If You Have A Problem, and Nobody Else Can Help...  As well as help with audio/broadcast matters, I am happy to work on custom engineering (hardware and/or software) projects - if you have a requirement for a custom software application then I may be able to help - please see my software page for details of current and past work.

Equipment Maintenance and Modification
Whether you have a mixing desk with a faulty channel, a crackly fader or a playout system that keeps playing Atomic Kitten - I am available for one-off engineering jobs and/or as part of a retainer.  It could be a personal visit to your station or just some advice via e-mail/telephone - rates are reasonable and references are available.

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Get in touch if you require information on any of the topics listed below...

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How To Guides ... A selection of audio and/or PDF files

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Software and Apps That I Use
This is a list of some of the things I use on my computers or 'droid phone - I am sometimes asked what I use to do a particular job or what I would recommend. This list serves purely as a guide and whilst they work for me, they may not work for you - I am not a doctor.

PC Stuff:

• Paragon Backup and Recovery - Used to make backups of my laptop and other drives. Offers full cloning of drive with filters to exclude certain files. Can backup/restore using hard-drive, USB storage, CD/DVD or network drive via SAMBA.

• FreeFileSync - A great file sync utility. It syncs my desktop PC to/from my laptop and has the ability to handle "profiles" so can exclude certain folders/files/extensions.

• Exact Audio Copy - for ripping CDs to WAV

• Free DVD Creator - burns DVDs from various video formats: AVI, MOV, MP4, WMV, Xvid etc

• Free ISO Burner - a quick and easy way to get an ISO file burned to a CD-R/DVD-R also supports RW and Blu-Ray

• MyLibrary - Yes, my own app but I love it!

• MP3 Tag - A brilliant audio file tagger and works with AAC, MP3 and OGG. You can also specify custom tag frames which make it possible to edit StationPlaylist APE tags

• Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird- For web-browsing and e-mail via IMAP

• TweetDeck - for all my twitterings

• Visual Basic 6 and Visual Studio 2008- for writing my software

• FileZilla and WS-FTP for FTP'ing

• IcoFX - a free and excellent icon/image editor - great for making/re-sizing icons and pictures

• dBPoweramp Music Convertor- converts most formats to, errr, most formats!

• Serif DrawPlus + PhotoPlus- used for planning DIY projects, making labels and PhotoPlus is used to edit/re-size most of my website pictures

I also use some of more popular programs like MS Office, OpenOffice, MSN Messenger, GoogleTalk, Skype and X-Lite. Broadcast-wise, I have Adobe Audition 1.5, a licence for mAirList Professional plus a dongle for BCX3/BCX Premier.

Android Apps:

• GMail, Google Maps, Google Reader, Mobile Search - reading e-mail on the move, not getting lost and when I want to find something

• TuneIn Radio Pro - for listening to online radio and podcasts. If you have one of those iPhone things, it'll even record the radio for you

• TapeRecorder Pro - waveform recorder and editor, works very well with a broadcast-quality microphone (3.5mm 4-pole breakout lead required)

• Repeater - offers list of amateur radio repeaters based-upon your current location

• TubeMap - although I'm fairly good with the London sewer transit system, this app makes viewing the maps, planning a journey and live travel information so easy

• Trainline Tickets- for journey times, planning and ticket purchasing

Music on my phone is stored as 320k/bit MP3 on an 8GB microSD card which is tagged and sync'd using MyLibrary.