Portable Player Portal slightly updated

I have made some small changes to the Portable Player Portal pages, including reference to the new iTunes scripts, a change on the mailing list page and so on.

iTunes and JAWS – the Latest News …

It has been some time since I posted a message to the Blog, but I wanted to advise people about the latest release of iTunes version 7.

 

First, I have produced JAWS for Windows scripts to support this release of iTunes, and yes they do function with the latest release which is 7.0.2.  However, I would advise you not to upgrade from iTunes 6 unless you really have to.  Apart from the change in the design of the program requiring separate JAWS scripts, we are unable to support JAWS 7.10.  The visual changes in the product are so different to the extent that JAWS 7.10 has tremendous difficulties in interpreting some of the information on the screen with the JAWS Cursor accurately enough to be anywhere near reliable, and I will not release a product version which I know to be unstable even in part.

 

So the reality is at the moment unless things change, you can use iTunes 7 but only up to and including JAWS 7.0.  This is unfortunate as you may need to upgrade to iTunes 7 because:

A. The new iPods rely on this and

B. If you update the firmware in your older iPod, iTunes version 7 is required as the older iPod Updater program no longer deals with that situation.

 

I have provided a link above to the iTunes scripts so you can read about them if you wish to do that.  We are now up to version 3.0 of scripts to support iTunes 6 and 7 as there are now two downloadable programmes. 

 

For the avoidance of doubt, iTunes version 6 is supported up to and including JAWS 7.10.

Text Review of the PTR2

I have written a short text review of the Plextalk PTR2 if anyone is interested in reading it.  The review contains links to useful resources relating to the product.

 

The Plextalk PTR2

Here is a message I wrote to the mailing list of the British Computer Association of the Blind concerning the Plextalk PTR2. 

 

I thought a lot about whether I wanted an Edirol R09 from Roland or the Plextalk PTR2 available from RNIB and for what I want to be able to do, I decided that the Plextalk for me was the better unit. Clearly this recorder is larger than the R09, and it is a DAISY recorder and the built-in microphone is certainly not as good as the R09. However, especially when used with an external microphone or sound mixer, this is a wonderful piece of equipment.

 

I wanted a recorder allowing me to produce material in daisy format if required (which it is quite often), which also gives me the ability to store large quantities of recordings without the need to connect it to a PC or use a card reader within a computer to transfer the material, and which gives me extremely comprehensive audio editing capabilities without the need again to use a computer.

 

The PTR2 gives me all of that and a lot more. I have a 6 GB storage card which gives me approximately 105 hours of recording storage using MP3 128K stereo, or a variety of other time lengths depending upon the file format and bit rate I choose to use during recording.

 

The biggest advantage of the PTR2 of course is that it speaks everything. This includes the recording level status, the elapsed time of a recording, battery status, whether you are in record mode or record/pause mode – as I say all its features. Best of all, this information can be heard through headphones without intruding into the audio recording which is incredibly useful.

 

One of the other functions I have found invaluable is that you cannot only edit material after the recording is made, but also during the recording process. For example, if I make a mistake during recording, I can go back and overwrite the material. In addition, if I decide after recording the spoken output that I want to insert a table of contents, I can do that just by navigating to the point in the recording where it should be placed, and start the recording.  Everything I record is inserted; the machine does not overwrite the recording already made.

 

In summary, this machine gives me the ability to record material and edit it on the storage card, and then without the need for any external devices, write the finished product to audio or DAISY CD. Moreover, at least if I was in a conference-like situation, I could guarantee the output of my recording was going to be of a high quality and could make appropriate adjustments for example to the recording level should I need to. I would also be able to mark sections of importance either during or after the recording process which would be very useful for reference purposes.

 

From my Portable Player Portal web site, I shall be creating a page containing links to resources about the PTR2.

   

Audio Post relating to downloadable music and DAISY on a phone

In this audio post, recorded on the Plextalk PTR2, I discuss DAISY books on the Nokia N91 mobile phone, together with an excellent article from Access World concerning downloadable music, written by Janet Ingber.

 

Welcome to the Portable Player Portal Blog

Hi and welcome to the Portable Player Portal Blog.

I have devoted part of my own web site to an area which I call the Portable Player Portal.

Because I am frequently making changes to the site, it is often difficult for people to easily be notified of those changes without having to read all of the text. This Blog aims to put that right. New changes can be posted here together with updates to scripts for iTunes, any useful information which gets posted to the Blind iPod mailing list which I run that may be appropriate for the Blog, and so on.

This Blog is likely to be updated quite often. We have a number of categories which posts can be divided into, and if you have a particular player, you are able to view posts specific to that player by activating the appropriate link.

Enjoy the Blog, and if you have comments, please do let me know. I want the Blog to be as accessible and as easy to use as possible, so please let me know if there are any difficulties and I will try and rectify them.