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Still so very impressed with Google Reader. It’s changed the way I read the web and I thought I was pretty good at that already.

While I felt like I  was on information overload with Bloglines with 117 feeds, since switching to Google Reader a couple months ago my subscriptions have spiraled up to 243 in Google Reader in a short time and I still find myself looking for new stuff to add. With Bloglines I always kept an eye out for subscriptions I could drop. That’s such a nice change.

Here’s my obligatory braindump feedback:

• They shold integrate Google bookmarks. I hit “share” on any item that I kind of like, which then creates this useless feed. It would be great if I could quickly Google bookmark this stuff, which Google could then do nice stuff for me with — let me search, syndicate, personalize my search based off of it, remind me of it later. I also find myself wanting to “share” stuff when not inside of Reader, such as for sites that only offer excerpts in their feeds.
• Integrate with Gmail. No brainer here. I’m using integrate with gmail greasemonkey script, but it lacks a level of awesome integration that could exist.
• I wish “v” would open in new tabs in the background instead of focusing on them. Not sure if this is anything they can do much about, but I WANTS IT.
• That “Loading…” screen gets old real fast and I’ve been using Google Reader for a while now. Could use some speed improvements.
• Better blog search. Lately I find myself going to Bloglines to find feeds to subscribe to in Google Reader. How weird is that?
• Everyone has complained about it, but the whole tags/folders/labels issue at Google is confusing. I can understand not wanting to use the word “tags” — it’s a little jarring for the moms of the world. But like, I tag a post and it makes a folder (with a different icon) on the left side. And the “tag” then shows up under “change folders” in the Feed actions pulldown. I don’t get it.
• Speaking of tagging entries, I don’t get what the point of tagging entries is. Why would I do this? What is it for?
• Also don’t get starring versus sharing. Starring seems to just be sharing without an RSS feed. What’s the point? (Full disclosure: I also don’t really get starring things in Gmail, but having a share option makes it more obvious.)
• It would be nice to prioritize my feeds a bit. Some (like friend’s blogs, important news sites) I’d like to see first thing when I hit “all items”. Others, like ebay searches I’m tracking can hang out near the bottom. Maybe just let me prioritize certain folders instead of individual blogs, that’d be good enough for me.
• A few feeds like to show up as new all the time. Pitchfork and Technorati searches for two.

Also may I also say I’m tired of comics not offering their comic image in their feeds.

I got psychologically suckered into signing up for Bebo this morning (everyone else was doing it), which in my circles has been getting the reputation of being a more music-oriented MySpace. The feature that intrigued me was playlists — users can create and display playlists on their homepages of songs that Bebo bands add to their pages. Why MySpace hasn’t added that, I have no idea. Here are my thoughts as I signed up and created my beautifully lame Bebo page:

• The username “bradsucks” was taken. Weird.
• You seem to be able to upload an unlimited number of songs which is way nicer than MySpace’s limit of four.
• Drag and dropping the order of my top 10 songs is sweet, though arranging the songs on my album was done with cumbersome “up” and “down” links, which I gave up on.
• I still swear to the lord god above something needs to be done to make it quicker and easier to sign up for these sites. All of my music and data are available for the taking — why must you force me to upload and label everything manually?
• You have to have a regular Bebo account and then you make band accounts inside them, unlike on MySpace where you have to set up a separate type of account. I guess this is neat but I have no interest in having a non-musician account.
• Instead of allowing the type of eye-gouging HTML customization that MySpace does, you’re restricted to using Bebo-approved skins. They’re pretty but they’re not customizable in any way, which sucks.
• I now have two Bebo blogs (my regular user blog and the band blog) that I will not use and I can’t hook up to this blog I have here. Get some RSS going or allow easy cross-posting or something.
• The search sucks, it’s just a full text Google search of the public pages. So there’s no way to search by location or interest in musicians or playlists or anything cool that would help me find people who are or might be interested in my music.
• Crazily there seems to be no way to link to my home page here. The profiles don’t allow HTML and there are no fields for pointing to external band home pages. Additionally you can create albums of your music but can’t provide a link to any place that the visitor could download or buy it. What in the sam hell.

