Jim Willis

  • Amazon quietly removes ability to download order history

    At the end of each month, I run an Automator process on my Mac that loads that month’s Amazon Order History file into a markdown table in Day One. I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now and it’s useful for a whole bunch of reasons. When did I buy something? Just search day one. How much did I spend last month on Amazon? Just look in Day One. 

    This month though, I went to download the file from Amazon and the interface for selecting a month’s worth of orders and downloading them is gone.

    I reached out to Amazon support on Twitter and through the website and was told that the page had been removed and it was replaced by a “Request My Data” page.

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    This isn’t a self-service download portal like the previous version but instead allows you to request ALL of your order history and it takes up to 5 days to receive the data. I submitted my request 3 days ago and haven’t seen anything yet. In any case, this seems like a step backwards to me and makes it more difficult to track on a monthly basis what I’m buying. 

  • Library Management of Live Grateful Dead Matrix Recordings

    For the past several months I’ve been using Roon audio server to handle my home hi-fi listening. It’s a slightly pricey subscription model for what I use it for and I’m actively looking for an alternative. Basically, I just want a box that holds a bunch of lossless audio files and serves them up to my raspberry hi-fi/pi with a DAC on it.

    Being able to control the playback through an iOS app is a must. So I’m on Roon and re-ripping a bunch of my CDs to lossless (opportunity provided by quarantine/working from home, an upside).

    Besides listening to losslessly-ripped CDs, I am also really, really enjoying matrix recordings of Grateful Dead shows. Occasionally, (well, frequently) when I download matrix recordings, the .flac files are missing good metadata. Applying metadata to the Flac tracks can be a bit tricky so I thought I’d detail my process below.

    Start by downloading some torrents of good matrix recordings. I use Transmission app to download torrents.

    Once you’ve downloaded a show, you’ll have a folder with a bunch of .flac files and usually a .txt file that contains the show information.

    You’re going to want to “tag” your Flac files using the information contained in that .txt file. There are a handful of Mac apps that do meta-tagging on audio files but I use one called xACT.

    X Audio Compression Toolkit does a zillion things but the one thing it does that nothing else seems to do is take a text file of song information and apply it sequentially to a bunch of audio files.

    So, if you’re great-sounding flac matrix recording files are missing metadata, here’s how you fix that problem, easily, in xACT.

    Open the app and hit the “tags” tab.

    Load the Flac files into the listing on the left side of screen.

    Next, open the .txt file that accompanied the flac files and you’ll find a listing of the songs like this:

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    You’ll want to edit this list to get rid of any line breaks, extra info, etc. I use TextMate to do this and it take about 2 seconds to create this:

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    The key here is you want exactly as many lines in the file as there are tracks in the xACT window. It will apply each line to the files sequentially. Brilliant. So, highlight the track listing (remember no blank lines!) now, in xACT click the small “Auto-name” box next to the “Title” tag field. This will pull up a window into which you can paste your sequential track names.

    Click OK and then “Write Tags” in xACT. Bammo!! There you go.

    I also like to add album art, the Venue, etc. and then click “Write Tags” again before uploading the tracks to my Roon Audio player so when I’m done it looks like:

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    Note that as long as all of the tracks are highlighted on the left you won’t actually see the Track name displayed. You want them all selected when applying Artist, etc. You can click an individual track to confirm that the Track name was applied.

    Once I import that show into Roon it looks like this:

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  • Zoom volume and Music Volume control with Keyboard Maestro

    My new favorite Keyboard Maestro shortcut allows me to toggle between audio outputs (Built In Output device and my USB output). The Built in volume controls my iMac speakers, the USB output controls my Amp. So, combined with the superb Rogue Amoeba’s SoundSource, I can easily bounce back and forth between controlling my music volume (Roon, Spotify, archive.org) and my Zoom volume using my keyboards volume controls. This sounds like it would be easy and it is, sort of, by using switchaudiosource-osx (available as brew install switchaudio-osx from command line). 

    Anyway, this is a huge problem solver for me. Stoked. Click pic below for larger version if you want to see the actions.

     

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  • Log/Append a photo to a Day One entry

    Someone posted a question about how to do this on the Day One Community site so I thought I’d build up a little iOS shortcut that:

    – checks to see if you have an entry for today, if not it creates a blank one and then prompts you to choose a photo, resizes that photo and then appends the photo to today’s journal entry.

    Here’s the shortcut, you’ll need to choose which journal to use and how large you want the inserted photo to be.

  • Friday Links for Jul 31, 2020

    My new gig at work is keeping me insanely busy and so it’s been a while since I’ve gotten around to updating here. Here’s a few of the links I’ve saved this week. Linking ≠ endorsement. 

