I've been amazed at how my new lightweight laptop has "worked for me" in the sense that the technology is right with me -- whether I'm at a meeting, on the road traveling, or just sitting at home in my living room watching the Colts demolish the Ravens.
Yesterday, relaxing on my couch, I Googled "learn to play fiddle". For about a year now I have been playing with a gospel/bluegrass band uptown at what we can the Gray Barn. I do well with gospel, but I've had to pretty much fake the fiddling.
Guess what? I found a website that provided (for free!) mp3 downloads of the top 10 fiddle tunes: Cripple Creek, Bilem Cabbage Down, Blackberry Blossom, Soldier's Joy, ...
I downloaded them all into iTunes and spent several hours listening to them over and over, and getting them figured out on my "fiddle". It wasn't too hard -- they pretty much all sound the same :) With a little more practice I'm going to be ready for our next shindig.
It's pretty exciting when computer technology can help you accomplish exactly what you want to do. It might be looking up your genealogy, finding that perfect quilting pattern, shopping for a used vehicle at CarMax ... or learning how to play two strings at a time like a real pro.
HowStuffWorks.com is a site that explains how stuff works. Fancy that? Click here for an excellent primer on iTunes. Note that there is a table of contents that has seven different selections: Introduction to How iTunes Works, Using the Software, The Store, etc.
Back in July I discovered RSS Buddy, a utility to create RSS feeds for a podcast. This week Steve Curtis and I used RSS Buddy to publish our first Educational Technology Center podcast. Steve and some of our ETC staff & students have been talking about publishing a regular podcast featuring a wide range of topics.
Several days ago they recorded the first episode and Steve edited the MP3 file down to 35 minutes. We used RSS Buddy to create the RSS feed and then submitted it to iTunes. Within a couple days it was approved and appeared in the iTunes catalog under Education/Technology. The name is ETCpodcast.
To subsribe to the podcast open iTunes ... Music Store ... Podcasts ... and enter "ETCpodcast" in the Search box ... You'll enjoy it.
Dad,
Wow spending money on Beethoven's symphony. I am going to have to dock you points on your report card cause this is definitely not what a millenial would download. If you want some good music with mandolins / sometimes violins or fiddles check out some Hootie and the Blowfish or Dave Mathews Band. These guys really jam. Haha love ya. Neal
My co-worker, Ben, put me on to eMusic. It is a site similar to iTunes from which you can download music. It doesn't have quite the selection that iTunes has, but the songs are cheaper. I signed up for a $9.99/month subscription which allows me to download 40 songs each month -- that's $.25/song compared to iTunes' $.99/song or Walmart's $.89/song.
Last night I downloaded Beethoven's Sonatas for Violin and Piano. Beautiful! I've played the violin for a long time. I took lessons for four years as a kid growing up in Japan, beginning in 4th grade. My teacher was Mr. Uchida, a wonderful but tiny man -- I was already taller than him as a 9-year-old. Following 8th grade I put the violin on the shelf for about 20 years, then picked it up again when I was 35. Music is a wonderful gift. Listening to the Sonatas last night on my Olympus MP3 player inspired me. The violinist was unbelievable.
I am part of a task force that is investigating the use of streaming media here at Taylor. We met for the first time two weeks ago. We meet again this morning, and will meet every two weeks through the summer and fall. On our campus there are demands for streaming coming from every direction -- admissions, athletics, academics, resident life, ... How do we facilitate all of this?
You may have heard about Apple's iTunes U. Apple is offering to universities free hosting for the streaming of academic content -- half a terabyte of server space (that's 500 GB!) Yesterday I talked to an Apple rep on the phone for half an hour, and then she sent me a formal application. We'll discuss it more in our meeting today. Some high-profile schools such as Stanford and University of Michigan have been early partners with Apple on this venture.
I have been so impressed with the cross-platform functionality of iTunes. Apple seems to finally be "getting it", that if they support the Windows world it will be to their advantage and everybody else's. Now that Macs are being shipped with Intel processors it is really getting interesting.
