Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

How to Create Custom Ringtones for your iPhone from Music Files in iTunes

Monday, March 29th, 2010

In iTunes, by default, you can only create ringtones from music you purchased from the iTunes Store. I personally have never bought any music from the iTunes store – I have a lot of music on CD that I legally own and have ripped to my computer in the form of MP3 files. It’s easy enough to add such files to your iTunes library and subsequently your iPhone (use the File -> Add File/Folder to Library option in iTunes).

So let’s say you’ve got a song you like and you want to create a ringtone out of it. Since you can’t make a ringtone out of an entire song, you need to identify which portion of the song you want to use as the ringtone. I try to find a catchy riff that’s easy to loop and is going to be loud enough to hear like you’d expect from a normal ringtone.

So for example, I have a song here that I want to make a ringtone out of. I’ve identified that if I just use the first two bars, or roughly the first eight seconds of the song, it should be about right.

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So right-click on the song and then click Get Info. Then click the Options tab. Set the Start Time and End Time values using the x:xx.xxx format and then click OK. At this point you’re just giving it your best guess.

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Now back in the music library screen in iTunes, I like to select the checkbox for ONLY the song I’m creating the ringtone from, like so:

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Then, at the bottom of the screen, select the repeat button – the third one from the left:

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This allows you to play and loop the snippet so that you can hear it just as you would if it were playing as a ringtone from your phone.

Most likely you’re going to find that your timing is a little off and you’ll need to go back into the song properties and adjust the start and stop times. Ideally you want it to play so that when it loops back to the beginning, it maintains the beat and blends seamlessly from end to start. Here’s what I came up with for this song after I was satisfied with the timing:

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Once you’ve done that, the next step is to right-click the song and then click Create AAC Version. This creates a compact audio file that captures only the portion of the song that you specified based on the start and stop time values.

Next, right-click the AAC version and then click Copy.

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Now on your computer, create a folder where you will store ringtone files. Right-click in this folder and then click Paste. You should see your file name with a .m4a extension. Rename this, changing the extension to .m4r.

Now, back in iTunes you can delete the AAC version of the song you created. Right-click it and then click Delete. Click Remove and then click Keep File. This removes it from your iTunes library without deleting the file itself from your computer.

Also, don’t forget to go back into the options for the original song and uncheck the start and stop times. If you don’t do this, then any time you try to play this song in iTunes, or on your iPhone or iPod once you’ve synced with iTunes, then it will play only the portion of the song between the start and stop times.

Now, in iTunes, click the Ringtones library. Then on the File menu, click Add File to Library. Browse to the folder where you copied the ringtone file to and then click Open.

Clearly, you can see that I think KMFDM songs make great ringtones.

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Finally, click your iPhone device, and then on the Ringtones tab, select Sync ringtones and then click Apply.

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Having done this, you can now go into your contacts on your phone and assign a custom ringtone that you’ve created as the default ringtone, or even to individual contacts.

Sounding Off Part Three

Monday, March 29th, 2010

An internal paint job to avoid monotony and quality equipment completes the package.

With the anticipation of spending many hours in the studio, I took a creative approach to painting the walls. A darker base color with splashes of bright colors helped lighten the small space.

The Electro-Voice Cardinal microphone is the key to quality in the recordings. I started out with a USB headset microphone and found that it created a thin and often echoing sound quality. Changing to a cardioid condenser microphone eliminated many of the audio artifacts that I was struggling to process out of previous recordings.

A tube pre-amp from Behringer provides a warm, smooth sound that rounds out the dull sound of purely digital recordings. The amp also provides the phantom power required by the Cardinal microphone.

The Behringer MX602A low-noise mixer provides live control over basic EQ and gain settings. It also provides a headphone jack. Using the mixer’s headphone jack instead of the computer’s jack eliminated the distracting delay that sound cards are notorious for.

I also added a Vistablet digitizing tablet for more precise control over mouse and cursor movement while recording the video portion of projects. Using a mouse works fine. However, the mouse would not always register when I moved it. Not to mention that the mouse pad is rarely able to cover the entire space on the monitor resulting in a jerky recording from picking the mouse up and moving back to the other side of the pad so it would roll clear across the screen. The digitizing tablet represents the entire area of the monitor providing instant movement of the cursor without the typical trials of a mouse.

All of this is used with the new Camtasia version 7 for both audio and video recording. If any additional processing of audio is required, I can easily do that with Audacity 3.0.

