My 1st Vodcast (Vidcast?!) Extend the battery life of the Microtrack - up to 11.5 hours

If you have a Microtrack, you'll find this battery extender extremely useful:

Buy one on eBay here!

Bargain CF card (for now!)

I found a Toshiba 4GB 40x CF card for £17.99. Here is a link:

http://www.mymemory.co.uk/memory/Toshiba/4GB/CompactFlash/Card

Mine arrived today and it's an OEM card so there is no branding on the card however it seems to work well. The Microtrack now shows 55 hours of recording time when I set it to MP3 rather than WAV!

Great free chromatic tuner for Mac...

Works really well!

Here's the blurb:

Tuna Pitch – New from the creator of Sound Studio

Tuna Pitch is a free tool to make sure you always hit the right note!

Tuna Pitch helps you tune your guitar (or any similar instrument), with 5 built-in presets, and the option to set all six strings to any note. Also, with the standard EADGBE tuning, there are Drop D, Drop C, Open G, and Open D tuning presets. It features keyboard control, reference tones, a big, high-contrast, easy to read display which can be resized to fill the screen
or made small to be unintrusive and it requires minimum CPU to get its work done…

Download it from the 'goodies' page here

I like this!

Tip! Microtrack CF formatting

You can reformat your CF cards using the Microtrack unit or by using the format utilities on the computer and this shouldn't make any difference. If you use the computer it is possible to change the format from FAT16 to FAT32 and vice-versa. This is useful as cards over 512MB should be formatted FAT32. The Microtrack unit can't change the format of the card.

It's a good idea to copy the files off of the card, reformat, and copy back what you need every once in a while as this keeps this CF card and Microtrack happy!

Oscar Peterson

... was on Sky last night. Live in Montreal in 2004. You might think I'm an old fart however this guy can play...! Unfortunately he suffered a stroke some years ago which has weakened his left hand and it was clear to see the effects of this.

Oscar speaks about it in his journal here

Even though he probably wasn't at his best this was a great show and I managed to grab my Microtrack, plug it into the Skybox and record the majority for future listening

Not good at all! (Education, education, education)

I visited a local school yesterday evening as it is one of the schools that my son could possibly attend when he leaves junior school next summer. Enthusiastic teachers, interesting demos, lots of equipment but the building was in a poor state of repair. If this wasn't bad enough, it's supposed to be a technology college however I didn't see one Mac in the whole school and the PC's in the music department were prehistoric!

Ah well. at least I have one or possibly two others to choose from...

...you gotta start somwhere...!

Just a quick note to say that I was going to ramble on about my Microtrack unit and have a blog full of tips and tricks. I've now decided that this should be less focused and a more general site for music tech and computer successes and headaches.

BTW, does this thing have a spell checker??!

;)