<p>All right. Well, good evening, hackers. My name is Clinton. And this
is a very off the cuff episode for me just to announce that I've got a
new microphone. So I just wanted to run through a couple of details of
that. Make a show, say a little about the microphone while I got it.
What I hope to do with it. So this is a roadie wireless go to setup. It
comes with three little boxes. Roughly, roughly, you can fit each one of
the little boxes inside a matchbox. So there are three of these that
come with the set that I bought. Two of them are microphones that you
clip onto your lapel. The third is a transceiver. So at the moment, I've
got the transceiver on and I've got one of the microphones on. I bought
this because I'm going to be going to a conference soon. And one of the
things that I do try to do at conferences is to interviews with people.
And this is kind of nice in that I can switch these two microphones on.
Give one to myself. Give one to the person I'm interviewing. And I don't
have to use a single microphone and shove it underneath their faces. And
I don't have to swap the microphone between the two of us. The other
feature, like the particular reason I've got this model is that each of
the two microphone units actually has built in RAM. So it will actually
record, like if you've got it set up in the mode, which I do, you can
get each microphone to do a backup recording of your presentation. The
regular mode for this set of microphones is to actually treat the
transceiver as a source and plug it into computer or plug it into your
camera as a external microphone. But it has this lovely mode, which I'm
recording this particular episode to. We can just turn it on. It's not
the transceiver is not plugged into a computer. It's not plugged into
anything. And it'll record something like 40 hours of voice. And later
on, I can hook it up to my computer as a standard mass storage device
and just download the waveform I believe. So it does have some Windows
firmware or Mac firmware. I didn't have too much fun getting that to
work under Linux. I tried under a couple of different VM products and
wasn't having any luck. So try it under wine. I tried under open box.
Eventually I did end up installing like a full Windows 10 install onto a
qemu image. And that had enough stuff working such that I could install
the Rode firmware on it. That let me do an upgrade of the firmware on
the two microphones and the transceiver because the first thing you do
when you buy something these days is out of the box you have to upgrade
the firmware because why would they do that at the factory before they
send it out when they can just make the users do that. And there is a
phone app but it does not let you update the firmware on these
particular hardware models. If I remember the error message correctly it
does look like the Android app lets you update the firmware on other
Rode microphone devices but not this particular model. So I had to go
down the track of setting up a qemu. I did find a good blog post on how
to set up a Windows box on qemu. It had a few things that seem outdated
so maybe it's a job for future me to write an updated blog post on how
to do this. If for nothing else instructions on how to do this in future
when I need to rerun the firmware update. The other thing that I really
needed to use the software for though is to switch on the recording
option. So out of the box these things do not record to the memory
that's built into the microphones. So I had to get, I had to update the
firmware and then I had to run the software on both of the microphones
to switch on the recording option. But now that that switched on I can
just hook it up as a USB master device as I've mentioned before and
presumably I can just copy the files and delete the files and I won't
actually have to run that software. So yeah there's a number of options
going forward so I can write that blog post with the updated details.
There were a number of hoops that I found that I did not have to go
through of the blog post I found so things are getting easier over time.
Depending on how in depth I want to go I could potentially one day sit
down and install like a USB listening device and see if I can work out
how to work out if there are any magic packets getting sent to do the
configuration on the device. Do I need to break any crypto stuff or is
it just a straight command like plug in the device and send a command
with a few funky options. So maybe in the very distant future when I've
got no other things on I could try and work out a pure USB non windows
solution for setting some of these configuration options. I'm not sure
I'd go down the track of updating the family I think that's probably a
little bit too risky but you know maybe one day in the future. But yeah
basically this set of microphones assuming that it works out okay
assuming that it sounds good. I'll hopefully be using these for
conferences coming up. Hopefully as well I'll be able to use it for
camping and stuff like that so if I'm out and about I'll just be able to
pull out these two things transceiver, microphone, a couple of clicks
turn them on they talk to each other wirelessly and then start recording
something. So it's much smaller than the current microphone that I'm
using so it's much easier to travel with. There are two of them so that
when I'm interviewing someone it's much easier and it's got recording
memory so I don't actually have to plug them into a computer so all up
it should be much easier to use. I think it might even give better
recording outputs and hopefully like increase the number of talks and
presentations that I give on HBO. So that's been Clinton this has been a
very off the cuff recording I very much am used to sitting down and
writing out a full script for these things so I'm doing this because
it's cool new hardware but also because HPR needs more episodes. So yeah
maybe other people can do an episode on what particular funky wireless
or what particular microphones that they've got that they enjoy using
and what the advantages are and disadvantages are. That's it for now.
Ciao.</p>
