Audio recording program for Windows

Aside from Audacity, does anyone know of a good (free) audio recording program for Windows (XPish… Media Center Edition, actually)? Only needs to do a single track, but I’m just not a huge fan of Audacity’s interface, and was mostly just curious to see what else was out there.

And no, I haven’t abandoned my Ubuntu behemoth, it’s just that we’ve got a baby Shuttle computer downstairs that has much better quality audio stuff going for it. The mic itself is slightly-but-not-much-better-than-the-average-PC-mic (it’s a now-discontinued Andrea product), which means you actually can hear the difference in line noise. Just. Well, okay, more than just, it’s probably the best cheap/free headset mic I’ve ever used, but that still probably isn’t saying huge amounts. Bah, whatever… the point is, whatever the soundcard I’ve got in my day-to-day computer (some C-Media thing) is crap and ridiculously noisy, and the Shuttle’s AC’97 is loads better (because it’s probably about five years more recent than the sound card in here, and also because its output is digital going to some Sony receiver that does things nicely enough. At least part of the problem with this PC is that its output is lousy.)

So yeah. I’m using XP Media Center Edition (I was planning on posting photos of the few-month-old box sometime, I promise! It just slipped past me/I couldn’t be bothered/It was downstairs and I live at the other end of the house/You’ve all probably seen these things before and it’s not really that exciting/It’s Dad’s toy not mine and I’m still vaguely convinced he shouldn’t have got it/Insert myriad other reasons for not blogging here.), and want to know what people who haven’t got money to spend on software they rarely use are using for occasional audio recording.

Slightly-crazy idea: Is Windows Movie Maker any good for recording audio? I recall you can use a commentary track on that… I’m thinking it’d be possible just to throw in a blank screen and extend it for however long I needed to record for. I’m a fan of not having to install more software, especially on something retarded and intended purely for… watching TV (hah!) and doing other such crap. So yeah. Comments? Please? For once?

Yeah, I know whenever I ask for comments I seem to get less than usual on posts… meh :P Failing feedback, I’ll give Movie Maker a go and if it’s too horrible then Audacity it is.

Sunrise

Smooth Variety

Mmm, gotta love that smooth placement variety from Tribe Media.

SanDisk puts DRM on memory cards

SanDisk puts DRM on memory cards (CNet News.com)

And I give it two weeks after going to market until it’s cracked. Plus it’s hardly as though it takes particulary advanced technology to manually circumvent copy controls: whilst we’ve still got analogue I/O for our digital devices, it’s perfectly possible to circumvent pretty much any DRM technology out there, cracking efforts aside. Got a line-in on your soundcard? Got a TV tuner with S-Video or Composite input? There’s your home piracy studio.

And if we can do it, the only people you’re fooling when you say it’s not possible are your investors: the professional pirates are yards ahead of you.

(Gosh this post makes me sound like a raving Marxist, doesn’t it?)

Anyway, the point is DRM is only ever going to succeed in a limited capacity. Then, the masses will revolt and overthrow the bourgeoisie oppressors and their control of a false commodity! Socialist order will rule!! erm. Then, circumvention will become the norm, rather than a temporary force. Innovation will be out-innovated. Until DRM is at the point where hardware is in some kind of stasis, and software can be updated at the whim of content purveyors. I don’t say creators, because content’s creators aren’t generally the ones heavily pushing the agenda we’re seeing from various recording lobbies — and also because I do find myself agreeing that the ownership of ideas is a fundamentally flawed concept.

Aside: I think this fits without difficulty into my political views — Liberalism follows the principle of government/legislative intervention only where this is seen to be of greater benefit (e.g. where there is no privately operated/owned alternative to state-owned/operated infrastructure/services)… and the notion that individuals rather than the state be creators of wealth is fairly irrelevant here, because there’s no defined need in liberalism for the creation of wealth in all spheres, plus the present intellectual property climate that we see exists because of legislative (read: government) intervention in matters best left to free market forces. I’ll stop myself from launching into a full-scale rant here… hopefully some other time.

So, I think SanDisk are digging themselves a hole. Rant over.

ImageBox Flash gallery app

I stumbled across this post on RMW Web Publishing’s blog today, and it struck me the app they mentioned could be useful for doing this whole CD/DVD thing for the year 12 photo website.

The purveyor’s website is horribly Flash encumbered (i.e. I’d have never found it if I were looking for it in a search engine — I actually temporarily lost the developer’s URL for a bit there, and had to trawl through my browsing history to find it again!), but the app itself is rather useful if you’re looking for a run-from-the-desktop gallery kinda thing. My only qualm is the difficulty of generating metadata for it to do interesting stuff with, but a quick spot of shell scripting should see that problem met, hopefully. (Or even just nagging Ben until he hacks support for this gizmo into Cat-scan natively… wink wink? :P) This is the kind of app that’s a prime candidate for XML application, not in the least because of Flash’s reputedly excellent support for that kind of stuff… but it uses boring and rather confusing (mostly because I don’t speak German so a few words are odd) flat files instead. With that one caveat, it’s an otherwise helpful application. Just don’t make the mistake of confusing applications with websites.