To TU faculty -- if you have an idea of how you might use streaming media (either audio or video) in any of your courses please let me know. If we were to go with a service such as iTunes U we need to document a carefully thought-out plan.
When I listened to my four podcast recordings (see entry 32) I knew the volume was too low. Today I was thinking about re-recording them from scratch. Then I remembered Audacity, the free sound editing software that I heard about at the CCCU conference.
I downloaded Audacity ... installed it ... opened the first MP3 file ... highlighted the clip (it looks like a wave pattern) ... went to a menu item and amplified it (the waves were now double in height)... saved the file back to my web folder. I repeated the process for the other three MP3 files. I was done! Nothing else had to be touched. It only took 15 minutes from start to finish.
If you now go to iTunes and search for Gary Friesen's Becoming a Millennial Podcast it will open the same RSS feed on our web server which will play the new MP3 files. And you'll now be able to actually hear them because the volume has been doubled. They're still not very engaging, but keep in mind this is just a test :)
The above illustrates the beauty of the web. It is all dynamic. You fix one piece and everything is fixed.
Yesterday I successfully got one podcast posted in iTunes. I wasn't sure how to add additional audio files to my RSS feed. That was my challenge for today. It's amazing what a simple search in Google will produce. I entered something like "RSS feed" and I quickly found a web site that gave me the information I needed.
Remember the XML file I was working on (entry 24)? For each additional feed I simply added a block of 8 lines. You programmers will eat this up (Angie, are you hanging in there?). The rest of you will say, "There's got to be an easier way!" I'm sure there is, and that's my next challenge -- to find a piece of software to automatically create this RSS code for me. I just want to fill in some boxes on a form and let the computer figure out all the syntax.
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Gary Friesen Becoming a Millennial Podcast</title>
<link>http://faculty.taylor.edu/grfriesen/rss/</link>
<description>A podcast of Gary's foray into the digital world of today's youth</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<copyright>Copyright 2006 Gary Friesen</copyright>
<lastBuildDate>Mon, 26 Jun 2006 08:00:00 EDT</lastBuildDate>
<item>
<title>Podcast #4</title>
<link>http://faculty.taylor.edu/grfriesen/rss/podcast4.xml</link>
<description>This is an experiment investigating the possibilities for faculty at Taylor.</description>
<enclosure url="http://faculty.taylor.edu/grfriesen/rss/gary4.mp3" length="1044480" type="audio/mpeg"/>
<pubDate>Mon, 26 Jun 2006 10:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
<category>Education</category>
</item>
<item>
<title>Podcast #3</title>
<link>http://faculty.taylor.edu/grfriesen/rss/podcast3.xml</link>
<description>This is an experiment investigating the possibilities for faculty at Taylor.</description>
<enclosure url="http://faculty.taylor.edu/grfriesen/rss/gary3.mp3" length="1044480" type="audio/mpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sun, 25 Jun 2006 10:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
<category>Education</category>
</item>
<item>
<title>Podcast #2</title>
<link>http://faculty.taylor.edu/grfriesen/rss/podcast2.xml</link>
<description>This is an experiment investigating the possibilities for faculty at Taylor.</description>
<enclosure url="http://faculty.taylor.edu/grfriesen/rss/gary2.mp3" length="1044480" type="audio/mpeg"/>
<pubDate>Sat, 24 Jun 2006 10:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
<category>Education</category>
</item>
<item>
<title>Podcast #1</title>
<link>http://faculty.taylor.edu/grfriesen/rss/podcast1.xml</link>
<description>This is an experiment investigating the possibilities for faculty at Taylor.</description>
<enclosure url="http://faculty.taylor.edu/grfriesen/rss/gary1.mp3" length="1441792" type="audio/mpeg"/>
<pubDate>Fri, 23 Jun 2006 08:00:00 EDT</pubDate>
<category>Education</category>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
Last night I received an email from iTunes saying my podcast was approved and would appear in iTunes within a few hours. I checked but couldn't find it. This morning I woke up early and decided to check again. Sure enough, it was posted. It's not the most exciting podcast in the world. What I did was record (using my Olympus MP3 player) a couple entries from my blog, beginning with day 1.
