Today I started recording a screencast in ScreenFlow for a demo on how a software product works. I went back to edit and heard static all throughout the mic track. I started doing tests in Wiretap Studio, changing headsets and iMics and all kinds of things trying to get a handle on what the issue was.

Finally, I started poking around in the Audio/Midi setup utility (found at /Applications/Utilities/Audio MIDI Setup.app) and noticed something. The Audio input settings for the iMic USB audio system were set to 48kHz 1 channel 8-bit. I changed them to 44.1kHz 1 channel 16-bit, and the recordings were crystal clear again.

The settings causing the problems:

The settings that fixed the static issue:

I’m not sure what changed them, but some app that uses audio did something and it resulted in static-filled recordings. There was a constant background noise regardless of whether I was speaking or not. If you find your recordings suddenly sounding really bad and you’re sure you haven’t done anything obvious, check the Audio Midi Setup utility and make sure things look right. Make sure in the “Properties For:” dropdown you select the input device you’re using.

Update: In retrospect, I guess I should have set it for 2 channel 16-bit.

Sometimes there’s no substitute for doing things yourself, because you can, and because it’s fun. Being a DJ on your own radio station falls into that category, and like most other media creation activities on the Mac, it’s easy and fun to do. Programs like Nicecast make it so.

I don’t have the time or interest to be an internet DJ, but I have occasionally fired up a stream for a handful of friends for an hour or so. Nicecast is perfect for this. The concept of Nicecast is that you can choose an app to hijack and broadcast it in a couple different ways. Rogue Amoeba’s blurb states that it’s great for broadcasting to the world, or just across your house, and they do not lie.

When you fire up Nicecast, you see a window that has controls for starting/stopping the broadcast, a status indicator, a level indicator, a selection area for the audio source, and several buttons to additional Nicecast settings.

Choosing the app you want to use as your audio source couldn’t be easier. Set the source dropdown to “Application”, click the “Select” dropdown, and choose your app. You can also set the Source to System Audio or Audio Device. The latter is the way you could, for example, play live music and run it from your mixer into your Mac and stream it to the internet. Powerful stuff.

Ok, so now we have set iTunes as our audio source… how does that help us DJ? Doesn’t being a DJ involve being able to open the Mic and yammer at people inbetween, during, or instead of playing songs? Yep. And that’s where the effects panel in Nicecast comes into play. Clicking the “Effects” button on the main app window opens the Effects window. Clicking in an empty slot on that will allow you to insert an effect to be applied to your music stream. The effect you want to add if you’d like to DJ is the Voice Over effect.

You can click on the Voice Over panel’s “Editor” button to adjust Device, Crossfade, and Autoducking features. Crossfade lets you adjust how much of the output volume is allocated to the voice source vs the main audio source. Autoducking presumably lets you have it such that the music volume would lower as you begin to speak, and increase again as you stop, but I haven’t used this feature in practice.

Before we can stream, we need to choose a streaming server configuration. You can use the built in server to let people connect directly to your Nicecast server, or you can set up to stream through an external service, such as Live365. The advantage of the internal server is that it costs nothing and is easy - just choose that option and off you go. The disadvantages are that people are connecting directly to you, which means you can saturate your bandwidth, and you are opening yourself up to external connections. The advantages of the external servers are that they can potentially let many more listeners connect, and they keep your computer from being directly accessed. On the other hand, they cost money and require additional configuration and another layer of learning to get your music out to the world.

Are we finally ready to rock? Whew. All we wanted was some music, right? In our case, we have iTunes set up as our app of choice, so we click Nicecast’s “Start Broadcast” button, switch over to iTunes, choose a song, and off we go.

And … woohoo!! We’re streaming. Just one thing. How do people hear our music? Easy enough, click the “share” button if you’re using the internal server, and you’ll be presented with a URL to let people connect with.

The Internet address is the one to give to people accessing you from outside, while the Local address is what you’d use if you just wanted to stream to other computers in your house on the same network. If you’re using an external shoutcast type server, you’ll have a URL assigned to you by that host instead, and neither of these will apply.

Ok, so now that I’ve babbled on and on and pasted pretty pictures for you, what’s my take on Nicecast? My take is that for basic audio streaming, it couldn’t be simpler. Select an app, set up your server options, click “Start Broadcast”, and you are in business. Nothing more to do.

