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Philip Glass album, which I learned about via Twitter.

To my surprise, I discovered 140 other free MP3 albums on the site. I had no idea.

I’m a big fan of international/roots music, so I was thrilled to find many free albums in this genre. These are all sampler compilations, so it’s hit and miss—but there are some good songs to be discovered. I’m not too surprised about that—the point of sampler music is to get you to buy albums from the featured label, so it’s in their interest to include a solid cross-sample of their best offerings.

Back in the day (just a few years ago, really), I frequently picked up low-cost or free sampler albums from labels in music stores. These days, I tend to get my music online from two primary sources: iTunes and Mondomix (before Mondomix, I frequented the now-defunct Calabash, which was bought out by Mondomix). I haven’t bought much from Amazon.

Here’s my point: iTunes doesn’t offer much in terms of free ‘sample’ music beyond the ‘Free Single of the Week.’ Calabash used to offer a lot of free singles. Mondomix does not, but they do offer streaming radio mixes and a decent podcast (it’s in French, by the way). There are not many online sources that offer a place to pick up free sample compilations anymore. Amazon, it turns out, has some of the best free offerings I’ve come across. Who knew.

At any rate, here’s what I think are some of the best of the lot from Amazon’s current free ‘International’ collection:

- Pressure Sounds sampler: solid reggae and dub tracks.
- Rotana sampler: great collection of Middle Eastern sounds from a huge label.
- Saavn sampler: Bollywood music…you can’t go wrong with Bollywood tracks.
- Anana sampler: interesting collection of music from Israel.
- Epsa world music sampler: ‘tango & folklore’ from Argentina.
- Putamayo sampler: decent sampler of music from around the globe.
- Turkish hits: nice variety of Turkish artists.

A few other albums of note that I picked up from other collections:

- A surprisingly good, wide-ranging compilation of Baroque music.
- A great collection of old music (and I mean old…Medieval and Renaissance period sounds). If you like this sort of thing, by the way, I highly recommend Anonymous 4.
- An album with five solid blues-folk tracks from influential American artists on the Vanguard label (e.g. Odetta, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot).

Oh, and if you’re a Mojo Nixon fan (I’m not), head to the free album store now. Looks like pretty much all of Mojo’s stuff if currently free.

Whatever you’re into, the Amazon’s free MP3 collection is worth a browse.

Note: In case you’re wondering, this site is not sponsored in any way by Amazon.com. Just thought I’d share what I found there.

National Novel Writing Month kicks off for its tenth year. Entrants (you could be one of them!) commit to completing a 50,000-word novel in one month, completing the effort by midnight on Nov. 30. The rules are simple: start your oeuvre from scratch, meet the the minimum novel length, and submit your entry at the end of the month. That's about all there is to it.

What a great idea. The writing window for the event is ludicrously short by design. Rest assured that your novel will probably suck, and take solace in the fact that most other entries will equally suck. Who cares? And that's the point: it's OK. Just write. A deadline imposed by an outside force may help you to finally start that great work of fiction lurking in the shadows of your mind. Focus on quantity, worry about the quality later. Starting the writing process is often the hardest part, and this yearly event is a clever, fun way to get you started.

So, if you're up to the challenge, why not try out a couple of writing-focused Mac tools? Here's a couple of good deals tied to the event:

Scrivener. Download the trial version of this excellent writing tool for a special extended period that runs through Dec. 7 (longer than the usual 30-day trial period). Use Scrivener to research, organize, and write your breakthrough novel. If you reach your 50,000-word NaNoWriMo goal, you can buy Scrivener for 50 percent off the regular price ($40). If you don't make your goal, but still want to buy Scrivener, take advantage of a 20 percent discount by entering the discount code 'NANOWRIMO' in the coupon text field in their online store. Good deal. I've used Scrivener since July 2007, and I'm quite fond of it. It's a great creative writing tool, and adapts well to a variety of research and writing tasks.

