I’ve been putting together a podcast for running, using Audacity to record myself and mix in some tracks from my wife’s “Energy” playlist. Unfortunately, this has not been the smoothest possible experience. There’s no line in the time ruler to show where the mouse is in the track, nor in any other track. So trying to edit in one track based on the events in another becomes pure guesswork.

For its second trick, the UI for the “Auto Duck” effect suggests that it’s exactly what I want to fade the volume of a track down for a bit (to quiet the music while I’m talking), but the effect does not seem to change the track at all. [Actually, I read the manual, and Auto Duck uses the level of the track below the selected track to do its ducking. It has nothing to do with the current selection, as I had been expecting it to work.] So I’m stuck using the envelope tool instead to perform the effect by hand.

Which wouldn’t be so bad, except that it’s rather light on feedback. Just like there’s no vertical lines for timing, there’s no indication of what volume level you’re moving the envelope to, nor (as far as I can see) a way to set the handle to a specific value. Either by using a reference handle, or by entering a specific dB value.

So it’s all guesswork and trial-and-error, instead of having software that helps you do what needs to be done. Professional audio on Linux has a lot more problems than what sound server a distro chooses. Not that I’ve ever seen Sound Forge in action, but hey. What good is an informed rant on the Internet?

(OK, my transcoding of m4a files should be done now—the m4a’s were crashing Audacity on import…)

[And as far as Auto Duck goes, it might be nice to just have a Duck effect that ducks the current selection. It could also be convenient to have Auto Duck work more like an adjustment layer in Photoshop, so that the audio below could be repositioned in time and the ducked section would move to follow, instead of the ducking being permanently recorded into the waveform of the upper track. But that's probably a ton of work to develop.]

1. A vanilla lame -V2 inserts 0.025s of silence at the beginning of its MP3s.
2. Encoding adds a lot of peak samples to a track. For instance, there are none in Alone Tonight ripped from CD to FLAC, but half the track is covered in red (at the “view entire project” zoom level) for pretty much any lossily encoded version.
3. Assuming I'm reading all of the meters correctly, the noise is held to -12dB in the 192k MP3, which matches the actual dynamic range of the envelope. So it’s no wonder that it's widely considered to be transparent.

I am less surprised that the differences between the rip and the encoding are concentrated in the higher frequencies, where there is the most to gain by discarding data. Particularly since LAME runs a lowpass filter on the input, so anything above the cutoff band will appear as a difference.

They say that familiarity with artifacts is a major predictor of how well one will do on an ABX test. In that case, I think I'd rather stay unfamiliar and enjoy my 128k MP3s. (I tested myself with abx-comparator and got 3 of 10 trials correct…)

And yes, I am bad at this hiatus thing.

The older I get, the more important it becomes to keep my hands and fingers in good shape. Upon reflection, generally being at the computer so much is mutually incompatible with this goal. Although I have ergonomic keyboards at work and home, it still feels like I'm typing too much.

Something has to give, and so I've decided to stop blogging, and severely limit time spent on projects like termitheme. (FWIW, I'm also going to try to quit the news again. I am so tired of the iPad and Section 3.3.1 right now. It just never ends, and neither Reddit nor HN offer much in the way of bringing the really interesting stuff to the top instead of the 25 most popular Apple rageblogs articles. Of course, the mainstream's fascination with Tiger Woods is not much more compelling, hence the desire to quit all news.)

I picked up some handwriting recognition software, but it doesn't seem to be a real alternative just yet. (CellWriter, for the curious. I've written and edited this entire entry with it, in half an hour.)

The new Ubuntu branding for Lucid is "Light", which is not too different than "Aura" which accompanied Windows Vista. In fact, I was looking at the default wallpapers available on my Vista machine at work, and noticed this one:


It particularly caught my eye because I've seen Canonical's choice for their default wallpaper in 10.04:


There are only so many ways to craft soft, glowy light themes, I suppose.

At work, I write PHP either directly in vim on the Linux test server (when debugging), or using gVim on Windows to edit files in my private tree. Today, I made a couple improvements to the setup, one to each environment.

First: using the keywordprg on Windows gVim to look up PHP functions in the manual. I have Python 2.5 installed (batteries included!), so I whipped up this script to work as keywordprg:

import webbrowser
import sys

def main (argv=None, keyword=None):
    if len(argv) < 2 and keyword is None:
        print >>sys.stderr, "You need to send a keyword to look up."
        sys.exit(2)
    elif keyword is None:
        keyword = argv[1]

    webbrowser.open("http://us3.php.net/" + keyword, 2)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main(sys.argv)

I saved it as C:\Users\sapphirecat\bin\phpsearch.py and then edited C:\Users\sapphirecat\_vimrc to set keywordprg to the Python script. Now the K command in normal mode brings me to the PHP manual page for whatever function the cursor was on.

Second: preventing vim on the server from highlighting HTML and SQL inside PHP strings. This was happening on the server in spite of having let php_sql_query=0 and friends inside ~/.vimrc. It turns out that the default PHP syntax file checks for the existence of the variable, but not its value, so 0 is considered the same as 1. Adding lockvar php_sql_query php_htmlInStrings php_show_preg actually prevents all three of those from becoming defined, and now my PHP strings are really just strings.