It did take me a little fighting to figure out how to do voice over… I had to find the Voice Over effect, figure out that you had to click “editor” and click the “Start” button in there as well, before starting the broadcast, etc, etc. It would be nice if the user manual had a list of recipes, such as “To DJ with voice over capability” but they really don’t. Although they have a pretty good index of the effects that can be applied, there are no examples provided anywhere.

Still, I have to give Nicecast an A at least. It’s easy to use, does the job, and on my fiber connection, several people can be connected at once and things just keep humming along. I like it.

Ever wanted to wiretap someone? Gain sneaky access to their conversations or hear what they are up to? Well, you can… wiretap yourself with WireTap Studio.

WireTap Studio lets you capture any audio source on your Mac - inputs, applications, even system audio. That means you can capture any sound that goes in or out of your Mac. And not just capture - WireTap Studio lets you edit it non-destructively (meaning the source recording is not altered) including adding effects and previewing how your compressed audio will sound, and manage your recordings in the WireTap Studio library. From there you can export them to disk, email them, etc. It’s versatile and simple to use.

The WireTap controller window. Set your audio sources, record, pause, stop, open the library, preferences, and more from here.

You can select two audio sources to wiretap, including system audio (everything). This means you could record mic input and all system output audio as well if you wanted.

When you’re recording, the controller shows you an indicator with a red record button. Here I’m recording one audio source, iTunes, with no second source selected.

When you stop spying on.. i mean RECORDING yourself, the waveform editor pops up to let you edit the recorded audio. This is non-destructive editing, meaning the original capture is kept safe and sound in case you regret your foolish edits or you need something desperately for your court appearance.

You can also add effects, in case you have some need to alter your voice.

Recordings are saved in the WireTap Library, for doing various things to. For example, once you’ve got the finished product you want, you can export to disk using your desired compression, email to the government, send it to itunes or your iphone, sor any of several other options for using your tapped audio.

Some of you might know that I used to be a huge fan of Audio Hijack Pro for capturing audio sources on the Mac. The fact of the matter was that AHP could do most things I needed, but then I ran into a couple situations where, although it was supposedly hijacking a specific app or the system audio, it was not catching everything. Some apps it would come up and say it just couldn’t hijack. So far I haven’t found anything WireTap Studio can’t handle, and handle well. Also, at the time I purchased this, there was a competitive upgrade price for owners of Audio Hijack Pro.

I have to say, at the moment, there’s nothing better for taking audio on your Mac and making it truly yours. This app does the job, does it well, gives you control over the final product, and does so without destroying your original capture. Right now it appears to be the top dog in the … well, sorry.. the audio hijacking software business.

In my previous post, I talked about my Time Capsule from Apple, and the problems with network connectivity that started cropping up with it over a month or so of using it. As I mentioned, the genius bar guys reset it to factory settings, and then couldn’t see any issue with it. This made me wonder. Was it just a factor of time, or some setting or combination of settings I was using that was causing me problems? Granted, there should not be any setting options that would be able to create this problem, but it was time to forget about what should be and start worrying about what is.

Anyone who’s owned an Airport Extreme should recognize the view of the Time Capsule configuration as seen through the Airport Utility. I’m not sure what the differences are, as the Time Capsule is my first apple airport base station product. Airport Utility is in the Applications/Utilities directory. In order to connect to and configure the Time Capsule, you need the latest version, 5.3.1.

Many of the items in the list above are links to the config pages for that item. For example, you can click on “Wireless Security” to get to the wireless security configuration options. Clicking on “wireless clients” takes you to a pane where you can view connected wireless clients and also DHCP clients as well.

As I pondered my situation and skimmed the Apple support discussions on their web site, I started thinking about what I was doing. First off, I was giving my Time Capsule long names for the TC itself and for the network and the internal drive. I changed the name to be one word with no spaces. Secondly, I was running in mixed mode with both n and g devices connecting. I decided to take the mini off the wireless network and set the TC to run in n mode only. And finally, I was running with MAC filtering on, so I decided to not do that anymore, at least for now.

My reasoning was based on the fact that, after a reset, I seemed to be able to run along just fine with factory defaults. It appeared that it was only after setting it up the way I described above that I started having issues again. So I thought I’d try as close as possible to the defaults, while still having my own TC name, network name, drives attached, WPA2 enabled, etc.

I set up the Time Capsule disks the same as before, each has a short name with no spaces, and turned on Disk File Sharing with password required and no guest access.

