I recently bought two gadgets that are awesome and doing two very different things. The Sony PCM-D50 is an amazing little digital audio recorder that I've been using for my work as a radio journalist and audio producer. The Asus Eee PC is an amazing little (really little, we're talking seven inch screen and 2.1 pound weight) PC that I've been using for blogging on the go.
While I don't really expect to use my Eee PC for radio production much more than I expect to use my PCM-D50 for blogging, the truth is there is some overlap. Every now and again I record interviews on my digital audio recorders for podcasts, or in some cases as soundtracks to videos I produce for this or other web sites. And the Eee PC is powerful enough to run basic audio editing utilities when I need to make some quick edits on the go.
There's just one problem. While the Eee PC instantly recognized my Zoom H4 recorder when I plugged it in (letting me drag and drop audio files, or even use the Zoom as an external microphone for Skype calls), the Eee PC doesn't recognize my PCM-D50.
If I were running Windows, I could install the driver that Sony includes for stubborn PCs that fail to recognize the PCM-D50. But there's no Linux driver at the moment. So the best solution I've been able to find so far is to scrap the custom Linux distribution that comes with the Eee PC and install Ubuntu. OK, scrap might not be the right word. I'm not quite ready to give up on Xandros. But I've found that when you boot Ubuntu (or eeeXubuntu to be specific) from a flash card, the Eee PC recognizes the PCM-D50 as an external hard drive with no problem.
As an added bonus, it's much easier to install Audacity 1.3.3 on Ubuntu than on Xandros. That's because Audacity 1.3+ is still in beta, even though it's pretty stable. The newer beta versions of Audacity include a whole bunch of features that are missing in the 1.2.6 version that you can download and install on Xandros.
So right now I'm carrying a 4GB SD card around with my Eee PC. It has eeeXubuntu installed, meaning I can boot into either Xandros using the main memory or eeeXubuntu using the flash card. There's only about 1.5 GB of free space on the card, and even less on the main memory, so I have no plans to do any serious audio editing on this setup. But as soon as the eeeXubuntu developer adds a few more features like support for all the Fn keys on the Eee PC, I'll probably install the operating system to the computer's main memory and use the 4GB SD card just for storage, which should provide plenty of space for editing long interviews.
I took a break today from playing with Linux on my Eee PC to play with Linux on my Toshiba A135-4527 laptop. I don't know if it was a recent Windows update or what, but for the past few days I've been getting horrible glitches whenever I try to play or record audio. At first I though Skype was the problem, so I downgraded Skype. But it turns out the errors are just as bad when I'm using my favorite audio editing software like Cool Edit or Reaper.
When I reinstalled Vista the other day, I made sure to set aside a partition for Linux, and so I went and reloaded Ubuntu. It's amazing how responsive and zippy it is compared to Vista. If I didn't need certain Windows-only programs I'd seriously consider switching.
Anyway, I had a lot of audio recording and editing to do today and yesterday. And while I really hate using Audacity for complicated editing tasks, the open source audio editor works as well as anything for recording tracks. So I loaded up Audacity, hit record, and went into my voice booth (err, closet). Everything worked perfectly, and I did some basic editing, saved my files to my Windows partition, rebooted, and did my editing in Windows while fighting with playback glitches.
And then I started to wonder. I know that Cool Edit and WINE don't play nice together. But what about Reaper? So after I finished my editing tasks, I booted Ubuntu again, installed WINE, and downloaded Reaper. And wouldn't you know it? It works like a charm.
I know Ardour is probably a better long term solution, because it's a digital audio workstation built for Linux. But I've had a pretty hard time in the past getting Jack configured. And Ubuntu just barely recognizes the sound drivers on my PC. So the fact that Reaper and WINE recognize my USB mixer makes me pretty giddy. And it also makes me one step closer to dropping Windows altogether. If I can just figure out how to synchronize my Windows Mobile 2003SE PDA with Sunbird, I think I'd be pretty much set.
Of course, if another Windows update make my audio drivers start working again I'll probably forget all about this.
Oh yeah, I tried loading Reaper on my Eee PC using WINE, and it didn't take quite as well. The application installed, and even seemed like it was going to run. But it froze on startup.
Update: I spoke too soon. It turns out Reaper does run on my Eee PC. It's a bit slow and glitchy when making recordings, but it seems up to basic editing tasks. The program is obviously meant for a larger screen, because there's no way to resize the mixer window, meaning you can only view one track at a time unless you just hide the mixer, which is what I've done below.
I was so excited to get Audacity installed on my Eee PC the other day, that I didn't notice at first that I'd installed Audacity 1.2.6. What I really wanted was Audacity 1.3.3 beta or at the very least 1.3 beta.
What's the difference? Well, there are a bunch of improvements in the 1.3 line, but the single most important change for me is in the way Audacity handles WAV splitting. In Audacity 1.2 the only way to grab a portion of the audio track and move it to the left or right is to create a new audio track. What I frequently need to do is chop an audio file up into lots of little itty pieces and place them on a timeline, which you can do with Audacity 1.3. If that didn't make any sense at all to you, just take a look at the image above.
Continue reading at Eee Site.
Sure, I was able to install Audacity on my Eee PC, but what good is an audio editor without an audio input devices? I figured if worse came to worse, I could always pop the SD card out of my Zoom H4 audio recorder, throw it in the Eee PC's SD card slot and edit audio that way.
But it turns out the Eee PC has some pretty excellent hardware support for a Linux machine. When you plug the H4 into a PC, you can either use it as an external SD card reader or as an audio I/O device. That means you can speak into the H4's microphone and record audio on the PC, or plug devices into the XLR/quarter inch jacks. I didn't really expect this feature to work on my new Xandros-based laptop, but it does!
Here's a picture of my Eee PC running Audacity and recording audio from the Zoom H4 mic. The Eee PC also has a built in webcam with a microphone, so if you're not looking for professional audio quality, you don't really need an extra device. But as a radio journalist, I can fit the Zoom H4, the Eee PC, and a couple of cables and mics in a bag that's barely large enough to carry a full sized laptop.
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