At least, boys and girls, you have to admit that I don’t keep yammering at you if I don’t have anything to say! In fact, this is the first time that I’m making a post just because I have been away too long.
Here is a brief report on Arch and his not-so-busy life. The end of term brought with it the usual desperate scramble to get semester grades calculated and entered. (It’s interesting: the grades I assign are calculated using an incredibly complicated formula that uses a combination of (A) several semester tests, usually 3, but with the option of using 4; (B) numerous homework assignments, usually about 35; (C) at least one or two so-called ‘extra-credit’ opportunities, which means that if there is a really terrible test, where a large number of my students in a given class reveal that they haven’t a clue about a portion of their curriculum —remember, this is mathematics— they get to work the very same problems on the blackboard sometime when the whole class can meet outside the scheduled period, one at a time, and embarrass themselves for not following the simple procedures that have been taught at such length, to no apparent avail, and get half the points they lost. Each student is only allowed to make up half the points between his or her score, and the next higher score. This is a logistical nightmare, and I rub their faces in how painful it is; (D) a score for in-class participation, a score for (E) attendance, and (F) the Final Examination. I can get the exact same final average by using just (A) and (F), but the remaining test items are effectively nothing but psychological aids. If I stop using them, the grades would plummet, just because motivation would plummet. If you did not know already, college kids have to be treated like elementary school kids, and urged and encouraged along. I do not hand out M&Ms, but a colleague of ours does have one day a week devoted to games, a depth to which I refuse to sink, though I have been known to use a quiz-show format for review sessions. (It did not work. Kids do not like routine questions during these Quiz Show games, so they have to be tricky. But kids are too complacent when someone on a team gets a tricky question right, and the entire class is on the lookout for tricky questions, and completely miss the straightforward questions which are the bread and butter of tests.
This is one of the things that grind my gears, as the man said. Being accommodated and indulged in college simply postpones the moment at which a young person takes responsibility for his learning and his obligations. There is a sort of wall that they hit when they get their first job. Pretty soon, I suppose, special jobs will have to be created in what has heretofore been termed the Real World, little starter jobs, where for a year or two, new hires are given lollipops for everything they do correctly, and gently spanked with a rolled-up newspaper for dropping the ball. (A fake little starter ball.)
It turned out that the local independent radio station was hurting for spots on its schedule, and my wife and I volunteered. It took me three weeks to put together something that looks like a program, so that they can see whether they want to put me on the air. It is called “Music From All Over”, and they’re still getting their heads around the fact that it is not all over the globe, but all over the world of musical styles; eclectic, in other words.
You might not have noticed, but when you hear music on the radio of your car, for instance, it has a sort of marquee that gives a fair degree of text information about the music. This is packed into the music file itself, part of the mp3 file standard, which allows for non-sound information to be placed at the top of the file, in the so-called file header area. In the case of sound files, such as a piece of music, this is called meta-data, or just metadata.
[Most modern file types, such as music files, picture files, spreadsheets, documents, web pages, have invisible (for the most part) header areas, in which you can pack in information that used to be considered “extra”, such as author, owner, genre, date of original creation, album cover, composer, and so on. Even this post, for instance, could contain invisible junk, such as that it was created by Microsoft Word, which is not the case. I create it right on the Web in an environment called Blogger, which is the blog-creator interface put together by Google themselves, and is a pretty nice HTML editor. Can you believe that sound files can contain a picture of the album cover? That is amazing. And a waste of space, in my humble opinion.]
So, the radio station was pretty keen that all the extra metadata was carefully inserted into each tune that I used, so that each record company and recording artist got credit for being played on the air, since they’re not getting money, or very much, anyway. Record companies forgo their royalties for small public radio stations.
Apparently many radio show hosts do not do their show on the air, but put their mp3's together at home, at their convenience, and then upload their tracks to the Station’s computer via the Internet, and the computer software, called SAM Broadcaster (one option; apparently there are a few alternative broadcasting softwares, but SAM is the one favored by our station) plays the tracks for you. The order would be random, which meant that if I also put in some explanation about the music as a separate track, it would be randomized too.
In addition, the station wants either four minutes at the middle of the hour for station identification, or two minutes at the midpoint, and two minutes at the end. (My wife thinks it is the former, while I believe it is the latter. We just don’t know yet. All I have to do is just listen to this station, I suppose.)
