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Why can't you get Electronic Musician or Sound on Sound etc... on Kindle?


vintagevibes

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I don't WANT to read my magazines on a tablet or computer. I want to read them in the bathroom, on the living room couch, or at the dinner table, and that means paper. The only magazines I'm still able to get on paper are Mix (with great difficulty) and Recording (because I write for them occasionally). I could buy a subscription for Sound on Sound but it's quite expensive in the US, so I get my fix on that one, and Resolution, by picking up issues that they give away at trade shows. And I still hae to buy toilet paper. wink.gif

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Quote Originally Posted by Anderton View Post
I dunno...that's not my bailiwick. I'm the content guy, what they do with it is up to them. smile.gif
lol

reminds me of that Tom Lehrer song about Wernher Von Braun...

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun
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Quote Originally Posted by MikeRivers

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Too inefficient. Look at the practical side. I can take a crap in the time it takes my Galaxy tablet to boot up (and at my age, sometimes I HAVE to wink.gif ). I can read a couple of paragraphs of a magazine article in that same time.

 

Yes but consolidating all those magazines into one place and never having that big pile of mags to throw out and always having them easily available for reference without having to throw them out trumps paper by a mile IMO. Besides, you need to take your time and enjoy your library visits uh, I mean craps.wink.gif
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I used to keep magazines for reference, back when the content was something worth referring to. But these days, while I enjoy reading an article about a producer or a recording, there's nothing there that I'd want to refer to in the future. I still, however, refer to copies of dB, Recording Engineer/Producer, and Studio Sound from the 1970s through the end of their publication. Lots of good history of products there, and good explanations of basics, too.

I have a load of PDFs on my computer, but I have more trouble sorting through those and finding something I remembered. I can look through a stack of magazines and often recognize what I'm looking for by the cover, but on the computer, they all look the same until you open them up. And those dreadful "magazine style" applications like they use for Pro Audio Review and Audio Media are so slow. You can't thumb through pages like you can with a magazine, at least not with my my computers (some of which are older than some of the magazines I have on the shelf).

You can do what you want, but you won't sell me on that concept.

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Quote Originally Posted by vintagevibes View Post
Besides, you need to take your time and enjoy your library visits uh, I mean . . .
Well, sometimes I chill out and read a whole article, but geez, why stare at a screen while I'm on the can when I'm just going to go back and stare at a computer screen when I'm done. I need a break.

Amend that . . . I need a life. wink.gif
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I have a "black and white" Kindle and enjoy reading books on it, although I still prefer a reg'lar book. You can read it anywhere you can read a book, so there's no issue there.

But I do enjoy paper. We are apparently the last people that still have a newspaper subscription, and I still read magazines. biggrin.gif And I like to read magazines. Paper magazines. Not that I don't enjoy my Kindle, but I enjoy the whole experience of reading a magazine, particularly since half the magazines I get are photography magazines, which don't translate to tablets as well. And I also enjoy the layout of a magazine.

But for books, a Kindle is really darned good.

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I have an HP tablet. Its actually a killer tablet with 16G memory.
It has the kindle store on it and my wife like it for reading.
From what I've seen messing around with it, any bok or magazine subscriptions
need to be viewed with the software application. If you have the Kindle application
installed you can read books. If you have a magazine application then you can view
the magizines that are offered on that site.

I dont think you can view books or magazines that arent purchased through those sites.
If you bought an online subscription on a normal internet PC, then its unlikely you can browse
to the site and view the magazine like you would a kindle book.

kindle books are compressed and formatted for the kindle software for viewing. Its not like you
download the book to the tablet. You view the book online and it resizes to the tablet and has
page turning touch features.

I tried to visit sites like HC and found I couldnt brouse the site properly so there are
many things you cant do on a tablet like you'd do on a normal computer. Some people
like my wife like them but to me they are pretty useless. I did get mine set up with lyrics
thinking it might be cook for live gigs but the dam thing times out on me
so that was a fail facepalm.gif

Theres a buttload of applications for tablets but 90% of them are garbage.
I see tablets as a yuppie satus symbol. They buy them to appear like they are on the cutting edge of technology.
Once they have one and they see someone else who bought one its like, "So you're a jackass and wasted your money
just like me one one of these too? I dont feel so bad that theres a bunch of stupid people like myself who are getting ripped off too"

Maybe it would make a nice hot plate for a hot frying pan when the battery goes dead.
They are pretty much useless toys otherwise. About as good as internet TV through a Wii.

