On the day of my first visit to the club I woke up fairly early, though it was a Saturday, in order to make it to the meeting on time (noon). As I live on the east side of town and NIPCC holds its meetings on the west side it took a bit of travel time to get to the Sengencho subway station. Emerging from underground, I found myself in an area not much different from any other area near a subway in Nagoya. After orienting myself to the not unfamiliar landscape, I set off with the help of my trusty map which I had downloaded from the NIPCC website. Despite my cynicism about finding a "four story grey multi-windowed building" as described in the directions, I was pleasantly surprised to easily spot the building which does look incredibly like a "4-story grey multi-windowed building" I cannot think of a better description.
Having checked out the NIPCC homepage at http://www.nipcc.org I had an idea of what NIPCC might be like. I'd read about the format of the meetings and looked at past meeting topics. I found some of the information on past meetings extremely useful. The write up of the June 2001 meeting 'Upgrading your PC' was especially good " simple yet with enough detail to do the job. It also included some great links that went into more detail suitable for the technically minded. However I had one lingering question as I entered the 4-story grey multi-windowed building. Was it going to be a formal lecture or an informal chat?
As I walked into the meeting room the first thing that I noticed was that I wasn't walking into a meeting room but an office (a computer company's office). I thought this was pretty cool, what better environment to have a computer club meeting than a place surrounded by motherboards and sound cards and all the odd gadgets that are inside a computer. And then my thoughts were interrupted by conversation. Some computer hobbyists may be loners but I found that talking to people about computers was as fun or more fun than operating one. Though topics sometimes strayed from computers, I got the feeling that people were intent on learning from each other. And in spite of the meeting being in English, many people were from non-English speaking countries. They say that binary is a universal language and when people talk about things binary (computers), a special language is created - a combination of computer talk and English - perhaps describable as Geeklish"
Soon people sat for the main show or presentation. Each month a person or group of people is given the responsibility of preparing a presentation to explain a particular topic. Presenters are often early members of the club who have a background in computing. Though people from non-computer backgrounds who are knowledgeable in a particular area also give presentations.
The presenter at the meeting I attended was a guy named Michael from Britain. His topic was 'audio on the computer'. When the presentation started I was confused because he wasn't talking about audio. But I soon understood this was a follow up to a previous meeting. He was talking about a computer that the club had built from scratch named Marvin" He continued on about what to do following physical assembly, like installing software, updating drivers, etc. The conversation flowed nicely and many related topics like the Windows Update function were discussed, which led to discussions of general tips for using Windows. He showed us how to install Microsoft Office and informed us of a free alternative to Office called OpenOffice.org, which I am using to type this report! The style of presentation was not just one person speaking but more like a facilitator conducting contributions from the audience. Most questions the presenter answered but many were referred to other members of the club who had experience in that area. The overall feeling was more of a discussion than a lecture.
Audio was the topic of the day.The talk was divided into three sections: hardware, software, and how to work the two. With audio hardware he showed how to physically connect a turntable via an audio cord with a sound card on the computer. The audio turntable was used as an example because it's analogue (compared to a digital computer), and because a record is one continuous track (compared to digital music where every song is a separate track) and lastly because records are fragile and people want to make copies for backup.
The type of audio cord that you need is one that fits into whatever you want to record from and to. While this seems obvious it explains that the cords you use will simply be the ones that can connect properly. Other differences are less significant. The difference between a copper cord and an optical cord was explained and he passed cords around so that we could examine them. A tip was given on how to distinguish between stereo cords and monologue cords, which I found useful for purchasing an audio cord recently. Later, we got all the parts hooked up and it was time to check out the computer. Michael had previously downloaded various audio editing and recording programs from the Internet. He explained each program and where to get it and then discussed various quality settings and file types.
Then we started recording from the record player to the computer! We were shown how to record in a file format called Wave format (WAV) - an uncompressed sound file. Splitting tracks was discussed (remember that we were recording from a continuous analogue record to a digital pc). First we had a go at manually and then automatically splitting tracks. The problem of splitting tracks automatically was that the computer detected silences mid-song as being the end of the track. Thus, manual splitting of tracks was recommended. Personally I disagree with this and find it easier to split the tracks automatically (and in the case of error) repair it by merging the two tracks later. After we got the music in wave format, we used a converter to change it to MP3, a compressed file format that is standard for audio files on the Internet. We checked the size of the two files and found that the MP3 file was substantially smaller. Up to ten times smaller depending on the quality of the sound. Useful stuff for someone wanting to save a large music collection onto a smaller space!
At the end of the presentation people moved to another room to have coffee and nibble on snacks, but in true computer club style the questions and discussions continued on and as the last few people began to leave, the talk moved to what the next meeting would be about. If you've read this far you definitely have geek-like curiosity and should join us at the next meeting! The first two meetings are free and if you decide to join membership is only 3000 yen per year.
Contributed by Richard B. from Nagoya University.