    • Free Speech Prevails at Princeton | Robert P. George – This is a time of testing for our nation. We were already in the midst of dealing with a pandemic—trying to protect public health while respecting basic…
    • How to Plan Your Week Like a Boss – If you feel that your productivity has been hitting a slump, I highly recommend planning out your week ahead of time. Getting clear about what you’ll be doing…
    • The American Death Cult – A significant percentage of conservative culture in America defines “freedom” as death. This is causing a lot more problems right now than even its usual…
    • ‘White Fragility’ Is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work? – Race and America Three Words, 70 Cases George Floyd Transcripts Debate Over Officers’ Protection Lessons from Camden, N.J. Robin DiAngelo at home in Seattle.…
    • Save Them All, Let the Algorithms Sort Em Out – Smartly serving up content amidst information overload M.G. Siegler Follow Jul 16 · 4 min read Every day is exactly the same. Even before the COVID lockdowns,…
    • What Makes Us Happy? – For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage…

  • Book Review – Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders

    I can’t say enough good things about this book. Saunder’s Catholicism-informed Buddhism is on full display. The detailing of Lincoln’s transformation of grief is one of the best things I’ve ever read on dealing with loss. The re-animation of the souls stuck in bardo through their metta/lovingkindness engagement with the departing Lincoln, also great.

    Also highlighted many passages about how, at the time, people thought Lincoln was a horrible leader, horrible parent, etc. and history holds him in an entirely different regard than his contemporaries.

    We must try to see one another in this way. As suffering, limited being.

    Also, the passages about what the dead will miss about daily life (the specificity. pasting a long one here):

    Though the things of the world were strong with me still. Such as, for example: a gaggle of children trudging through a side-blown December flurry; a friendly match-share beneath some collision-tilted streetlight; a frozen clock, bird-visited within its high tower; cold water from a tin jug; toweling off one’s clinging shirt post–June rain. Pearls, rags, buttons, rug-tuft, beer-froth. Someone’s kind wishes for you; someone remembering to write; someone noticing that you are not at all at ease. A bloody roast death-red on a platter; a hedgetop under-hand as you flee late to some chalk-and-woodfire-smelling schoolhouse. Geese above, clover below, the sound of one’s own breath when winded. The way a moistness in the eye will blur a field of stars; the sore place on the shoulder a resting toboggan makes; writing one’s beloved’s name upon a frosted window with a gloved finger. Tying a shoe; tying a knot on a package; a mouth on yours; a hand on yours; the ending of the day; the beginning of the day; the feeling that there will always be a day ahead. Goodbye, I must now say goodbye to all of it. Loon-call in the dark; calf-cramp in the spring; neck-rub in the parlor; milk-sip at end of day.

    — this seems right out of William Carlos Williams’ edict of no ideas but in things. meaning Saunders’ specificity of things in this passage is what makes it so damn powerful.

    amazing book. have already read Saunder’s stories, looking forward to more novels from him for sure.

  • Mac->Parallels->Windows Remote Desktop Keyboard mapping problem

    Whoa, this was driving me nuts, so glad I got it sorted.

    When I used Remote Desktop on my Mac’s Parallel’s VM running Windows 10, every time I typed the pipe key (|) I got double quotes (“) and every time I typed a backslash (\) I got a single tick (‘) and my quote (“) key gave me a tilde (~).

    Made it very hard to work in putty while shelled into a remote machine on the remote machine because I couldn’t type | pipe character which is kinda important for Linux. Anyway, I found the answer on the Parallels forum from a guy in Italy who was having a similar problem. 

    I had to edit the keyboard settings on the version of Windows running in Parallels (not on the Remote Desktop machine) to use just US QWERTY instead of US (Apple). Logged out, and everything is working!

  • Good Grateful Dead Matrix Recordings

    On facebook the other day, a friend asked for some Grateful Dead live show recording suggestions the other day.

    I can’t imagine a show that I wouldn’t listen to but I list some recent favorites down below.

    There is always gold to be mined in every show, somewhere.

    That said, for the past year I’ve been really enjoying matrix recordings of live shows, where an audio engineer takes a really good Soundboard recording and one or two really good audience recordings and layers them on top of one another.

    I go through phases where I really just like audience recordings and sometimes when I like the clarity of really good SBD but matrix recordings are another world entirely, sort of the best of both worlds but greater than the sum the parts if you know what I mean.

    Generally I categorize shows into a handful of eras
    -early w/ Pigpen
    – shows with just billy on drums-my favs,
    good Wall of Sound recordings circa ’74,
    good ’77 shows when jerry was at one of his peaks of creativity and dexterity
    and then the later stuff-mid 80s onward into the 90s which probably has about 3 sub-categories e.g. with Bruce, etc. but all of these categories are generally meaningless.

    Sometimes in the 80s jerry plays like he did in the early 70s. He was really a magical guitar player whose catalog of ideas were like lines of poetry that he would go back to mine again and again and again. But anyway. I have been listening to about 20 or so different matrix recordings this year. Some of them standout, but they’re all standouts to me and I would have loved to have been at any one of these shows. So here’s a little sample of some matrix recordings worth listening to:

    Providence, 1974, wall of sound

    Winterland, 1977, great matrix

    Greek theater, 1984

    and, of course, you’ve heard Barton Hall but here is a great matrix recording of that show that may give it a different shimmer for you.

