gavinshearer.com

« Travel Makes You Tired | Main | Light Rail Photos »

October 11, 2006

Tape Is Dead

As I've mentioned previously, I've started taking singing lessons. (And, for the record, I love it.)

When I first started, Sarah, my instructor, asked me to get some blank audiocassette tapes to record our sessions. At the time, I gave her a bit of a blank look (tape?), and then asked if the tapes were for her, or for me.

"Oh, they're for you," she said. "It's really important that you have a record of how you're improving over your sessions."

Ah, gotcha, I thought. And then I promptly popped down to the Apple store.

See, I don't have anything that plays tapes in my house. Nothing. Nada. In fact, near as I can tell, the only two tape players in my world these days are the ones embedded into the dashboards of Richard's and Elaine's respective automobiles. (And there ain't no way I'm stressing either friendship by playing my session recordings in their cars. No way, no how.)

So instead, I sprang for a wicked little iPod accessory: the Belkin TuneTalk Stereo.

The TuneTalk snaps on to the bottom of the Video iPod, and uses the dock connector for power and to communicate with the iPod itself. It allows me to make great-sounding recordings (referring to the quality of the audio, not the singing) that are dumped directly to the iPod hard drive as WAV files. When I get home and plug the iPod in to my Mac, the files are converted and moved into a playlist called "Voice Memos."

It's hot cool voodoo.

In practical terms, the TuneTalk lets me get together with Sarah for my lesson, slap the iPod down on top of her piano and capture my "la la la"-ing, pausing here and there as needed. When the lesson's all done, I've got a directory of files, time- and date-stamped, ready to go.

It also means that I have a complete archive of my lessons on my 'pod, so I can go back and listen to old lessons (trying to hear what I did well, or - more often - poorly), and use some of our warmup exercises to practice with.

And thus, here I am tonight, standing in a hotel room in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, iPod in pocket, earbuds in ear, "la la la"-ing away, and getting ever-so-slightly better at this newfound hobby of mine.

In fact, the slickness of the Belkin product really made concrete to me the value of the iPod as platform, a device that is, in theory, extensible in a dizzying number of ways. The dock connector offers a lot of flexibility - you can already plug your digital camera into your iPod, or plug your iPod into your Mini Cooper. But what about GPS? Or hooking up a keyboard? Or a joystick for games? Or any one of a million other cool uses for the device? It's a large hard drive and generic operating system, right? So ... why not?

In fact, makes me wonder just how far away the much-rumored Apple "iPhone" might actually be. It's just another extension to the platform, right?

(Oh, and if you get a TuneTalk, a quick word of warning: WAV files are big, and they accumulate fast. After the first month of lessons, I had 1,430 MB of files sitting on my 'pod. So take a moment to rip your WAVs into AAC or MP3; doing so dropped the space footprint of that first month to just 135 MB.)

Tape is dead, baby. Tape is dead.

UPDATE, November 11, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at October 11, 2006 9:34 PM. Posted to Apple.

Comments

Post a comment

« Travel Makes You Tired | Main | Light Rail Photos »