Using low-cost ultraportable computers for audio editing on the go

A colleague wrote me the other day to ask for advice on setting up a portable audio recording/editing kit. Most radio journalists are used to carrying around a recorder, recording media (flash cards, minidiscs, digital audio tape, etc), a microphone, assorted cables, and a good set of headphones. Typically, you can run out to conduct an interview, record a press conference, or otherwise gather sound, and then run back to your office or studio to load the audio onto a computer for editing. But if you're on deadline and need to file your audio as quickly as possible, you might want to carry a laptop so you can edit your sound in the field and then upload it over a wireless internet connection.

All of which is to say that low-cost, tiny computers like the Asus Eee PC look like a godsend for professional radio journalists who spend a lot of time away from their desks. What my colleague wanted to know was whether the $400 Eee PC 701 would be up to the task. Here was my reply:

As for Audacity, it runs pretty well on the Eee PC 701. Keep in mind, while the Eee PC offers extreme portability, there are a few downsides for digital audio editing:

1. It has a very small amount of storage space. If you expect to be editing more than 1 or 2 GB worth of audio files at a time, you might want to invest in a 4GB or large SDHC card for the memory slot.
2. It has a pretty slow processor. That said, we were all using computers that were slower than the Eee PC just a few years ago, so it can certainly handle Audacity and several other audio packages. I haven't tried installing my old copy of Cool Edit, but it runs Reaper (www.reaper.fm) quite well. It just takes longer to import/export/render long files than it would on a faster laptop.
3. The 800 x 480 pixel display is less than ideal for mixing long pieces, since you just can't fit that much on the screen at once. But for simple cut and paste editing, it will do.

I've never tried mixing a full story on my Eee PC. But I have used it to trim long files, convert them from stereo to mono, and upload them to FTP sites. I frequently wind up doing tape syncs and other audio engineering gigs in Manhattan, and rather than come all the way back to my studio in Brooklyn I just find the nearest public library or coffee shop with WiFi and upload the audio from there.
be up to the task.

I've been playing with the HP Mini-Note for the past week, and while its processor is as slow, if not slower than the Eee PC 701, the Mini-Note is much more comfortable to use. It has a larger keyboard, which HP describes as being 92% full size. And it has a larger, higher resolution screen, cramming 1280 x 768 pixels onto an 8.9 inch display. That's just a few pixels shy of the resolution on the 15.4 inch laptop I use for most of my day to day computing. In other words, you should have no problem viewing multitrack project files using the audio editing software of your choice on a Mini-Note.

The Mini-Note is also a bit pricier than the Eee PC. The cheapest model is $499, and prices go all the way up to $750. That makes it cheap by ultraportable standards, but not necessarily cheaper than any other discount computer you can pick up at most big box electronics/computer retail stores. But at just 2.6 pounds, the Mini-Note probably fits in your bag easier than the big ole Dell/HP/Acer computer you'd find at Best Buy. The interesting thing is that Dell, Acer, and at least a dozen other companies, some of which you've heard of, plan to release low-cost tiny computers to compete with the Eee PC within the next few months.

You can read much more about this low-cost ultraportable revolution at my other blog, Liliputing.

Announcing Eee Site

I've realized that this blog has become a bit of a mish mosh of news about digital audio recorders, podcasting, radio, and the Eee PC. One of these things is not (much) like the others, so I've decided to launch a spinoff site: Eee Site.

I'm not sure if I have the energy to update two sites in addition to my daily blogging routine over at Download Squad, Green Daily, TV Squad. Oh yeah, and I still manage to squeeze some time in for radio occasionally.

So for now, Eee Site contains mirrors of most of the articles I've written about the Eee PC. My goal is to continue publishing future articles about Eee news and tips over at Eee site. When those articles are related to blogging, audio production, and/or journalism I may mirror the posts on this site as well. It's all still an experiment and a work in progress. I may dump the whole thing and just keep publishing all of my non Weblogs Inc posts on this site.

But if you've only been reading this site for Eee news and couldn't care less about digital audio recorders, you might want to check out Eee Site.

Asus launches $499 Asus Eee PC 8G

Just a month after Asus first released the Eee PC 4G in the US, it looks like the company is ready to start pumping out some new variations, including a black model and the higher end 8G.

