Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Audio Clips

I brought along an M-Audio Micro Track II portable audio recorder to record conversations for reference in my blogging and to capture environmental sounds. The sound quality is quite good, considering the cheap stereo mic that comes with the Micro Track II ($20 for a replacement). The recorder can be configured for auto-limiting, but I've been using manual levels. You can also save the audio in various formats. I'm using 160kbps MP3. I can get about fifty-five hours on a 4GB CF card at that quality setting. The battery life is a bit of a disappointment, at around five hours. A portable USB battery pack could fix that, but I chose not to bring one as I'm already carrying over fifty pounds and I can recharge the audio recorder from the wall or from my laptop.

  • Bloco in Botafogo —  This was a bloco (street party with lots of locals singing and dancing, a drum band, and a big truck pretty much made of speakers with an MC/announcer and some other people on top) in the neighborhood where I'm staying. It started in Botafogo and, over the course of three hours, inched its way to Copacabana. It took about three days for my hearing to return to near-normal in my left ear, which was near the drummers.
  • Bloco in Santa Teresa — This was a much smaller bloco which played in place—i.e., no marching. It had just a director and drummers, with locals standing around dancing, watching, and listening. This is my favorite clip. If you can, use good headphones or a good stereo to listen. You'll want the bass drums to come through.
  • Sambodromo — This is some audio from one of the parades in the Sambodromo.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jay - I am friends with your favorite sister (work with her too) - anyway I can't get the sound clips to work. What am I doing wrong?

By the way, I don't want to tell you incredible pictures (you know that already). I want to tell you that you are an incredible photographer - you obviously see things in a different way than the rest of us.
RRD

Jay Philip Williams said...

RRD,

Nice to hear from you!

The audio clips are standard mp3 files. Any audio player should be able to play them. Ideally, they will play automatically when you click on them.

They might have to download first before they starting playing. You might want to check the progress bar at the bottom of your browser window to see if the clip is downloading before you give up.

One last thing to try is to right-click on the clip, then click "Save As" and save the clip to your hard drive. After it has downloaded, click it and it should play in your default audio player.

Hope this helps!

Jay

Anonymous said...

Jay -

Each of the audio links, when clicked on, says 'Page Not Found'. We tried both our computers, and I've tried my computer at home as well. When right-clicking to "save as", the message comes back as 'the requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found'.

Jay Philip Williams said...

Thanks for the feedback. Fixed!