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Quote Originally Posted by MikeRivers View Post
I don't WANT to read my magazines on a tablet or computer. I want to read them in the bathroom, on the living room couch, or at the dinner table, and that means paper. The only magazines I'm still able to get on paper are Mix (with great difficulty) and Recording (because I write for them occasionally). I could buy a subscription for Sound on Sound but it's quite expensive in the US, so I get my fix on that one, and Resolution, by picking up issues that they give away at trade shows. And I still hae to buy toilet paper. wink.gif
You just need 1 of these: IMG_20121121_123510.jpg Just stick it to a nearby window or shower door, get yourself a camera based page turner application for Android and you'll be able to read in the bathroom hands free. biggrin.gif

PS... Such an app -- unbelievably -- does not appear to exist, however. Just one more wasted opportunity in tablet land.

PPS... Some of you probably know me as a tablet skeptic... Even though I own one -- and like it fine -- for what it's good for... which is certainly limited to passive media consumption and running a few helpful apps like guitar tuners or the TouchDAW RC app and maybe GPS (although that'sspotty on mine for some reason).

Getting actual work done is a total PITA -- when it can be done at all without a mouse and keyboard. Speaking of which, yesterday I was sitting at my favorite coffee house and one of my coffee house friends had his own Nexus 7 sitting out on the table in front of them -- along with a jumble of accessories -- and a bag the size of two laptops to carry it all. He was clearly determined took trick some sort of productivity out of it.

By the way, this website is barely usable on a Nexus 7 because part of the text window often disappears to the right or left under the rest of the page.

PPPS trying to type on the native v-keyboard is totally frustrating... You can save a little of your sanity by using a 'smart' v-keyboard like SlideIT -- but the cuteness wears off quickly.

Hell, I liked my Nexus 7 pretty well when I started writing this... But I'm totally drained now... I feel like I just typed Moby Dick on a 120 year old manual....

PPPPS... Just doing simple browsing or social media can be a pain in the ass.... Many mobile sites are so dumbed down you need to switch to 'desktop' view -- but then the sites often don't work correctly... And some don't even respect the 'request to view as desktop site command (although they MAY have their own standard view option somewhere.... But good luck finding it if you can't see the page correctly.

Really... Not a brave new world... more like a stunted, barely usable one.


PPPPPS.... It does make a great portable TV around the house though... Assuming that you do your TV doing over the Internet and it doesn't require Flash.

And if the sound chip in it was better sounding, it would make a pretty reasonable Internet music player -- although the mobile player app for MOG, my streaming music service, leaves more than a bit to be desired.
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Quote Originally Posted by blue2blue View Post
You just need 1 of these: Just stick it to a nearby window or shower door, get yourself a camera based page turner application for Android and you'll be able to read in the bathroom hands free. biggrin.gif

PS... Such an app -- unbelievably -- does not appear to exist, however. Just one more wasted opportunity in tablet land.
My vision isn't very good. Unless I blow up the display so just a couple of sentences takes up a whole page, I can't read text if it's much further than an arm's length away.

I know that there are page turners for sheet music on an iPad, but maybe just not an Android. Ain't much of anything musical or audio for an Android.

.. Some of you probably know me as a tablet skeptic... Even though I own one -- and like it fine -- for what it's good for... which is certainly limited to passive media consumption and running a few helpful apps like guitar tuners or the TouchDAW RC app and maybe GPS (although that'sspotty on mine for some reason).
I think the application that I use most is the Safeway shopping app. But that means that I have to take the tablet when I go grocery shopping instead of just a piece of paper in my pocket. I finally got TouchDAW working . . yawn . . . probably would be more useful if I was recording myself. I wanted to use it for a talk, just to start and stop playback, but it just wasn't reliable enough. Could have been a WiFi problem, but whatever the reason, if I can't depend on it, I can't use it.

