Brian's Brain

Continued from 'Post-Mortem: The High-Tech Holiday Weekend'....

Regular readers of my writeups know that when at music festivals (and when allowed) I enjoy doing audience-based recordings of musicians' sets. My wife and I have both recently upgraded to Dell Inspiron 700m laptops, and late last month I donated my Fujitsu Lifebook-P2040 to charity, but we've held onto my wife's Lifebook-P2110. Although it's inadequate for audio editing, it's perfect for audio capture, which doesn't require much CPU horsepower especially if the incoming audio stream is already digitized and doesn't require sample size or rate conversion prior to storage on the HDD. The Lifebook-P2110 has two available battery slots, if you remove the optical drive and replace it with a battery pack, and you can independently swap them out while the system is running. And although the Transmeta Crusoe CPU may be underpowered, it sips battery juice very slowly.

At past festivals, I've used Digigram's VxPocket V2 sound card on the Lifebook-P2040 with great success (and I finally broke down and used it on the last set I recorded Sunday evening, and again had great success). However, for this festival, I decided to test-drive two alternative setups:

• Core Sound's Mic2496 phantom power-plus-mic preamp unit, in conjunction with a M-Audio Transit to convert S/PDIF to USB, for two-channel, 24-bit, 96 kHz recording, and
• Tascam's all-in-one US-122 USB peripheral, at two-channel, 24-bit, 44.1 kHz

I'd previously, and successfully, used both setups on my PowerBook and on the Inspiron 700m, so I had confidence they'd work fine on the Lifebook-P2110, too. Alas, my confidence was shattered once I pressed 'record' on Adobe Audition v1.5 (I also tried Sony's Sound Forge v8). When I listened to the resultant recordings, I heard randomly-located, repeated brief intervals in which the audio stuttered....not gaps of silence, mind you, more like what happens when a record skips. I quickly figured out that the Lifebook's USB 1.1 ports were giving me fits, but no matter how much system tweaking I did (and believe me, I tried everything I could think of, including maximizing latency to employ the largest-possible buffer for incoming USB data), I couldn't eliminate the USB dropouts and resultant missing bits of audio. Randomly, the Transit-to-PC connection would also inject white noise into the recording; I also chalk this up to USB controller problems.

I could proceed with USB debug, using PCI bus latency tweaking tools (thanks to Gordon Gidluck and the gang at laptop-tapers for the suggestions) and other esoteric techniques, but I think I'm just going to give up on USB and return to tried-and-true PC Card interfaces. The VxPocket V2 works great at up-to-48 kHz sampling rates, and if I want to use an external mic preamp it provides a RCA S/PDIF input (regardless of whether I employ the integrated mic preamp or use a discrete unit, I'll need to supply external phantom power). For 96 kHz recording, I briefly tried out the Beta 2 WDM driver for Core Sound's PDAudio-CF card yesterday and it seems to be rock-solid on my system.

Or, you might ask (and my wife did); why bother at all? Soundboard recordings were available for sale on CD immediately after the conclusion of each set for $12. Soundboard feeds were being broadcast live over Grizzly Radio (four channels, one per stage), and both my iRiver H10 and my wife's Creative Zen Micro embed FM receivers and support on-the-fly radio recording. And high-quality recordings done by other folks at the festival are already available for free download on Etree. To which I can only reply:
a) Hey, what can I say, I'm a geek, and
b) I don't buy the postcards at Yosemite National Park, either...I take my own photos.
I'll continue my experimentation at upcoming festivals; the California WorldFest, Trinity Tribal Stomp, and Austin City Limits Music Festival.

Happy weekend, all!