So I like the additional song storage. MySpace users are often asking me to post additional songs so they can add them to their pages, but if I remove any of the original four I put up there, it breaks every page with those songs on them.

The additional songs and the playlisting are probably what give Bebo the reputation as being more musician-friendly than MySpace. But it’s worse in that without links back to my site here or to a place they can buy my album it’s hard to believe it’ll sell any music for me. Not only that, it’s unlikely almost anyone will make it back to my site here and sign up for my mailing list so I can keep the relationship going, keep them in the loop on future releases, etc.

The social networks are definitely useful for spreading music and that’s certainly cool. But I find them frustrating — like there’s a huge barrier between the fans and the artist and that any contact between the two is almost accidental and always totally fleeting. And with Bebo’s lack of external links it’s driven home to me that, as a musician, it would be hard as hell to build anything lasting out of my social network “groupies” or “friends”.

And I guess I wonder: is that the nature of the post-Napster musician/fan relationship these days or is it just a side effect of crappy web tools?

I quite enjoyed Superman Returns, it made me a little emotional.

I just did a Google News search for “You’ll believe that a man can cry” and found nothing. My crappy pun headlines are way ahead of mainstream journalism.

I tried to switch from Bloglines to Rojo for my main RSS reading. Someone I respect but can’t remember the name of mentioned they had been lured away from Bloglines by Rojo so I thought I’d give it a shot. In the interest of improving Rojo, here we go:

• I had already made an account a long time ago, couldn’t remember my password. The password retrieval didn’t work. I sent them an email and got a response back pretty quickly, verifying the password retrieval was broken. They got me a new password in a few hours though, not too bad.
• Right off the bat I want to like Rojo. It’s very slick and seems to have a lot going on for it. I fantasize about all the awesome ways it’s going to help me read and manage all my feeds with its web 2.0 goodness.
• I import all my feeds. Very easy. I don’t like the page layout though — I’m a brutal RSS skimmer and the headlines are too faint for me to skim very well. I whip up a Greasemonkey script to embiggen and embolden the entry titles and am happier with it.
• I really like the “Add mojo” idea (it’s very similar Digg-ing something, but inside the RSS reader). Not many people use it though and also I don’t know what adding mojo to an article actually does for me.
• I feel confused by the entries that are rolling in. I realize it’s set to sort stories by “RELEVANCE”. What the hell does that mean? I’m an info-nerd, I just want everything in chronological order. I switch it to stories sorted by date.
• Stories sorted by date is still weird compared to Bloglines. I really want the stories sorted by date and also by the category I’ve put them in. If there are five new Boing Boing posts I’d like them grouped together rather than mixed in with all the classified ad feeds I subscribe to. As I cruise through my news I feel sort of lost, unaware of the context of what I’m reading. Is this written by someone I know? Etc, etc.
• To make matters worse, a lot of the feeds I imported are labelled as “Untitled feed”.
• I don’t like having to go through pages of items. Bloglines lets me scroll through everything that’s new.
• Marking as read is weird and clunky. The Mark All Feeds Read should be over near the feeds. I turned on
  “Automatically mark a feed as read after viewing that feed” but that doesn’t work for reading new items? Also when I’m paging through the new items I have to remember to hit “Mark Page Read” before I hit “next page”. Bleah.
• The new item counts on the left seem to always be out of sync with reality.
• Some feeds (like Negatendo’s Livejournal for instance) just show html craziness.
• Site could be more responsive, it was a little slow earlier today when I was trying it out.

It’s a bit prettier than Bloglines (though more cluttered) and certainly more web 2.0-ish. If more people used it, I might be sucked in more by the Mojo feature. An RSS reader and Digg functionality go together nicely (for me at least). But the confusing feed order probably means I’m headed back to Bloglines for the time being.

I went into a music store the other day thinking I’d buy a Shure Beta 58A mic for live vocals. They didn’t have any and I got talked into picking up an Audix OM2. I tried it out with the band last night for the first time and I was seriously impressed, what a huge difference over my SM48 and 57. I can’t find many reviews of the OM2 online but so far I’m really happy with it.