The 8G is pretty much identical to the 4G, except it has 8GB of solid state memory instead of 4GB, and 1GB of RAM instead of 512MB. Oh yeah, and it costs $100 more. If you're willing to void your warranty, you could upgrade your RAM pretty easily on your own for less money. But increasing the storage capacity would take a bit more work, so this seems like a reasonable price. Still, somehow a $500 Eee PC just doesn't seem as appealing as a $400 model.

In other news, at least one retailer seems to be selling the 4G for $299. I've never heard of this company, I've never bought anything from them, and I wouldn't recommend you do so either unless you know someone who has dealt with them in the past. At $299, I can't imagine anyone is making any money on this deal, so it sort of feels like a scam. If you have reason to believe otherwise, please let me know in the comments.

[via Gizmodo and Asus Eee Hacks]

Adding in-line spell checking to OpenOffice.org on the Eee PC

For some reason the Eee PC ships with OpenOffice 2.3 preloaded instead of the more current OpenOffice.org 2.3. Since I don't really need to do much more than basic word processing, that doesn't concern me much. But I have noticed that there's no in-line spell checking. You know, the thing that underlines spelling errors in red as you make them?

I figured there was just a package missing, so I went and installed AbiWord, one of my favorite open source word processors. It turns out there was no in-line spellchecking on AbiWord at first either. But then I installed the "aspell" package and it worked like magic.

But no luck with OpenOffice.org.

So I did a little more digging and discovered that OpenOffice.org uses "myspell" instead of aspell. Since the OpenOffice.org build for the Eee has smaller toolbars and fonts, I uninstalled AbiWord and installed myspell and all is right with the world.

So to make a long story short, here's how to enable in-line spellchecking:

1. Add "http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main" to your repository list.
2. Open up a console window.
3. Type "sudo apt-get install myspell-en-us"
4. Enter "y" when asked
5. Open up OpenOffice.org Writer and mispell a word.

Adding power management to the Eee PC

Update: It's not particularly clear that mucking with the Eee PC's clock speed actually does anything to improve battery life. So consider everything that comes below to be an intellectual exercise.

Original Post: The Asus Eee PC uses a relatively low power 900 MHz Celeron processor to help cut down on costs and to help prolong battery life. Unlike newer Pentium chips, Celeron processors don't include SpeedStep technology, which means you generally don't get advanced power management features. But while you can't configure the Eee PC's processor to alter its voltage, you can alter the processor frequency, which should theoretically prolong your battery life.

SmallFootprint over at Eee User wrote up some great instructions for turning on CPU scaling using a command line process. I figured there was no way I was going to remember that command though, so I wanted to create some shortcuts to put in my start menu. Here's how I did it.

There are three commands you need to know:

1. "echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor" will turn on CPU scaling (which will automatically adjust your CPU speed from 112.5 to 900 MHz depending on your work load).
   
2. "echo performance > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor" will return you to full performance mode (where your CPU will run at 900 MHz all the time).
3. "cat /proc/cpuinfo" will show you what your current CPU speed is.

You can type any of these commands into a terminal. You may need to type "sudo" at the start of each command so that your command will have root privileges. Or you might want to type "sudo bash" to bring up a root terminal so that you shouldn't have to type "sudo" before each command.

In order to add these commands to my start menu, I first created two executable files:

1. Open File Manager
2. Navigate to your Home/User folder or whatever folder you want to put these files in.
3. Right click in the File Manager and select "Create New" and then "Text File."
   
4. I named the first "Power Saver," and the second "Performance."
5. Open up the first file using the Kate text editor by double-clicking on the file. Later, we'll make these files executable, so you'll need to right-click and select "open with text editor" to edit them.
6. Enter "echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor" (without the quotes) in your power saver file.
   
7. Click Save and Exit.
   
8. Enter ""echo performance > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor" in your performance file.
9. Click Save and Exit.

Now you'll want to make the files executable:

1. Right-click on a file and select Properties
2. Select the Permissions tab
3. Make sure the box that says Exec is checked. For good measure, I check the boxes under Owner, Group and Others. I'm not sure is you need to click all three, but I don't think it hurts.
4. Repeat the process with your other file.

Now you should be able to double-click on a file to execute it. To check and see if it worked, bring up a console and type "cat /proc/cpuinfo" and check the CPU speed. You might need to type this a few times to be certain. In power saver mode, you will sometimes get a 900MHz report, especially if you've just executed a series of commands.

