Creek / music

I made it down to the creek for the first time in more than ten days. God, it was good to get away from the house! It's been quite a while since I took an inventory of beaver-chewed trees. That was today's priority. The results are: 43 trees showing only bark sampling, 22 with some zylem damage and 41 downed, either partially or fully. The partially down trees are typically entangled with others still standing and simply cannot fall any further. That's a total of 106 trees some kind of beaver activity. Referring back to my last count, the total is down. That could be explained by missing some of the old stumps.

I got word that a few eagles are hanging around now that the ice is melting, so I checked for them too. I saw two in the trees on the south end and one one the ice. As for the ice, it's mostly gone; the lake is 90% water now.

The guy who sold me on replacing the roof was in the neighborhood yesterday. I found that he had visited one neighbor I'd referred to the company, and saw him climbing on a second neighbor's roof. I get a credit on my bill for the referral, and was told by her that she'd referred the second. Damn! I was going to approach them for permission to refer them.

I'm beginning to have doubts as to the ultimate listenability of the vinyl I've been ripping to the PC. During the recording I occasionally hear a burble in the sound as Windows or some hidden process wakes up and sucks some processing power. I've checked the tracks in the past and come to the conclusion that it shows up during the simultaneous playback function because on replay that burbled area sounds OK. Today there was a significant burble, perhaps caused by a running virus scan. When I played that section back there were bits (words) noticably missing -- they hadn't been recorded. It may be that when I checked in the past the missing bits were too short to be noticed. I just don't know. With 70 records now recorded in whole with the Ion/Audacity setup I'm reluctant to go back and redo them all. I'm not even sure that would work, even with all non-Windows processes terminated.


I've had another minor complaint about Audacity. It's click removal filter doesn't get them all. As a matter of fact, some significant ones slip through. But I have found a way to eliminate them. A click is usually visible in the waveform display (mine is four minutes wide, scrolling across the screen). I put the cursor on the suspect waveform, highlight it and begin to zoom in (magnify) the waveform. That centers the highlighted spot. If the click starts wandering off center, I highlight it again and magnify again, recentering it. Magnify the waveform enough and you can see the individual sound samples which are taken at the rate of 44,100 per second. At that point I switch to the pencil tool and redraw the waveform, eliminating the wild oscillation that is the click. Demagnify (zoom out) and listen to the section. The click is usually gone.

There is one type of click that's just too much trouble to remove with the technique. It doesn't show on the compressed waveform display but can clearly be heard. Highlight that spot and zoom in, and what do I see when I get down to the sample level but a several screen wide very high frequency sound (around 10kHz-20kHz) riding on the music. It's nearly impossible to redraw that wide a click without the fix being as noticeable as the original aberration. So, it stays adding to the vinyl-ness of the product.