Leveling Out Audio in a Single Track

Tragic things can happen when mixing audio or video clips from multiple sources. Sound levels (read: volume) can fluctuate erratically, causing the resulting splice of tracks to be inaudible. To stop your viewers from having to play games with their volume nobs while watching your videos we will cover some techniques here to remedy the problem.

Tools you will need:

• Software to process audio tracks (I use Audacity.)
• And something to mux/demux Video (I use VirtualDub.)

Audacity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

VirtualDub - http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/

Some points I would like to make:

1. If you can run a filter called "Normalize" on all the tracks you are mixing. This will make it so that everything has the same maximum volume. If you do this you avoid having to do...
2. Dynamic Range Compression should not be confused with plain Compression. Compression refers to making a file smaller. (We will be doing Dynamic Range Compression)

If you can find other software to do these things then good for you! (There is more than one way to skin a moose.)

Virtual CloneDrive

This is the best Optical Drive emulation in existence right now (in my opinion). I used to use Alcohol, but they started wanting money. I used Daemon Tools, but they added spy/mal/adware. So now I turn back to ElaborateBytes and SlySoft. These developers really know how to please.

Virtual CloneDrive has a lot going for it. From great emulation to a humble price tag (i.e. free), you can expect the unexpected. The main selling point for this is that it is from a company I trust, and it is free (cause I'm poor). This thing is easy to install, and easy to use. It isn't very complex or bloated with features you probably wont use. It has a little tray icon that starts up when windows does and hides out in your task bar. You can turn this off, but I've stopped caring about programs that hide down there since Windows 7.

A potential downside, it does install its own drivers on your computer. While this isn't a big deal, it does bother some people.

I'm just waiting for Microsoft to figure out that people really do want to emulate CD Drives so they don't have to burn a disk image every time! It was kind of them to include the ability to burn ISO files natively in Windows 7. But seriously. Why waste a disk unless you are giving it to a friend or loading a new OS?

Virtual CloneDrive can be found here: http://www.slysoft.com/en/download.html

Updated: Using BitTorrent

I've made a second video on installing the Vuze BitTorrent client. The Client can be downloaded from www.vuze.com. Once you have the client installed you can search google and other sites for torrents to download. Just download and open the ".torrent" file and you are good to go.

You should also have to ensure that the port you've chosen for torrent data is forwarded through your firewall.

The Troublesome Laptop

So I have this Dell Inspiron 5150, which are notorious for having hardware failures. This particular laptop only worked occasionally. The original user thought it was a heating issue, definitely a common problem with this model.

However, this laptop is actually a victim of a bad RAM seat. The DIMM B bus is going bad, and has cost me a memory module. It took a while to diagnose but the main thing I noticed that lead me to the RAM was the intermittent failures both in booting and freezing while running.

I began to get the message, "The amount of system memory has changed. Press F1 to continue..." And after that the piece of RAM in that slot started to have read errors in some sectors. I upgraded the RAM in DIMM A with a 1GB stick and haven't had a problem since. The DIMM B slot remains empty.

While troubleshooting the hardware I also found out that the memory slots are directly connected to the motherboard and would require me to replace the main board in order to fix it.