I took a peek at Bittorrent, a file sharing site. That is a web area I always thought was just an ftp program until somebody clued me in that they have music downloads. I didn’t have a great initial tour. The material is similar to eBay listings with thumbnails, which take up a lot of screen room. You have to scroll through the pages and that little delay between each begins to add up. Anyway, unless there is an undiscovered way to turn that off, I think Bittorrent is going to have to wait.While there, I took a peek at eDonkey, to notice they have been shut down solidly. No free music but what got me was the warning. A screen pops up stating that downloading copyrighted material is a criminal offense and that your IP (computer address) has been “logged”, displaying the IP. This is the type of Big Brother operation that will eventually lead to new privacy laws. I said “eventually”.
I dropped up to visit Dickens and Jerry was there, so it was like a Thrift reunion. Dickens is listing the store for sale. We discussed what a “turn-key” operation is and I’m going to have to look that up. I always thought it meant a business where to open an close, all you did was turn the key and collect money in between those events. It may have morphed to a larger meaning in Florida. The low rent is a plus, along with the fact that almost any shop in Florida is an alternative to a low-paying job.
There is something wrong with my V-Stream [analog to digital card] so I thought I’d buy a Vide-Oh! card. You know, or wouldn’t you know, they have become hard to find just when I want one? Every body is sold out. It is a PCI computer card that converts incoming analog signals, such as playing a VHS tape, directly to MPEG-2, the popular DVD format. (It does other formats for the same price as other cards, so that is why I want a Vide-Oh!. Tomorrow I must drive to TigerDirect to see if they have a stray one on the shelves, and besides TigerDirect is 2/3 of the way to JP’s place.)
In my own defense, I point out that I stated the el cheapo DVD player for my music was a trial. Sure enough, it appears to have blown a channel. This happened just minutes before I was to begin playing my Saturday evening gig. Interestingly, it was not really a “channel”, but some effect whereby the vocals come through loud but not the instruments. Examining the Audacity tracks show that these are not separate signals, so what have I stumbled across here? I lack the skills to follow it up so the important thing is learning that this problem can occur.
It is simple. If the vocals can be singled out, then so can the music. So you’ll know, the balance was all wrong for what happened tonight, so I cannot directly use this feature even if I find what causes it. I played the gig with one “channel” but I was constantly working the foot pedal to get the correct balance. Still, my mind races ahead to the possibility of grabbing the music only channel. Why? Let me explain something further.
If I could single out the music, I have long since noticed that with Audacity, while it is possible to adjust the key of the music (which explains why I can play most of Johnny Cash in E major), this process also changes the pitch of the vocals. This limits the range to which you can fine tune the pitch before the vocals rumble or become chipmunks. But the music suffers no such distortion, and have I not long noticed most vocalists tend to prefer music in a key they can sing along to the original hit?
If I could remove the vocals and change the key (yes, I know there is a device in PopSci that claims to do the same, I’ll look it up), and if I get an old laptop from Mike, it would be a financial boom to offer “live Karaoke”. Most evenings I have to turn away people who want to sing along with my music for I can’t let them clash with the ambient track. I think I should follow up this idea.
Even if I choose just a few classics, I could already put thirty tunes in the correct keys on each CD, 137 tunes on each DVD. That is correct, you could walk up to the stage and say you want to do “Cracklin’ Rose” in G (as long as the original was in E, F, A or B) and you’re in a “live” band. At this point it is speculation but it would certainly mean big money in this town if I could accompany any vocalist and/or guitarist live on stage with the full musical backing track. I may already be the only musician in this town who knows how to remove a bass track from the recordings. I’ve already met people who wish they’d thought of it but it is the type of thing that is too late once somebody is already doing it. Live Karaoke would completely distance me from the pack. I could turn that into a gold mine around here, believe you me.
The gig was fine. Whereas Friday packs the place, Saturday is a small crowd. The club is shifting toward a local popularity; I see the odd new faces. Finally. The important part is small groups of women show up at times. They are housewives in gaggles of two to four, but that is still a major difference in this area, meaning they feel comfortable walking in to a non-restaurant setting. This is not a development to overlook, I know I would head straight for a place if I heard there were unattached females present. Jimbo’s does have single women at the bar. It is cheerlessly comical watching some drunk 25-year-old Latino being fended off by a woozy 45-year-old grandmother where both can’t understand a word the other is saying.
Funny or not, word quickly gets around when there are stray females. I could list you nearly twenty other clubs in this immediate area that I have checked out that have no women on their own, barring the obvious exceptions. I hope this means something for Jimbo’s. It is too early to tell. Single women bring in single men, the paying audience. Speaking of that, there were more fives and tens in the tip jar tonight. I’m taking tomorrow off and going shopping.