A significant number of the tracks I wanted to feature were created by me, as you can guess, and I had to insert the metadata right into the file myself. The software I use can do this, and I also got free software off the Web that enables anyone to edit the metadata on their own mp3's obtained from anywhere, because metadata is being taken more seriously today, whereas about 10 years ago, record companies just couldn’t be bothered. Also, sometimes the operating system would strip out the metadata when moving files from your hard disk into a floppy. I still don’t understand this; do they filter it out, or does Windows maintain the metadata in some other location than the header area, like inside the bowels of, what, MediaPlayer, or something? What is with all this metadata stripping? It does not compute.
Anyway, with great difficulty I actually created new mp3's which contained an introduction, the music, and a closing, which sometimes had the performers’ names. (My voice is a lot less clear and attractive than my writing, which tells you something; but no matter how clearly I try to speak, I seem to my own ears to be mumbling. I need to get a hearing aid---seriously; I can’t hear some of the things my students say, which is a problem, but in my line of work, I can do all the talking first, and then go around the classroom trying to understand what the questions are. If I were a receptionist, or something, obviously a hearing aid would be a major priority. A decent hearing aid, the top of the line, is between $3000 and $5000, at time of going to press.)
But now, we have a problem. I can arrange for the first set of tracks to be exactly 28 minutes, as the engineer wanted, and the second set to be another 28 minutes, so that they had the whole program in the format they wanted for station breaks. But obviously this does not permit randomization, because if they reorder the tracks so that a track from the second half got into the first half, the 28-minute structure would be screwed.
“I guess you’re going to have to do a 28-minute podcast, or actually, two 28-minute podcasts, then,” said brother engineer. I pointed out that this meant sacrificing the metadata, because a podcast was just a single mp3, with a whole bunch of “songs”. (The radio world, as it exists for people outside classical music, is focused on the model of the song, and the album, and the performer. A performer is a collection of albums, and an album is a collection of songs. And a genre is a collection of performers. This is the silliest thing I have yet had to deal with. As a hierarchical structure it is brilliant, except that it does not reflect the real world. What about performers who perform in different genres? Hah. They create two symbolic performers, one for each genre. That way they can have the cake and eat it too. So there’s Linda Ronstadt I, who is a country-western singer, and Linda Ronstadt II, who is a rock singer, or whatever.)
Anyway, I went in with all the songs on a CD, because I was too lazy to pick up a flashdrive to dedicate to the radio program. I did take in an SD card also with the same songs on that. (SD cards are the things you use in a phone, or a digital camera.)
Well, they had to ‘rip’ the CD, and they promptly lost all the metadata. (It is possible to rip the CD and preserve the metadata, but brother engineer (who, to be fair, had been laboring under a personal tragedy at the time) had either not figured how to do this, or was under the impression that my CD had been created without metadata. But we listened to the tracks anyway, and he liked it. It was a crazy collection, with my own MIDI stuff, and some classical pieces, some Beatles, some Peter Paul and Mary, some chamber music, some opera, and even a track from my daughter’s first group, Episodes. It would have satisfied anyone with the attention span of a demented fruit fly, but there was such a variety that, by the same token, it would have antagonized anyone who was any sort of purist. I also put in a track by Tom Lehrer, namely Alma, which describes a lady who was married to three famous musicians. (The theme was Three: trios, counterpoint with three themes, etc etc.)
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| SD card reader |
You know, it just struck me that, if SAM considered the program to be two programs, one for 28 minutes, and one for another 28 minutes, the program would tolerate shuffling within each of the two segments. Hmm. (I hate it when I get brainwaves while in the middle of a post.)
So, anyway, that is where things stand, and I await their decision. They’re not in a position to turn me away entirely, because they need locally produced shows, or they become a sort of a robot Clear-Channel type of station that plays exactly the same thing that all other Clear-Channel stations play, which is precisely what they do not want to do. But they could put my show on at midnight on Sunday, when nobody is listening, and still appease their conscience! And I’m fine with that.
[Added later:]
The reason I'm hiding this down here is because I'm a little bashful about having any Internet readers hearing my gorgeous voice! Hee hee.
Anyway, I want to try and embed my second radio show (actually, none of the shows have aired yet. I don't know whether the Mills of our Radio Station grind exceeding small, but they do grind slowly) right here as a second test of the MP3 player capability in HTML.
If you cannot hear the sound, your computer or browser doesn't support the sound format.
Or, you have your speakers turned off :)
Warning: this code might not work. It DOES not work. Yes, it DOES work. You might be asked whether you want to allow QuickTime to run on this site, and you would answer Yes (or No, as appropriate! Turn the volume down, and allow it, just this once.)
It does not appear to work today (2014/6/30)
Let's try somezing different: click here: Show 1 part 1
Arch
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