Notwithstanding how much of a fan I am, it was definitely worth the extra $110 to see The Police for a second time on their ‘reunion tour’. I took in their July 25, 2007 show at the Bell Centre in Montreal (click here for that blog post), and last night’s opener of the third and final leg of their tour and career as The Police, here in Ottawa.

Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland looked and sounded very refreshed following a two month break. They opened with a ‘controlled’ version of Bring on The Night with Sting on acoustic guitar and bass pedals which gave the song a presence that could be felt in your rib cage. It wasn’t the whip-the-audience-into-a-frenzy start you’d expect from this tour. It was an entrance full of finesse. They saved the frenzy for their second number, a ripping version of Demolition Man. It was a one-two combination of songs they didn’t include in Montreal and both are very welcome additions to the set.

Sting seemed to enjoy himself much more last night than he did in Montreal. He moved about the stage more naturally and worked the arena with good banter, all in English (Sting has a history of fumbling through his French during previous appearances in Ottawa). He conducted the room through a few ’sing-alongs’ that were more reminiscent of their heyday than last year’s performance in Montreal. Andy also seemed more in place last night and worked the arena on several occassions; a bonus. Stewart is always fun to watch.

At one point Sting recalled a 1979 performance in a theatre here in Ottawa. I remember an article in the Ottawa Citizen (many years ago) with the original Barrymore’s owner about his biggest regret being the cancellation of an appearance by The Police during their first Canadian tour. The cancellation was on the grounds that they were a punk band and he was having bad experiences with the punk scene in his bar. I hereby announce my intention to find out if they did actually play Ottawa.

While there were a couple of weak moments in the show (Invisible Sun didn’t carry enough umph and Don’t Stand So Close To Me remains a near show killer on this tour) the concert was filled with musical highlights like Driven To Tears, Voice Inside My Head/When The World Is Running Down, Synchronicity II, Message In A Bottle, Can’t Stand Losing You, So Lonely and a great if not slightly-slower-than-it-should-be version of Hole In My Life. Noticeably absent was their reworked version of Walking In Your Footsteps and thankfully absent was their watered down version of Truth Hits Everybody.

The concert ended on a high with an edgier-than-Montreal version of Next To You. It was their second encore and, by all accounts, the beginning of the home stretch of all Police collaboration. Too bad, really. The record industry would get a great lift if they produced a new studio album. Of course, this tour was never supposed to happen so we can always hang on to that hope.

Thanks for the Ottawa show, boys! It was great to be able to see you in my hometown. Good luck with the rest of the tour and thanks for the music.

I am a huge fan of my Delta 1010 audio card (by M-Audio).  I love the card and its driver so much that I’ve made sure to keep a PC with a PCI bus in my house and haven’t made the move to a Mac Pro because I’m concerned that the Mac driver isn’t as powerful and feature rich as the PC driver.  Indeed, I was incredibly disappointed when I bought the M-Audio Firewire 1814 card for my Mac and discovered that the driver was lacking at least one of the features I love most (keep reading and see Delta 1010 and Skype: a powerful combo for this podcaster).

Last night I upgraded my Delta 1010 driver to the most recent version, Delta_V32_5.10.00.5065.exe.  To my horror, M-Audio has decided to remove all of the flexibility and power I have come to enjoy with my Delta 1010 and dream to have in my 1814.  They have removed a series of audio routing options that have wiped out the ability to record the mix-monitor track without sending it back through the audio chain — a feature that allows me to record a local microphone and the input (or monitor mix) as separate streams in Cubase.

If you are a Delta 1010 owner, I highly recommend that you do not upgrade beyond Delta_WDM_5.10.00.5057v3.exe.  That driver is solid, powerful and feature rich.

I upgraded the Cubase 4 installation on my MacBook Pro from 4.0.3 to 4.1, yesterday evening, and discovered that I was no longer able to import and export MP3 files. The symptoms included:

• Error: Medium type not supported or invalid medium! when trying to import MP3 files;
• Missing export preferences for MPEG 1 Layer 3 File format in the Export Audio Mixdown window; and,
• Unexpected Error when trying to export MP3 files.