By making these changes, I went from my extremely degraded situation of not being able to keep any of the macs, even the hardwired ones, networked for more than 20 - 30 minutes, to now several days of having no issues. The two MBP’s are on the wireless network. The Mac Pro is connected via ethernet, and both it and my MBP are doing time machine backups. The one caveat is that my wife’s MBP is not doing backups again yet - I need to hook her machine up via ethernet overnight and let it do its initial backup. That would take a day over wireless.

My theory right now is that having mixed mode slows down the network traffic enough that the wireless backups kill things and throw the TC into some whacked out state. Granted, this should NOT be happening, but it seems likely. What I’m not sure of is what will happen once both MBP’s are on the network doing wireless backups at the same time again.

Time will tell.

Anyone who follows Apple products probably noticed when Apple announced the Time Capsule earlier this year. I sure did. I was one of the ones who pre-ordered the terabyte version and couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. I figured it would change the way we used our computers in the home, and free us from having to connect to an external drive to perform backups. As it was, I was leaving my Macbook Pro on 24 x 7 and connected to my external display, keyboard and mouse, and external drives.

The Time Capsule arrived, and all was well. I hooked up our printer and a couple external drives via the USB port. I set it up for mixed mode wireless, as the Core Duo Mac mini is g. I enabled MAC address filtering, set up the internal drive to be my Time Machine backup drive on my MBP (the mini’s still running Tiger), and life seemed good. I did notice that occasionally I’d get notices about a server disconnection, even though I seemed to be connected to the Time Capsule and the drives attached to it.

When the Penryn Macbook Pros were released (the current rev), I bought one of those and my wife happily moved from the Mac mini to my previous Macbook Pro. Now we were both using the Time Capsule for wireless time machine backups and to connect to the network drives hanging off of it. The Mac mini was still set up to connect wirelessly as well, for network and internet connectivity, but not for time machine since it’s still running Tiger.

At some point the disconnection messages started getting more frequent. At the same time, sometimes the wireless indicator in the menu bar would keep changing as though it was losing then regaining connection to the Time Capsule repeatedly, but we seemed to still be on the network and able to get on the internet with no issue.

Eventually it got to the point where everything would look normal on the Time Capsule, but our computers would lose wireless connectivity. We could not reach anything internal or external. Our airport adapters in our MBPs were simply not connecting to the Time Capsule anymore. The Mac Pro, connected to the Time Capsule via ethernet cable, was unaffected. At first. Then it degraded to where it would not see the network or the internet either. Around this time, it got to where I couldn’t keep the computers connected for more than 20 minutes at a time, and then it would take everything from rebooting the Time Capsule to resetting it to factory default settings to get it working again. Clearly, not what I anticipated when I paid for this device. A trip to the genius bar was in order.

If you haven’t been to the genius bar, I suspect (based on one trip) that your mileage may vary depending on what the issue you’re having is, who you deal with, and many other factors too numerous to mention and impossible to stick into any equation for success or failure. But I knew one thing, resetting the Time Capsule to factory settings was a recipe for at least 20 minutes of apparently normal behavior by the Time Capsule. And sure enough, in the course of things, a reset was done. They couldn’t connect to the Time Capsule to configure it or look at it with their Mac even with the password, because I’d enabled MAC address filtering. More on that later. But the end result was that I was told they couldn’t see a problem (it’d just been reset to factory settings, and was appearing normal) and I needed to take it home, and good luck. They set me up with some basic settings, and told me not to change them, and let them know if it crapped out again. Great. Thanks, guys. I’d offered to let them keep the bloody thing for as long as they needed, for troubleshooting, but they don’t do that kind of thing. If they can’t see your problem then and there, tough. Sigh… It was annoying enough when they started asking about interference from phones, etc… I’ve lived in this house 8 years and this is the first router that’s ever done this, and besides, that stuff wouldn’t affect the Mac Pro on ethernet connection, right? “Oh, yeah…”

I had a strong suspicion that things would fall apart again when I got the device home, and I was right. I’ll continue my saga in the next post, because I want to write about my steps in trying to troubleshoot and fix this problem myself.

Peter Nikolaidis of the Fresh Ubuntu podcast and I recently did an episode for Hacker Public Radio on Yahoo! Pipes, which I’ve mentioned here before. We had a lot of fun, and we’ll definitely be doing it again.

As for HPR itself, I haven’t listened a whole lot yet, but it seems kind of formal, all things considered, from the opening music to the tone adopted by those I’ve listened to so far. I’m more of a “vary your tone and have some fun” kind of listener myself. But we’ll see. Like I said, I’m only about 3 episodes into it.

