I vaguely recall a quote from Henry Ford saying that customers could purchase a model t Ford in any color they wanted as long as it was Black.  That is apparently the approach that Palm has taken with the Pre on many areas, especially on the music manager.  You can use any music manager you like, but the Pre will only work with itunes.

That’s just fantastic if you already use itunes, like itunes, want to keep using itunes etc.

If you manage your music in Windows Media Player, Real, Winamp or just play music from folders on your hard drive or something, well then you are kind of stuck with Model T coloring.

Personally, I use Windows Media Player.  Is it better than itunes, is it superior to Winamp?

No idea and I don’t care.  I use it, because that is what I use, have used, and what I have thousands and thousands and thousands of songs organized within.  So to have to switch to itunes, basically means that ALL of my songs are now lost and disorganized in itunes and I have to start from scratch.

Not cool, but as an early adopter of a new device, I realize that the customer is not always right.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d be just as un-right if I were trying to use an iphone, but that’s kind of expected from Apple, because they are the screwy fools that made itunes!  Palm’s been working with other music players for years and years and doing it pretty damn well from my past experiences with treos, handsprings, palms etc.

I guess, I’m currently hoping that some non-Apple fan boy at Palm stands up and says, “hey some of our customers don’t love Apple just because, maybe we should give them some music player options on the Pre, after all we are trying to save our company with this phone, no point in alienating Windows Media Player users.”

Oh, and while you’re at it, don’t forget to fast track that Audible project.

I still really like the Palm Pre, but after my first Palm Pre died the yesterday, and Palm sent me on a 150 minute wild goose chase through technical support, I guess you could say the honeymoon period is over.  Oh, and if you are wondering what all those crazy stupid ‘itunes’ hyperlinks are for, you can find the same links by doing a google search with the keywords ‘itunes sucks’. 

Note. I’m a blogger, not a journalist.  I’m purposefully subjective, and prefer to look at the applied uses of gadgets and software in specific unique circumstances, and at extreme tolerances.  If you are looking for a generic ‘review’ of something, you have mistakenly come to the wrong place.  We don’t sell black model t cars here, we offer chartreuse model t’s with glitter pain jobs, flames on the hood, and well, that analogy is a little tired, but we don’t do generic reviews here.  If you want generic and objective, go over to Cnet and read a paragraph with a lot of verbage that you probably could have found in a Palm press release.

After I have had some more hands on with the actual player on the Pre, I’ll cover that again soon.  At first glance, the sound (and the headphones that come with the Pre) are excellent.  I would like to see software improvements in the following:

• the ability to adjust volume on the touch screen
• the ability to delete a song from the device (haven’t found this yet, if it exists, then it needs to be added as an option in more spots
• the ability to convert part of a song into a ring tone.  The G1 (android) from T-Mobile has this capability and it was excellent, a little music editor that you could select part or all of a song and set it as a ringtone or notification.  The ringtones that come standard with the Pre are about as diverse as a gaggle of Canadian Geese
• the ability to drag and drop songs up and down within the play list as the songs are playing (mixing on the fly)
• The ability to rate songs with stars on a 1 to 5 rating level and then later play songs by rating level, and better yet, have it update my computer files
• push button notification to update my facebook letting people know what song I’m listening to & maybe it includes a YouTube link if it can find one, or an Amazon MP3 sales link on my Amazon Associates account so I can make a fortune of my friends. 

But like I said, haven’t had a chance to think about this much yet . . .

Does the Palm Pre support Audible.com?

So far I don’t know but think it should work.  I was told that the Pre supported Audible at CES in January. 

When I look on Audible, it doesn’t list Palm as a brand, but if you go to PDA, you will find PalmOS listed.  But the PalmOS is not the same as the Palm WebOS I believe, and I just don’t know yet, but after I get this slow itunes thing figured out, I’ll be testing Audible next.

I did some checking on PreCentral and the long and the short of the story from the long forum thread is that

1. the Palm Pre and Audible do not currently support each other.  
2. There is an emulator that allows you to run the old Palm OS on your Pre, but that does not work with Audible either for many users
   1. I saw a couple users that were able to get this to work, but its the activation required by Audible Manager that causes this to fail for most users, plus the emulator known as ‘Classic’ costs $29.95.  If you have palm apps already, you may want to plunk down $30, if you are just looking for an Audible solution skip to step 4, which will save you $10 and make all of your audible books functional on any device that plays mp3 files.
3. The theory that linking Audible to your itunes might make it work, does NOT work
4. The only workaround that I found in the forums that DOES currently work is converting your Audible files to normal mp3 files using SoundTaxi Platinum cost $19.95 (they do offer a –> download link for exe file -> free trial download but it only converts the first 90 seconds, still it does prove that it works before you buy.  I’ve tried a few programs like this in the past that did not work/convert at all, so I was happy to see that this program DOES work.  )

SoundTaxi Platinum CAN convert an Audible .aa format to mp3 so that it can then be played on any of your devices.