Storyist. Here's another novel-focused app that aims to serve your research, word processing, and storyboarding needs. If you want to buy a copy to help you through NaNoWriMo, you can get 25 percent off the purchase price of the boxed ($79) or download ($59) version of the app by entering the coupon code 'NANOWRIMO' in the coupon text field in their online store. If you want to try out Storyist for the duration of NaNoWriMo before you buy, send Storyist a message to get a trial copy that'll keep working through the first week in December. If you decide to join the NaNoWriMo challenge and can make it to San Francisco for the kickoff event, you can get a free copy of the app. Lastly, Storyist is giving away two Kindles with $50 gift cards for those who raise the most money for the event — similar to a walk-a-thon, you can line up sponsors for your NaNoWriMo effort via Giftool.com if you're so inclined. Proceeds go to creative writing programs around the world.

This week, I decided to seek out alternatives to NetNewsWire, the popular feed reader from NewsGator.

My disenchantment with NetNewsWire began soon after NewsGator updated the app, switching from a private syncing service to Google Reader at the end of August. I didn’t have any trouble migrating my feeds to Google Reader, as some users did. I also didn’t mind that the updated version of the NNW desktop client displayed unobtrusive ads. Hey, it’s free (A paid version is in the works to get rid of the ad; a paid, ad-free version for iPhone is already available).

My problem with NetNewsWire is all about the iPhone app. Before NNW switched to Google Reader, my iPhone app was reliable, quick, and pleasant to use. After I upgraded to the newest version of the free NNW iPhone app, syncing began to take much longer and, more importantly, ceased to function reliably. Sometimes it would sync, sometimes it would not. It drove me crazy. Often, it would appear to sync correctly, but selecting a feed would result in a blank screen or (even more annoying) a blank screen with an embedded advertisement. I put up with this spotty performance for weeks (hoping it would get better, hoping it would be upgraded) before deciding to try something else.

I’m not saying that the NetNewsWire iPhone app is terrible. Based on user comments I’ve read, many people seem to be happy with it. I will say that, in it’s present version, I can’t use it. A reliable feed reader on my iPhone is important to me. This frustration led me to consider other options. Since there are many, many front ends to Google Reader for the iPhone, why not shop around? It was an easy decision. And since I decided to try out something new for my iPhone, I also decided to try out other desktop clients. It was sort of a reverse halo effect.

After sifting through a plethora of reviews for iPhone RSS readers, I decided to go with Byline (from Phantom Fish, current sale price: $3.99). I’m pleased with my choice. The interface is clean and simple. There are many customization settings, the best of which is that I can choose to cache from 25 to 200 feeds for offline viewing (great for subway commuting). I can also set it to cache items only when I’m using Wi-Fi, which is a handy option given I’m on a slow Edge network. Another nice touch is that I can choose to cache Web pages linked to feed posts. I can also read my feeds in landscape mode. It’s worth a look. The one glaring item I’m missing is the ability to mark a folder of feed items (or all items) as ‘read.’ As far as I can tell, I can only mark individual feed items as ‘read.’ A minor annoyance. According to the developer notes in the iTunes store, a new version is due out very shortly which promises to be a ‘major update.’ I’m looking forward to it.

As for a desktop replacement for NetNewsWire, the vote is still out. I’m currently testing two options: Gruml and feedly.

Gruml, currently in late stages of Beta, looks and operates much like NetNewsWire. The main difference is that Gruml offers more features. It allows me to send an article link from my feeds direct to a variety of social media sites. Or I can send an article direct to MarsEdit, which I find very handy (more blog tool integration is forthcoming). I can also post to Instapaper, my favorite iPhone ‘read it later’ app. More, I can share items and add notes to articles (options currently unavailable with NetNewsWire). So far, I like it. It’s easy on the eyes and is a quick, efficient way to get through a lot of feeds. It’s much easier to look at than Google Reader.

Feedly, on the other hand, is something completely different. It’s a free browser-based aggregation service (available on the Mac for FireFox or Safari) that presents your articles in a pleasant, customizable magazine style. It offers strong social media integration and fancy algorithm-based filtering/recommendations that purportedly improve over time based on reading habits. It’s also highly customizable. I’ve tried these kind of news readers before and never really cared for them, but this one is pretty slick. I vastly prefer it to the iGoogle service. I’m giving it a go. We’ll see if I like it as much a month or so from now.

Meanwhile, I’ve left NetNewsWire behind. I don’t miss it. If you have a suggestion for a killer feed reader for the desktop or iPhone, I’d love to hear about it.

If you attempted the temporary fix to get your wireless working correctly on your MacBook after the recent Mac OS 10.5.8 update, check out this MacFixIt post before you try to install the patch issued by Apple earlier today.

