A French amateur radio operator was able to record and convert the signal of the Mar Express probe’s X-Band transmitter into an audio file. More information plus a sample of the recorded sound is available from here.
The equipment from an abandoned telecom uplink site used to listen in on the ESA’s Mars Express space probe wasn’t enough to allow download of the actual data.
“Listen here to the whistle of Mars Express as it hurtles towards Phobos and consider that this signal was generated on Mars Express by a transmitter only slightly more powerful than a light bulb.” – http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/7/1058
Some intersting potential for a new midi controller could be possible after some reseach and development carried out by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology into creating mobile technology which reads the users lips. A development of this could be to create a midi expression interface?
Current applications highlighted are communication in silent environments or where the phone user may disrupt other users and the transmission of confidnetial or sensitive information – not to mention “having a quiet word” in public.
Apparently, “the most successful deterrent music”, in one area “included the Pastoral Symphony by Beethoven, Symphony No. 2 by Rachmaninov, and Piano Concerto No. 2 by Shostakovich.”
Recording using an iPod is something that I have briefly tried and always been a bit disappointed, however a new to me gadget looks like someone is trying to take things seriously with these 2 efforts from Logitec. I must admit. I’ve tried Belkin TuneTalk on my Nano and it was a bit rubbish. Mind you, Apple don’t seem to have taken anything more seriously than a ‘memo’. Continue reading and listening to Recording using an iPod
Trackside recording of the Peppercorn 60163 Tornado passing along the old LNER route in Bedfordshire. The recording starts with the sound of the whistle a few hundred yards away and the the locomotive and train passing very close at high speed.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
I’m seriously looking at buying a M 10 and have been doing the usual web research and conseqeuntly picked up a few interesting links to reviews, specs and opinions. Here they are.
Christmas I look forwards to for a lot of reasons but an extra for me is how unusually quiet it is, making for a good opportunity to record and document the relative silence. This year however was an exception and I didn’t bother. I think there are a couple of reasons for the unexpected extra urban noise this year; 1. this year was hit quite badly (for the UK at least) by snow meaning that many seasonal travellers had postponed their journeys until Christmas day, or 2. general urban noise levels are increasing and have increased appreciatively in the last 12 months. Although general urban noise is agreed generally to be on the rise I hope this doesn’t indicate an exponential increase.
Via the BBC, the European Union is proposing changes to MP3 players to prescribe default safe listeing levels for MP3 players. Current legislation mandates that “a statement be put in the instruction manual to warn of the adverse effects of exposure to excessive sound level”. The new proposals would see that the default sound setting for any device “shall be the ‘default’ settings on products”. January will see the start of a two-month consultation of all EU standardisation bodies with a final agreement expected in the spring of 2010.
The EU notes that safe use depends on exposure time and volume levels, “At 80 dB(A), exposure should be limited to 40 hours/week. At 89 dB(A) exposure should not exceed 5 hours/week”.
Blue Spiral Lights in skies over Norway. This is being reported by The Sun and Daily Mail but here is a video from YouTube. Aliens, wormholes, rockets or a massive viral campaign to highlight climate change? Draw your own conclusion.
I’ve done a short test to look at how much saving lossless digital sound formats can provide considering the 20 or so gigabytes of data I generate a month. I did some tests rendering a WAV file from Reaper.
I used a single 16 bit WAV file of a P-51 Mustang downgraded from the original 24bit original arranged on a single track in Reaper then used the standard render option in the application to generate each file. The file sizes are taken from the windows command prompt as the standard explorer window tends to display “size on disk” which is not necessarily the file size – don’t know what additional things are allocated.
These are the results. As part of the test I’ve also included OGG Vorbis – I think that most people can imagine the savings if going to MP3. I’ve included the reference file at the top of the table and added in the resulting file size, how much space this would save and how big this is compared to the original. I’ve not played the files so I have no idea whether the renders were successful or not but I must assume they are.
A conclusion from these tests is that APE produces smaller file sizes that FLAC so if space is your major concern this is the format to go for, however it could be said that support for the FLAC format for playback is more widespread and has been included in some of the newer MP3 players released recently (the iRiver range has direct support for in some newer model and support via RockBox firmware upgrades).
Does this start to adress some of the issues, around storage, not just space issues, but archival format and archive media, archive risk etc?
For me, the archival format will be the original file on harddisk with a back up on DVD. My day to day review format will probably remain as VBR Mp3 but I may start looking at FLAC for distribution of sound.
