Update
I fear I've allowed my regular schedule of blogging to suffer as I've been in training for my new job at U. S. Cellular and as I've been toying with MixCast Live. To those of you who check this site regularly, I offer my apologies, however there are only so many hours in the day that aren't occupied either with work or with sleeping. Still I hope that soon I may have a bit more time for my life online than I've had in the past. More about that if and when it happens.

On the MixCast Live front, I've created a couple of podcasts that I've made available only to a small circle of friends because I'm hosting them from my own computer and don't want to create an excessive bandwidth problem with my ISP. Perhaps I'm being grandiose to think that it would be a problem, but rather than risk it, I think I'll wait to make them publicly available until I've found a hosting service that I'm comfortable with using. I am told there is a new one coming available soon, and I want to hold off for that one until it is available. More than that, I can't say until it is announced.

Yesterday I took my own advice in a previous post here and purchased the SanDisk SDMX1-1024-A18 MP3 Player from this location at NewEgg.com. It should be here in a couple of days and because it is also a portable recording device, I am hopeful that I'll be able make recordings of conversations with people that I can then incorporate into my podcasts. Maybe I'll even do a sound scene tour of our sleepy little, lovable town of Knoxville. Of course all of that depends upon the quality of the recordings that the SanDisk generates.

In my last post I mentioned that I was traveling down to my son, Jeff's, house to pick up some of my recording gear that I had loaned him. That mission was accomplished successfully, though I made a really long day of it. I awoke on Saturday at about 4:00 AM and because I was wide awake, I stayed up and then drove to Georgia and back in the same day, arriving home about 9:00 PM. Because I had some new toys, I got caught up in playing with them and didn't get to bed until 1:00 AM on Sunday morning. It was an enjoyable day, but I suffered the consequences on Sunday. I could hardly muster the energy to do anything all day long. Still I'm pleased to have this equipment here at home again. And the new microphone really makes a difference in the sound of the podcasts I've done since installing it into the mix.

One final note. James Prudente released another update of the pre-release of the MixCast Live program yesterday. It's version 0.9.2, and in it he includes a much-improved WaveScope, which is a kind of oscilloscope that shows the waveforms as the sound is traveling through the program. With each new release, he keeps fixing problems and adding nice, new features so by the time version 1.0 comes out, this program is going to be one of the most effective tools on the market for creating podcasts or even just for creating MP3 files. If you haven't taken a look at it and you have any interest in being able to create these kinds of recordings, I'd suggest that you can't go wrong by giving it a try. You'll save $20 by getting it prior to the release of version 1.0.
- posted by Perry @ 10:49 AM