The Smallest Sample on ACB

This tiny sample of audio represents the instant that my iPod ran out of battery life while recording a performance of myself, Nils Westdal and Graham O’Brien on drums from Monday, November 17, 2008 at Cafe Barbette in Minneapolis.

Typically when a recording is interrupted due to power loss on a digital recorder, the device is unable to save the document properly so what you end up with is a corrupt file, or worse, nothing at all. In my case I ended up with a corrupt file on the iPod of about forty five minutes of our second set. After a minute or two of searching I discovered that Audacity has a file menu option called “Import Raw”. Using this option I was able to import the unreadable content into Audacity.

I was delighted to see that most of the recording was intact. However, what was was interesting to me is that at the end of the file was about a minute or more of random white noise. I fancifully imagined this as my iPod going into a dream state as the power level was no longer adequate to support the standard functionality of the device. So here’s the first 48 milliseconds of that dream state with a three dB pad to eliminate clipping.

Ghost in the Machine

3 thoughts on “The Smallest Sample on ACB

  1. Hey, I don’t know if it’s just a bug from my side of things or what, but there’s nothing contained in the mp3 you’ve posted here but a millisecond or so of a click like sound.

  2. Ahhhh nevermind that’s the way it’s supposed to be! I’m sorry! I misread “48 milliseconds” as “48 seconds”. Woops.

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