On this page you will find information about how these recordings and the web-site were made. It’s really not as complicated as you might think. And you don’t need to put out a bunch of money to do it yourself. All you need is some technical aptitude, some patience, a few hundred dollars, and an interest in how it’s done. Oh, and something to put on your site. Could be music, as you find here, or other content, like audio recordings of interviews or memoirs, video, or whatever. Not for everyone, for sure, but it’s not that hard. After reading this, you may want to give it a try.
Making music has always been a hobby of mine, but it is not where I made a living. I’ve been working with computers for over 50 years. I wrote my first FORTRAN code in 1967. In those days, recordings were made using 4 track tape and digital editing and mixing of the sounds was a long way off. They used to cut the tape. Gads! Computers were too small (in capacity), too large (they occupied buildings), too slow (way too slow) and too expensive (millions). Not any more. Recording studios, with all the gear needed cost millions then. Not now. And you don’t even need high-end computers with Pro Tools and dedicated hardware. Unless, that is, you intend to do high-end stuff. In that case, not much of this is relevant to you. Just have a good laugh, but remember that most of us do this for fun. And don’t quit your day job until you don’t need it any more.
The Recordings
I started making these recordings in about 2010. When I was done with my tech work at the end of the 1990s I started using my old laptop computer to record shows at a local music club. Initially, just a feed from the house sound board, this evolved into a weekly event where I used a separate mixing board to create an on-the-fly stereo mix for the performers. Some came out pretty well, but there is only so much one can do with these. The mix is what it is. Multi-track recording hardware at the club was still a ways off. Some of the recordings on this site came from that club.
I’ve never been a Mac fan, and I gave up on Windows about ten years ago. Linux has come a long way and is now my primary OS for most of my computers. It even runs well enough on 15 year old hardware to be usable for digital mixing. (And for just about everything else you might want to do aside from streaming video). Linux works great on current hardware if you have it. I did most of the work on How Long on a $219 Chromebook! And it’s free, as is all of the software you might need. So if you have an old computer and are willing to install a new OS on it and learn a bit, your cost for computer hardware and software could be zero. Don’t be afraid, it’s just an old computer. Put in the install CD and you have a new system in less than an hour. I use Audacity (a Digital Audio Workbench—that is, a mixing program) and it is also available (free) for Windows and Mac so you can use it there too if you want to stay in those environments. There is other software for digital editing, but Audacity is good enough for what I am trying to do. If you have a Mac, Garage Band might be a good choice. Talk Show was made using that application.
The earliest recordings on this site were made using an old 2 channel Radio Shack mixer a friend found in a dumpster plugged into the sound card of a Pentium-4 computer running Ubuntu Linux and Audacity. That worked pretty well, and I was able to do some over-dubbing and mixing. I still use the same pair of Shure SM58 mics—they are good enough for now (about $80 wholesale, $99 on Amazon). This arrangement changed in 2013 when I bought a Zoom R-16 recording board for about $400. With it, I can capture up to 8 tracks at once while playing 8 more, so the old “you got what you got” mix days are over. Amazing. Multi-track capability for cheap.
From the Zoom, I bring tracks onto a computer and then into Audacity where all the editing, balancing, effects, and mixing are done. The Zoom can be used as an external controller, and comes with mixing software for Windows, but I find it easier to do this work on the computer and bring tracks back to the Zoom as needed.
So the current setup looks like this.
Shure mics and cables ($200) and any Direct Inputs → Zoom R-16 ($400) ←→ SD Card and USB flash drive ($10) ←→ Computer with Ubuntu Linux and Audacity ($0) → CDs (cheap), MP3s and Web-site ($0)
I have another $80 invested in some Sennheiser wireless headphones (RF, not bluetooth as it has too much latency) and some cables and adapters, but the total cost of hardware and software for all of this is less that $750. Without the Zoom, about $350.
Hardware and Software:
2 Shure SM58 mics and cables
DI box
Sennheiser wireless headphones
Zoom R-16 recording board
SD card (goes in the board) and USB flash drive (used to move tracks back to the board)
Computer – could be anything from a Pentium-4 with 2GB to a high-end current computer.
Even a cheap Chromebook running an Ubuntu Chroot will do.
Ubuntu Linux 16.04 or 18.04
Audacity 2.1.2
The Web-Site
As you can see, this is a Google Sites web-site. It’s not really that hard to write you own HTML based site, but it’s really hard to secure one. So I let Google do that for me and just use their simple site builder. That doesn’t give me a lot of flexibility, but it’s free.
A side benefit of using a Google site is that it is promoted to the top of Google search results. I didn’t know this when I started and just stumbled into it. The full URL for the landing page of this site is https://sites.google.com/site/tomscd. That last part, tomscd, is the site name within Google’s world, and if you enter just that (tomscd) in the Google search box, this Google site will be at or near the top of the search results. This seems to work for any Google site. If you put “site/” in front of the site name (e.g., site/tomscd) it appears that your site will always be at the top. Maybe that’s one of the reasons the EU is suing them.
There are tutorials on how to build a Google site, so I won’t go into that here. This site started out as a “Classic” one. In 2019 I conveted it to a “New Sites” one as Google has begun to force users of the earlier tool onto the new one. The tutorials will show you how to make a page, add text and links, link to , and so on.
A Google site is limited to 100MB of storage and that is not nearly enough for what is here. So the files are stored on a Google Drive. The Google drive has the capacity to hold the larger zip files available from the Downloads page, along with the mP3s, jpgs, and a PDF.
Each of the songs has its own page, and all are structured the same way. The music players are added by embedding the file link (from the Google Drive) in the page. At one time I was using a Flash-based player Google Gadget called Bojodo but Gadgets are no longer available in the New Sites tool.
At the bottom of each page is a snippet of hidden HTML containing a link to Statcounter where I gather statistics on page visits. Take a look at the page HTML source and you will see it. Statcounter.com is free too. Don’t worry—all I can see is that there was a visit from an IP address using some browser. I can’t see you or anything about you and I don’t plant cookies on you. I’m just curious about whether anyone has come to visit. Not many do.
The Downloads page is pretty simple too—mainly a bunch of links to files that download. The PayPal button at the bottom is a Gadget brought over from the old sites world. It returns to another page that says Thanks! It has actually been used a few times. Thanks!
The home page, however, is a bit more complicated. It was probably not necessary to be able to play everything from a player on this page but, at least for me, it was interesting enough to spend some time learning how to do it.
The HTML-5 player uses JavaScript and was never available as a Gadget. I built it from sample code I found in a tutorial. But if you need one, just download this one from HERE and modify it to point to your MP3s. It is added to the page by embedding the code. The file names need to be mp3 names, not links to the files on your Google drive. This still works here because the mp3s are actually stored as attachments to old sites pages. It will break when Google finally deletes all of the old sites, probably in 2022.
That’s about it. Send me an email (tomscd@gmail.com) if you are trying to do this and having trouble.
…… Tom Bruce ….. 3/6/19