Steps

1. Open the uncompressed version of your recording (try not to start with an mp3 or similar)
2. Select All (Ctrl/Cmd + A)
3. Effect > Normalize…
   1. Tick Remove any DC offset only.
   2. Press Enter
4. Effect > EQ…

   

   1. Add one point just before the 100Hz marker and one at the 100Hz marker. Drag the left-most point all the way down to -24dB.
   2. Add one point at 1000Hz, one at 2000Hz and one at 3000Hz. Drag the 2000Hz point up slightly.
   3. Add one point at the 10,000Hz marker and one just after. Drag the right-most point down to -24dB.
   4. Press Enter
5. Effect > Amplify…
   1. If the audio was recorded at a low volume, you will want to run the Amplify effect over it to bring up the overall volume.
   2. Set the New Peak Amplitude to -0.3dB and allow the Amplification slider to adjust itself automatically.
   3. Press Enter
6. Effect > Compressor…
   1. Threshold: -10dB
   2. ratio: 4:1
   3. attack and release times: 0.1s
   4. Press Enter

To provide an example, Stephanie was kind enough to send me a sample of a direct-to-PC recording she had made for her own podcast. Have a listen to the short before and after snippets to hear the difference for yourself.

[public tag: bloglines]

Thanks to products like Pear PC and Cherry OS, it is now possible to run OSX from within XP; potentially allowing a single PC to run Windows, OSX and Linux — the ultimate test box. This is where you come in.

• Who has had a go setting up Pear PC + OSX? (Or Cherry OS if you were able to get the download in the brief time it was available).
• What specs did the system have?
• How long did setup take? Reports of 4 hour setups littered the net when Pear PC was first released — scary stuff
• Did Safari run smoothly? IE 5.2? Omniweb?
• Where there any strange side effects?

Any feedback is welcome; I’m not real keen on buying an OS that I may have very little use for until I’m more confident in the results.

Proof of Concept
Here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about. I’ve used Photoshop as the example application as it is the closest thing I use to an IDE, it is the program I have been using the longest (as of next birthday I will have been pushing pixels for more than half my life!) and it is far and away my favourite piece of software. Element names have been made purposefully verbose to ease readability .

Below is a snippet detailing how basic preferences could be stored:

<preferences>
	<preferencegroup>
		<name>General</name>
		<pref name="color picker" value="Adobe" />
		<pref name="interpolation" value="Bicubic Sharper" />
		<pref name="history" value="30" />
		<pref name="export clipboard" value="true" />
		<pref name="zoom resize" value="true" />
		<pref name="auto update" value="false" />
		<pref name="asian text" value="false" />
	</preferencegroup>
	<preferencegroup>
		<name>Display and Cursors</name>
		<pref name="color channels" value="true" />
		<pref name="diffusion dither" value="false" />
		<pref name="pixel doubling" value="false" />
		<pref name="painting cursor" value="brush size" />
		<pref name="other cursor" value="standard" />
	</preferencegroup>
</preferences>

Simple, yes? Now to use XML to really make a difference. The snippet below is an example of what I really wanted last Monday – the details of my desktop arrangement within photoshop.

<palettegroup>
	<height>710</height>
	<width>274</width>
	<x-pos>1292</x-pos>
	<y-pos>2</y-pos>
	<palette>Layers</palette>
	<palette>Channels</palette>
	<palette>Paths</palette>
</palettegroup>
<palettegroup>
	<height>132</height>
	<width>212</width>
	<x-pos>1571</x-pos>
	<y-pos>2</y-pos>
	<palette>Info</palette>
	<palette>Histogram</palette>
	<palette>Swatches</palette>
</palettegroup>
<palettegroup>
	<height>382</height>
	<width>212</width>
	<x-pos>1571</x-pos>
	<y-pos>136</y-pos>
	<palette>History</palette>
	<palette>Actions</palette>
</palettegroup>
<palettegroup>
	<height>218</height>
	<width>212</width>
	<x-pos>1571</x-pos>
	<y-pos>520</y-pos>
	<palette>Character</palette>
	<palette>Paragraph</palette>
</palettegroup>

This could easily be extended to include the paths to action files, patterns, brushes and other such goodies. Techniques like the above are the sort of lead the big guys should be taking from the linux/unix crowd. I’m not saying everything should be controlled via .conf files, but at least give advanced users advanced options.

Oh, in case Andrei stumbles upon this, perhaps you could mention the idea to the guys at work?

Screen rulers are all the same. At least, that’s what I thought up until about a month ago – that’s when I discovered Screen Callipers from Iconico (Windows only 23/10/05: Now available for OSX aswell!).
Here’s why this application rocks:

• It doesn’t just measure a distance between two points – like a real calliper, it measures around and between objects.
• With a memory footprint of 2MB, I can leave it in the far corner of my second monitor and it’s always there, ready to work.
• Don’t like the default skin? No problem, download another or skin it yourself.
• The colour of the measuring edge can be changed with a single keystroke, ensuring that you always have enough contrast to see what you’re doing.

Whilst the full version isn’t free, there is a fully featured version which is. Try it out, if you like it make sure to pay the $15 to support the creator.
Get screen callipers

Colour Palette Generator

After Andy Clarke’s Creating Colour Palettes article kindly reminded us about high-school art theory, Steve Chipman from slayeroffice.com took it upon himself to automate the process of generating a colour’s tints and shades. The reason I rank this colour tool above all others is that it saves me time again and again. No matter how I go about choosing the primary colours of a design, I always like to have all the relative tints and shades mapped out in swatches before I get knee-deep in the design. As of the latest update (1.6), this handy script can also output all your colour sets as a single PNG file – Awesome!

Slayeroffice Colour Palette

ColorPic Colour Sampler

Unfortunately I was beaten to the line regarding publicising this app, but it’s so good it should be mentioned more. I find having my colour palette loaded in a graphics application far too limiting. I don’t want to be jumping back and forth just to see my hex values when writing CSS, that’s counter productive! ColorPic is another fine product by Iconico, the makers of the Screen Callipers.
Reasons this program rocks:

• Magnified (2-50x) navigator window so you know exactly which pixel you’re sampling.
• Run by keyboard shortcuts. I can never get enough keyboard shortcuts. (Ed-nerd!)
• If the sampled colour is web-safe, displays its name as well as RGB and hex values

Get ColorPic

Favelet Suite

Steve Chipman of slayeroffice.com is someone who doesn’t get enough recognition for the free work he does. His “web experiments gone horribly awry” are awe inspiring to those of us with less than average javascript skills, possibly none more so than his Favelet Suite. I’m not even going to bother going into the details of how incredibly useful this is, but here’s my top reasons this tool rocks:

• Mouseover DOM inspector: Something bugging out in your design and it’s not the CSS? Worse yet, trying to help someone else fix their live site? With this Favelet you can edit the content of any html element live! Want to test if a clearing div will help? Stick it in. Want to try changing the source of an image? You can do that too.
• Colour List: Samples the colours of the current page and gives the result as swatch/#hex pairs. Not perfect, but very handy and insanely quick.
• Document Tree Chart: Displays the elements of the page and their nesting in glorious technicolour. So simple a designer could understand it.

Get the Favelet Suite

And What Did You Bring For Show & Tell?

That’s it folks, four pieces of kit that make my life that little bit easier. Now it’s your turn. Please take this opportunity to share any similar simple little apps or online services which you think would benefit others.
If you want more of these sorts of tools, have a look in the tools section of mindlesslemming.com.