And I wonder who designs these things anyway. I got the Audiocontrol SPL meter and was surprised at how much gain I had to add to it in order to get it to agree with my other sound level meters. Then I realized I didn't know where the built-in mic was. I got out the manual and discovered that it was covered by the edge of the cover I have for it (which, admittedly, isn't the $50 genuine Samsung one). I cut a hole in the cover to expose the mic and I got about 6 dB more level but the labyrinth formed by the space in front of the mic makes the frequency response wonky (as verified by my spectrum analyzer app). And the orientation of the meter on the screen is fixed, so when you point the mic toward the sound source, you have to read the meter sideways. Maybe it's oriented correctly for an Android phone. That SPL meter really needs an external mic, but there's no provision for one on the Android tablet. The tuner (PitchLab) is pretty good, though, even with the mic covered up.

My GPS works OK as far as it goes, but I only have the WiFi version, so when you walk or drive off the map, it won't get another piece. My real GPS works better.

But we were talking about reading magazines on a tablet, weren't we?

I was sitting at my favorite coffee house and one of my coffee house friends had his own Nexus 7 sitting out on the table in front of them -- along with a jumble of accessories -- and a bag the size of two laptops to carry it all. He was clearly determined took trick some sort of productivity out of it.
That's a big step removed from going to the grocery store with the tablet instead of a paper shopping list.

PPPS trying to type on the native v-keyboard is totally frustrating... You can save a little of your sanity by using a 'smart' v-keyboard like SlideIT -- but the cuteness wears off quickly.
I find that I can type fairly accurately, but considerably slower than with a real keyboard, by using a stylus in one hand and a finger or two on the other. But I think I've written a total of three e-mail messages with it, and I gave up taking notes on it during an AES show lecture.

I should have traded it for a cat.
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I thought about this some more...if there needs to be a special Kindle edition, I doubt there would be enough readers at the moment to justify the cost. But ideally, I would like to see the mags go primarily paperless at some point (sorry Mike). The financial and environmental impacts aren't sustainable over the long run.

For example, right now EM is not actively trying to get more readers for the print edition. I thought this was insane - of course you want more readers, right?!? But the economics of extending the print run and paper/postage costs, coupled with the need to raise ad rates to cover those costs, don't add up.

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Quote Originally Posted by MikeRivers View Post
My vision isn't very good. Unless I blow up the display so just a couple of sentences takes up a whole page, I can't read text if it's much further than an arm's length away.

I know that there are page turners for sheet music on an iPad, but maybe just not an Android. Ain't much of anything musical or audio for an Android.



I think the application that I use most is the Safeway shopping app. But that means that I have to take the tablet when I go grocery shopping instead of just a piece of paper in my pocket. I finally got TouchDAW working . . yawn . . . probably would be more useful if I was recording myself. I wanted to use it for a talk, just to start and stop playback, but it just wasn't reliable enough. Could have been a WiFi problem, but whatever the reason, if I can't depend on it, I can't use it.

And I wonder who designs these things anyway. I got the Audiocontrol SPL meter and was surprised at how much gain I had to add to it in order to get it to agree with my other sound level meters. Then I realized I didn't know where the built-in mic was. I got out the manual and discovered that it was covered by the edge of the cover I have for it (which, admittedly, isn't the $50 genuine Samsung one). I cut a hole in the cover to expose the mic and I got about 6 dB more level but the labyrinth formed by the space in front of the mic makes the frequency response wonky (as verified by my spectrum analyzer app). And the orientation of the meter on the screen is fixed, so when you point the mic toward the sound source, you have to read the meter sideways. Maybe it's oriented correctly for an Android phone. That SPL meter really needs an external mic, but there's no provision for one on the Android tablet. The tuner (PitchLab) is pretty good, though, even with the mic covered up.

My GPS works OK as far as it goes, but I only have the WiFi version, so when you walk or drive off the map, it won't get another piece. My real GPS works better.

But we were talking about reading magazines on a tablet, weren't we?



That's a big step removed from going to the grocery store with the tablet instead of a paper shopping list.



I find that I can type fairly accurately, but considerably slower than with a real keyboard, by using a stylus in one hand and a finger or two on the other. But I think I've written a total of three e-mail messages with it, and I gave up taking notes on it during an AES show lecture.

