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Just an update, to help people who might want to do the same thing: If you have iTunes on a Windows machine with Windows Media 9 or better installed, iTunes will automatically convert any (?) .wma files you drag into the library, and you can put them on the iPod from there.

I'm running a Mac, so I used Virtual PC with Windows 2000, set the iTunes music library to point to my VPC shared folder on the Mac side, and let it take it from there. I had it convert them to .aac format files to keep them small, and Mac iTunes is of course happy with these.

Why can't you do it on just a Mac? Because Microsoft only makes a bare-bones v9 player for the Mac, and iTunes has no way of accessing those files without the full Windows Media support that's missing. Such is life. But convoluted as it is, this system works and I'm happy!

Pres

There's a link to the the files at the top page of this site. (But now that I look, there's not actually a link to the non-forum part of Astral Pulse, here in the forum...    )

The Direct Voice page has a whole slew of recordings in Windows Media format (Windows Audio 9 to be precise). The link explains it all in much more detail than I can. They're quite fun to listen to.

And I'd actually found a free utility that was working for doing the conversions, but now I've misplaced it... It's been a busy month!

Pres

Hi all,

While I'm happily looking forward to the eventual archiving of the Direct Voice recordings, in the meantime I was trying to convert the ones from the newsletter from .wmv Windows Media to .mp3 that I can put on my iPod. There are several utilities that say they can do it, but for whatever reason I've been utterly unable to actually get a successful conversion.

I could certainly use something like Audio Hijack to re-encode the sound as it plays, but with...how many? 54? recordings in my DV folder, that's a lot of recording to do in realtime...

Has anybody tried this? Anybody successfully gotten mp3s out of them? What software worked for you? Mac or Windows, I've got 'em both so that's no obstacle.

Thanks!

Pres

A year or two ago I spent some time working on learning Gregg shorthand. Mostly I wanted to use it for the Morning Pages that I was writing then (a technique from the book The Artist's Way where you start the day off by writing three longhand pages of anything, as a way of "opening the channels" for more consistent creativity). The problem was that three pages of longhand was taking me forever, every morning.

So I worked on learning Gregg shorthand and got reasonably OK at it, but ran into a second problem: I could write in shorthand, and mostly   read back what I wrote, but only very slowly. Soon I discovered that my Morning Pages writing and journal writing and whatever I wrote in shorthand began to slow to a trickle. I needed to practice it to get more proficient so I used it in my daily life, but trying to use something that I have only limited skills with is difficult. If I look at my journals from that time, the entries in shorthand get briefer and briefer, until I finally snapped and returned to writing in longhand.

I just wish there were more resources available for _practicing_ shorthand, the way there used to be Gregg magazines back in the 50s or whenever. Unfortunately shorthand fell out of popularity before the web got going, so online resources are few and far between. If you buy a book on shorthand, basically you've already got everything that's available on the web and more. I wish somebody had a scanned archive of their shorthand magazine collection online or something. The handful of Gregg books that are still in print are prohibitively expensive to just buy casually, and using my own shaky shorthand writing to practice my reading is very much a case of the blind (me) leading the blind (me).

So I guess what I'm saying is, I think learning a shorthand system is good idea, but I'm personally stumped as to finding enough resources to make a good go at it.

Pres