Thursday, 26 November 2009

What was no. 1 the day you were born?







Idle fun, for anyone who's not come across this yet:

What was the no. 1 hit in the charts on the day you were born? (you can pick from UK, US or Australian charts)

Monday, 23 November 2009

Vocal extraction - hear Vera Lynn reorchestrated






Very interesting - Audionamix ADX Technology isolated the vocal track from Dame Vera Lynn's iconic 1930's mono recording of "We'll Meet Again" for record label Universal Music, and worked with Universal's sound engineers to:

"clean up and re-master the voice track into a high definition stereo component. This was seamlessly integrated with the new orchestration and the contemporary Fron Male Voice Choir. The whole project was completed within a week…

Audionamix has previously worked on movie soundtracks, such as the Oscar winning The Passionate Life of Edith Piaf. On this project, the film makers wanted to use the original sound recording of Edith Piaf singing. Audionamix separated out the voice tracks while conserving all the original elements in order to remix these into the 5.1 surround sound technology of the film."

You can hear a couple of lines from the original track, then just the isolated vocal of the same lines, then the remixed re-orchestrated version of those lines, on the Audionamix site: click here or click on the pic above.

Via Audionamix press release.

Thursday, 12 November 2009

Google Reader keyboard shortcuts






I notice the list of keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys) for Google Reader on Google's Help/FAQ pages isn't comprehensive (e.g. it's missing: e for email, v for view original webpage, / to move the cursor to the search box).

To get the most recent full list of keyboard shortcuts, while you're in Google Reader just type a ? and you'll get a translucent popup with the list.

Or you can access that list of Google Reader keyboard shortcuts here. I use 'em all the time. (Just wish there was a Shift v for opening the original item in a background tab/window).