even the vaguest details of any of them
now. I sort of feel OK this morning, and wasn't
even bothered about waking up earlier than I
thought I would like. Once again my blood glucose
is higher than desired, but nothing too terrible.
I have probably made it even worse by having a
breakfast of two Braeburn apples with some
walnuts.
I have one very specific plan for day, plus
a possible add on for it. At 4pm, a most civilised
time, Lord Algea are playing a gig in The Morden
Arms pub in Greenwich. I like the band, the pub is
easy to get to, the time is good, I'll probably be
travelling there in sunshine. It seem almost
certain I will be going. I don't think it will
happen, but if Michaels hips are playing up, he
may join me, and Angela is also interested
(although she will probably be too busy with lover
boy - although both of them could turn up). If I
have not heard from anyone by mid afternoon, or
earlier, I may go out early, and take a walk
around Greenwich before the gig.
|
|