I reinstalled the 10.5.8 Combo Update, then applied the Airport patch, and all is now working well.

Last week, we discovered that my wife had not updated her Google Maps home location on her iPod Touch since our move to Maryland last year. As far as the little device was concerned, we still lived in Ewa Beach, Hawaii. We found this out because we had to travel to a Costco in Virginia from our home and needed directions. We usually use my iPhone to dial in a driving route, but on this occasion my wife fired up her Touch. The directions we received gave us a good laugh, and I thought I'd share a couple of screen shots. Someone at Google has a sense of humor.

If you are one of the many people experiencing AirPort connectivity problems after upgrading to 10.5.8, here’s a solution that worked for me, found on the Apple Discussions forums from user SpacePirate.

This solution allows you to revert to the 10.5.7 AirPort kernel extension (kext file) without reverting the entire OS back to 10.5.7. It appears that Apple is aware of the problem, so hopefully we’ll see an update soon that fixes this bug.

It’s worth emphasizing that you should not do this unless you are comfortable modifying system files. Ensure you have a good backup. Proceed at your own risk.

- Download the 10.5.7 Combo Update.

- Download and install Pacifist, a handy tool that allows you to extract specific files from an Apple package (i.e. the Combo Update is a .pkg file).

[Pacifist is $20 shareware. You can use it in trial mode to accomplish this task, but if you think it’s something you might use from time to time, consider buying it. It’s helpful for repairing damaged files without reinstalling the entire OS, verifying installations, and finding missing or altered files.]

- Turn off your AirPort.

- Delete /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAirport.kext.

- Delete /System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext.

- Extract /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAirport.kext from the 10.5.7 package using Pacifist and copy this file to the /System/Library/Extensions/ folder on your Mac.

[Open the 10.5.7 package with Pacifist, find the AppleAirport.kext file in the /System/Library/Extensions/ directory of the package, and extract this file to your /System/Library/Extensions/ folder on your Mac, or copy the file to the desktop, then drag it to the /System/Library/Extensions/ folder on your Mac. Don’t try taking these files from a Time Machine backup unless you know how to properly set permissions for the copied files. If you use Pacifist, the app will set the correct permissions for you.]

- Extract /System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext from the 10.5.7 package with Pacifist using the method described in the previous step.

- Delete the /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kernelcaches/ folder.

- Delete /System/Library/Extensions.mkext.

- Empty your trash. Reboot.

- Turn the AirPort back on.

We’re about to head North to my home state of Maine for a couple of weeks, a place I haven’t lived for 20 years. Over the past two decades, I’ve moved from Colorado, to Boston, to Guam, to Germany, back to Boston, to Germany again, to Hawaii, and (most recently) to Washington, DC. For work and pleasure, I’ve had the privilege of traveling throughout Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and around the Pacific Rim. Yet I still consider myself to be from Maine.

What I’ve missed most about Maine over the years, aside from family, is the remoteness of the place. At points past Bangor, you can still get properly lost. There’s the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, a natural water park over 90 miles long best seen by canoe. There’s Baxter State Park, where you can hike to a distant pond, cast your fly rod all day, and not once hear or see another human.

And there’s a vast section of unnamed townships between Bangor and Eastport riddled with lakes, covered by trees, and connected by logging roads. It’s one of many places in Maine where moose and deer outnumber people. It’s here that we’ll be staying with my folks at their camp on the edge of a very large lake sparsely populated with a few camps, cabins, and campsites. It’s a quiet place. It’s far from other people, electricity, running water, or many of the other amenities we’re accustomed to in our urban environment. And we can’t wait to get there.

When I was a kid, I used to explore the world with the aid of a small shortwave radio and dream about leaving Maine. I would often spend hours at night, alone in my room, slowly churning through the channels. I could usually get Voice of America and the BBC. I would often pick up French language stations from Quebec. I once picked up an English language broadcast from Cuba. And, weather permitting, every so often I would pick up broadcasts in German, Chinese, or Russian. It was exhilarating.

