I finally finished listening to May’s Hanhurst tape last night. Which means that I finally got my notes up, for whatever that’s worth. I can’t say I was super impressed by this month’s batch, but there are a few goodies.

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Last night, I used my computer and Vic Ceder’s Ceder Square Dance System (CSDS) for all my patter music. It worked well. Here’s what I like about using the computer rather than an MD player:

• Real time tempo changes. Yeah, I could work with my MD tracks to deal with tempo…I’d keep track of the tempo for each song and then pick songs based on their recorded tempos. However, I have to admit that it’s easier and more flexible to just adjust the tempo to whatever I want. Now, when Vic adds a tempo field to the database, that’ll be even better.
• No paper. With MD, I have to keep some kind of paper (so I can have them with me) records of what’s on which disk. With MP3 and CSDS, the info is all in the computer. And once I write a script to export all the lyrics in my Mac database to PC-readable document files (do-able and trivial if I was willing to accept plain text, but I’d like some formatting too, which makes it harder), singing call lyrics will be available through CSDS.
• No more remembering to go into single-track repeat mode. CSDS takes care of the looping and remembers where you set your loop marks.

I think the MP3 quality is a little lower than the MD quality. Both formats compress the music, but I like the sound of the MDs a little better. However, for pitch shifting, I think using CoolEdit’s non-real-time transformations result in a better sound than the on-the-fly shifting done by pitch-shifting hardware. It takes about 20 minutes for CoolEdit to do its work on my 300 Mhz Pentium laptop.

So I’ll be continuing to record records to my laptop, and continuing to report on how it’s going. Next step: singing calls.