I want to love Google Notebook but it’s not doing it for me. The best part is the little browser plugin. It’s awesome and functional but makes me annoyed that the other Google services don’t use something like this to make them quicker to use. I can manipulate my Google Notebook without manually logging in, but I can’t do that for my Gmail or Google Calendar? Lame.

And I’m really kind of lost as to what to use the Google Notebook for. For serious info-hoarders the lack of tagging is hard to overlook. Sure I can cram all my little snippets of text into “notebooks”, but how am I any better organized than jamming that stuff into a text file (or a blog if I care about accessing it via the net)? And once we get over 10 or so snippets, it gets rough to find what I want. Very weird choice.

I’ve been getting annoyed at del.icio.us ever since it was bought by Yahoo! My reasons are nerdy. Tag intersections don’t work well anymore which constantly bones me when I’m looking for something, it’s slow as hell and the number one thing I’ve found having used it for a while and racked up around 550 bookmarks in there: I often forget I bookmarked things. For a while I’ve wished my bookmarks were more in my face. That I’d get reminded of what I had seen before when I was looking for something.

Which leads me to tonight when I was playing around with Google Bookmarks. At some point I realized the absolute killer feature would be having my tagged and annotated bookmarks integrated with regular Google search results. When’s the best time to remind me what I bookmarked? When I’m searching for stuff on Google. I did a search for something I had bookmarked and HOLY CRAP:

It shows my tags and annotation underneath the link in the regular search results. That’s awesome! So now when I’m searching Google for things I can instantly see what I’ve bookmarked before. I used Your Web to import all my del.icio.us bookmarks and grabbed the Google Bookmarks Button extension for Firefox.

Google Bookmarks has a seriously primitive interface, no social sharing (I’d like my bookmarks to be public), the Firefox Google toolbar doesn’t support it yet and Google seems to barely acknowledge its existence, but this search results integration alone combined with knowing their servers will be nice and responsive I think has sold me on it.

Update: okay so the interface for Google Bookmarks REALLY BLOWS. I can’t type in the tag I want to jump to anywhere, so I have to click on my tags. I have a billion of them of course so that means scrolling up and down the screen like an idiot. Now I’m thinking about some way to sync Google Bookmarks and del.icio.us together…

Testing the limits of my attention span today I continued trying out the Edirol UA-1EX. Though I originally bought it only for softsynth use on the laptop, I thought I should at least give the inputs a chance. I loaded up REAPER today and did some recording with it and it worked way better than I expected.

The first test: direct monitoring was fine. There was a small amount of latency at first. Not enough to hear an actual delay, but enough that there was a slight doubling/chorus effect as I listened to the vocals from my mic. I reduced the buffer amount in the driver control panel to the absolute minimum and it sounded better, though I did experience a few dropouts while playing around. Some tweaking in there to find the right level will be needed.

I went from the MXL v67 mic -> Bluetube -> Edirol UA-1EX and it sounded good to me. I was monitoring using my Sennheiser HD 280 headphones and not my Event 20/20 monitors so I can’t tell exactly how it stands up yet compared to other audio, but in the headphones it certainly sounded good enough.

I’m a little unclear about how to properly use the input gain dial. I’m enough of an audiophile to know that I probably want my fancy Bluetube preamp doing the amplification and not whatever’s in the little $80 UA-1EX. But is setting the dial all the way to the max (poorly) amplifying things or is that just providing 100% of the signal from the input? There’s no medium notch on it to indicate where it begins amplifying which is what I’m used to on mixing boards. Guess I’ll check the manual.

So the conclusion of all this nerdy gear talk is that the Edirol UA-1EX is staying and may actually get used as a makeshift mobile recording unit along with lugging around my Bluetube. The preamps on the Presonus Firebox are disappointing however and it’s getting returned. I can’t justify paying for preamps that won’t totally replace the Bluetube.

