Month: April 2018

How to EQ vocals

Of course there is no exhaustive and conclusive answer to “how to EQ vocals“, but there are some guidelines you can follow and that offer you reasonable results even if you’re not into audio.

You can use the following 4 steps within your audio package of choice.

Step 1 – Remove low frequency rumble
Set your “High Pass Filter” somewhere between 80 and 120 Hz

Step 2 – Add more freshness to audio track
Top shelf, boosting high from 8 kHz with 1 to 6 db (if you want to do it subtle: 12 – 16 kHz)

Step 3 – Reduce offending frequencies
Sweep your vocal track by using a small bell curve, to find offending frequencies round 800 – 1 kHz and reduce them by -3 db

Step 4 – Make vocals more outstanding
Boost the vocal presence in your mix, by boosting the range between 2 – 5 kHz with 1 to 4 db

 

EXTRA:

  • With everything you do while EQ ing your audio, listen carefully to the results!
  • Never work on your original files, always use a copy!

 

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Backing up and restoring software installations in Ubuntu

Sometimes you just want to restore (or clone) your favorite (studio ;-)) installation, to a clean installed, freshly formatted machine, without having to  install manually all your favorite applications again.

This can be done, by exporting the list of all your installed applications to a text file and reinstall all your applications listed in the text file to your freshly formatted machine (as Hannibal would have said “I love it when a plan comes together“).

First create a text file in your ‘Home’ folder containing a list of all your applications of your favorite (studio ;-)) installation. Open a terminal window:

sudo dpkg –get-selections > app-backup-list.txt

 

Next copy the file “app-backup-list.txt” from your ‘Home’ folder to your freshly formatted machine (your ‘Home’ folder will do ;-). Now to restore your applications, open a terminal window:

sudo dpkg –get-selections < app-backup-list.txt
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

 

Suggestions for improving this article are welcome, please let me know and drop me a line .

Running Google Sketchup on Wine

You can run “Sketchup the 3D modelling software for everyone from Google” in Wine on Ubuntu. In this article I’ll try to explain how to get by the error “Sketchup was unable to initialize OpenGl”.

This error is relatively easy to get by.

  • Go to your “Home folder and make sure you see all your hidden files (in Gnome File Browser go to View and select “Show Hidden Files”.
  • Go to .wine folder
  • Open the file user.reg with notepad or Gedit
  • Search for GLConfig
  • Change de “HW_OK”=dword:00000000 to “HW_OK”=dword:00000001
  • Save the changes you made in the file user.reg

Now you’re ready to start Google Sketchup on Wine

 

Suggestions for improving this article are welcome!

Please let me know and drop me a line.

Firefox zoom not working on Mac OSX

By default the “pinch open” and “close zoom” options are not working in Firefox on OSX. But it’s not that hard to enable the Firefox zoom settings, if you know how to do it…

Open Firefox
Go to a new tab, type in “about:config” and hit <Enter>.
Click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.

You can now modify the related browser.gesture preferences by changing the values as stated below:

  • browser.gesture.pinch.in -> cmd_fullZoomReduce
  • browser.gesture.pinch.in.shift -> cmd_fullZoomReset
  • browser.gesture.pinch.out -> cmd_fullZoomEnlarge
  • browser.gesture.pinch.out.shift -> cmd_fullZoomReset
  • browser.gesture.pinch.latched -> false

Once you have changed the preferences, close the tab and the new settings should work. You might want to restart Firefox!?

 

Suggestions for improving this article are welcome, please let me know and drop me a line.

Updating Squeezelite on your Raspberry Pi

After running Squeezelite on my Raspberry Pi for a while, I thought it would be time to update Squeezelite to it’s latest version. And this is how I did it…

First you’ll have to login to your Raspberry Pi, you might want to open a terminal and use SSH…

If you don’t have a squeezelite folder, then create one! You can do this by using mkdir in your terminal:

mkdir squeezelite

 

Now go to your squeezelite folder:

cd squeezelite

 

Remove an older version, if it’s there:

rm ./squeezelite-armv6hf

 

Next download the latest version:

wget http://squeezelite-downloads.googlecode.com/git/squeezelite-armv6hf

 

Remove the old version:

sudo rm /usr/bin/squeezelite-armv6hf

 

Copy the latest version to the folder /usr/bin:

sudo cp squeezelite-armv6hf /usr/bin

 

Setting the permissions right:

sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/squeezelite-armv6hf

 

Reboot If you want, else stop start the service:

sudo shutdown -r now

 

Now you are ready to rock and roll (again) !!!

 

Suggestions for improving this article are welcome, please let me know and drop me a line .