Rabbit & Pork

Sounds easy - well, almost.

I was looking for a set-up that provides a Skype recording of three independent tracks:

• Track 1: My voice (as Skype host) only
• Track 2: Voices of Skype participants (minus host) only
• Track 3: Auxiliary sound effects & pre-recorded material

Independent tracks give fine post-processing control e.g. volume level balancing, application of different audio effects. Also, track 1 & 3 can be recorded directly at source, rather than via Skype, thus improving clarity.

Basically, I wanted Mac software to support the following (as inspired by my colleague’s MS Windows set-up):

In particular, I wanted to feed auxiliary sound effects & pre-recorded material into the Skype conference allowing all participants to hear them “live”.

The solution is built using the neat Mac software packages Audio Hijack Pro and Soundflower (a virtual audio device), but the secret sauce is in “how to configure them”.

Here goes the configuration…

In Audio Hijack Pro:

1. Create a session named ‘Skype Host’
1. Source Type: Audio Source
2. Input Device: Built-in Mic (or mic of your choice)
3. Output Device: Soundflower 2ch
4. Recording: AAC
2. Create a session named ‘Skype Participants (minus host)’
1. Source Type: Application
2. Application: Skype
3. Recording: AAC
4. Effects: Channel Tweaker: Kill Left, Channel Tweaker: Duplicate Right
3. Create a session named ‘Auxiliary’
1. Source Type: Application
2. Application: GarageBand
3. Recording: AAC
4. Effects: Auxiliary Device Output: Soundflower 2ch

The trick appears in 2.4 - When hijacking an Application, both Input & Output are recorded. However, Input and Output are sent to different channels, so we can use a chain of effects to filter out the left channel (Skype input) and duplicate the right channel (Skype output).

AAC recording format is chosen in all sessions to minimise CPU usage (i.e. no compression is required) during the Skype conference.

The virtual Soundflower audio device is used as the sync for the hijacked Mic and Garageband inputs. This allows Audio Hijack Pro to record them, but also pass them thru to Skype. Thus, in Skype, the following preferences are required:

1. Audio Output: Built-in Output (or output of your choice)
2. Audio Input: Soundflower 2ch

With the setup complete, here goes the recording…

1. Start Skype Conference
2. Start GarageBand
3. In Audio Hijack Pro, “Hijack” and start “Record” on the three configured sessions
4. Chat In Skype, play audio & sound effects in GarageBand
5. In Audio Hijack Pro, stop “Record” on the three configured sessions

At this point you’ll have three AAC files which may be imported into Garageband for post-processing and exported to a single audio file for Podcast publishing.

Well, I’ve been without a PC at home for a while now having suffered yet another hard-disk failure. Not anymore. It’s hard to believe but I’ve just switched to a Mac, an iMac.

So far, so good, so very good.

Cool feature of the day has to be the magnet on the right side to hold the Apple Remote.

And this is my first post from it (using Firefox).

iPod next.

p.s. this is also my first post to feature photographs taken on my new digital SLR EOS 30D - for those who care, an external bounce flash was used to compensate for low light.

You may be interested to know that I also post about Alfresco (an open source Enterprise CMS, where I devote my software development time) on Alfresco’s blog.

It’s been years since I developed software on anything other than a windows box. Now, as Alfresco begins to gain traction and our community grows, it’s obvious that no single platform is a clear leader for either development or deployment. Alfresco source code is 99.9% Java which has obviously helped attraction in all environments. However, as we provide an open source offering, the idea of operating in a completely free stack, from OS to database to application server to application to browser is very appealing. Hence, I shall dip into this idea by first enabling dual boot Windows/Linux on my development laptop. Of course, I shall follow my colleagues lead and learn from his experiences posted here.

In February of this year, Alfresco was just a set of ideas, designs and long list of questions - including “what do we call this thing?”.

Roll on eight short months, and Alfresco v1.0 is released on 1st Nov, in two forms, open source & enterprise network.

First day sourceforge stats are:
alfresco-jboss-1.0.0.tar.gz 242
Download alfresco-jboss-1.0.0.zip 5236
Download alfresco-src-1.0.0.zip 2900
Download alfresco-tomcat-1.0.0.tar.gz 451
Download alfresco-tomcat-1.0.0.zip 2480
Download alfresco-war-1.0.0.zip 212

Not bad at all, now the fun is really starting as we engage with all sorts of users.

Well done guys - we need / deserve a beer.

Since the beginning of 2005 I’ve been concentrating on a new venture named Alfresco, an open source enterprise content management system. We announced ourselves in June and on the 27th, posted our preview release for download.

So far, we’ve actually been surprised by the positive response and coverage we’re getting in the press. This is encouraging and helping us drive towards our next goal in October.

Alfresco is different in that the core team (which includes dedicated qa & user interface design) has come from the commercial content management world and is not only experienced in these matters, but has worked together for years. The jewel though is that John Newton (co-founder of Documentum - the big bang of content management) is the co-founder (with John Powell of Business Objects) of Alfresco. This gives Alfresco at least 15 years of experience in content management with a unique understanding and insight based on the requirements of thousands of enterprises.

What’s happening now? Well, we’re beginning to build a community (both developer and end-user) whilst heads-down on delivering the first “production” release targetted October 05.

The current preview includes a content management repository, portlet based web application concentrating on document management (which just looks and feels great - yes, I’m biased, but it’s true) as well as CIFS integration for windows and unix file access. All of this is available at http://www.alfresco.org.

Recently, the development team I belong to received two days of training on the Spring framework. It’s certain now that our infrastructure stack will include Spring. I’ve gained some more insight into the framework, so am likely to update the Spring Start tutorial. It requires some tidy up and corrections anyway - when that’ll be, I’m not sure, as my first child is expected in the next 3 weeks.

The training was given by Rod Johnson himself. An interesting chap who has a unique style of teaching by writing code in front of your eyes (he obviously likes to write code). He also (almost obsessively) followed TDD - which was an eye opener for me, as I’d never actually seen a developer practice this in reality. But, having seen it for two days, I might have a go myself.

For a while, I’ve been intrigued by the growing popularity of the Spring Framework.

Like most, I had a surface understanding of its capabilities, but, recently I decided to delve deeper and actually write some code with it to learn a little more.

Spring comes with a mass of documentation and complete application samples, which is pretty good compared to some open source projects. However, it’s all a bit overwhelming for the novice who’s just walked in the door. Where do you start?

Well, I’ve persevered and cut through some of it. And, as a result I’ve compiled some very simple examples for the developer who’s never seen Spring before and wants to know where to start on day one.

I’ve bundled the code samples together with all their required dependencies into the following Spring Start - a getting started guide / tutorial for the Spring Framework. The whole thing has been tailored for use within the Eclipse IDE and takes almost no setup to get going. You should be able to step through code that uses Spring within minutes.

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