Before adding the items to my start menu, I decided to hide them so I won't see them all the time and accidentally delete or modify them. All you have to do to make these hidden files is right-click the file, select "rename" and place a "." before each file. Now in order to see them you'll have to select "show hidden files" from the File Manager.

Okay, next up let's bring up the menu editor by selecting Applications/System/Menu Editor from the start menu. Select the folder you want to place the new icons in and either create a new item or a new subfolder from the File Menu. I decided to add my files to a new folder called Applications/System/CPU Speed.

Here's how to create your new shortcut:

1. Type a name into the name field, and a description into the description field if you like.
2. Click the folder icon next to the Command box and a window will pop up that lets you browse to find your executable files. If you've hidden them, you'll have to right-click on the white part of the window and select "show hidden files."
3. Click on the icon section next to Name and Description and look through the system icons to see if you like any. You don't really need an icon, but it makes your start menu look prettier.

Now you should have a start menu that looks something like this:

When you select Power Saver or Performance, a little hourglass should pop up in your taskbar. It takes a few moments for the changes to kick in, which is odd because they're almost instantaneous in command line mode. But I think this solution is still a lot more convenient.

Note that when you reboot your PC, you will always wind up back in performance mode. But I'm pretty certain someone at the Eee User forum will come up with a way to fix that soon. And I haven't been using the new power saving trick long enough to know what if any impact it has on battery life. I'll keep you posted.

Update: OK, there seems to be a flaw in my brilliant plan. In order for the shortcuts to work, you need to make sure that scaling_governor is executable. I figured that doing this once would be enough. But it turns out that when you reboot your Eee PC, you have to reenable executable access. I'll let you know if I come up with a solution. Or if anyone has a better idea for creating a working power management shortcut, let me know.

Eee PC + external monitor = awesome

So it turns out that not only can you use that little VGA port on the Eee PC to display an 800 x 480 desktop on an external monitor, you can go all the way up to 1280 x 1024, and possibly beyond. Since my monitor won't support resolutions higher than that, I can't promise anything.

When you plug in an external monitor you can choose to view the display just on your Eee PC, just on your external monitor, or on both screens. Then you can choose whether to display 800 x 480 pixels on both screens, or manually set your resolution. If you choose anything higher than 800 x 480, only a portion of your desktop will actually be displayed on your Eee PC. Here's a shot of Google Reader in Firefox showing how much more screen real estate you get with an external monitor:


And here's a game:


Although you could probably buy a more powerful laptop or desktop PC for $400, I'm starting to think that you really could use the Eee PC as primary computer. Just plug in a mouse, monitor, and external keyboard and you're good to go.

Oh yeah, and while support for external monitors is cool, it's also very useful. Because of the Eee PC's cramped display, some applications just don't fit very well. I've run across several programs that make it nearly impossible to edit your preferences, because several check boxes (including the "ok" or "apply" buttons) fall below the screen where you can't access them without an external display.

Add a start menu to the Eee PC and customize it

One of the best and worst things about the Eee PC is its "easy mode" user interface. In easy mode, you have no start menu, and little ability to access some of the Eee PC's more advanced features (unless you know your way around a terminal, which you can pull up by hitting Ctrl+Alt+T).

If you like to customize your desktop, easy mode can be pretty frustrating. On the other hand, everything is well designed to fit on the Eee PC's 800 x 480 pixel monitor. (Well, almost everything. Every now and again a menu will pop up that you just can't edit properly because it extends below the screen. But we'll get to that in another post). And restricting access to some of the more advanced features is probably a good thing for many users who aren't familiar with Linux.

It turns out there is a pretty simple way to enable a full KDE desktop, but if you want the best of both worlds, you can also add customizable start menu to your easy mode interface. Somewhat ironically, this might be harder than enabling the full desktop.

Read the rest of this post at Eee Site.

Video walkthrough of the Eee PC interface

I put together a little video showing the highlights of the Eee PC user interface for Download Squad.

In part two, I'm going to walk through a couple of more advanced tricks like accessing a root terminal and installing unsupported applications.

Update: And part 2 is up.

Installing Audacity on the Eee PC take 2: The easy way

OK, it turns out there's an easy way to install Audacity, and there's an easy way. I showed you the hard way already. Now let's take a look at the easy way.

