Week Twenty-Three In Which I Shout At My Computer & It LISTENS!

Trust me, after all the fuss and potheration of the Culture Shift from PC to iMac, to find a genuine software glitch. Well, it is a glitch to me. As regular readers know, I am something of an obsessive and at the moment I am learning how to be a video editor. I have been dreaming in video clips! Yet for an old dog, I do seem to enjoy learning new tricks. That said, I have owned this fire-breathing computer for months and yet today is the first time that I have enabled dictation.
It’s a little odd really, keyboard skills that began in the 1970s, bashing the living hell out of one of my mother’s office typewriters now seem largely redundant. Yet this technology is merely the digital version of the Dictaphone I would hear mama using on a Sunday morning. So yes, today I am a fat man shouting at my computer again but at least it is productive this time!
And the glitch? Well, it is most likely due to my odd status of semi-professional. Real professionals will not be involved in the upload process, as they will be ‘˜proper’ editors. Steve Meade, with his 170 million Internet hits, uses one single channel. Modified Nationals TV is another channel I created but is dormant. (After all, many other people post videos of this fabulous show every year, so mine was hardly definitive.) But recently, I created a channel for my fishing and outdoors pursuits. Apple’s posh comes-embedded-if-you-order-it Final Cut Pro edit suite has a single click upload function to Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook and a couple of other sites as well as options to store completed project video files to your computer in whatever resolution you choose.
Now, I did get those videos I wrote about doing last week, completed but absurdly, had to use YouTube editor, because at the time I had not found the magical method involved in storing video projects as described above. Normally, one’s editing efforts are merely preserved as a list of instructions. When I ordered the computer, I did not know this and specified the 3 TB internal storage as this was what filled up my last machine. I wanted to future-proof myself. In the event, since I now have two channels on YouTube, the one click upload function sends my work to the new channel called Mounted & Stuffed. So the main-career space saver thing is obviated!
I did a very different shoot to previous non-editor work. Not gonzo but fully 36 clips to make my two videos. One clip concerned Chris Wood and his sound quality install. Of course, the Eagles’ Hotel California was utterly intelligible and clear. Thus, the copyright protection software kicked in, identifying third-party content. As a flagged video it does not show up in YouTube’s clip selector, so I was compelled to call Apple support and get a grip. (get it handed to me on a cushion, really..) So well done Chris, by default yours is the first ‘˜proper’ Talk Audio video edit!
Now, on a slightly more optimistic note than of late, did you know that old-fashioned vinyl records are selling better than ever and there are even new gramophones being made! Every single record user can be called a hobbyist and these days anybody who buys a subwoofer for their car is likely to be hobbyist too. And yet our number is legion. There are more now than ever before. There were 80 different entries into the EMMA sound off at Peterborough. I simply have to feature the car belonging to James Renshaw, who entered four classes!
The horrible truth about aftermarket DAB seems to be that that huge population of FM radios in cars is not going to be replaced by the million, creating a last Golden Age for the industry. They wanted FM switch-off, to make it a whole-UK necessity purchase. Rather, new cars and the scrapheap will change things – are changing things instead. The increase in listenership indoors has been about the supply of product in the shops. I don’t think you can buy an FM radio in John Lewis’s any more. Yet the tipping point has been reached with new cars, whereby any car without digital radio is seen as old-fashioned. There are some awesome radio stations on digital. Eighties shizzle Absolute 80’s or Gaydio will delight one of my Talk Audio chums in particular, love ‘˜im.
OK, still lots to learn, better go get on and in the meanwhile shut the heck up. The sheer novelty of watching my machine type for me means this verbose git is at worse risk than normal of over wordiness!
Adam Rayner On Line Editor!