I am Patrick Perdue! I am bad for you!

People do the strangest things, then go off and tell other people to do even stranger ones. Why? No idea! Welcome to human nature, I suppose.

Due to the events of last week, causing a temporary scale-back of TBRN services until the start of the month, which has resulted in adding preventive measures to ensure stupid things like that don't happen again, I decided to move FX Radio completely in-house, since I have enough bandwidth to support the couple of users that exist at a time, without wasting TBRN's resources.
So, that's exactly what I did, using two internal icecast servers in a master/slave relay configuration, homing on both the residential and business class gateways, and a round robbin DNS for fake load balancing (as if I'm really going to saturate anything locally with FX Radio).
The end result: you probably won't notice much of a difference. FX Radio can still be found at http://fx.pdaudio.net:8888/fx.m3u as always, with the same great content and SHOUT-Box, just that you may get one of two internal basement servers instead of a real one in New Jersey. Oh well, New Jersey is a bad idea, anyway, even if it does have some fast Linode boxes.

Speaking of bad ideas, a few people suggested, for some unknown reason, that I should stream my Omnicron TCC-14 talking clock, which just sits in the studio and announces the time all day. It's available on TBRN's PBX, and you can theoretically sip to time@pbx.tbrn.net from the outside to reach it as well.
Now, as if looking at your watch or clock wasn't standard and efficient enough for you, you can inefficiently get the time via an Icecast stream, too, all be it a slightly delayed one. Yep, that's right, I was sad enough to set it up, because everything I needed was already available without much extra effort on my part. So now, as a result, radio time, all time, all the time exists for your enjoyment. Note: this streams at AAC+ 24kbps, which is probably a bit much, but with all the natural aliasing provided by the clock, I figured I'd give myself some headroom to play with. Please feel free to say "Oh, wow, that's totally useless, pointless, dumb, etc." and I will agree, but remember, I wouldn't have bothered had I not been asked to do so by not just one, but several people. I only do what I'm told, you know? Sorry if it's abnormal or otherwise socially unacceptable, but that's just the way it is.

In other news, my vintage JBL 4311 reference monitors arrived from Fort Worth yesterday, all 107 lbs of them, and I just got them into the studio this morning. I think this particular set was made in 1974, given what I know about the serial numbers. These things are very, very different from the monitor 1's, obviously, as they are three way, and contain 12-inch drivers. Power? Yeah! Efficiency? Lots of it! Loud? Oh yeah, definitely! I'll have to get used to them, but so far, I love them! They have a very tite and beautiful stereo image, and sound so punchy you'd think you're being knocked over by accident. They do need some cosmetic work, some new fome rings around both tweeters, and a couple of other superficial touch-ups, but they sound and work great. I'm not sure if all the drivers are original, or if any of them have ever been replaced, but unlike dgl1984's pair of jbl 4311's, my set actually has two sets of fully working drivers. His right mid and tweeter drivers are dead, or maybe the crossover is bad. I don't know, but they've been that way for as long as he's had them in late 1997. There are many, many parts on Ebay, and Derek is a bad person for not having them fixed, in my opinion. I've heard Derek's set many times, and even with no highs on one side, I thought they were great. Having them on monitor stands rather than the floor, the way Derek's are positioned, I've come to realize very quickly that those presence controls for the mid (1.5k) and tweeters (6k and up) are really quite a good thing to have, because full on, when you're sitting between them and the mids and tweeters, which are on the bottom, are facing you, it can get pretty intense. So, rolling the output back on those is a really good idea.
Now, to figure out what to do with my Alesis Monitor 1's. At the moment, I'll keep them in the closet, and probably find something interesting to do with them at some point, as I still like them.

Oh, and on a side-note, freakyfwoof and his wife, Kirsten, had a big ol' baby boy on Monday morning at 6:58 AM BST. His name is Jacob Peter Louis (although I think J. P. Louis sounds very important, kind of like J. P. Morgan, but not), and tipped the scales at 10.6 lbs. Pretty big for starters, ya think?
Things should be pretty interesting after this point, and I, personally, am looking forward to the likely madness that will occur as a result.

Now, I will internally debate with myself as to the merits of staying awake, or not. I will most likely lose that battle with myself, as winning would just be too boring, now wouldn't it?

After a couple of weeks of total existence failure, FX Radio is now back, and even more pointless than ever, thanks to a bit of boredom on my part.
You still get the same *great* content you can only expect from FX Radio's random rotation of far too many sound effects stacked on top of each other (somewhere around 43,000 files at last check), but now, you, the listener, can be heard atop all the madness... if you're loud enough, that is.

As per usual, you can tune in to FX Radio. Now, you can also call +1(360)526-6240 for the FX Radio SHOUT-Box, for your free 90 seconds of fame. You can also sip directly if you have a sip capable device or softphone by using the address sip:fxradio@test.pdaudio.net.
If multiple users are on the system at once, a temporary conference will exist. After 90 seconds, you will be unceremoneously dumped from the box. I haven't found a way to kill a session and be nice about it, so for now, it just drops. I hope to change this in future.

Feel free to do or say whatever you like for the 90 seconds of time you get. This is the internet, which is all about freedom... Right? Yeah, thought so.