  • Essential Working From Home Apps and Tools

    All of this working from home has meant that I have not spent this much uninterrupted time behind my personal computer since I do not know when. This is to say, over the past few weeks I have dialed in my personal setup in a way that is super-useful to me and I thought I’d share the apps/tools I’ve started/revisited using since working from home during the quarantine.

    First up, Apple’s AirPods Pros.

    I’ve never owned headphones with active noise cancelation before but, man, where have these been all of my life???? Right now, there is a huge racket in my house from one of my kids shooting hoops in his room with a nerf basketball. I can feel the ball bouncing but my concentration is not broken because I can not hear the sound of the ball bouncing. This is AMAZING!

    Throughout the day I am bathed in the warm nothingness of active noise cancellation. On occasion I’ve noticed that I do not even have music playing, I’m just enjoying the near-silence that they offer. If you need to concentrate in a noisy house, highly recommended.

    Audio/Listening/Zoom

    Over the past few weeks I’ve evolved a somewhat complicated Zoom/music listening setup on my iMac. At work, we live in Zoom and I’ve had to do some refactoring to balance my music and Zoom needs. I’ll detail a few of those tools here:

    Triode: I listen to The Current throughout the day when I’m not actively listening to music from my collection. Triode is *the* best radio playing application, ever. If you listen to internet radio stations, hard to imagine life without it.

    I want my music to play through my Kinter Tripath amplifier to my external speakers but want my Zoom/Facetime audio to go through my iMac display. This black magic wizardry is achieved through an application called SoundSource from Rogue Ameoba. Combined with a cheap dongle, I can easily send audio from any app to any output. Awesome application, highly recommended.

    As an aside, I have been using this time while trapped in my office to re-rip some CDs into Lossless (ALAC) format and am using XLD running on an old, headless Mac mini to do so.

    Other apps for maintaining sanity:

    DayOne Journal. I’ve been using this application for years but making notes about what it is like to experience this quarantine has felt important.

    Waking Up. Sam Harris’ meditation app has been my meditation app of choice for about a year now. I have less time to use it now that we are all at home but every time I use it, I feel better.

    I’ve got a few other notable mentions like Parallels, Microsoft Teams and OneDrive which have all made getting real work in a Windows-centric environment less unproductive. Also, I just started using GeekTool to pipe some useful outputs to my desktop but the jury is still out on how useful that is. If time permits I’ll circle back in a few weeks to update here.

  • Recording Music/Video with GarageBand on iPad and video on iPhone – Part 1

    If you’ve spent anytime at all on YouTube watching videos of guitarists you know that they range in quality from quick and dirty iPhone videos to more elaborate multi-screen, multi-track presentations.

    Until this week and being quarantined and all with the Coronavirus pandemic, I had never really given much thought to posting my own videos or how one might even go about doing so.

    Over the past few days, I’ve hit on a pretty good middle-ground between the quick and dirty iPhone video and the more elaborate, high-production quality videos and figured I’d share how I do it.

    Here’s an example of a video I recently recorded of Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright using the setup detailed below.

    I’m going to break this HowTo into 3 sections:

    • Part 1, recording guitar and vocal into GarageBand on iPad using 2 external microphones
    • Part 2, recording the video component
    • Part 3, synchronizing the audio and video component and publishing the final product.

    Part 1

    Recording guitar and vocal into GarageBand on iPad using 2 external microphones

    I record my audio using Garageband. By design I don’t do a lot of tweaking to the default settings. I use the preset “lead vocal” setting for the vocals and the default “nice room” setting for the guitar. I don’t fiddle with the EQ.

    Here are some details from Apple on using the “Audio Recorder” function of GarageBand on iPad. Some very useful stuff here and worth looking over.

    Recording into an iPad Pro with external microphones requires some kind of Audio Interface to convert the XLR or 1/4″ inputs of your microphones into USB for the iPad.

    I have an older Zoom H4n Pro that does double duty as field recorder and an audio interface (here’s how to set it up). I got lucky, I had no idea it had the audio interface feature when I bought it, but it does.

    So I didn’t need to buy an interface. If you need one, for under $200, the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 is referenced on a lot of websites/videos as being a good safe bet.

    Once you have your microphones and XLR cables, here’s a diagram detailing how I get them into the iPad.

    Once you have all the hardware hooked up, you can just record into GarageBand.

    You can, of course, go down some really deep rabbit holes of which microphones to use, mic placement, eq, etc. Feel free. I’m using a Shure SM-58 and a Sennheiser 609 that I usually use for mic’ing up my amplifier but seems to work just fine for vocals. Very easy to start chasing marginal gains with this kind of stuff. My advice is get it good enough and start recording.

    There are a couple of minor settings changes you need to make in GarageBand to do simultaneous multitrack recordings. This guy has a fantastic video. If you’re not super-familiar with GarageBand and don’t want to through your iPad out the window trying to sort out multitrack recording on your own, I highly encourage you to sit through this guy’s tutorial.

    Ok, so that’s the audio part! I’ll write up the video and synchronization stuff as soon as I can.

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Posts Worth Reading:

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Reading Notes

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