In this episode I introduce and go through the process of customising settings for the Mini Guide.
The Mini Guide is a handheld ultrasonic mobility aid which is to be used in conjunction with a white cane or guide dog. it uses two sonar sensors to provide tactile and/or audio feedback to the user.
The guide has a number of distances or ranges to which it can be set from 0.5 metres through 8 metres. If there are no objects in the field of view of the device inside the set range, the guide provides no feedback, however it will start to vibrate once there is an object detected within the chosen range. It will vibrate faster and faster as the object comes closer, giving the user extremely useful information about the environment they are moving through.
The Mini Guide fits in the palm of your hand and is approximately 3, by 1.5, by 1 inch.
Some use cases include:
* Keeping an appropriate distance behind someone in a queue or line of people in a shopping centre.
* Scanning for head height obstacles when used with a white cane or guide dog
* Finding or counting doorways or shop entrances whilst walking down an isle
* Used with a white cane, excellent for finding and avoiding obstacles prior to touching them with the cane
* Used by it’s self in environments you know well like your office or home to avoid other people
These are just a few of the ways the device can be used, it is very versatile and users can customise it so that it gives them valuable feedback for their particular situation.
To find out more about the device and where it may be available in your area I recommend contacting your local blindness support organisation. You can also check out the below link: Mini Guide
In this Round of Audio Pizza, we cover the weeks Tech News from an accessibility point of view. Blind blokes BS’ing about Tech.
Topics include:
* Apple’s Education Event
* The New iPad
* iWorks Updates
* iOS 11.3
* Accessibility Emoji
* CSUN
* Vorail Wand
* Google Home Bluetooth Support
* Alexa Followup
The Nudge/set items dialog is another extremely useful feature within Reaper. You can open it with N.
As the name suggests, it allows you to either nudge the position of an item or set it to a specific location. Nudging the position is extremely useful however you can do far more than this. For example, you can nudge the right trim set the position of an item, or duplicate an item a specific number of times placing each item on a beat, or every second.
There are a number of combo boxes within the dialog. Firstly, you can choose to either Nudge or Set. Nudging moves the selected parameter relative to it’s current location, and set will move the parameter to a specific location.
The second combo box lets you choose what you are moving. Choices include, position, left or right trim, end position, left edge, duplicate, or media contents.
The item position is the most straight forward, and is exactly as it sounds, the position of the item on the track in it’s current state.
If you choose the left or right trim, you are saying you want to change where the left or right edge of the item starts. It is the same as growing or shrinking the edge of an item. So, nudging the right trim right by one second makes the item one second longer.
Another option is setting the position of the end point or right edge of the item. So if you need an item to finish at a precise location in your project, than this is an easy way to achieve it.
Rather than moving the item you can move the position of the edit cursor, either nudging by a certain amount or setting it to a specific position.
The dialog also allows for very precise positioning of your chosen boundary/item edge. A combo box gives access to seconds, milliseconds, measures and beats, along with samples and frames. There is also a button that will return the current position of the edit cursor to the text field.
For more details check out the podcast and explore the dialog in Reaper.
Use Option+C on Mac, or Alt+C on Windows to open the console. Type the command and press Enter to commit the command, leaving the console open for another command.
You can also press Command+Enter to commit and close the window, which is Control+Return on Windows.
Escape will close the console without performing the command.
A ReaConsole command can have up to three parts.
Firstly, the command, which is a letter that denotes what is to be done. eg M for mute or V to set the volume. ,
Than,, an optional text string to specify which tracks are to be adjusted. This can be the track numbers, and/or the track names where * is a wild card. Eg. 2,4–6, which would specify tracks 2, 4, 5, and 6. Or, voc* which would specify any tracks that started with the letters “Voc”.
The final part is the parameter value where relevant. Eg, dB of volume change or in the case of mute, not relevant.
If no tracks are specified in the command, the function will be performed on the currently selected tracks.
