Lisa Housman and Dave Falk make up the folk band, “Sweet Wednesday”. I found Lisa playing solo in the Park Street subway station the other day. She was supportive of the compiliation CD idea and said she’d heard of a similar project that was done in New York City recently. She seemed to be a fan of the compilation CD in general as a way to get people exposed to new music.

She had a 14 track CD, “Wherever You Go” for sale which I picked up (It sure feels good when you know more than a few pennies actually go to the artist.) She very kindly allowed me to post a song here. So here is track 1, “Mid-Morning Rain” (4 MB MP3)

Lisa and Dave are also the most web savvy buskers I’ve met so far. They are hip with the Internets. You can find out more about them and their work, including additional song samples, on their numerous web sites:

• Lisa and Dave’s web site
• Sweet Wednesday web site
• Lisa Housman web site
• Dave Falk web site
• Their blog with stories of life as a street musician

I found Jermaine Carter playing percussion on plastic buckets, pots, and an oven rack in Boston Common. He told me his old equipment disappeared so he pulled together this assortment from an ally and was raising money to buy some better stuff.

Jermaine also tells me he was featured on a video game. Apparently ESPN filmed him after the Red Sox won the World Series.

Here is a 3 minute 38 second live recording of Jermaine playing percussion. (3.3 MB MP3)

The second street musician (or busker as Pam has taught me) I came across in Boston was Aaron Burnett. Aaron was playing his saxophone on a street near Boston common. He is a junior at the Berklee School of Music.

Like Augusto, Aaron was very friendly and generous. He tried to wait paitently for me to attempt to explain my project. He also allowed me to record some of his sounds and provide the sample here.

This audio contains street sounds here and there, which I’m still up in the air whether add or ditract from the music.

Aaron Burnett playing saxophone (2.6 MB MP3)

According to Aaron, he recently recorded some music with a bassist, but has yet to get the final product. Hopefully I’ll get to post some more of his work in the future.

I hit the street last Friday to seek out street musicians, try to explain to them my idea of compiling a CD of Boston street music, and see what their reaction was.

My first stop was Downtown Crossing where I found a friendly guitarist named Augusto Garces. While I failed to clearly explain my idea (it isn’t even clear in my head), Augusto was interested and very cooperative. He was also a good salesman. He sold me the CD that he created with his son Kevin who plays the drums.

Augusto was so nice, that he’s given me permission to post one of his songs here. So here is track 9: Y Que siga La Rumba (4 MB MP3) Augusto on Guitar. Kevin on Percussion. J. Russel on Piano.

Just about every day I pass at least one street musician during my commute. They range from a homeless guy pitifully blowing on a recorder, to a guitarist with a professial looking CD for sale and a website. They are all interesting in their own way, but I’m always in a hurry to catch a train.

For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about these musicians and a project sprung to mind. Why not compile a bunch of songs performed by these street musicians, make an album, sell it on CD Baby, iTunes Music Store, etc. and give any profits back to the musicians. Maybe even collect interviews of the muscians and tell their story.

After asking around and doing a few web searches, I haven’t found any similar project. However, I’m very far from the music scene, so I’m sure someone must have tried something like this. If anyone has seen a similar project, please chime in.

The IR Blaster arrived today. Got it running in a few minutes, and I’m happy to report it controls the Sirius Starmate ST-2 radio perfectly (with the config file I created earlier.)

I need to make some tweaks (get the module loaded and LIRCD started at boot, etc) but it looks like it is going to work.

One problem I’m having is that sox (or some combination of sox, lame, and my script) for some reason is stopping the recording after exactly 3 hours 22 minutes and 54 seconds. Some sort of buffer or something must be filling up. Sox is sort of overkill, and doesn’t take an argument for number of seconds to record, so I’m instead going to try rawrec. In the days of Linux 2.2 I used mpegrec which worked like a champ. But I don’t think it builds on 2.6. So I’m hoping rawrec will do the trick. For some reason, after playing with it for 5 minutes, all I’m getting is nasty static. I’m not sure what is going on as all my arguments look good to me, but I’m tired and will try again tomorrow.
I’m not aware of any other stripped down utilities that will send line-in audio to standard out for handling directly by lame. Anyone?

As I mentioned in a previous post, the only way to have a computer controlled recording set up for Sirius satellite radio involves buying a receiver unit designed for a car (the SIR-ALP1 for example), then getting a board that provides a serial interface.

Today it occurred to me that there must be away to use my current satellite receiver (a Sirius Starmate ST2) to schedule recordings. My first proposed solutions involved the new lego mindstorms kit set up in some sort of Rube Goldberg way that physically pressed buttons on the receiver at given times. A good way to rationalize getting the new lego mindstorms. Then I realized I could probably get an infrared transmitter that is controlled by the computer, point it at the receiver have the computer change the channel at specific times.