I should have traded it for a cat.
You can have a cat and a tablet.

After watching one of those 'cute' cat on iPad vids (it actually was kinda cute), with the kitty fascinated by some sort of finger painting app, I was a trifle disappointed (and maybe a trifle more relieved) that my cat has as little interest in my tablet as my computer screen.

I don't have an SPL meter on my tablet but I do have Borce Trajkovski's Sound Meter V2.1 on my cheapo LG Optimus Android. That phone has fixed input levels, so I didn't have to calibrate. Comparing it with a strikingly similar app on my pal's iPhone, we determined that the low and high level readings with the phones adjacent to each other were pretty much identical. He's never properly calibrated his, but he's compared it to a Radio Shack SPL meter which he said it mirrored pretty well. So, that's like a game of Gossip, right? biggrin.gif

I'm still a bit iffy about reading on the tablet. I can't hold it out in front of me -- but then I never really did that with books. I use a ~$15 Moko 'convertible' cover that converts to an easel (vertical or horizontal viewing) -- and its relatively heavy leather over fiberboard case already came in quite handy when the tablet was involved in a several foot drop to concrete. (Whew!)

OTOH, it's nice to be able to get public domain books for free. And some e-books seem quite reasonably priced. I bought an old 3DW pals' new cop procedural novel, A Detailed Man, as a Kindle book for a few bucks on sale from Amazon (and installed the Kindle Android app) and that's pretty cool.


But, really, my favorite accessory is that suction cup holder. I'm not entirely sure I'd want to drive around with it stuck to my windshield (the suction cup mechanism is very good though), and it's illegal on the windshield anyhow in my state, pretty sure, but it is absolutely great stuck to my work table, since it has a ball joint that allows a surprising amount of viewing angles (which is good, because that suction cup really doesn't want to give up, even when you flip the release lever).

You know, with re the GPS, maybe the times it's worked have been those where I plotted a path from home. But that seemed to work well. I've had to drive across the megalop at rush hour a couple times recently and it dynamically switched recommended routes on the way back to accomodate traffic conditions. (I have no ideal how the traffic conditions got in there but they seemed dynamic.)

In a pinch, I can tether my tablet to my phone, but I'm on a 'dynamic tiered' phone plan (from Ting, Tucow's US-service area phone company); if I keep my data use low, my bill is super low, if not, not so low.


PS... re: TouchDAW, I'm guessing your problem was the Wi Fi. (I have a tiny apartment, but I nonetheless have a near-dead zone in my kitchen. I've tried moving the Wi Fi router around but it doesn't have a lot of reach.) The other 'problem' I had was simply 'disconnecting' the slightly tweaky software connections and having to reconstruct them a couple times. But as long as I've got the connection, I've been able to control a number of quite useful functions of Sonar from TouchDAW. That said, I don't have huge call for it.
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I love my Nook. I reqd it every day and absolutely dig the ability to get content, any book, 24/7. But magazines do not fly in the least. It just dosnt lend itself to the format. I still subscribe to Guitar Player but will drop it shortly. I dont think the formatter/layout folks have really cracked the nut on this one yet...

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I'm stuck in a waiting room serving jury duty. I've been reading downloaded Premier Guitar all morning, read this thread and responded to it all on a Kindle 3G. It's kinda clunkey, black & white and slow but it works and only cost me about $100. Premier Guitar is available as a PDF download and transfers beautifully to the Kindle.

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Quote Originally Posted by MikeRivers

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Well, just about every music application for a phone or tablet is for iOS only. Is there an amplifier simulator for the Kindle? wink.gif

 

If I wanted that I'd get an iPod since that market doesn't exist on other devices. I just want to read. Magazines don't require low latency ;>)
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Quote Originally Posted by vintagevibes View Post
That's the point. Every music mag is iPad only.
I didn't know there was even an iPad version until I spotted an ad for it this morning while reading the print version.

Hey, you've gotta start somewhere; and I'd bet more of their readers have iPads than Kindles. That doesn't mean there won't be a Kindle version in the future though. If there's money to be made in releasing one, I don't see why they wouldn't get around to it.

Best,

Geoff
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