SS > SF > cons > Helicon 2: Eastercon 2002 > Clanger.wav
home > SF > cons > Helicon 2: Eastercon 2002 > Recording the Clanger .wav Helicon 2: Eastercon 2002 Recording the Clanger .wav Small Clanger whistles (367K .wav) Such a simple statement -- such a palaver to achieve! We didn't record the sound (or take the photo) at Helicon -- we used our own instance of Small Clanger at home as the source. This took some time... Find the microphone, plug it into the microphone socket on Chiana, our Win-2000 machine. Boot it up. Twiddle thumbs while it boots. Go to Start>Accessories>Entertainment>Sound Recorder, and record the whistle. Nothing. Fiddle with input levels, fiddle with output levels. Hear very faint whistle in the background. Fiddle some more. Whistle never gets any louder. Try Line In socket just in case. Nothing. Maybe the microphone has the wrong impedance, or something. Find the other microphone, go to plug it in, but it's got the wrong kind of socket and we don't have an adaptor. Okay. Take the original microphone, and plug it into Moya, our Win-98/Linux dual boot machine. Boot it up in Windows. Twiddle thumbs while it boots. Go to Start>Accessories>Entertainment>Sound Recorder, and record the whistle. Nothing. Fiddle with input levels, fiddle with output levels. Hear nice whistle, along with LOTS OF NOISE . Switch off microphone, even unplug microphone, and still hear LOTS OF NOISE . Right, then. Unplug the printer from the printer port of Spock, our Acorn Archimedes. Take second microphone, plug it into the printer port. Boot it up (no thumb twiddling required, of course). Find the sound recording software, which has been shelfware for several years by now, and install it from floppy. Fire up the software. Error -- version 3.5 of the OS required . We have version 3.1. That's fine, we have version 3.7 on Riker, our "Next Generation Archimedes" -- an Acorn RISC-PC. But the software requires version 3.5, not 3.5 or later ... Hmm. So, take another step backwards in technological history. Take the microphone, and plug it into Geordi, our Win-3.11 machine. Boot it up. Twiddle thumbs while it boots, wondering if it actually will boot after so long. It does, noisily. Find Sound Blaster software, fire it up. Attempt to record. Not Enough Disc Space . Desperately try to remember how Win-3.11 works, find File Manager, see it's reporting 300K free, delete a large temporary file. Record the whistle. Mirabile -- it works! Save file onto floppy. (Take photo of Small Clanger with Geordi in background, as acknowledgment.) Go to Kira, the Win-95/Linux dual boot machine used to prepare the Web pages. Boot it up in Windows. Twiddle thumbs while it boots. Copy file from floppy. Use the Netscape Winamp WAV player to edit out the BANG s from the beginning and end of the recording (but unable to edit out simultaneous noise due to Geordi's VERY LOUD HARD DRIVE ), and link into the Helicon 2 Web page . Switch off Chianna, Moya, Spock, Geordi, and Kira. Plug the printer back into the printer port of Spock. Finished! There is a reason for never throwing away the old tech...
