Writing Software: TreePad

Monday, August 31st, 2009

I do my writing in a program called TreePad.

TreePad is a hierarchical information manager with an organizing tree on the side, and a pane for articles. In the article pane you can also put links, graphics, and so on. In the TreePad Lite, the freeware edition, you’re limited in how much text you can put in the article pane. I use TreePad Business Edition, and in that version, the article pane will hold vast quantities of text.

Here’s a screenshot of my fantasy poem in progress. (Click on the thumbnail to see a full-sized image.) As you can see, I can keep different versions of scenes I’ve edited and easily find them; I can also keep fragments, partials, or differing versions of scenes I’m working on. (There’s a wordcount utility called ‘Article Statistics’ under the Edit menu, by the way.)

TreePad screenshot of fantasy poem

And here’s a screenshot of a story I was working on with the aid of someone else’s map. I created a story-planning section in the tree, and pasted the map right into an article.

TreePad screenshot: a story with notes and a map

Tags: hierarchical, notes, screenshots, TreePad, writing software
Posted in Hardware and Software | No Comments »

Preparing to Record

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

My new microphone arrived today. I bought a Samson Q1UCW USB mike, which comes with Cakewalk Music Creator Limited Edition.

The microphone works well — and I sound better than I thought I would, on a good microphone, which is a relief. I really like the microphone, and I recommend it.

To my surprise, I had problems with Music Creator. I say it’s to my surprise, because several months ago we bought an Audio Technica USB turntable to convert vinyl records with. The turntable came with Cakewalk Pyro, and in that case both hardware and software worked perfectly and effortlessly.

Alas, on my system, Music Creator seems to have some problems with the mike. It induces a popping or clapping sound that sounds a bit like clipping distortion; but it was doing that even with the mike gain at uncomfortably low levels, when clipping was impossible. Nothing I could do to the audio settings fixed the problem, to my frustration.

So I went and downloaded Audacity, which is free. Audacity with the LAME plugin (which is easily installed) exports MP3s, and I’ve done some successful test recordings. I should be able to start making recordings of Dragon Winter and Sigurd the Volsung soon.

I wanted to do a recording per week, but I’m not sure I’d be able to keep that schedule and upload a new text section of Sigurd every week too. The sections in Sigurd are long, and I’m not used to making recordings yet, so I’ll have to do a few before I can make a realistic judgement about a schedule for them.

I’m happy. I’ve always liked Sigurd, obviously, but reading it aloud is giving me a new feel for the poem as a work of art.

Tags: audio, Audio Technica, Cakewalk, Samson
Posted in Hardware and Software | No Comments »