Additional Syntax
You can just use a space to separate the track selection from the parameter value, however if you need to be more specific, you can use a semicolon when necessary. One example is where you are renaming a track, you may have multiple words in the text to select the track and than need to use a semicolon to designate where the new track name is to start.
For the toggle commands, using lower case will toggle the current state, prefix with a dash will force to off, prefix with a plus to force on for the selected/specified tracks, leaving the other tracks at their current state.
An upper case command letter will force on for only the selected/specified tracks and off for all other tracks.
If you place an exclamation mark, after the command, the action will be performed on the unselected tracks, as though you have inverted the selection.
If you follow the track specifier with a slash, than the command will also be performed on any child tracks, that is tracks within the folder specified.
ReaConsole is a very quick way to adjust volume, panning, adding/renaming a track, the status of such things as the mute and solo state, and the input (if any) the track is to record from.
Adjustable track values and the command needed to change them are as follows:
track volume:
type v, followed by a number that the volume should increase in DB. Add a – to subtract the value.
Example:
v10 increases the track volume by 10DB.
v–10 decreases it by 10 DB
Using an uppercase v sets the number entered to an absolute value.
So, lower case v will adjust the volume relative to the current value, but upper case V doesn’t care about what was, it just sets the track to the volume you specify.
Track Pan:
type p and a percentage to adjust the relative track pan from –100% (hard left) to 100% (Hard right)
A value of 0 = centre. Just as with volume upper case P makes the pan value you enter absolute; Again, it doesn’t care about what was, it just sets the value to what you want it to be.
set track input:
i followed by the number of the input
example: i2
sets the track input to the second input on your audio interface.
Upper case letters are ignored, so check your capsloc.
To select a stereo pair of channels, use the s after the channel number. For example:
i1s
This creates a stereo track containing the first 2 inputs of your interface.
Again, check capslock.
To cascade inputs, that is, to set track 1 to input 1, track 2 to input 2, etc. create and select the necessary amount of tracks, enter the reaconsole, type i followed by the first track you wish to use, followed by – (dash). So, lets say you created 10 tracks, you could select them with the reaconsole, said command written about in a bit, or use the reaper/osara interface to make the selection.
Cascading inputs would look like this:
i1-
what if you wanted tracks 1–10 to start from input 3, and go to input 13?
i3-
Selecting of 1 or more tracks:
Bring up reaconsole, and type an s followed by a single track, or a range of tracks to be armed such as:
a 1–10
Using 1–10 establishes the selection in this case.
To establish the selection of multiple tracks in various parts of the project, use a comma to ceparate the track names/numbers if they’re not contiguous and a – if they are.
Example:
s5,10,15
selects tracks 5 10 and 15.
s5,10–15
selects track 5 as well as tracks 10 through 15.
You can also use wild card characters at any point to establish your selection or a part of your selection.
Example if you have 2 tracks called “Piano left channel,” and “Piano Right Channel”
You could type:
spiano*
to select those tracks.
If the tracks are named something like “08, Piano left,” and “09 piano right,” the string above wouldn’t work because numbers exist before the word “Piano.”
This, however, would work:
sPiano
If no other tracks contained the letter p, you could even condense the command to something as small as:
sp
These selection commands will not work with upper case letters, so if nothing seems to work when you perform an action on your selection, check your capslock.
Remember that volume and pan commands are effected by the case of v and p.
Here are several ways which could be used to pan our piano tracks, going with the example that the track names start with 08 and 09:
s08*
P100
s09*
P100
This would work but not be the most efficient way of panning because track 8, all one would have to do is simply say
p8 –100
p9 100.
Entering a command such as
sp P–100
Would pan both tracks left, as any track containing the letter P would find itself hard left.
Adding Effects
To add effects to a track or selected tracks, type x, followed by the first part of a plugin which you’d like to add, then press either enter or Control+Enter as required.
Examples:
xreag
Adds the reagate to the selected track, or tracks.
x2–12 reag
Adds the reagate effect on tracks 2–12, which is much faster than manually adding a gate on each track.
unfortunately, this command acts like the “I’m feeling lucky,” button on google; that is, it adds the first result it finds in a search.
