playford

There are several useful cheat sheets:

• cheatsheet-en.pdf
• mwcheat.pdf
• wiki-refcard.pdf

These are rather similar, but all are quite short.

By editing the section above you can see how to format links to uploaded files. You can upload files of several types – mostly images – using the Upload file link to the left. Note that the sysop (NashJc) has to add file types to a configuration fil

Here is a reference <ref>Nash, J.C. (1979) Compact numerical methods for computers: linear algebra and function minimisation, Bristol: Adam Hilger (subsequently Institute of Physics Publications and more recently Taylor and Francis)</ref>.

Remember to put a &lt;references/&gt; tag at the end of your edit or the references won't appear.

<references/>

You can edit this if you are an administrator (a few users are), by going to

http://ottawaenglishdance.org/playford/index.php/MediaWiki:Sidebar

There is a page on File Naming Conventions.

OECDC has been using a laptop computer and a pair of inexpensive speakers. The configuration is as follows:

 Hardware:
    HP 4540ca (?? I may have numbers wrong)
    40 GB Hard Drive
    256MB RAM
    DVD-ROM/CDRW
    USB mouse (the Synaptics touch pad is too difficult for most people to use)
 Software:
    dual-boot Windows XP Pro and Ubuntu Linux (6.06 LTS Dapper Drake)
    The dancing is set up to use Ubuntu with username=dancing, password=music
    We use AlsaPlayer to play tunes and Mousepad to display the (text) dance instructions
    The Gnome file browser is set up so double-clicking on a file opens it.

AlsaPlayer can slow down or speed up playing of music. The main problems with Alsaplayer are that its display is inconveniently small for quick use while calling. Ideally:

• we should be able to use keyboard shortcuts i.e., use buttons on the keyboard to run the playing. This should be possible, as Alsaplayer is open source. However, we need someone who knows C programming.
• we should be able to make the display bigger.
• an smoother speed adjustment would be nice.
• a start delay would be helpful so the person starting the playing does not have to run to his/her dancing position.

While the laptop can play CDs, the drive is fairly noisy and vibrations (e.g., enthusiastic dancers) can cause the CD to skip.

Extracted tracks from CDs are frequently saved as .wav files. These are easily playable, but generally large (of the order of 50 MBytes).

MP3 (type .mp3) files are more compact and generally have good sound quality, but some of our early encodings were too compact and have either noise or other quality problems. A number were also extracted from tape or vinyl LPs, and suffer from low sampli

One issue could be that MP3 files could be considered a proprietary format (??references). There is an alternative in the Ogg-Vorbis encoding (type .ogg) which works very well. However, it is not as common as MP3s. Note that some of our recordings were co

?? Can someone provide some notes??