Due to some incredibly crappy performance from TBRN's machine, as well as the ever so helpful staff at midphase... er not... TBRN has moved. The network is now hosted by a few linode servers in different datacenters, each with specific tasks for the sake of redundancy.
This means a huge downsize in terms of locally stored content, and available bandwidth per month.
However, it also means a striking increase in reliability, and more fun things to come in the future.

Most critical services are operational, but currently are accessible through a different address, until DNS hosting is moved and migrated to reflect the new changes.
Until said issues are resolved, you can listen to TBRN's live programming by visiting http://tbrn.andrelouis.com:8888/tbrn.ogg. Sorry, no automation at this time, though this will change as soon as some other issues are addressed.

All archives will be hosted off-site by Bluehost, conveniently provided by seather12, and links to past shows on this blog may or may not work until the entries are manually edited. At this point, I don't know, and, to be honest, I really don't want to manually go through and edit each "Things and Stuff" link to connect to something that works if it can be helped, but... well... whatever.
I have some time on my hands if it comes down to it, as I know some people find my show, and thus, TBRN, through this strange and odd misshapen thing that appears to be a blog of some sort.

Also, due to the server move, FX Radio has a new address. It can now be found at http://fx.pdaudio.net:8888/fx. The link for FX Radio has also been updated on PDAudio's semi-broken website as well.
Same great... um... great? content??? you're all used to. Only the address has been changed to protect the innocent.

Now, before I go to bed, I'd like to bring the following interesting application to your attention: Fideliphone.
This is a high quality p2p, full duplex audio app, similar in concept, at least to some extent, to AudioTX. Differences:

• It doesn't cost $800


• It uses the open-source Celt Codec for it's audio via UDP, rather than mp2, mp3 or pcm wav


• It plays nicer with points that are not connected via VPN

and much, much more... Well, eventually, anyway.
It works sort of like Speak Freely without a reflector, in that you and your remote party must be connected to each other. There is currently no way to send a connect request or anything fun, so that bit must be done very manually.
It just works when both machines have established a connection.

It's still very much in development, but so far, this promises to be a rather cool tool for things like net radio remote co-hosting, or just chatting with very high quality, stereo audio, which I've done quite a lot over the last day, including a three-hour Fidelicall with Jim Snowbarger, with stereo miking on both sides. that was fun!
In fact, there is currently no way to use this program in mono (though this will be implemented soon, I've been told). The idea was to get a stable stereo application working first, then implement other things on top.

Celt, which is a compromise between the quality of Ogg Vorbis and the latency of Speex, allows mono and stereo encoding at either 44,100 or 48,000 hz, and fixed bitrates from 32 to 500 kbps, or quality managed bitrate.
The quality of the Celt codec is adjustable within the program, although the default quality is right on the edge for users who have 256/384 kbps upstream.
In fact, due to a stupid issue with one of Charter's routers, I can't seem to send to Derek at anything higher than about 20 KBPS without errors, while I can send Andre, in london, much further away, a solid 100+ KBPS stream from this program with no break-up at all, with Andre sending a slightly smaller stream, somewhere around 90/93 KBPS to accommodate his upstream... and the quality is amazing at such a bitrate!
If you didn't notice, we're measuring in kilobites, not kilobits, so it can get pretty intensive at the upper end of the quality scale for some users. Still other people were not able to make good connections, despite having available bandwidth... Maybe some bad routing? Well, one of them was in New Zealand, another was onMCHSI which has lots of bad old AT&T routes, so it wouldn't be too surprising, or anything...

I'm very excited about the potential of Fideliphone, as I've been looking for an alternative to the highly expensive AudioTX for some time now, and it looks like this could very well do it.

I, however, have not been looking for bed replacements in a while, although I've decided to make use of the one I've already got. They're convenient, these bed devices. I like'em.

P.S. I bought a Samson C com mono optical compressor for $29, for use with my mic upstairs. It should be here tomorrow. Just thought you'd all like to know.

This is just a quick update to inform those 0.15 of you who might care, that FX Radio, after being down for three weeks, has returned to an Icecast server near you. We have dropped SHOUTCast support for this feed.
The new url is http://tbrn.net:8888/fx.m3u.

FX Radio still provides the same lovely cacophony of sound as brought to you by three stacked media players streaming a rather large sound effects library at random, to create interesting fake scenarios that would otherwise not exist. Not, of course, that this is a bad thing.
Most of these effects are first generation or lossless compression, so you only will normally get one layer of artifacts rather than several layers of transcoding. Not, of course, that AAC+ 64KBPS is pure, but it's nice for what it is. I may switch to Ogg when I am convinced that 64KBPS Ogg sounds as good as AAC+ at the same bitrate, perhaps when codecs are updated in the future.

One of these days, I *will* put a link to FX Radio on PDAudio.net, but at the moment I'm kind of busy with other things... like leaving.

For anyone who may be interested, FX Radio is back after not existing for a week, due to system maintenance, re-organizing, adding, and replacing lots of sound effects libraries.
I've added several new libraries and replaced some existing ones with higher quality versions, as well as upped the bitrate from 48 to 64kbps AAC+ for a nicer listening experience. The result: even more random issues!

click here to listen, if you dare!
Remember that in order to listen to FX Radio, your player must support AAC+!
Believe me, I'd rather stream in ogg, but I don't have that much spare bandwidth hanging around to keep a higher bitrate stream up all the time.

FX Radio, all sound effects, all the time... Wasting time... or something like that.