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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss NASA space walk news, the growth of social media advertising, Facebook’s public likes, the speed of typing on smartphones vs regular keyboards, Grammarly’s tone check feature, Amazon scanners that can identify a human hand, iPadOS, and more.
Joshua in Nashville, Tennessee listens to the podcast and asked: “I’m the media guy for my church and we are doing live stream videos and I’m trying to find out what you think the best hardware is to do live streaming as well as would you prefer vMix over anything else, or what software would you recommend to get the best quality and bang for your buck?”
Joshua, as usual it’s all down to budget and needs.
vMix is good and the software starts at just $60 which is really hard to beat, if you’re able to add some decent hardware to make things easier on yourself you can have a cost efficient and effective set up based on it.
We used NewTek’s Tricaster products for years, they’re not particularly cheap, they start out at a few thousand and go up to a few 10s of thousands, We’ve seen press releases for some of their recent products that they refer to as “affordable”. To give you an idea, these “affordable” systems START at $15,000. But if you can afford any of the models, they are capable, will let you live stream, easily connect external audio and video, use virtual sets if you ever want to, edit on the device, use transitions, and more.
We did have a bit of trouble with our last one locking up on us – a lot, but we a carried it all around the world and it was probably a little bit more bruised than a static church-only Tricaster would be.
You probably won’t have too many other options that you could consider “best quality and bang for your buck”, though. There’s a very quick shift from those systems to full professional ones that cost more money that anyone who isn’t using them to make a living will likely want to pay, so your options may be between those and building a powerful computer custom made for the job, and even then you’ll probably end up paying for vMix as your software of choice.
Eddie in Akron, Ohio listens to the podcast and asked: “I am looking for a program that will recognize tracks on a CD. I want to check out audiobooks on CD from the library, which I have. I put them into iTunes on the computer and iTunes does not recognize the proper tracks. I was wondering if there was a program that would help me with this.”
Eddie, that’s tough one. Normally if any program can read a CD it should be able to navigate through the tracks.
It sounds like the real problem is that iTunes may be set to join the tracks once it realizes it’s an audiobook. That’s the preferred option of many people who don’t want to deal with maybe 50 or even more files each making up a chapter.
To see if that’s the case, you can select all of the tracks, click on the options menu and see if “Join CD tracks” is selected.
If that doesn’t work, just about any other software will do. Anything from old Window Media Player to FreeRip will probably be able to handle this job with no issues. You just want a ripper that will consider your book to be an audio CD and then it will split it into tracks.
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