It also converts the following formats

Convert your audio and video at one click with an easy to use software created with you in mind. The SoundTaxi simple and intuitive design will let you concetrate on your music and movies, instead of technical details.
Easily convert DRM protected music and movie files and various audio/video files to unprotected MP3, MPEG4, CD,
iPod and other MP3 player file formats at high speed and CD quality – legally.
SoundTaxi unprotects and converts music and movie files from:

* iTunes
* Napster
* Zune
* Yahoo Music
* MusicMatch
* MSNMusic
* MusicLoad
* MTV / urge
* MusicNow
* BuyMusic
* AOL Music
* Virgin Digital
* Sony Connect
* Beon Music
* Peer Impact
* iMusica
* Rhapsody
* Wal-Mart
* AOL MusicNow
* Audible
* connect-europe
* akuma
* Listen JP
* ongen
* hmv
* Bigpond Music
* Soundbuzz
* digirama
* imusica
* cdigix
* cingular mMode
* puretracks
* metro tunes
* fnac

UPDATE

Forgot to include the final source from Precentral that helped get me in the right direction, it came from user quest1772, who stated

I called audible and they assured me they were working on it and expected the app should come out in about two months. for the short term I bought ‘soundtaxi‘ and converted a few books to mp3’s (it takes as long as the track is to convert). This creates a 6 hour mp3 with no bookmarks but the fast forward goes really fast when you hold it down so I can get to where I was in less than a minute, the only problem is now I have to remember where I was or leave the music app open.
edit: also tried the classic+audible air route and crashed my phone. i wouldn’t say that is a viable option unless i did it wrong

I put together this video showing a quick setup of my Skype recording capability with a Sony IC Recorder (pocket MP3 recorder). 

see original video article – Wiring MP3 Recorder to Capture Skype Interviews

The setup is not intuitive, but it works.  I meant to create a image that identified where the cords were supposed to be plugged in, but somewhere along the line I lost it.  (I think I wrote the article and my machine crashed and I forgot to recover the article and original image).

Someone asked me about it on YouTube today, and reminded me that I couldn’t find the article either.  I know I wrote it, but couldn’t find it. 

So I am publishing this new image of my setup for recording interviews or conversations with skype.

Great Buy on 1 Terabyte Hard Drive at Buy.com

Last week I mentioned my plan to pick up a 1 terabyte Western Digital MyBook external hard drive.

Well they are on special right now at Buy.com.

I’m still holding out for the device that I can connect to my network through the ethernet and then connect to 1 terabyte of space via my wireless router from anywhere in the house or login from the internet while traveling.

The drive I’m referring to is the World Edition MyBook.

That said, paying $199 for a 1 terabyte Western Digital MyBook is a steal compared to the rates I’ve seen at office stores and even online.  I think that price is good until Friday, the 16th if I understand Buy.com’s weekly specials correctly.

Voice Transcription with MP3 Player Voice Recorders

Next up, I’m also going to be testing out Creative Zen MP3 players and their ability to record voice notes which can be transcribed with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.  I’ve been working with a Creative Zen V this evening, trying to figure out the file conversions first.  It records in 32 bit WAV and it needs to be 16 bit WAV I believe, but there’s something else that I’m not getting quite right.  I think maybe I need to also convert Stereo to Mono and something else.

Then this weekend I will be test driving a regular Creative Zen (the video, picture and MP3 player).  This is a 4gb and newer than the Creative Zen V.  I looked originally at Wally World where they were $120 in the store ($10 cheaper online) but only $90.99 at Buy.com plus they give you a $10 rebate that was not available at Wal-mart, so you can get a 4GB Video MP3 Player Creative Zen at Buy.com (technically better than a 4gb IPod if you follow CEA reviews and awards) for about half the price of an IPod and $40 less than you would pay at Wally world.

I have a Sony IC Recorder ICD-UX70.  It is not sold to work with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, but works just fine.  It cost me $100.  For $200 you can buy a Sony Recorder that comes with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 software, and I consider that a great bargain.

I bought my software, Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 Preferred, over a year ago and bought the recorder later.  In total I spent $150 for the software and $100 for the recorder.  Total $250.

Since the Sony IC recorder doesn’t come made for DNS 9, I had to do some trial and error testing to figure out the best settings on my recorder for Automatic computer transcription.  (I recorded something on my sony recorder by speaking into it.  Then ran the mp3 file it generated through Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, which transcribed my voice into text.  You can see the results below for each of the recording quality settings on my Sony IC Recorder.

This is the original Text that I read aloud:

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional 9 is the most accurate speech recognition product Nuance has ever developed – delivering up to 99% accuracy! Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional 9 is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals who want to work faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, on the job.

Here are 4 quick tips to duplicate my results or just get good results for every day voice transcription. 

1. If you run a file through transcription and it seems to get it dead wrong, or if the first few words are incorrect, try running the file from the beginning all over again.  Sometimes your machine just needs a fresh start at a transcription. 
2. Hold your MP3 recorder a couple inches to the side of your mouth.  I hold mine with my right hand to the right side of my mouth so that it doesn’t pick up my breathing too much.
3. Plus, when creating a voice file that should be transcribed, I try to allow 5 seconds of silence at the beginning of the recording to give my computer time to start the transcription process.
4. Set your microphone sensitivity to low

This is the Transcription results at 5 different quality settings. 

