Pimp My Music Stand

So, I was bored one Sunday afternoon and decided my music stand was boring. It’s a useful structure which is nearly always present when I’m playing the ‘cello, so why should it only hold music? Music stands can hold bows, but they have a tendancy to fall off, knock off the music, or other bad things. So, I began to customise.

Firstly, you will need:

• Lots of sticky tape. Gaffer tape is a plus, but might not be so removable
• Lots of spare paper. I use small notelets, but plain A4 would do the job.
• Scissors – I got by with tearing, but scissors are certainly helpful

So, the first feature I added was… (drumroll) The Bow Holder. This is very simple to do – take one unused pencil, pen or other straight object, and sticky tape it horizontally to the top of the stand. If done correctly, this does not interfere with the stand folding or music on it. The more tape used, and the tighter, the less the bow holder wobbles. Warning: If you generally have your music stand very low, as I do, the bow might hit the floor. Solution: Raise the music stand (or just let the bow rest on the floor).

After encountering problems with the bow falling off the holder when the stand is knocked or moved, I added an addition to the end – this small piece of [Pencil/Pen/knex/chopstick] goes perpendicular to the original holder, on the end. It being horizontal provides more security against the bow falling off, but makes taking the bow off a pain. If it is vertical, as mine is, the bow can simply be lifted (taking care to avoid mashing the hair). If horizontal, the bow must be angled then removed.

Secondly, the pencil holder – I simply rolled up some paper, added a lot of sticky tape, stuck more paper on the bottom, and taped it to the back of the music stand, at the top, in pride of place.

Lastly, the rosin holder – this depends on the shape of your rosin – mine is in a very nice round, metal tin. I made a paper cylinder with a bottom, and taped it to the bottom of the stand, with small nips out the edges to ease removal – it is a bit too tight, but you don’t want your rosin falling out.

No pictures, as my camera is dead (thanks to my antics with a screwdriver, but that’s another story for another blog – that and my antics with a soldering iron to try and resurrect it).

rectv

Here is a nice script I wrote, which I figured I’d share with the world – it’s for doing TV related stuff with just mplayer/mencoder rather than needing a special program (It could probably be done inside cron too):

#!/bin/bash

mencoder tv://$1 -tv driver=v4l2:norm=PAL:quality=100:input=0 -of avi -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -lavcopts vbitrate=10000 -o tv.`date +%S%M%H%d%m%y`.avi -ffourcc DX50

Nice, eh? This records the channel specified on the command-line on my tuner, which in my case is always 60 since that’s where sky is plugged in. It captures (not sure which codec it encodes with, probably some variety of mpeg4) to a file named from the current date and time to the current directory.

One thing I want to do is add an option so I can specify which sky channel it’s recording on the command line, and it’ll look up TV listings on the net and name the file after the program name. Heck, maybe even give it a beamer and let it control the sky box.

Any idea how exactly to get it to encode properly so my files aren’t massive and will play in a sane media player, please tell me.  I suck at mencoder options.

Edit: I’ve recently figured out some encoding with lavc and mpeg4. The quality seems rather nice, and the file size isn’t /too/ massive. Also I figured out nice deinterlacing. Here is the updated script

mencoder tv://$1 -tv driver=v4l2:norm=PAL:quality=60:input=0 -of avi -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts vqscale=5 -o tv.`date +%S%M%H%d%m%y`.avi

And to play the videos with deinglacing I use:

mplayer -vf lavcdeint tv.<dateandtime>.avi

You can modify the original command to let you watch TV with mplayer too (can’t figure out deinterlacing with this one, lavcdeint only works when playing video, not live TV):

mplayer -tv driver=v4l2:norm=PAL:quality=60:input=0 tv://$1