Score!

I had a lot of errands to do today. I still haven't completed my list, but I did enough of them to keep me happy.

One of the errands was to go to the Apple Store and pick up a car charger. I keep my "big" iPod in my car, and keep my nano with me all the time. This way, I don't have to worry about recharging the "big" iPod every few days. I'm also happy to say that the power is shut off to the 12V outlet when the car is turned off, so I don't have to worry about draining my car battery. While at The Westchester, I ran into perlcub who was eyeball deep in Pro Care customers. It was then, when I decided to check out their Audio section. Sure enough, they had it, The Snowball

I've seen the Snowball online for $99 in some places, but locally, I've only seen it for $139. Apple had it for the $99 price, so I scooped it up as well. This is a *fantastic* mic. I'd say it easily rivals mics that cost many times more (I do have some audio engineering background), and for $99, it's a no-brainer. If you want to podcast, it's perfect, *and* it's actually USB, so you don't need an external mixer, or XLR cables. The downside is latency. While I haven't tried it with headphones, a USB mic is always going to have more latency than a traditional mic. How much is yet to be determined.

The mic itself has three positions, position 1 activates the cardioid capsule, position 2 is the same, but with a -10db pad, and the 3rd position is omnidirectional. I'm still fiddling with placement, and speech volume, but it seems so far, the best sound comes from me speaking using position 1, about 3-4" away, at a slightly oblique angle, so as to not pop my p's. I'll probably record in full-on 44.1khz/16bit/mono uncompressed audio, then convert it to a 32kbit AAC file. Recording a compressed file kinda sucks, as it seems to introduce some odd skips, at least when I tried doing it in one particular app.

Now I've got a lot of homework to do. I totally blew off Friday, and now I am *still* procrastinating doing the work. Grrr.

Oh, and it's been about 48 hours since I last logged into World of Warcraft. I'll start playing again, once I get my work-plate cleared a bit.

Score!

I had a lot of errands to do today. I still haven't completed my list, but I did enough of them to keep me happy.

One of the errands was to go to the Apple Store and pick up a car charger. I keep my "big" iPod in my car, and keep my nano with me all the time. This way, I don't have to worry about recharging the "big" iPod every few days. I'm also happy to say that the power is shut off to the 12V outlet when the car is turned off, so I don't have to worry about draining my car battery. While at The Westchester, I ran into perlcub who was eyeball deep in Pro Care customers. It was then, when I decided to check out their Audio section. Sure enough, they had it, The Snowball

I've seen the Snowball online for $99 in some places, but locally, I've only seen it for $139. Apple had it for the $99 price, so I scooped it up as well. This is a *fantastic* mic. I'd say it easily rivals mics that cost many times more (I do have some audio engineering background), and for $99, it's a no-brainer. If you want to podcast, it's perfect, *and* it's actually USB, so you don't need an external mixer, or XLR cables. The downside is latency. While I haven't tried it with headphones, a USB mic is always going to have more latency than a traditional mic. How much is yet to be determined.

The mic itself has three positions, position 1 activates the cardioid capsule, position 2 is the same, but with a -10db pad, and the 3rd position is omnidirectional. I'm still fiddling with placement, and speech volume, but it seems so far, the best sound comes from me speaking using position 1, about 3-4" away, at a slightly oblique angle, so as to not pop my p's. I'll probably record in full-on 44.1khz/16bit/mono uncompressed audio, then convert it to a 32kbit AAC file. Recording a compressed file kinda sucks, as it seems to introduce some odd skips, at least when I tried doing it in one particular app.

Now I've got a lot of homework to do. I totally blew off Friday, and now I am *still* procrastinating doing the work. Grrr.

Oh, and it's been about 48 hours since I last logged into World of Warcraft. I'll start playing again, once I get my work-plate cleared a bit.