Well, it’s finally time to announce my new podcast, Sound of History!

The Sound of History is a weekly podcast featuring full-length, unedited, and uncut historic audio. You’ll hear speeches, broadcasts, and events from around the world. Sometimes you’ll hear famous people, sometimes not.

Episode 1 is up now. On this episode, you’ll find John F. Kennedy cracking jokes about Marx in front of a bunch of newspaper publishers, Ronald Reagan talking about the Challenger, some blues from 1922, and an Edison recording from 1902.

Thanks to Cliff for mentioning that Reagan speech in a comment. That prompted me to go find it.

I’m finding material for this podcast from around the Internet. Some of that music comes from archive.org, and there are various sources for presidential speeches.

I’d like to find some British prime minister’s speeches as well, but I’m having difficulty with that. If any of you Brits reading this know of a good site for uncut audio, accessible to Americans, please do let me know.

I’ve uploaded our photos from our trip to Nebraska. Don’t worry, I’ve limited it to 43 items.

In this fantastic collection, you will learn such immeasurably useful morsels of knowledge, such as:

• Why people think Nebraska has more trees than Kansas
• The shocking encroachment of nationwide department stores onto rural areas
• Traffic congestion in rural Kansas
• Nebraskan vowel usage
• Silo painting tips

Click here to start, and make sure to hit “next” so you see all the different photos.

Yesterday I had the frustrating experience of trying to configure a machine so I could use the internal soundcard while simultaneously recording sound from a USB iMic.

While ALSA appears to fully support this setup, I discovered quite a few annoyances about what should be trivial:

• There appear to be no GUI sound recording apps that support ALSA directly.
• KDE’s artsd normally provides good ALSA support, but it provides neither a systemwide nor an app-specific way to select either the recording or the playback source with ALSA.
• Some apps appear to use Jack, but configuration of it is extraordinarily complex and it seems to die in subtle and odd ways from time to time.
• ecawave segfaults on start, every time.
• audacity doesn’t even support anything other than OSS! (A shame from what’s otherwise a great program)
• The mechanics of OSS support in ALSA are anything but clear. There is the aoss LD_PRELOAD wrapper, and then there is also a kernel module, which appears to be rather under-documented. For whatever reason, ALSA is managing only one PCM device under /dev, despite having two PCM cards in the system.

Now this is probably no worse than the situation in Windows, but it is certainly not where we should be, and isn’t where MacOS X is either.

Note that most of these problems are with the apps not supporting the second audio source *at all*.

Kayray has been writing recently about librivox, a project to make public domain audio recordings of public domain material (much of it present in Project Gutenberg).

I’m interested in volunteering to read some material. But I don’t have any nice microphone. After doing some research, it looks like I’m down to a couple of different options.

The first option is described by The Roadhouse. It has a $60 MXL 990 mic and a Behringer Eurorack UB802 mixer at $50. I assume that he is running an output from that into a standard sound card. So the total cost of that setup would run around $110. I don’t really need to mix more than one source, but having something that can power condensor mics with XLR connectors looks good.

The second option is to get a dedicated USB mic. The mic of choice here seems to be the Blue Snowball at about $140.

I don’t know enough about this to know which setup would get me the best quality for voice recording that is going to be going to wind up digital on the PC in the end.

I guess the third option is something such as the m-audio mobilepre USB preamp at about $120. So if I used that with the MXL 990, I’d be talking about $180. That’s rather more than I’d like to spend, but it would give me more options down the road.

If any of you have suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.

This was a nice quote from the British miniseries Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy:

“The true measure of a nation’s morality is how it operates its secret services.”

I think we’re not quite up to par in that department right now.