1. Go ahead and open a terminal by starting the file manager (located under the Work tab) and selecting "Open Console Window" from the Tools menu.
2. Now type "konqueror" to bring up the KDE file manager/web browser. If you want to avoid entering your password down the line, try typing "sudo konqueror."
3. Select Applications
4. Select System
5. Select Synaptic Package Manager
6. Under Settings, select Repositories
7. Click add and enter "deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main"
8. Click the Search button and enter Audacity, GIMP, or any other program you're looking for.
9. Click on the check box next to the program you want to install and select Mark for installation
10. Click Apply and you're all set.

Related Posts:

• Installing Audacity on the Eee PC
• Unboxing the Eee PC
• Photos of the Eee PC next to other stuff

Unboxing the Asus Eee PC

I went ahead and bit the bullet. Here are my first few moments with the Asus Eee PC.



The battery is charging up right now, but I have taken a few minutes to play with the tiny, tiny PC.

Here are some initial thoughts:

• It's smaller than you think. I've typed on small keyboards before, but this one's going to take a little getting used to.
• The trackpad also takes a little getting used to. I think I'll invest in a tiny mouse for traveling with the Eee PC.
• The 800 x 480 pixel screen is a bit small for viewing many, if not most websites. But it certainly beats the heck out of most PDA/phone browsers. It will be interesting to see if Asus makes it easy to install Opera or another web browser that's capable of auto-scaling web pages.
• The operating system and preloaded applications take up about 62% of the 4GB of memory. When Asus begins shipping the 2GB versions of the Eee PC, the company will obviously have to strip off some of the applications.
  
• While initial reports were that you could either use the simple Xandros-based user interface or a complete Xandros desktop, I don't see a way to access the complete desktop yet. For most users, this is probably a good thing. The Eee PC is very easy to use right now, and includes Office software, a web browser, some games, an e-mail client. What more do you need?
• The add/remove software feature links directly to an Asus server. Right now there are only three or four applications available for installation. And several of them are actually just updates for applications that are already installed. I would like to see an option to install 3rd party software like Audacity, but it's not a high priority at this point.

Stay tuned for more videos/photos as I put this puppy through the paces.

Will the Asus Eee PC be available November 1st?

Rumor has it that the Asus Eee PC will be released on November 1st. I'm taking this with a grain of salt. First we heard that the tiny Linux-based laptop from Asus would be available in September. Then we heard mid-October. Now that it's nearly mid-October it's not too surprising to hear the date's been pushed back again.

The price keeps going up too. I first got excited about the Eee PC because it sported a $199 price tag. It's not clear whether a $199 version will be available or if the cheapest model will be $259, with pricier models going for up to $399.

That said, the Eee PC is still one of the two bits of hardware coming out in November that I can't wait to get my hands on. Sony is set to release the PCM-D50 digital audio recorder next month, which will satisfy the audio geek in me. The Eee PC should take care of my mobile computing geek side.

What's so cool about the Eee PC? First up, it's a low-cost laptop for under $300. Second, it's tiny, weighing in at just about 2 pounds. That means you also only get a 7-inch screen on the basic model (the pricier models will have 10-inch screens). But this isn't a desktop replacement. Rather, it's a mobile computer that you can throw in a bag and take anywhere.

You don't get a powerhouse for your money. The Eee PC packs a 900 MHz celeron processor, from 256 to 512MB RAM, and from 2GB to 4GB of internal flash memory last we heard. The specs are subject to change. Early on we'd heard that the units would not be upgradeable, but it turns out upgrading the RAM is pretty easy.

One of the first things I did when I bought my Toshiba A135-4527 laptop was to create a partition for Linux. But after having tried several varieties of Ubuntu, Mandriva, and Fedora, I've come to the conclusion that there's not much Linux support for some of the hardware in this PC.

And while a true Linux wiz could probably hack together a solution, I'd rather just buy a system where the hardware and software are meant to work together. The Eee PC runs a custom version of Xandros. I'm not sure if I'll be able to do any sort of audio editing on it, but for $259, it would make a great mobile companion for the times I don't feel like lugging around my 6 pound laptop, power supply and other gear. For example, the Eee PC would be great for blogging from a coffee shop. It's got 802.11b/g and a 4 cell battery that should be good for about 3 hours.

Now I just have to see if my budget will let me buy a $600 professional audio recorder and a $259 laptop in the same month. Might be time to hit up eBay and sell some older equipment.