The first step involves getting all the IR codes the remote uses for each button press. I wasn’t even sure the IR remote that came with the receiver would work with other IR equipement. I tried to find specs for the remote, read through the docs for the Starmate ST2 on the FCC website, took the remote apart to see if the board said what frequency it worked on. Nothing. Time to just try it out. To do so, you need to use the irrecord utility that is included with LIRC and an IR Receiver (which I happen to already have from my PVR project). Unfortunately, for reasons I don’t understand, but probably makes sense, LIRC requires a kernel module. And for more reasons I don’t understand, the lirc kernel module needs to be built from source. Perhaps because the settings are hard coded into the module?

So I spent a bunch of time trying to get LIRC running on my Ubuntu Breezy linux box. There are a couple packages. lirc-modules-source which you first use to build the kernel modules, and lirc which includes lircd, irrecord, etc. I had trouble building the module, and all I could find was reports of others having the similar problems. I decided to just download the source directly from the LIRC website. That ended up building without any trouble.

I built the module, insmod’d it (I first had to run setserial according to the instructions on the LIRC website). Ran mode2 to test it out. It started… I pressed a button on the remote… success! text and numbers scrolled along the terminal.

Then I ran irrecord and went through the steps to create a configuration for the remote. Basically, naming a button, and then pressing it as it registers the command sent via IR.

With a config file in hand for the receiver, I placed an order for the IR Blaster. Other IR transmitters varied greatly in price. The IR Blaster was only $15 including shipping, so I emailed Mike, the guy who makes them and he didn’t see any reason it wouldn’t work.

Next will come figuring out how to make LIRC work as a transmitter instead of a receiver. Then with a few utilities to record from line in as mp3 (lame, sox, etc.), cron, and Podcastamatic, I’ll have Podcasts of Howard Stern, Wiretap, and any other Sirius content. Update to follow.

The primary reason for my upgrade of Beyond TV to version 4 was the support for re-encoding the programs from MPEG2 to DivX. I thought this would allow me to do things like get my “Daily Show” fix while on the commuter train. Unfortunately it is fundamentally flawed. The DivX has the wrong aspect ratio. BeyondTV’s “Showsqueeze” is also very unpredictable. Shows weren’t being encoded on a regular basis.

My solution is, “TV Tranny”, a couple Perl scripts and other bits of glue I threw together, mostly while on the commuter train. I’ve decided to run this on my Mac Mini so that the transcoding doesn’t consume the processor on my PVR box. After running for 24 hours, it seems to actually be working. I’ve tried to use standard tools so that if I’d like to move it, it will run under Linux or Windows without too much hassle.

How it works:

• The directory holding the MPEG2 TV recordings is SMB mounted from the PVR on to the Mac Mini.
• A file watcher script checks this directory every couple minutes and updates an SQLite database with what files are present and their status. (still recording, done recording, transcoded)
• A transcoder script checks the database every few minutes to see if any shows have finished recording and are ready to transcode.
• When the transcoder script finds a show, it then re-encodes it to XviD using FFmpeg

It doesn’t yet clean up old recordings, and there is no auto-sync with my Laptop. I think simple cron entry that deletes files older than x days will take care of the first issue. And a script that creates a RSS feed with enclosures, or rsync will take care of the latter.

The only similar solution I found was AutoXvid, but will only run on Windows, and uses AutoGK which seems to have spyware in it. So in case anyone else is looking for a solution that allows you two tweak everything, you can use this kludge to get you started on your own solution: Download TV Tranny 0.1

My Beyond TV, Beyond Media, and the Firefly Remote arrived yesterday. I was using the trial for a while, but the Remote control really has changed the experience for the better. It all just works and is much closer to a Tivo experience. Plus the remote is RF not IR, so it works without line-of-site. So I can in theory put the box in the other room. Unfortunately, it won’t control the IR based TV and stereo receiver.

So far, I’m not very impressed by the Harmony remote. The setup is this horrible mix of web based configuration with a locally running application that actually sends the config to the remote. The remote itself has plastic buttons instead of the nice rubber buttons like the Tivo and Firefly remote. Not sure which one I’ll end up using.

Beyond Media is surprising cool. I’m not sure how much I’ll use it in practice, but it provides easy access to DVD player, Weather, Live365 streams, Photos, Music, and whole bunch of other things. I thought the fact that it is a separate application from Beyond TV was really annoying. But the remote allows to go back and forth without really noticing it.

After a couple more tweaks, we should be able to do away with the Tivo.