To find my podcast open iTunes ... select Music Store ... Podcasts ... enter "Becoming a Millennial" in the search box ... Then click on the Subscribe button.
Evan, our TU webmaster, helped me figure out the problem with my XML code (see entry 24). He pointed me to a website called FeedValidator that checks RSS code for errors. It showed I had a wrong date format in two of my lines. It was easy to fix.
I went back to iTunes and submitted my podcast. iTunes puts it through some kind of a screening process. They sent me an immediate email letting me know they had received my submission. They will notify me within a few days whether or not they will post it on their site. Stay tuned ...
Neal was home this weekend. He came up from his new job in Florida to attend a funeral and a wedding. Both involved his close friends who were involved in the April 26 accident. He is doing well.
This afternoon before leaving for the Indy airport he asked if I would rip a few CDs to load onto his iPod. He said I could then talk about it on my blog. The kids are giving me some pretty good ribbing about my blog.
So I opened iTunes and popped in his CD. Never having done this before (which embarrasses me a bit, since I'm supposedly a tech guy) I wasn't sure what to expect. It couldn't have been easier. iTunes recognized the CD, quickly added all the song titles to the Library, and then I told it to copy all the songs. It took about 10 minutes to "rip" the CD, meaning to convert each file from the audio format to the Apple AAC format. Then we plugged Neal's iPod into the USB port and within seconds the entire album was downloaded to his iPod. He was ready for his trip!
When I got home from the airport run, I tried using both Windows Media Player and Musicmatch Jukebox to see how a CD was ripped using Windows software. The process was similar to iTunes, very easy and intuitive. Windows Media Player saved all the songs in WMA format, and MusicMatch Jukebox saved them in MP3 format. I'll probably use Jukebox in the future because it saves them in the format I want. (Note additional information about Windows Media Player in Entry #16)
Today my MP3 player came in the mail. It is a nifty Olympus WS-320M that can play Windows Media and MP3 files, record voice, and also function as a 1 GB flash drive (the cover actually pulls off to reveal a USB connector).
At lunch when I brought it home to show my family Carla asked me, "Why didn't you get an iPod?" It could have been interpretted, "Dad, you're such an idiot -- don't you know anything?" but Carla was nice and I explained that it had some neat features ... She said it was cool.
It is hard to know whether to stay completely within the Apple world (with iTunes and iPods) where everything works together so well, but where sometimes you lack flexibility -- for example, if you want to convert your iTune song to an MP3 format to play on another device
Yesterday we had three Taylor students over for Sunday lunch. I asked them what they used for their blogs. Two out of the three were posting on Xanga. So, I decided that's what I would use also.
Today, Monday, I was in my office and I cranked up iTunes and listened to music just about the whole day. It was "Blues" at the office, then "Classical Guitar" here at home (as I write these blog entries). You know ... I can multi-task! One of these days I'll open a couple IM windows and see if I can do three things at once.
Saturday I installed iTunes and spent a good part of the day playing with its many features. What a great tool! I knew you could purchase $.99 music, but I had no idea all the other features built into this software.
The two features that most fascinated me were the huge library of podcasts and the large selection of internet radio stations. I had played a bit with vTuner several years ago to access internet radio but really hadn't pursued it much in recent years. I do like music but just don't generally make the effort to get something playing.
I'm interested in podcasts because I'm looking for ways in which our professors can record lecture material for playback by the students. This type of technology could be used by traditional students for review, summer school Blackboard classes for primary delivery of content, and also by Taylor's new Center for Global Engagement to deliver the Taylor education to any region of the world.
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