Monday, June 10, 2024
Listened to an old Mark Rubel interview on Working Class Audio last night while folding laundry. Three things I want to remember from this:
- Don’t look at the screen when you’re mixing. Use your ears.
- Don’t buy gear. Buy capabilities.
- He paid for all of his studio gear in cash.
The Apple USB-C to 3.5 mm Headphone Jack Adapter through the Koss KSC75 headphones (modded to use a cheap headband) sounds very good playing Apple Music, but kick drums and bass notes lack the muscle behind them that the Cambridge Audio DacMagic XS has. There’s just more power in the XS’s amp, which makes sense.
This might not work for all cases, but it’s potentially handy enough that I’m trying it everywhere: How to turn off in-app review requests on iPhone, iPad, and Mac
Sunday, June 9, 2024
I tried Hookmark last night and the first time I linked a Markdown file in BBEdit with a URL saved from Arc, it didn’t associate the hooked URL with the file. It threw me off at first and then I realized that Little Arc was the cause. The URL isn’t really “open” until you do Cmd-O, so it’s invisible to Hookmark until then. It would also help if I’d read the instructions.
Sent Torch Marauder some record/stylus-cleaning tips.
Huh. That video I included in the Blot version of yesterday’s daily note renders a big blank space after the video when I look at the post in NetNewsWire. Well, I’m not going to bother with working around it for now. I’m just using Blot’s ability to embed a video with a single YouTube URL, and that’s so easy and it looks fine in all my browsers and the phone.
The Apple USB-C to 3.5 mm Headphone Jack Adapter arrived and I hooked it up to the RoPieee Raspberry Pi. It works, but Apple limits it to 1 Vrms (as opposed to the normal line-level 2 Vrms) when you’re on a device that can’t control volume. I can get around that by setting RoPieee to use software-controlled volume over AirPlay, but then I’m back to guessing which volume setting on the phone or laptop is the best to use when AirPlaying to the stereo. I don’t want to do that, and I don’t want the audio to go through extra volume math steps, so I’m back to using the Cambridge Audio DacMagic 100 because it’s a normal line-level device. Other than that silliness, the Apple dongle was indistinguishable from the DacMagic 100. Any preferences I had between the two were probably down to volume mismatches when I was testing them.
Because I need to start learning this stuff for work, I downloaded the Oh My Git! game and got through all the exercises in these sections:
- intro
- files
- branches
Saturday, June 8, 2024
It bugs me that every time there’s a power blip, the otherwise wonderful Cambridge Audio DacMagic 100 shuts off, and the LEDs on it are so small and dim, I never know whether it’s going to work when it’s time to listen to AirPlay or Roon through the RoPieee attached to the NAD C 316BEE v2. It’d be great to have a DAC that just stayed on all the time. A search for “best cheap DAC” revealed the Apple USB-C to 3.5 mm Headphone Jack Adapter as a surprising candidate, so I just ordered one! Also included a low-profile ddHiFi TC01A USB-A to USB-C adapter.
Watched this old Josephine Foster interview while I did the dishes. She is just in her own time, isn’t she?
We took our niece to Charm School Study Hall for soft-serve today. Mine was a dairy vanilla cup with chocolate sprinkles and caramel, but based on how we felt afterwards, I think our bodies are too old to process soft-serve properly anymore. It made us feel woozy before we were even done.
And now I’m going to play with Hookmark. It’s included in Setapp, so why not?
Friday, June 7, 2024
Well. After searching for some old info about the Mackie MR524 studio monitors and remembering I had only made notes about them in TiddlyWiki, I saw some daily journal entries and was astounded at how freeform and un-precious they were. Apparently, I used to use this thing to think out loud in a way that I never ever do when writing a Real Blog Entry in Blot.im. I would “accidentally” blog all the time. So I’m going to try it again today, keeping this open for things that come up. At the end of the day I’ll paste this entry into either a Post or a Daily Note in Blot with a link back to this entry in the wiki.
