Classical guitar progress logging (Apr'13)

For this month I'm playing Andaluza (Danza española, n.5), by Enrique Granados (1867 - 1916), with a YouTube partner.

The video used is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suTKOmmoBtw. With the help of youtube-dl (http://angel-de-vicente.blogspot.com.es/search?q=youtube-dl) I get the mp3 file:

angelv@pilas:~/GUITAR-APRIL$ youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format=mp3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suTKOmmoBtw

Then I use that one for practice, with the help of audacity. With it, I can use this track nicely for practice by:

• splitting the stereo track and muting the right channel, which has mostly the sound of the first guitar, which I'm playing. I also normalize the audio, as it has some saturation in a couple of places.
• using the "Change Tempo" effect, so that I can practice slower, but maintaining the right pitch.

For creating the final video, I created a stereo track and put the YouTube recording in the left channel (after removing its right channel, which is where most of the first guitar was recorded), and myself in the right channel (so it is more or less like I'm playing a duet with Marisa Gomez). The result is here:

Andaluza (Danza española, n.5), by Enrique Granados (1867 - 1916) from Angel de Vicente on Vimeo.

As an aside: For this piece I wanted to try with my Aria Silent guitar but I just found out that the line-in jack in my Dell Latitude E6530 is one of these combined in/out connections. By mistake I bought just an audio splitter where in reality I needed a Headphone and Microphone Jack Audio Splitter, so I had to do it with the Acer Aspire 1810T netbook.

Presentations with org-mode + beamer

I decided to give a try to creating presentations with Org-mode (and Beamer). In the end I got something that looks nice (though further tweaking will be required).

Webs that helped me to get it:

• For a nice template: http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/rtc/event/introduction-r
• To get movie playbacks in PDFs in Linux: 
• http://abarry.org/the-complete-guide-to-embedded-videos-in-beamer-under-linux/
•  http://tug.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/flashmovie/flashmovie.sty
•  https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.text.tex/VLg2UE3kpLA[1-25-false] 
•  To shorten the titles, etc. in the footer:
•  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2011-01/msg00177.html
•  http://www.uncg.edu/cmp/reu/presentations/Charles%20Batts%20-%20Beamer%20Tutorial.pdf
•  To get rid of navigation symbols:
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1435837/how-to-remove-footers-of-latex-beamer-templates
• For semi-transparency:
• http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.editors.lyx.general/72441
• To scale images: 
• http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2011-03/msg01554.html
•  Greying-out images: in the TO-DO list

I also had to do a couple of small changes to the file flashmovie.sty (which is in the in this tar file). The basic theme of the presentation can be seen below and the resulting PDF (in Linux I think the embedded video will work only with Acroread 9.4.1) is this.