Electric Picnic
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Another year, another 3-day music festival. Highlights were the weather (it didn't rain and Sunday was actually sunny), the food (more vegetarian than ever before), the B&B (seriously, who camps at these things?) and The Breeders; who'd have thought I'd be able to relive that 1993 indie mega-hit "Cannonball"?
I took my trusty T90 and 300TL flash along to snap the crowd. I never know what that flash is gonna do, so I was pretty happy; every photo turned out! (slide show here).
God is a DJ - but not ours
Bravely we decided not to get a DJ for the wedding reception.
The idea was that I'd compile playlists and plop them on the ipod and we'd be laughing - money saved, no gawky DJ in manky suit and bowtie.
But I really didn't think that one through. For one thing, the ipod isn't much chop as it will probably will run out of batteries at the most inconvenient time. And fumbling around on the scrollwheel in a dark corner to pause or replay a song isn't so great either.
So then I thought I'd use the laptop. That would be especially good, I thought, because I can use a player with volume leveling preventing our poor helper from running to and fro jiggling the volume when one song is too loud and the next too quiet. But then I find out the "background music" needs to be on CD, so a volume-leveling player doesn't really help. Never fair, I found a great little utility call MP3Gain which will boost tracks to a fixed volume without decoding and re-encoding the mp3. Now I remember the audio output on my laptop is a bit noisy (you can hear all the little pops and squeaks of the electronics) so I'll need to buy or borrow a USB sound card.
And this is aside from actually ripping and compiling the playlists. I'm using a simple formula to predict the complex upper / downer effect required from the music. Basically, as long as everyone behaves exactly like me, it should be perfect :-o.
The idea was that I'd compile playlists and plop them on the ipod and we'd be laughing - money saved, no gawky DJ in manky suit and bowtie.
But I really didn't think that one through. For one thing, the ipod isn't much chop as it will probably will run out of batteries at the most inconvenient time. And fumbling around on the scrollwheel in a dark corner to pause or replay a song isn't so great either.
So then I thought I'd use the laptop. That would be especially good, I thought, because I can use a player with volume leveling preventing our poor helper from running to and fro jiggling the volume when one song is too loud and the next too quiet. But then I find out the "background music" needs to be on CD, so a volume-leveling player doesn't really help. Never fair, I found a great little utility call MP3Gain which will boost tracks to a fixed volume without decoding and re-encoding the mp3. Now I remember the audio output on my laptop is a bit noisy (you can hear all the little pops and squeaks of the electronics) so I'll need to buy or borrow a USB sound card.
And this is aside from actually ripping and compiling the playlists. I'm using a simple formula to predict the complex upper / downer effect required from the music. Basically, as long as everyone behaves exactly like me, it should be perfect :-o.