When you need something to listen to it could be Podcasts that you are missing in your life.
A good place to start with those is a directory of podcasts, that even helps with categories and search functionality. Just like fyyd:
Of course as you can find all sorts of podcast there you can also find ours.
The first sound card I got as an upgrade to a PC without sound back in 90s was the glorious Sound Blaster 16:
There were several different sound card options back in the days and all sounded a bit different.
A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces used for professional audio applications.
Wikipedia
With the synthesizers and audio processing each series and make produced a distinctive sound. Some of us want to bring these sounds back. But keeping the (old) hardware running is an increasingly difficult task.
For example: The interface used by the above mentioned Sound Blaster 16 card is the ISA bus interface. This interface was introduced in 1981 and replaced in 1993. If you want to hear how such a sound card sounds today you would have to run hardware from this time period.
But some people are working towards getting at least some authentic sound back.
In this talk, Alan Hightower takes a look at the complexities, challenges, and even current progress at integrating all of the above cores into one FPGA based ISA sound card.
This is what the concept would bring if done:
Oh that would be soooooo nice to have all these vintage sound interfaces available and to be able to actually use them for audio output.
In hearing distance of the place I am usually staying when in Tokyo is a train station. So if the wind is right and the window is open I hear all these train station chimes and sounds.
If you don’t know what it is, let Wikipedia educate you:
A train melody is a succession of musically expressive tones played when a train is arriving at or about to depart from a train station. As part of train passenger operations, a train melody includes a parade of single notes organized to follow each other rhythmically to form a lilting, singular musical thought.
In Japan, departing train melodies are arranged to invoke a relief feeling in a train passenger after sitting down and moving with the departing train. In contrast, arriving train melodies are configured to cause alertness, such as to help travelers shake off sleepiness experienced by morning commuters.
発車メロディ
With this post I also want to have you hear what I mean. These sounds are having interesting pavlovian effects anyways.
Tocotronic is one of the bands I listened to during my teens/twenties. That dates me, that dates the band.
It’s very german. You’ll find their music on most streaming platforms. I recommend starting with the albums “wir kommen um uns zu beschweren” and “es ist egal aber”.
Anyhow. Now one member of the band starts a podcast!
Jan Müller ist seit über 25 Jahren Mitglied der Band Tocotronic. Er ist mit dem Format des Interviews bestens vertraut und kann sich als Fragender gut in die Perspektive seiner Gäste hineinversetzen. Die persönliche Auswahl seiner Gesprächspartner*innen bildet die Grundlage für authentische Gespräche, die stets von Interesse und Respekt geprägt sind. Mit “Reflektor” startet Jan seinen ersten Podcast.
https://viertausendhertz.de/reflektor
Airplay allows you to conveniently play music and videos over the air from your iOS or Mac OS X devices on remote speakers.
Since we just recently “migrated” almost all audio equipment in the house to SONOS multi-room audio we were missing a bit the convenience of just pushing a button on the iPad or iPhones to stream audio from those devices inside the household.
To retrofit the Airplay functionality there are two options I know of:
1: Get Airplay compatible hardware and connect it to a SONOS Input.
You have to get Airplay hardware (like the Airport Express/Extreme,…) and attach it physically to one of the inputs of your SONOS Set-Up. Typically you will need a SONOS Play:5 which has an analog input jack.
2: Set-Up a RaspberryPi with NodeJS + AirSonos as a software-only solution
You will need a stock RaspberryPi online in your home network. Of course this can run on virtually any other device or hardware that can run NodeJS. For the Pi setting it up is a fairly straight-forward process:
You start with a vanilla Raspbian Image. Update everything with:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Then install NodeJS according to this short tutorial. To set-up the AirSonos software you will need to install additional avahi software. Especially this was needed for my install:
sudo apt-get install git-all libavahi-compat-libdnssd-dev
You then need to get the AirSonos software:
sudo npm install airsonos -g
After some minutes of wait time and hard work by the Pi you will be able to start AirSonos.
sudo airsonos
And it’ll come up with an enumeration of all active rooms.
And on all your devices it’ll show up like this:
and
Since there are still 9 days to go till SXSW 2010 it’s a pleasure to give out a link to the completely unofficial torrents which old all mp3 files of almost all songs which are to be presented at this years SXSW:
“The SXSW® Music and Media Conference showcases hundreds of musical acts from around the globe on over eighty stages in downtown Austin. By day, conference registrants do business in the SXSW® Trade Show in the Austin Convention Center and partake of a full agenda of informative, provocative panel discussions featuring hundreds of speakers of international stature.”
Source 1: http://www.sxsw.com/music
Source 2: http://sites.google.com/site/sxswtorrent/2010
Great find this weekend. I haven’t heard of Ladyhawke until Saturday. Now it’s the soundtrack of this weekend and the upcoming week!
Great pop music with a touch of rock. Powerful and fast. One of my favourites in the album is “My Delirium” – a song that has a subtle feeling of the Cardigans song “My Favourite Game”.
Ladyhawke writes in her blog about it:
“I wrote the song a year and a half ago after days of no sleep due to terrible jetlag. I felt like I was going out of my mind. I was missing my friends and family back home, and I was basically living to hear my phone ring in hope that it would be one of them calling. So my delirium came out of me thinking I was going crazy from lack of sleep!
I always knew this song had the potential for a really imaginative video, considering the general theme of the song is me going crazy. So when I read the treatment sent in by the Frater guys, a duo of London based directors who specialise inanimation, I knew it was the one!”
Source: http://www.ladyhawkemusic.com/