It sounds like the preamp limitation on the Firebox is due to Firewire’s power constraints so I have no idea how it stacks up against other Firewire audio devices. I assume they all have similar limitations and will need external power for beefier pre’s. I will say this for the Firebox: it sounds really good and it’s a sturdy little unit. Latency wasn’t an issue, the drivers worked great, they have fantastic support and they pretend to like my music.

I may think Firewire itself is a little stupid now though, which was my suspicion all along.

Just got a really informative response back from Chad at Presonus support about my -6db clipping/low gain issue with the Presonus Firebox:

Yes, the FB pre’s are a bit on the low gain side, although they shouldn’t clip too easily.  Unfortunately, if they don’t provide enough gain with the digital boost engaged (and you may try disengaging it to help with clipping), you may want to couple them with the Blue Tube or use the Blue Tube with line in.  The BT has about 20db more analog gain than the FB. Sorry.  As I understand it, they had to make the FB in a way which was bus-powerable even under the most extreme conditions (daisy-chained w/ other FW devices, on laptops, etc.) which probably compromised the voltage that the preamps could run off of.  The BT gain circuit runs off of about 16v rather than the 6v or so that the FB runs from

That’s some good information for your ass right there. Awesome support from Presonus.

Unfortunately the goal was to replace my Bluetube and Delta66 with a portable firewire thang. The Presonus Firebox would handily replace the Delta66, but replacing the Bluetube with a quieter preamp that doesn’t go above -6db kinda blows. If I’m going to keep using the Bluetube, then I’m not sure why I’d pay a bunch of extra money for a device with preamps I never use on it. So much to think about.

Things I learned from reading the Firebox and UA-1EX manuals:

• you only need to use the power adapter for the firebox if you’re connecting it to a 4-pin firewire port. if it’s a 6 pin, it powers itself off that. the firewire card i installed has 6-pin. nice.
• my laptop only has a 4-pin firewire input. i’ll have to use the power adapter when using it with the laptop AND i’ll need to get some sort of 6 to 4 pin firewire adapter as the included firewire cable is 6 pin. i was not aware of this different firewire port size situation. weak.
• the mysterious driver switch on the edirol ua-1ex switches you between normal windows drivers and ASIO drivers. neat i guess, though i’ve never had a problem with regular windows stuff working on ASIO drivers.
• i still don’t understand what “plug-in powered” on the mic input means even though i read the description, for now i remain afraid to plug anything into there.
• the ua-1ex actually has dipswitches on the bottom i hadn’t noticed for selecting the recording source, input monitor, kHz and sample rate. dipswitches are hardcore.

Then I tried recording with the Firebox. Here’s how that went:

• plug my microphone into it
• flip the phantom power on
• check the input levels
• looks like i have to crank the level up to the max (+30) to get a decent signal when singing into my condenser mic (MXL v67.) guh?
• switch the XLR cable just in case this one’s flaky
• still need to crank the input to +30 to get a decent signal
• even cranked at +30 the preamp’s nice and quiet though. no hiss or buzz.
• notice that if the input exceeds -6db the preamp clips. so i can’t record anything over -6db? should i even care about that? christ i hate audio, why do i bother with this
• grab the mixer software off the cd-rom to make sure nothing’s set real low but everything’s at the max.
• flip back over to record a test with my presonus bluetube + delta 66. doesn’t clip when i go over -6db. but does this matter, hmm.
• test out the direct monitoring on the firebox. there’s a bit of noticeable latency when singing. i try lowering the 10ms latency in the control panel to 3ms, fixes it up nicely.
• recording vocals at a clipping max of -6db alongside my loud projects makes it hard to monitor. input signal keeps getting lost in the mix. will i have to lower the volume of my projects to deal with the input volume? bleah.

Current Edirol UA-1EX mood: :) pleased

Current Presonus Firebox mood: :? confused and unsatisfied

The low Firebox signal is bothering me but I’m not 100% sure if it should or not. Clipping at -6db seems goofy as I always try to record with the hottest signal I possibly can so I have as much data to work with as possible. (You can always lower the volume later without audio consequences but you can’t boost what isn’t there.)

I don’t have another condenser to test it with. Maybe my mic sucks. I’ll go read some Firebox reviews and see if actual professionals have the same issues as I do.