Above is a song I was writing for my sister’s wedding. Unfortunately I never finished it and logistics got in the way of me bringing a guitar to Italy (namely I didn’t want to lug a guitar all around Italy). I thought I would record it using my Cannon PowerShot camera and edit it with Jokosher and PiTiVi to see how far our tools have gone.

I have to say it was fairly easy but I still ran into issues. As far as UI Goes PiTiVi is much easier to use than Jokosher in terms of organizing what I wanted to do. I really only needed Jokosher to tweak the sound a bit but it was still a bit of trial and error to get something decent. I used the high and low pass filters to filter out background noise and echo from my room. Jokosher lacks a basic noise filter effect which can be implemented manually in most other editors by taking a sample of the ambient noise and phase shifting it 180 degrees so the ambient noise is canceled out. Unfortunately the solid bar UI which departs from the usual wave graph makes it impossible to do this by hand. In any case the low and high pass filters worked fairly well to get the most annoying twangs and hisses out.

Another issue is not being able to mark cutin and cutout points and have PiTiVi sync the video with these point. I essentially had to do minimal processing in Jokosher so I could easily sync the video to the edited sound in PiTiVi. It would have been nice to trim the audio in Jokosher and when I imported it into PiTiVi, had it sync up to the correct points in the video. Manually doing that in PiTiVi is hard because of the timeline scale and the fact that it is exclusively drag and drop. It would be nice to be able to enter exact values or load markup metadata so I could snap to my cuts. Once the audio is in PiTiVi we are stuck with PiTiVi’s audio tools which will never be as complete as Jokosher’s (assuming Jokosher gets some development love). It would be nice to be able to jump back and forth between the two.

All that being said, once I planned out what I wanted to do it took no time at all to do it for a video as simple as this. It might not be all roses and honey yet but it is much better than it has been. The next step is to start multi-tracking in Jokosher and syncing it to a video. We shall see.

Tell me a little bit about yourself. What are the last three bands you listened to on your iPod?

I don’t have an iPod (or a Zune). It won’t play Ogg Vorbis files.

This is from a guy who knows a thing or two about generating profits and value. It is an exciting time to be a Red Hat employee.

Getting in touch with my Italian roots while running around Florence was great fun.  Thank you Dorothy and Karl for getting married and sharing the moment with all your friends and family.  I’m busy uploading all of the photos which I managed to save after my camera started corrupting the memory card.  More on my time in Italy later. Now it is time to go and check out buzzgrinder.com – a music blog one of the guests at the wedding maintains.

Ahh, now I can laugh and cry any day of the week. Crazy kids.

It should not take Apple’s iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users.

In a market where both DRM and DRM-free music is available via easy legal purchase from the same location and assuming there are enough content providers who would release without DRM as to reach critical mass, which side would generate more money over the long haul? It is an interesting question. Would we see market forces pulling people to more indie labels willing to release non DRM material which would cause pop labels to follow after losing sales? Or would trafficking in unauthorized copies of non DRM music cause more artists to flock to DRM?

I say let the content creators decide which way they wish to license their content and let the market sort it out.

There are a number of people in the community who already record studio quality songs. It would be great if they would contact the author and offer their songs. What would also be cool is if we could get the Drooling Macaque band together sometime before GUADEC to write and record a few songs.

This would take a bunch of logistics to pull off, including finding instruments and cheap or free studio time which is why I am throwing the idea out there now to see who is interested and what kind of resources we can pull together.