It also has the problem of not trying to find your typed string of text anywhere with in the name of your available plugins.
So,
xreav
would give you reaverb added to your selected tracks,
but
xverb
would not.
Just a quick relatively empty special bus this time around. Join Shaun and Garth as they talk over the recent tech news. I’d like to say the content was incredibly insightful, realistically though it is at least somewhat amusing. do enjoy.
Custom actions are incredibly useful, and this Reaper tutorial shows you how to create them. A custom action allows you to string together a number of actions and combine them so that with the press of one keystroke, a number of actions can be performed at once.
I found that when editing podcasts, I was often dropping the end marker of a time selection, then moving back to a point prior to the time selection and pressing the keystroke to play, skipping time selection. This previews the edit. I decided to combine these keystrokes into one action, and in this tutorial I show you the process so you can create similar custom actions, that assist you with your own workflow.
You can create a custom action by entering the action list with F4, and moving to the first “New” button. Press this and it will bring up a dialog to create a new custom action. In this dialog, you will find two tables, an edit field for the action name, an edit field for the filter and a couple of check boxes.
You need to create a list of actions in the second table from those in the first table. Use the filter text box to narrow down the list of available actions in the first table. find the action you want to add and on Mac, use VO+Shift+Spacebar, Spacebar. On Windows With NVDA, use the Insert+Numpad Enter. This will add actions to the second table, and your custom action. Once you have all the desired actions in the second table, and a name for your action, click the Okay button.
All that is left now is to add a keyboard shortcut to invoke your command. Your new custom action should be already selected in the actions dialog, so find the “Add” button, click this, than type the desired command followed by the Enter key.
With this you’re done and ready to be that much more efficient with Reaper.
This weeks Audio Pizza is brought to us thanks to Hugo. He actually recorded it last year, but to ensure we don’t make the mistake of being seen as too professional, we decided to leave the recording in a DropBox folder for a month or two, then pull it out and dust it off.
Of course, we all know it is Shaun’s fault, but no ones pointing fingers, mostly because we can’t see well enough to know which way to point. But if we could, and if Hugo sobered up for long enough, we’d all definitely blame Shaun.
So what is it about? Well you’ve probably already started listening and know it’s about the iOS app Instacart. It seems pretty cool but it’s not available in Australia so how cool can it be really?
If you’re in the US or somewhere else that the app is available, than check it out, otherwise forget it.
Probably the only reason you’re reading these show notes is to see if we put a link to the app in them. Well, yes we did but whether or not the link is clickable is dependant on your podcast app of choice. In any case, heres the link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/instacart/id545599256?mt=8
We take a look back at our predictions from 2017, and find out that we really had no idea what we were talking about. Given such an amazing record, we try again for 2018.
The Audio Pizza team finally get back together just in time for Black Friday with all their picks and recommendations of just what gifts & gadgets you should be hunting down in the sales.
Happy shopping.
Useful Links.
Join Shauns Amazon Echo fan club by getting your hands on one of these great voice assistants here.
Kayaker’s copper Braille embossed dog tags along with other great Braille embossed jewelry and identification tags for all genders and ages can be found at Elegant Insights Braille Creations.
Garths Lightning to 3.5mm headphone adapter & his beloved Apple Air Pods can be found in the Apple Store, along with Shauns old faithful Apple Earpods
The TrackR bluetooth tag finder that can be used to find items via your iPhone or android can be found at The TrackR website.
You can find more information on the Mini Guide here.
If you, like Shaun, want to turn your home into your own personal lighthouse, check out the Tradfri Smart Lights from Ikea.
The ultimate Star Wars toy, er, I mean art sculpture of light sabers can be found at Ultra Sabers.
Relax with Garth and the Bose QC35 Series 2 noise cancelling headphones.
Kayaker’s favorite USB battery charger is the Jackery Bolt 6000 available from Amazon.
Shaun really can’t get enough of voice assistants. If you’re the same check out the Google Home range here.