An update on my progress in the forest sculpture walk/audio tours
project is at the bottom of the email, but first my usual barrage of
questions...
I have been doing a far bit of looking for Australian suppliers for all
the audio gear I'm pricing at the moment. So my first question is - are
there any Australian gear suppliers that anyone on the list could
recommend? I recently priced AT3032s at $400AUD each from an Australian
supplier. Rob D. tells me he can get them for $170US each. That is on
pat with most of the prices I see over here. The exception is Rode mics
which seem cheap and plentiful here. I have a price of $585AUD on an
NT4. Not sure the exact conversion of that to US$ but it is sure to be
a lot more competitive than the AT3032s.
My reason for trying to find suppliers in Australia is that buying from
the US (or UK) involves lots of unknowns:
How long will it take (I've had amazon books take months)?
Will it arrive at all?
Will the American site reject my credit card for no good reason as usual?
Will it arrive in working order?
If it doesn't how long is this going to go on for?
Then there is:
lousy exchange rates and fees for charged for exchanging money
often expensive postage
the difficulty (to put it mildly) of after-sales service
So I am wondering if anyone has regular good experiences of importing
from America to Australia or somewhere equally distant and if so with
which suppliers. I am thinking of getting som gear from Sound
Professionals - for one example.
Another thing: my understanding is that as long as the total (Australian
dollar) price of the order is less than $1,000 then no customs applies. =
Anyone had charges or delays from customs?
So enough of the third degree; Here's an update on my project to create
audio tours in the forest along a sculpture walk:
I have received my 3 sony minidisc recorders. The were an amazing
bargain from www.minidisc.australia.au and I believe they are being sent
all over the world from Australia due to some peculiar local pricing
decisions by Sony.
I have managed to rig up an old Pentium II with Win98SE and
SonicStage3.4 and then Network it to my Linux home setup (with samba).
None of that was very easy. But the best bit is that the Automated WAV
converter on the SS3.4 importer now dumps the fresh WAVs straight onto
my Linux desktop. Like loaves out of the oven...
I will gladly help anyone trying to acheive such a setup but I'll have
to admit I was flying blind. And it was a weekend's work.
Rob D. has mentioned to me I will need a bit of RAM to handle 7Hour
Hi-SP files. I have 288MB which sounds enough to me. But I'm guessing
the 2GB and 8GB hard drives on the Win98 machine might cause me
problems. On the other hand the wav files never touch the Windows
machine (they go straight over the network to my linux workstation) so
perhaps that will be okay too. Sonicstage 3.4 seems to really creak
along with frequent long pauses for breath. But the actual importing
and conversion goes quite smoothly.
Graham E.
btw the project I am working on is the Southern Forest Sculpture Walk,
and is managed by a purpose formed group:
Southern Forest Arts.
There is very little to Google on any of those names yet but there will
be. Eventually. We plan to open in November.
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