It did. Kinda…

The video image out of this camera is amazing, and the fact that I can use my wider lenses is very handy—one of the reasons I went this way to begin with. But unfortunately, it seems the audio story isn’t good if you’re looking for simplicity.

I had hoped to just hook my mixer right into the camera’s microphone port, because that’d eliminate the step of trying to align separately-recorded audio with the video. I’d done this fairly successfully with my Canon HF200 camcorder, so it should have just worked, right?

Well, there’s no on-camera audio level monitoring, so you can’t tell if you’re clipping your audio until you’ve moved the footage to your machine. Thankfully the D7000 records directly to .MOV files, so you can do this straight off of the card reader fairly quickly.

Unfortunately, It took about 6 tries before I was able to tame the audio level in my testing, and once it was sufficiently within range, I wasn’t sure about how it sounded.

So I fired up a copy of FuzzMeasure and used the field recording feature so that I could do an offline measurement of the D7000. I sent the signal through the mixer so that I could get a sense of its frequency response. Sure enough, my fears were confirmed in this graph:

I’m not too sure what’s causing the two dips at 5600Hz and 6900Hz, but I think that’s the least of my concern right now. Just look at the overall curve! The -3dB points are at approximately 300Hz and 3000Hz! That’s optimized for the response of speech, and not full-range recordings.

It’s such a shame that the external microphone jack works this way, but at the same time I can see why they chose to make life easier for the majority of customers that shoot video on DSLR cameras, and want reduced wind noise with intelligible speech.

I guess I need to finally start doing audio recordings properly now, and synchronizing the audio after the fact. I expected I’d have to go this route eventually…

My customers include a mixed group of musicians, playing instruments such as guitar, piano, drums, ukelele, bass, etc. If you play a less-portable instrument, such as the drums or a piano, then Capo on the desktop can be cumbersome to work with. When I’m sitting at my own kit, I’d have to get up in order to set, stop, or start a loop on my desktop. That was extremely annoying, and something I couldn’t wait to rectify.

Besides my own annoyance, I’d have to say that Capo on the iPhone and iPod was my top request in my support emails. My customers have been asking for Capo on the iPhone since version 1 shipped, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

See, I believe that it is just as important to streamline the selection of music as it is to improve the learning experience in Capo. Unfortunately, I had to wait a very long time until Apple’s iOS allowed me to access the music that was already in the user’s iPod library. Because I didn’t want to compromise the user’s experience, I waited until Apple allowed developers to access this music.

With that in place, and other awesome additions to iOS 4.0, I set out to create an outstanding experience for Apple’s iPhone and iPod devices¹. The process began earlier this year when the iOS 4.0 beta program started, and I went to WWDC with some code already written and running on real hardware. Of course, it looked and worked completely different from what I shipped today.

After Capo 2 launched, I continued to hone the iPhone release, hashed out the rest of the UI, licensed a powerful audio slowing library, and performance-tuned every aspect of the app².

Building Capo on the iPhone was a significant effort for me, and it was a stress on all the other aspects of my business. I think that the end result turned out great, and I think it will be a huge success. Capo will continue to grow as the best way to learn music on the Mac, and now also the iPhone and iPod.

So, head over to the Capo site and check it out!

I have some WD Green Power drives in a ReadyNAS NV+, and the latest one I purchased was parking its heads far too often. Its load cycle count was growing very high over the few days I owned it.

I followed these instructions to disable the idle timer on my drives, but I just couldn’t get the Ultimate Boot CD to boot at all on my Early 2008 Mac Pro. It would freeze before it ever presented me with its (large) options menu. The CDs booted fine on my 13″ MacBook Pro, so obviously it didn’t like my Mac Pro. (I can’t say I ever imagined I’d boot any flavour of DOS on an 8-core machine with 10GB RAM—crazy!)

After a whole lot of searching, and failed attempts, I finally decided to try the 5.0 beta of UBCD this morning, and that managed to work.

The key (for me, anyway) was to choose option #3 in the FreeDOS boot menu that’s presented to you. That was the only one that was able to detect my CD drive, and actually pass the initial part of the boot process.

So now all my WD Green Power drives have their idle timers disabled, and they seem to be living happily in the ReadyNAS, for now…

All my products: TapeDeck, Capo, and FuzzMeasure are a part of the program. All my sales from today (January 20th) will be donated to UNICEF Canada.

So if you’ve been kicking around the idea of buying one of my products—hopefully helping a charity will push you over the edge. If you’re already a happy customer, please consider buying another app from the list, or telling your friends about the program.

Update: I have made a donation of $1600 to UNICEF Canada as a result of the Indie+Relief event. Thanks so much for participating!

So much was going on with FuzzMeasure 3.2 that I had to stop myself in my tracks, cut features, and simply focus on getting the few key changes that I’ve made so far into my customers’ hands.

I wanted FuzzMeasure 3.2 to be a grand release, with major UI changes and features. Unfortunately, what I wanted to offer was well beyond what I was capable of producing in the given time frame. When I got stuck, I turned to my other products and added features to those instead.

Enough is enough. I need to get FuzzMeasure 3.2 out of beta.

What I’ve done over the past 13 months (yikes) is not insignificant. There are no big splashy features, but it’s definitely a far better application than it was a year ago.

For starters, I’ve added some great new AppleScript commands that should help anyone that needs to do a fair bit of post-processing of impulses. These changes were motivated by members of the impulse response sampling community (the folks that generate convolution reverb presets) who needed FuzzMeasure to do some things it wasn’t originally designed to do.

I also spent a great deal of time dealing with performance and stability issues that cropped up due to the huge memory footprint that FuzzMeasure tends to have. (No, that doesn’t just mean enabling 64-bit compilation, though Snow Leopard users will be happy to know FuzzMeasure now runs as a native 64-bit binary on systems that support it.)

Speaking of Snow Leopard, a lot of bugs cropped up when Snow Leopard shipped. It turns out that many of my silly programming mistakes—made early on in FuzzMeasure’s development—have come back to bite me hard. I’m not exactly sure what Apple did, but lots of ghosts were coming out of the closet. (Ray, Egon, and Peter were not able to offer any help, but rest assured that the ghosts are now mostly gone.)

So you can look forward to FuzzMeasure 3.2 shipping very soon now. Head over to the latest builds page to see the result of what I’ve been working on all this time, and please let me know what issues you come across while using it.