I've been thinking some formative thoughts to myself about advances of technology that have made my life easier. Thanks for the opportunity to flesh them out a little here. These advances are why I've said to people that we are living in a 50's or 60's science fiction movie: Many of the cool gadgets that we have now would be at home in such a movie.
Tape Splicer wrote:I've tried to edit audio digitally and found the process quite a challenge . I'd bring back audio tape, the splice block/splice tape and the razor blade.
I have fond memories of tape but I will not make a new recording on tape unless I have no other choice. I grew up with cassettes and played with them since before I can remember (the evidence is on the tapes!) and the earliest I
can remember is the thrill of being
able to record stuff. The technology has moved on and the most obvious use that tape may now have is forcing analogue distortion into recordings.
Moving on with digital, I've taken advantage of the advances that digital recording has brought us. My current portable recorder records WAV files at 96/24 and one example of what I've used that for is to record the ultrasonic calls of bats and other night critters.
A very useful side-effect of digital audio is that the time of any sample can easily be determined knowing the time the recording started, thanks to having a sampling rate. Audacity displays a time offset into a recording so all that one needs to do is add the start time to it to know when some event happened. My point is that for a while during my first go at DXing I was recording to cassette but I found it to be a management nightmare due to tape not having such an in-built clock. Digital makes indexing a recording so much easier.
I wouldn't be happy if we had a new dark age without digital audio.
Another thing to bring back is a radio that tune with a know instead of up down buttons.
Yes, a knob gives one variable speed control over the tuning rate whereas buttons don't; it's instinctive, one isn't even aware that one is turning the knob at a variable rate. Maybe that's the DXer in me - I operate the tuning knob all the time.
Smartphones and tablets. Incredible stuff! In reality these are extremely portable computers (some of which can take phone calls!). Keep the battery charged and they can run 24x7 with no startup time. Touch is a huge win provided that one has steady fingers and that icons are sized properly for one's fingers. What I find lacking with touchscreens is a really usable touch keyboard; can anyone productively type into a touch keyboard — even on a tablet, never mind a phone? I find it's a battle of single finger typing versus a touchscreen looking for an excuse to misread which key I pushed. A touch keyboard must feel like an insult to the typical touch typist!
Flat panel monitors. They're still getting better. For the longest time the CRT was the most common vacuum tube still in use. Does that honour now fall to the humble magnetron in a microwave oven?