For some reason, putting the link to embed the second youtube video (the embed link constructed by YouTube, no less) makes weird things happen to this post, so screw it. Sometimes it’s not worth fighting wordpress to figure out what it’s attitude problem is. Here’s part one, and a link to part two.

Find Part 2 of this screencast here.

Ok, I poked fun at Microsoft’s Interoperability attempts, showing that I was unable to view their video highlights of the event on my Mac.

In reality, of course there are ways to view Video encoded for Microsoft Media Viewer in Quicktime, as well as many other formats of video. The way to do this is to snag a couple free plug-ins that install preference panes and will do the job of getting you compatible with the world.

First up, to play Windows Media files, you need the Flip4Mac WMV Components for Quicktime. You can download the free version from either the Flip4Mac web site, or from Microsoft’s site.

Look, just for fun, I’ve included pictures of the web sites. Yay.

Flip4Mac installs an app and also a preference pane in your system preferences for the Flip4Mac plug-in.

Next, head over to the Perian web site and snag a copy of that plug-in as well. Perian handles a ton of different formats, and between the two of these plug-ins, I don’t think there’s anything I’ve tried to watch yet that I can’t.

Perian also installs as a preference pane in System Preferences, and you probably noticed its icon near the Flip4Mac icon in the System prefs screenshot above.

Ok, well, as much fun as it was laughing that the New Interoperable Microsoft was showcasing videos that weren’t interoperable, in reality it’s easy to set yourself up for viewing such fine works of art as the highlights of Microsoft acting like they are the first people in the world to grasp that data needs to move around and open source is not going to curl up and die. Hooray, Behemoth!

Recently my old pal Peter asked me to be on an upcoming Hacker Public Radio with him, and suggested we talk about Yahoo! Pipes. Not knowing a Yahoo! Pipe from a Google Bong, I thought I better do some learning. Like anything else, I suggest studying the works of others. Example source code.. well, in this case, example flowchart pipe thingys.

I like what I see so far. Honestly, a lot of the functionality is in the applications these pipes are tapping into. Flickr and YouTube, for example, have great API’s that let people have their way with their stuff. These guys realize that accessibility and data transfer and manipulation is how their stuff is gonna rule the world. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s just now making press conferences about it. Anyway…

Anyway, I’m gonna keep playing with these so I have something intelligent to say. Well… so that I have something to say. Ok, so that Peter won’t strangle me. Plus, they are cool! Check ‘em out.

Okay, I’ve been talking a little bit about screen capture apps, mentioning snapz pro x and ishowu. I think for doing something like capturing game action (WoW junkies, listen up), ishowu is probably the best choice (Update: I don’t think this is the case anymore. I think ScreenFlow is probably better for this too). But for general screen presentation, a recently released product called ScreenFlow just flat out rocks. For how simple it is to make great screen casts, it’s pretty mind blowing really. And for $99.00, it’s a bargain for anyone who depends on screen casts for a living or for serious information sharing.

ScreenFlow takes the approach of recording the whole screen area, unlike some of the other screen video capture tools. You can adjust the zoom, and you can crop the area if you want. But basically, it starts off by default capturing the whole screen and then letting you add Video Events to do what you want within that space.

Below are the media tracks in my video: the isight track on top, and the screen capture video underneath.

If you watch my video on MS Interoperability that was produced with ScreenFlow, you’ll see that I am capturing the screen as well as my isight video, and that I then slide the isight video off the screen and change my zoom and focus areas as I go. These are all done by adding video events on the appropriate media track, and then making those events be whatever change I want. The length of the event determines how quickly the changes take place. In the image below, the purple squares on the two media tracks are video events I’ve added to slide the isight image off the screen, and zoom in on the various things I’m discussing.

The changes can be made on the workspace by moving things, cropping things, etc, or in the Properties panels. Here is the video properties panel for the screen track. As you see, you can also edit audio properties, cursor effects, and more.

You can start/stop recording with Command-Shift-2, or use the ScreenFlow menu in the menu bar by clicking its icon. The neat thing is, you can stop, then start again and it will ask if you want to append to the existing project, or make a new one.

There’s a lot more to this application, so download a copy and have at it. Any video exported will display “DEMO MODE” in nice huge letters across it unless you unlock it by purchasing a key for $99.00.

Microsoft announced a whole new effort towards interoperability with open standards and all kinds of great happy horse poo, so I thought I’d watch their video highlight of the event. Here’s what happened.

By the way, this screencast was created using ScreenFlow, a product I’ll detail more in my next blog post. It’s a very cool video screen capture and screencasting tool.