I have a few more recordings I made while in Japan this last summer I haven’t posted yet. This one is from a noodle soup restaurant right next to Omiya station (in Saitama prefecture), which had wonderful cuisine. The calls you hear are from the employees welcoming new guests into the restaurant, or saying bye, or who knows what. I can’t really remember. And for the keen observer, at the end of this snipit, the cash register beeps and it sounds very similar to Walmart’s checkout beep. Or is it just me?
Download Audio: Noodle Soup Restaurant
In an earlier post, I was wondering if there were a way to search custom vorbis tags for things that I add to my classical music like conductor, orchestra, etc. I now have my answer.
Turns out, I was using the wrong player. I’ve never liked Winamp as much since (the now dead) version 3 and their newest 5. It is too bloated for my taste. I began trying out Foobar a few days ago, and so far I don’t see myself going back to Winamp. It is smaller, simpler, yet highly customizable to suite your own taste. Winamp users should give it a try.
Oh, and did I mention, I can now search my custom Vorbis tags? In Foobar, goto Preferences –> Display, and under playlist search, I added the custom tags I use under ‘fields to scan’: orchestra, conductor, and label. You can add any tag you might use as well, be it anything from pianist, violinist, performer, or whatever. Now I can load up my music and find all the recordings I have with Ormandy conducting or the New York Phil playing. Sweeeeet.
I remember playing with an ICQ plugin a while back called Merlin, who could read your ICQ messages, or any other text for that matter. The speech synthesis used was rather uninspiring, but fun to play with nonetheless. Searching for speech synthesis, I came across a Wikipedia entry on speech synthesis. Its rather amazing how far speech synthesis has come. And, I must add, its a bit too much fun to play with. Here are some free demos of some commercial speech synthesis programs:
AT&T Natural Voices
Rhetorical TTS
Scansoft RealSpeak
Check the Wikipedia entry for more links.
There has been a lot of talk online about NBC’s coverage (or lack thereof) of the 2004 Olympic games in Greece. You see, NBC paid $793 million for the rights to broadcast the Olympics; in fact they are the only U.S media outlet allowed to do so. Of course, since Greece is located on the other side of the pond, showing the games live doesn’t fit in nicely with prime time U.S television. NBC’s quick ‘fix’ to this problem was to delay broadcasts of the Olympics so they did fit nicely into the profitable prime time slots.
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