I checked the Cubase.net forums and saw that many other people had the same problem. Still, many had a seemless and error-free upgrade. A few workarounds and possible solutions have been shared in the forums with mixed results.

I submitted a ticket to Cubase support today and Lindsay was amazingly helpful and responsive with this Mac-specific fix that worked right away!

• Close all Steinberg applications
• Go to Mac HD–>users–>you–>library–>preferences–>
• Move all Cubase 4 and Cubase SX folders to the system Desktop
• Reopen Cubase 4
• It may take a while for Cubase to rebuild the preferences folder

While it may have been inconvenient and scary for a few hours, Cubase is worth these exciting moments. Of course, if I had lost data it might be a whole different story.

Thanks a million Lindsay and Steinberg!

I brought my MacBook Pro to an authorized Mac service depot to upgrade my internal drive from an 80Gb/5400rpm drive to a 200Gb/7200rpm drive. The service I arranged included a cloning of the data of my existing drive to the new drive so that, other than the sudden increase in available disk space and speed, I would notice no difference.

That was the theory.

As I understand it, the technician used Migration Assistant, a data transfer tool that comes with the Tiger operating system. The process resulted in a new user path on my drive which broke all of the application and data hooks. My environment was a disaster. With the exception of Address Book, all of my applications crashed and reported errors when I started them. I was unable to save data to certain directories in my user environment because I apparently had insufficient privileges. I tried everything I could to fix the environment, drawing on my Unix experience. Nothing worked. Thankfully I still had the original drive in an external chassis and figured out that I could boot to that as an alternative.

By the time 11pm rolled around, I was at my wit’s end. That’s when I took one last look online and discovered Carbon Copy, a shareware tool by Bombich Software that claims to offer the “absolutely best fidelity in the industry“. I rebooted to my original drive, downloaded and installed Carbon Copy and started a drive-to-drive clone of my data. At 1:00am, about 25% into the transfer process, I decided to go to bed.

About twenty minutes ago I bolted out of bed and ran to my computer. Carbon Copy reported that it had done its job and I rebooted to my new internal drive. Sweet success! My system is just as it was before the upgrade, only with a larger and faster drive. All of my applications load, all of my data is accessible and I have privileges to my user environment.

Thank you Carbon Copy!!! A donation has been made.

I had the chance to take the Samson Zoom H4 portable digital recorder for a test drive in December (thank you to Steve’s Music in Ottawa). At first glance it looks to be a distant cousin of the Sony PCM-D1 — at a fraction of the cost.

The Zoom H4 has many of the same features as its direct competitors — the M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96 and Edirol R-1 (I can’t bring myself to consider the R-09 to be in the same league) which include internal mics that capture a great sonic spectrum and have nice stereo definition, and an interface that’s easy to understand.

There are significant bonuses with the H4. This device comes with two combination XLR-1/4″ inputs with phantom power (a huge feature), a built in limiter and other digital processing effects, and four-track recording with amp modelling (for all you musicians out there). All that and it fits in the palm of your hand.

The downside to the H4 is that the switches at the side of the unit are stiff, and I found the “joystick” control to feel delicate — I was concerned about breaking it.

The Zoom H4 is a great addition to the market and offers yet another great option for anyone looking to buy a portable recorder. Be sure to consider all features carefully and pick the unit that best suits your needs.

Authors: Paul Colligan and Alex Mandossian
Published: 2006 Morgan James Publishing
ISBN: 1933596376 Chapters.ca Amazon.com

While some may argue that Podcasting is still too young to merit a “business bible”, the ambitious early adopters have been known to help explain and define the marketplace so the timing of their books will always be in question. Of greater concern is the accuracy of the facts and the nature of the vision.