These days, I experience much of the world through the glare of LCD screens. At work, I spend the bulk of my days in front of dual monitors, shuffling between applications and responding to e-mails. At home, I often find myself sitting in front of another set of dual monitors, shuffling between a similar bunch of applications. And wherever I go, I carry my trusty iPhone. When I’m not working on a project, I’m likely managing multiple e-mail accounts, or floating between different social media sites, or surfing the Web, or doing something online.

While I’m a big fan of technology and gadgetry, the amazing ease and convenience many of us have grown to expect comes at a cost. Today, I can casually read news, hear radio stations, or watch broadcasts from all over the world. I can chat with friends in Europe as if they were next door. I’m never disconnected from the Internet. Yet I rarely feel that sense of mystery and exploration that I experienced surfing for distant voices over the airwaves.

That’s why I still like to listen to shortwave from time to time. It takes work. You need to find the right bands, you need to dial slowly, and you need to rely on chance because reception is tied to atmospheric conditions. Sometimes you find interesting broadcasts, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you only pick up the background radiation of the universe. In all cases, you can only listen. I like that.

I’m looking forward to visiting Maine. It’ll be nice to get away from the city and unplug for a while. I’ll also be taking a shortwave radio. For an hour or so during the trip, I plan to canoe out into the lake at dark, put on some headphones and see what I can tune in.

Podcast Production Process from Troy Kitch on Vimeo.

As I mentioned in a previous post, part of my job is to produce a bi-weekly audio podcast (for the National Ocean Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Recently, I was asked to put together a presentation about what it takes to produce it. To that end, I made the following video at home on my Mac using a product called ScreenFlow from Telestream.

This screencast provides an overview of the workflow involved in the podcast production process, with a few tips specifically relevant to those who work in the Federal government. However, it's aimed at a general audience. If you're interested in making a podcast with interviews, it'll give you a good sense of the time and resources involved.

It's also a demonstration of ScreenFlow, an outstanding screencasting application. I purchased ScreenFlow a few months ago, and intend to use it for some future projects on this site. It's a bit pricey at $99, but well worth it if you have the need. It's as easy to use as iMovie, and I think the results are stunning. Enjoy.

A few notes of interest.

1. MacUpdate Spring Bundle: Yet another bundle for $49. Standout included applications are TechTool Pro, Parallels, Circus Ponies Notebook, and NetBarrier.

2. Google Wave: What would E-mail look like if it were invented today? Check out this video preview from the Google I/O developer conference. Pretty interesting and ambitious (and it’s open source).

3. Adobe CS4: Dvorak and WebKit. I recently learned two interesting bits about Adobe CS4. First, CS4 drops Opera as a built-in rendering engine and replaces it with WebKit (the open-source browser engine used by Safari and Chrome, among others). That will fix the problem I encountered with Opera. And for Dvorak users out there, I received word from a reader that Adobe CS4 now correctly handles Dvorak and Dvorak-Qwerty. Finally.

4. QIDO: A company called KeyGhost in New Zealand is now offering a hardware device that plugs into a USB keyboard and allows one to convert from Qwerty to Dvorak instantly without relying on spotty operating system support (especially from Windows) and even spottier application support. They’re sending me one to test out and review. More to come.

5. History of the Earth in 60 seconds. I came across this several months ago. Watch 4.6 billion years of history compressed into one minute. Cool.

6. MIT Media Lab Center for Future Story Telling. I also came across this many months ago and have been meaning to post it. Here’s an excerpt:

Research will range from on-set motion capture to accurately and unobtrusively merge human performers and digital character models; to next-generation synthetic performer technologies, such as richly interactive, highly expressive robotic or animated characters; to cameras that will spawn entirely new visual art forms; to morphable movie studios, where one studio can be turned into many through advanced visual imaging techniques; to holographic TV. It will draw on technologies pioneered at the Media Lab, such as digital systems that understand people at an emotional level, or cameras capable of capturing the intent of the storyteller.

The MIT Media Lab does some very interesting work. The new Center is slated to open in 2010, but research is already underway. Sounds intriguing. Can I work there?

In my work life, one of my tasks is to produce an audio podcast. I use Soundtrack Pro and GarageBand to do the job. However, I recently tried out a few audio editing alternatives. I evaluated Adobe Soundbooth, Adobe Audition, and Audacity. I thought I’d share my conclusions:

- Adobe Soundbooth CS4 ($200). I found Soundbooth was a bit hard to use (read: non-intuitive) and had limited features. You can only split stereo tracks to mono by exporting them, which is silly. Even the free Audacity can split stereo tracks and convert to mono on the fly. You also can’t divide clips (at least, I couldn’t find how to do it after a reasonable period of time spent searching around). I was also unable to locate a scrubber, mixer, amplitude filter, and several other key features. They may be there somewhere, but I lost patience.