Note. I have not trained the software to work with my digital recorder.  I did not make any effort to correct the transcription.  If I had subsequent transcriptions would have substituted the word ‘nine’ for the number 9 for example.

ST – 192 kbps – Very Accurate, bit rate might consume too much memory, but fine if you will sync up file on rapid basis (37 seconds 887 kilobyte file size)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the most accurate speech recognition product nuances ever developed-delivering up to 99% accuracy!  Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals who want to work faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, on-the-job.

 

STSP – 128 kbps  – Very Accurate, Recommended, also good for Podcast quality (37 seconds 589 kb)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the most accurate speech recognition product nuance has ever developed-delivering up to 99% accuracy!  Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals who want to work faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, on the job.

STLP – 48 kbps – Decent and definitely workable (36 seconds 218 kb)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the most accurate recognition product new one is ever developed-delivering up to 99% accuracy!  Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals who once worked faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome on the job.

SP – 32 kbps – Not Optimal, but could be better (35 seconds 141 kb)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the most accurate beach recognition product and once is never developed-delivering up to 99% accuracy!  Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals want to work faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, on-the-job.

LP – 8 kbps – Not Recommended – Barely Functional (34 seconds 34.7 kb)

Him in an in him or over and and and and or allowing for which you will will work for your or should look to the work of the to him or her on.

The more work I do with audio and video these days the more tedious I find it to work with individual files, one at a time.

Often I need to convert video or audio files in batch processes or let them run in batch when I’m not on my machine.  TotalAudioConverter from Softplicity provides this capability.   TotalAudioConverter (TAC) can perform batch conversions on multiple audio file types.  Running Batch Audio conversions can definitely speed up production time and make the overall process much less tedious.

This batch conversion software works fairly easily.  Just select your file(s) and right click to launch the conversion.  It supports the following file types:

1. WAV,
2. MP3,
3. OGG,
4. WMA,
5. APE,
6. FLAC,
7. MP4,
8. AAC,
9. MPC

If you have a file in one of those file types, you can convert it one file at a time or in a batch process.

The Price is right!

You can download the software for free for use during the first 30 days.  That is pleanty of time to determine whether or not the software will work well for you.  If it does, you only have to pay about $20 to keep it permanently after that.

Twenty dollars for a audio file converter that supports batch processing with just a couple clicks is pretty cheap!  TotalAudioConverter is definitely worth a try if you work audio files regularly.

Dragon Naturally Speaking Dictation Potential

I plan on testing it out soon with the Dragon Naturally Speaking dictation tools.  I’m curious how well DNS9 will work when I convert an MP3 file or some other file into a .wav file and run it through the transcription tool.

The price of this software utility is free for the first 30 days.  After that it only costs about $20.  Thirty days is pleanty of time to determine if you will use it or not.  If so, then $20 is not too much to pay for the time you can save by picking up TotalAudioConverter, especially for batch jobs.

Several Millenia ago people began to make noises, and the noises sounded cool. They learned to repeat them, and make rythim and many types of sounds and even some melodies. Then they may have begun to click and humm to these sounds. Soon they were singing and making instruments, simple things made with their own hands.

Music was free!

Then the people making the instruments started to specialize and started demanding barters and then money for the instruments. The people making the cool noises and music and songs, started to pan handle while they were performing and earned a few odds and ends to pay for their instruments.

Then the musicians got better and started to perform as a service to various lords and wealthy individuals that would sponsor them to ‘produce’ more music. One thing led to another and before you know it the feudal system was out and musicians were trying to panhandle their music again. Fortunately, sheet music came along and music composers made a small fortune selling sheet music, which was tedious but not impossible to copy by hand.

Then the age of radio came and the actual performers could perform their music for the masses. Radio stations needed musical ‘content’ for their programs and would pay performers to perform. The record player had been created before the advent of radio. With the combination of a recordable media player and a methodology to promote the media, record sales became a big business.

The dawn of the digital age brought forth a new era where music could be copied from records to discs, faster and cheaper. However, the music industry did not pass these savings on to consumers. Technology surged past the music industry and suddenly the music could be technically copied and shared for free. Music was free again!

This upset the balance of things, and a backlash ensued as the record industry and some performers and composers staged attacks against their customers and fans that were listening to music for free. Along came an entrepreneurially, Steve Jobs. He offered up a crazy plan to sell music again in an era when no one was paying for it.

For no apparent reason,

People started to pay for music again!

The price? It was the same price that it had always been!

Now, one of the companies that had helped to spur on the age of free music, and then suffered the consequences of the backlash of music companies, reformed and was purchased by a group in the music industry. The company after finishing its ‘Napster‘ in the courts tried and tried to find a way to lure customers back away from their paying for music ‘Jobs.’

They tried competitive rates. They even tried a subscription service offering an unlimited list of music for $14.95 per month. People signed up but could not get the apple out of their eye-pod.

So now, Napster has gone back to their roots.

Music is Free Again at Napster!

As history has proven, music cannot be free forever, so unless your dead set on paying for music right down to the very last ‘nano’ buck in your bank account. Check it out now!