Tag: iPhone

Welcome to Sunday and a Little FOMO Talk

These days it seems like all I do is complain about how tired I am. If that is the case, then why am I still awake at 12:44am. I’m really tired, but I just can’t seem to drift off. It is really annoying.

My still being awake has nothing to do with the huge thunderstorms that have been rolling buy for the last 2.5 hours or so. The lightning made the back yard look like a Pink Floyd gig, and the thunder was loud enough to shake the house a few times. What I wanted to see in the sky tonight was the Persiod (sp?) meteor shower, but the weather did not play ball. We got Earth shattering thunder instead.

This afternoon my wife, one of her friends, and I went to a movie. Afterward, we went out to eat at a nice restaurant in Lowell. The name escapes me. Jen was working right up until we left and we were a little late getting out of the house. In my haste I did something foolish.

I forgot my iPhone.

If I had had my phone with me I could have checked in on Facebook at the restaurant and I’d be able to give you it’s name. If I’d had my phone I would have posted my mini-review of the new Star Trek flick long before I did. If I’d had my phone I would have been able to Google that Olympic bike race we saw that had the weird moped pace car thing and found out why the moped paced the track for six out of eight laps. I would also have been able to snap a pic of the salt shaker using Hipstamatic. It would have been soooo artistic.

It’s not so much a FOMO (fear of missing out) thing for me. It’s more of a FOMOOAOSM (fear of missing out on an over sharing moment) kind of thing.

It’s 1:03am now. Maybe I’ll try sleeping again. My beautiful bride has our alarm clock set for 5:00am. Better get what I can.

One Day Behind

I feel so out of touch. There was an Apple Event yesterday and I was not able to follow along with any live blogs or anything. I missed almost all of the new gadget revelations.

I know there’s a new iPad that I want.
I know there’s a new WatchOS.
I know there’s a new iPhone.

I know these things, but I know nothing about them.

My step kids’ father loaded a release candidate of the new iOS onto their phones. Last night my step son loaded a release candidate of the new WatchOS onto his watch. I’m not going to do either of those things. When it comes to software releases, I prefer to play it safe(er) and wait for the actual release. Still… they have stuff on their devices that I don’t have! I am so far behind the curve right now. I have actual gadget envy over gadgets that I actually have!

iPhone Sadness

The iPhone 6 Plus is dead.  Long live the iPhone 6 Plus.

A while ago I had a problem with my iPhone’s headphone jack.  A little ball of lint got stuck in it and I couldn’t plug in.  I took it in for service and they pulled out some fuzz and life was good.  The next time I plugged in headphones the same thing happened.  The plug went in a little further, but nothing connected.  I vowed to go back, but months went by with nothing.

Until today!  Last night I booked a service appointment and backed up the phone on my desktop.  Today I was at the store for less than five minutes before the Jack was clean.  I asked them for a pair of headphones I could test with and the plug clicked in sweetly.  When I got to the car I plugged into the stereo and… Nothing.  The music came through the phone’s built in speaker.  I got out of the car and went back in to the store.

They don’t fix broken headphone jacks, the just replace the phone.  Sad face.  I had a few minutes to wait so I started frantically signing out of everything.  iCloud first, then my work email, then as much as I could get to.  They brought out a new phone and swapped the SIM card (never seen them do that before), and let me paranoiacly test the headphones.  Then off I went.

Now I’m updating the OS to iOS 8.2 so that I can restore from last night’s back up.

The moral of the story?  Always keep an up to date back up of your devices!

There is No Excuse for Clipping

Now I know how Rush must have felt when they got the first mix of Vapor Trails…

It’s a good thing these are just demos and not a real attempt at doing anything… real.

So the vocals… the clipping… the distortion. No excuse. It’s spoiled the entire song for me.

This is the second of two songs that I recorded in their entirety using GarageBand for iPhone. My ability to get a good vocal take on an iOS device is iffy at best, but I was just all over the place with my iPhone today.

Tonight, when I did the iOS mix of this one the vocals sounded bad, but they always sound bad, you know? They were worse than most of the songs I’ve done this month, but it wasn’t the end of the world.

Then I ported the file to the Mac and I could actually see the waveforms. Uh oh. Then I actually played the track. Oh damn, what a mess.

Sorry about that.


———-

As soon as I heard how distorted the vocal tracks were I listened back to the iOS mix to see how bad it sounded there. Now that I knew what I was looking for, yeah it’s there. It just doesn’t seem quite as insultingly awful on the first mix.


———-

I suppose I could go back and rerecord, but June ends on Monday and it’s a kid weekend. I don’t have time to do any more vocal recording. I’m stuck with this, unless I want to fix it next month. I won’t want to fix it next month though. The best this can hope for is that I rerecord the entire song from scratch at some future date.

Fat Finger Syndrome

I posted not long ago about how for the first time ever I used GarageBand on my iPhone to record a song from start to finish, top to bottom. It was a happy little up with people flavored post.

I actually had two songs this month on the iPhone. This morning I finished the vocals on the second song.

Never again.

I had the worst case of fat finger syndrome ever recorded in human history. You want to move the cursor from one block to another? Well hey, let’s drag this guitar segment along with it, and in doing so erase two other segments. Hey, now let’s repeat that nearly catastrophic error like four times!

Never again!

A GarageBand First

I said I was going to do all of the recording this month using GarageBand on my iPad. That’s mostly correct.

I just finished doing something that I’d never done before. I have a song that is recorded 100% on my iPhone. Drums and bass are GarageBand MIDI tracks. There are also two tracks of guitar, the Strat, and three tracks of vocals.

It’s rough, but everything this month is rough. I’m just glad I was able to sneak in a vocal today before this SOB of a cold ruins what little voice I have.

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