- Audacity (free). I found this to be an excellent open-source, free editor. Available filter and effect extensions (add-ons) give this editor most of the features available in pro-level applications. For a simple audio project, this would be sufficient. However, I discovered several limitations which render the current iteration of the app ineffective for large, complex multitrack projects: (1) for me at least, the app starts to crash periodically when I have more than 15 or so tracks, (2) When you split a file, it creates a new track (instead of leaving it in the same track as Soundtrack Pro and Audition do). This is a problem when you are editing an hour-long recording and need to pull out only about 10 minutes of clips. You soon end up with tons of separate tracks and it’s a pain to manage them; (3) You cannot drag and drop tracks around. You must manually select ‘move up’ or ‘move down’ from a drop-down list. This may not sound like a big deal, but it’s a huge deal when you have many tracks and need to order them. (4) While you can mute select tracks (so you can edit one or two clips at a time) and shrink the size of each track to save screen real-estate (necessary when you have many tracks), these settings aren’t saved. The next time you open up the app, all the tracks are ‘unmuted’ and expanded to the full size. The good news about Audacity is that the development community is active, there’s lots of online documentation and support, and the app continues to get better and better.

- Adobe Audition 3 ($350). Clearly, this is intended to be the main competitor for Soundtrack Pro. It does everything that Soundtrack Pro does, but several aspects of the design and layout of the application make it hard to use (at least from the perspective of someone very used to Soundtrack Pro). Overall, this is a very competent and powerful editor. However, I could do the same job in Soundtrack in about half the time. Again, I stress that this is coming from someone who knows Soundtrack Pro very well. I would recommend this to someone who has intensive audio editing needs, but does not wish to purchase or need the full Final Cut Studio.

My conclusion: I’m ready to head back to Soundtrack Pro. Maybe it’s because I’m most-familiar with it, but it’s the easiest tool I’ve found to put together podcasts. Another benefit of Soundtrack is that it seamlessly meshes with the other Final Cut tools for creating more complex multimedia and video projects (or for, say, pulling an audio track from a video interview to use in an audio podcast).

It’s not my preferred tool for creating enhanced podcasts or exporting AAC/MP3 files, though. I use GarageBand for this. GarageBand exports MP3s and AACs faster than Soundtrack Pro and produces smaller files. This shouldn’t be too surprising, considering it’s tailored to podcasting. Soundtrack Pro does podcasting as well, but I’ve found that the best way to use it is to export an uncompressed AIF file, and then work with that in GarageBand. It’s also the easiest tool to use for creating enhanced podcasts (adding chapters, pictures, and links to the audio podcast). And, it’s worth noting, it’s the only tool to use other than Soundtrack Pro that I’m aware of that allows one to create an enhanced file. GarageBand is, of course, also an all-in-one solution to create a podcast. You don’t need Soundtrack Pro. What you get with Soundtrack Pro is much greater control in terms of editing, filtering, and mixing. For many people, though, GarageBand will do the job nicely. And it’s cheap. Conversely, Soundtrack Pro only comes as part of the Final Cut Studio, which is quite expensive. I really wish Apple would offer the choice to by the apps in the Studio a la carte (an option they discontinued). If you’re on a Mac and wish to try your hand at podcasting, definitely start with GarageBand.

Audacity is a good general-purpose editor that does the job for simple podcasts (no interviews, or simple Q/A interviews that do not require a lot of nonlinear editing, and those podcasts that are 10 or less tracks). It is a good ‘starter’ solution for those who wish to try their hand at creating a podcast, and it runs on PC, Mac, or Linux. Audacity projects created on one platform open on any platform, which is nice. For more complex audio editing on a PC, Adobe Audition is a solid next step up. And if you want to go the Adobe route, you can always try out Audition and Soundbooth first with Adobe’s free 30 day trial and see which works best for you.

In a few weeks, I’ll have a completed screencast demonstrating how I put together a podcast, which I’ll share in this space.