The final touch was the strategic placement of baffling materials on the walls and ceiling. My first recordings were much too “live” with reverberation, even in this small space. Baffling hung from the ceiling and on the walls dampened that to a reasonable bright sound. Some additional wall hangings also cancelled out an annoying high frequency ring. I had no idea when I started that it would get that detailed and nitpicky to make everything work smoothly.

I have now spent nearly a week and a half recording both video and audio in the new studio. The difference it has made is indescribable in both the quality of the recordings and my ability to block out the daily distractions.

Sounding Off Part Two

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

The greatest challenge to building a room, or booth, suitable for recording quality audio is ambient noise. Simple walls and basic building materials are definitely not suitable for dampening the various sounds and frequencies that surround us. To solve this issue, walls were built with two by four construction overlayed with dense compressed wood. Inside the walls is standard insulation along with a specialized sound dampening board that looks like compressed dead grass and dirt.

Most of the wall studs and floor joists are offset instead of straight across to help capture various sound frequencies. My research indicated that the more consistently shaped the air spaces in the wall and floor, the easier it is for various frequencies to penetrate into the sound room.

The floor is elevated two inches off the office floor by commercial casters. This helps isolate the floor of the “studio” from the low end frequencies and vibrations that easily move through solids. Flooring is completely enclosed with the spaces filled with the same as the walls. A dense foam rubber gasket to further isolate the interior of the room from the exterior also isolates the top floor.

All cabling and wiring is also run with an offset. By this I mean that the entry location of any cabling or wiring is approximately 30 inches to the side, or below the location of the other end on the inside of the room. Any straight through access from the outside to the inside would allow sound to travel through the walls with very little if any dampening.

Ventilation is provided by an ultra-quiet bank of 12v fans. The fans are placed within a ventilation box that is composed of two sides. One side provides incoming air and the other provides a return. Within the box are randomly placed caches of baffling to quiet the sound of air movement within the ventilation box.

Lighting comes from a special fluorescent lighting fixture rated for extremely quiet operation. There is none of the typical buzz heard from standard fluorescent lights.

Flooring is simply low pile commercial carpeting over a six pound pad and stretched to keep it from bunching up.

Finally, the door is built with an outside layer that is about three quarters of an inch overlap similar to the way the walls are built. This helps eliminate sound penetration through any gaps along the sides of the door.

In the next blog, I will discuss the equipment used to create the audio recordings.

Sounding Off Part One

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

A big part of what we do at Aeshen is creating instructional and informational content. We painstakingly work to create PowerPoint presentations, demonstration scripts for instructors, and supporting documentation. After creating these materials, we are often called upon to create a complete set of video and audio recordings based on the new content.

Creating the video recordings is a simple task. Very few things in the surrounding environment force me to re-record video footage of the demonstrations or PowerPoint presentations.

Audio is a completely different story. The human brain is very sophisticated. Not only can it perform calculations and orchestrate the overall functioning of your body, it works as an extremely fine tuned filter for extraneous stimuli. I did not realize this until I began recording audio tracks for the content that I developed.

It quickly became evident that a silent office or home space is not quiet at all. The extra sounds were simply filtered out and ignored by my brain. When I played back some of my first recordings, they were filled with sounds of breathing, air moving through the ventilation system, vehicles passing by, airplanes overhead, birds, dogs, and even far off construction noises.

I started out by hanging carpet and other materials around me to absorb the sounds. When that did not work, I moved from location to location hoping to find a quieter spot to record in. What I really found out is that each location in the building presented a different collection of background noises to filter out.

The other frustration was the variety of reverberation experienced in each location. One location was a simple room that offered little reverberation, but was subject to a great deal of background noise. Another room had a vaulted ceiling set at odd angles. Definitely not the right place to record quality audio.

After trying every room I could, I finally resigned myself to finding an alternative place to record. Unfortunately, recording studios charge from $65 to well over $100 per hour of use. That put them out when I realized that I would need many hours to record the audio.

Some heavy research helped me to decide that the best thing to do was to create my own studio. I am now sitting in a six by eight foot sound isolating room writing this blog. Building the studio was definitely not without its challenges. However, the tighter control I now have over the environment is enabling me to record much higher quality audio than I had before.

In the second installment of this blog, I will discuss the building of the studio along with some of the challenges I faced.