Paul and Alex definitely have a good view of the Podcast marketplace and they open The Business Podcasting Bible with a solid discussion on what defines Podcasting. From page one they challenge the reader to think holistically about any Podcasting strategy, business or otherwise. In fact, I feel that this book has the strongest philosophical discussion on Podcast production and consumption to date — almost to the point that I questioned if the book’s title was accurate.

The Bible is a great introduction to Podcast-based business and marketing strategies, and definitely inspires exploration and innovation. There is discussion on both direct and indirect models of monetization, and the authors set the stage for further analysis of the use of Podcasts to market organizations and thought leadership. I believe that the “Podosphere” is just too oversaturated to seduce the kinds of sponsorship and advertising dollars that the early adopters had envisioned.

The authors encourage the reader to question the various elements of the decision to Podcast. The most important of these questions is ‘why?’ and ‘when?’, and the book guides you through the thought process.

If I could change one thing about the book it would be to turn the sidepanel discussions (some of which carry on for several pages thus forcing the reader to backtrack) into full-page panels.

Paul and Alex are clearly knowledgeable and excited about the power and flexibility of Podcasting. More importantly, they are very honest about its shortcomings. It is this combination that makes the book a great resource for anyone considering using a Podcast as a business or marketing (business OR personal) tool.

About a month ago, Anders Holte Nielsen announced that he has discontinued development of his popular Counterize WordPress plugin, a plugin that summarizes and presents statistical information about a WordPress blog. Fortunately, he offered a solid alternative, the relatively young FireStats plugin by Omry Yadan.

I installed FireStats on two of my WordPress sites today. The installation was typically easy and the interface is slick with a collection of important statistical information. Even so, one of my FireStats installations came up with nice tabbed navigation interface, the other did not. I posted a comment on the FireStats Blog to report the problem. Omry was right on top of the post - he replied within fifteen minutes. The issue appears to be with the way the Sociable plugin applies javascript to the WordPress administrative interface, and Omry is tracking the problem as issue 51 in his ticket system.

If Omry can add a graphs tab that provides graphical representations of hits and visits by hour, day of week, day of month and month of year (current, average and running totals for these graphs would also be great) I would have no reason to operate any other statistical plugins. For icing on the cake, I would love it if FireStats had full featured statistical gathering for the PodPress plugin since PodPress has some unresolved bugs and development efforts seem to be stagnating.

Tricks of the Podcasting Masters (TotPM) is the latest book about Podcasting. This offering by Rob Walch (Podcast 411) and Mur Lafferty (Geek Fu Action Grip) was released at the beginning of June.

In the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t read any of the previous books (in their entirety) - probably because I didn’t think they had anything to offer that I didn’t already know. However, I have read sections of those books while hanging out at Chapters/Indigo.

TotPM offers information that I haven’t seen in any of the books I have skimmed through. Rob and Mur have done a great job summarizing genres and identifying their standouts from these genres in a case-study style. They offer great insight into the challenges of Podcasting and make strong suggestions on surviving the hobby. The authors also offer ideas for various types of organizations (e.g. mainstream media, NGOs, government agencies, educational institutions, etc..) that may be considering Podcasting as a tool. What they do especially well is present ways to promote your Podcast and they provide a very realistic view of revenue opportunities and how to evaluate them.

Discussions in the book that I have concerns about include the chapter “The Art of the Interview”, and some of the technical areas such as editing and production. Specifically, some of my ideas on conducting and editing interviews are very different than the authors’, and there is a noticeable absence of any worthwhile technical details, a fact that the authors acknowledge in the text. I also feel that the comparison of a newspaper being able to cheaply adopt Podcasting versus a radio station having to invest millions to get into printing was weak; a more accurate and level comparison would have the radio station launching an informative, text-based website.

Podcasting books have been serving up great introductions to the craft. This is the first book that takes Podcasting information to the next level and introduces solid suggestions, creative ideas and realistic data.

If it were up to me, the next book to be published for Podcasters would offer more specific details on editing and production techniques without a slant towards music production.