Only- Electronics

The iPod shouldn’t dominate the digital-media-player market.

One of the biggest frustrations of people who record and edit audio is the amount of time it takes to fix volume level issues. If you record two people, one of them is invariably softer than the other in the mix. You might turn your head away from the microphone to look at a distraction or have the microphone pointed away from the source. This even happens to the pros on occasion. To solve this common frustration, Gigavox created The Levelator. Essentially, the software examines a WAV or AIFF file, looks for volume inconsistencies and fixes them. It’s a bit geekier than that under the hood. The Levelator handles both the gain optimization on a file and RMS normalization to make sure the volume level is consistent. The output is a new file, so you can always go back to the original if you need to. The software runs on both Windows and OS X and is free for personal non-commercial use. While The Levelator can’t do anything to make your podcast more interesting, this is the first tool I’ve ever seen that makes almost anyone sound like they hired a top-notch engineer. If editing audio has been holding you back from podcasting or making music, give The Levelator a shot, you’ll be surprised by how simple it is to sound great. [Windows 2k/XP Mac OS X $0.00]

This week’s podcast comes to you from the Wired NextFest in New York City. Jason Margolis looks at all
the newest technologies on display. The latest robots, looking to put your local bartender out of work. A
surgical experiment in zero gravity. Bringing the Internet to rural Filipino seaweed farmers. Nomadic
Mexicans using lanterns, powered by energy. New games, where the joystick is controlled by your brainwaves. And the airline boarding passes of tomorrow.

Few corporations deserve to be equated to Richard Nixon’s White House or Enron, but Hewlett-Packard seems richly entitled to that comparison. And unlike those two arch-villains, HP awaits your judgment the next time you walk into any computer or electronics store. What do you do?

Windows XP is turning five years old, but will anybody want to celebrate the occasion?

Exploring the depths of the ocean floor. The effects of climate change in Bangladesh. A big chunk of change to combat climate change. An interview with one of the world’s best cyber gamers. And letting people know about AIDS in Africa through song. And, more e-mails from you.

If anybody can fix the broken movie-download market, it ought to be Amazon or Apple.

A birthday celebration: looking back at 25 years of the personal computer. A bank filled with seeds buried deep in the Artic. Permafrost melts in Siberia. A conversation from Australia: the stance on climate change from Down Under. And the benefits of green tea? And your letters, along with the magical sounds of the one and only Alex Gallafent on keyboard, drums, trumpet and guitar.

For several years now, the refrain in the movie industry has been: “We don’t want to make the same mistake as the music industry.” Hollywood studios, having ventured billions of dollars on their titles, say they can’t afford to let customers get used to finding movies via black-market file-sharing.

Mike writes, I’ve been trying to embed a Windows Media Player on my website and have it play from a library. I’ve figured out the part of embedding the player itself but cannot figure out how to get the player to play from a list of mp3s elsewhere on my site.

You could create an ASX file that calls each of the files and then link to that ASX file from the embedded Windows Media Player, but I’ve never had that work consistently without setting up Windows Media Services on a Windows server. Using a simple ASX setup doesn’t allow for easy skipping between tracks or any of the normal play controls you might expect from most of the common media players. The only easy way to build an embedded playlist with Windows Media Player is to have a server running Windows Media Services hosting all the files. A better alternative is to setup an embedded Flash based player designed for playing back files. Read on to find out how to setup an embedded Flash playlist.