Changing the default folder view in Windows 7

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

For whatever reason, Microsoft decided that when you’re in Windows Explorer, you don’t need to see the folder structure.  So if I’m in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12, my Explorer window may look something like this:
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I find that I frequently need to browse other folders within the folder structure, which means that the simplified view offered out of the box means extra clicks.  So, if you right-click on an empty space in the folder view pane, you’ll see the Expand to current folder option:
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This setting is persistent. So from now on, when you’re navigating in Windows Explorer, you’ll now see the expanded tree view like this:
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Becoming Microsoft Certified – Part 3.

Friday, November 6th, 2009

Last week I determined that the MCITP: Enterprise Administrator certification is my goal, but getting there requires several MCTS prerequisites.
My certification roadmap looks like this:

At this point I will have met the requirements for MCTIP.
So first up is Exam 70-640. How do I get prepared for this exam? I’ve decided to purchase the MCITP Self-Paced Training Kit for the low, low price of $229.99 and begin studying.   Maybe Powell’s Books will have a good used copy.  Anyway, this covers the core server exams, but I’ll need to pick up the Configuring Windows 7 book at some point.

Becoming Microsoft Certified – Part 2

Friday, November 6th, 2009

Last week I wrote about my desire to finally become a card-carrying Microsoft certified professional (I like to carry cards) and was a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of certification choices and various permutations of each.

This week I’m looking at each one and going to choose the path that will reinforce what I already know and do in my job, and enhance my knowledge to give myself more confidence and expertise in my field.

So let’s look at the certifications, their associated specialization paths, and their relevance to my goals.  I hope in doing this, it will help myself and others visualize their specific certification and achieve it.  As I consider myself firmly in the IT professional camp, rather than a DBA or application developer, I’m going to focus only on the certifications that target the IT professional audience.  Therefore, I’m not going to delve too deeply into the following certifications:

  • MCDBA – Microsoft Certified Database Administrator
  • MCPD – Microsoft Certified Professional Developer
  • MCAD – Microsoft Certified Application Developer
  • MCSD – Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer

So that narrows it down a bit.  Let’s look at the ones that seem to be more in my realm.

MCTS – Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist

This certification is the launching point in working towards other, more technical certifications.  As an MCTS, you choose to focus on one or more products and technologies and then take the exams for them.  This includes such technologies as Business Desktop Deployment, Windows Mobile, Windows Vista and 7 Configuration, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 Active Directory, Networking Infrastructure, and Windows Server Virtualization.

To me, Active Directory is one of the key technologies to understand, followed by networking.  And, since I frequently work with client/server environments, Windows 7 seems to be a good third choice.

MCTIP – Microsoft Certified IT Professional

In my field, this is the big one, and it aligns well with the MCTS choices I’ve made.  In addition to the MCTS requirement, there are two specialization paths: Server Administrator and Enterprise Administrator, with Enterprise Administrator being the deluxe version of Server Administrator.

MCSA – Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator

This certification is similar to the MCTS, but is focused more on Windows Server 2000 and 2003.  Since I want to look ahead and not back, I won’t spend much time on this.  Besides, with Windows Server 2008 technology expertise, I’m already very familiar with Windows Server 2003.  Moving on…

MCSE – Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer

Very similar to MCSA, and is more of a backfill certification on older technology, and is not what I’m looking for.

MCM – Microsoft Certified Master

This one’s a bit out of my league at this point and is required for MCA consideration.  There are over 15 exams and promises to really test one’s knowledge.  Maybe someday.

MCA – Microsoft Certified Architect

The top-tier certification, with MCM being one of the requirements.  Certainly out of my reach for now.

 

So it appears that MCTS -> MCITP is the logical path for me.  Next week I’ll review the various exams and start planning out my next steps.

Becoming Microsoft Certified – Part 1

Friday, November 6th, 2009

One of my career goals for the year is to obtain a Microsoft Certification.  I figure, I use and write about this stuff all the time, I suppose I fit into the “IT Professional” category, so I might as well have some real credentials to back up and enhance my expertise.

Years ago when I was considering getting MS certified, I was aware of two major certifications: the MCSA (Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator) and MCSE (Systems Engineer) with the latter seemingly the more prestigious and sought-after of the two, although frankly I didn’t pursue it so I never bothered really looking into what either entailed.

Nowadays, there are no less than 10 certifications, with most of them offering differently targeted specialization paths.  Next week I’ll examine the available certifications and review and choose the certification and specialization path.