I’m developing a fascination with the music and drumming skills of John Colpitts. I can look at his arms and legs and still not understand what he’s doing.
I pulled the old Sony ZS-S2iP boombox out of the closet last night and set it up in the kitchen. It has an Aux In jack, so I plugged the WiiM Mini into it and streamed lossless AirPlay to it from my phone. That works fine, but the speakers on this thing are terrible and always have been. Makes me want a pair of Audioengine A2+ speakers in there. I just added myself to the waitlist on their website to get notified when a pair of white open-box ones is available.
So if I put a bunch of notes in here, that makes Bear.app… not the one source of notes that I thought it would be. Oh well! I do still have an urge to do some kind of daily notes in there, but I appreciate the fact that the developers steadfastly refuse to design the app to do daily notes at all, so that makes me take a breath and not build a weird set of scaffolding that would force-fit them in.
By the way, I’m full-on copying today’s daily note from TiddlyWiki into this blog, but I’m not hyperlinking every link that points back to the wiki. I think it would give readers (all two of you) whiplash to point you back to the wiki with every link. If you want all the links that originally appeared, visit the TiddlyWiki version of this post and have a much nicer time.
Wednesday, June 5: Now
This isn’t a real “now” post like you see on peoples’ blogs. It’s in the spirit of trying not to overthink writing. Here’s what I’m thinking about today, right now, during lunch.
Due to many factors — famous people continuing to die, my parents getting older, my own eyesight and hearing getting worse — I feel intense pressure to:
- Stop obsessing over things that don’t actually matter. Giving up keeping “future-proof” text/Markdown/org-mode files for my notes for the most part and relying on Bear instead is still working great and is way more useful and looks nicer.
- Learn the keyboard parts of more songs using the gear I have (well, now that I’ve bought an Arturia KeyLab Essential 61 mk3).
- Listen to more music, not just the equipment. Abandon the idea of two stereo speakers being set up in the exact right place, at the optimum distance from the wall, and me sitting in the “sweet spot” on the couch. What if I just had two bookshelf speakers nestled in our actual bookshelf, surrounded by books, and not even facing us while we do other things? What if the turntable was put somewhere else “not as good” but easier to get to? Wouldn’t we use it way more without it being a whole ceremony involving removing the dust cover (and the cat-proofing logs of aluminum foil) and propping it up in a random place every time?
- Not be guilted into using devices or services just because I keep paying for them, which means not signing up for things as knee-jerkily as I was. Sorry, Readwise. You are great, but I probably don’t require an Obsidian-hosted archive of all the things I’ve highlighted in all the things I read later. The free Omnivore app on the very not-free Boox Palma is plenty good enough.
- Arrive at a “photo workflow” that isn’t a workflow. Especially now that it’s been a year since our Seattle trip and I still haven’t finished processing those files.
- Just read the news in Spanish or listen to Spanish YouTubers frequently with the Language Reactor plugin.
Not that I have allowed enough time in any given day or week to actually do all these things. This is where the mania creeps in.
Steve Albini
Steve Albini passed away five days ago and I still see musicians on my feeds posting about him. No one can process it. These aren’t even aftershocks. The earthquake hasn’t finished yet. I never thought about the possibility of him dying because how could a person with that much energy and conviction ever leave us?
These are the albums I know well that he was involved in, and they’re only a sliver of the giant sequoia of music he recorded. There’s so much more out there to explore.
- The Breeders: Pod
- Dirty Three: Ocean Songs
- Nirvana: In Utero
- Palace Music: Arise Therefore
- Palace Music: Viva Last Blues
- Slint: Tweez
- Superchunk: No Pocky for Kitty
- The Wedding Present: Seamonsters
Every one of his how-to videos on the Electrical Audio YouTube channel should go in the Library of Congress right now.
Read his brother Marty’s remembrance on Facebook.