Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Education

Christina and I are PADI Open Water Scuba Divers

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Today, Christina and I are absolutely delighted to have been certified as PADI Open Water Scuba Divers. This is our gift to ourselves for our 25th wedding anniversary!

To be certified, we had to complete four training dives in the sea, a number of training dives in a pool as well as a very long and quite complex theoretical course which was followed by an online exam.

We opted to do our training with Scuba World Ltd, based at Le Preskil Hotel in the beautiful bay of Mahébourg. I already knew the owners, Daveena and Christophe, who I had met during my UNDP days. They assigned Visham to us as our dive instructor and he was great. He shared his experience with us and, little by little, we understood what was needed to become a good diver. On our third dive, we descended to 17.5m.

Now that we are certified, we can dive in open water all over the world as buddies (or with an instructor) up to a depth of 18m.

We managed to do everything over a period of a little less than one month. Our first dive was on 16 December 2024, the second on 4 January, the third on 7 January and the fourth and last one, today, 10 January 2025.

Of course, we celebrated this fantastic milestone with a good beer on the beach. A big thank you again to the Scuba World Ltd team. Thanks to you, we are divers!

Room correction when listening to music

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As you probably know, I am a musician and I also listen to a lot of music (including my own) on my Hi-Fi system.

Over the years, I have invested in quality equipment and I now have a good streamer (a WiiM Pro Plus), a good integrated amplifier (an Audiolab 6000A) and a good speakers (a pair of Elac Debut Reference DBR62). I generally listen to music in a small room with one side open.

While I was very happy with the sound (compared to what I had before), I knew that it could be made better by EQ, a process which is called Room Equalisation. As a matter of fact, there are resonances in all rooms. As explained in this article, “these are standing waves that primarily affect bass performance, which result in pronounced or boomy bass notes due to a room’s architecture and geometry.”

These resonances can be identified using a free software called Room EQ Wizard (REW) using a relatively inexpensive calibrated microphone such as the UMIK-1 I own.

The screenshot above is what I get when attempting to correct the resonances in my listening room. Six EQs are needed.

As I use Roon to listen to music, I initially used the parametric EQ which is built-in and it worked great. The screenshot above is from an old REW measurement and therefore the EQ settings do not match.

Screenshot

Since investing in the WiiM Pro Plus, the device has been getting updates after updates and, these days, it has a very good parametric EQ with up to 10 bands. Unfortunately, the gain is +12dB / -12dB max (which is a problem) and Q is 24 max (which should not be an issue). To solve the gain issue when, say, cutting by -15.3dB, I just use two EQs in a row, hence using -12dB followed by -3.3dB as seen at 61.9Hz above and this works great.

The result is a fantastic sound when listening to music. In fact, the soundstage becomes wider and the speakers kind of disappear (in the sense that the music does not seem to originate from the speakers but rather from wherever the mixing engineer has decided).

Interestingly, as a lot of bass is being cut off (the bad bass due to room resonance), initially, the sound feels lacking something but, within one minute, our ears settle to the new sound and everything feels right.

(PS: I am doing room correction on a WiiM Amp connected to a pair of Pioneer SP-BS22-LR in another room with excellent results too).

Splitting a large text file on every blank line

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I had a file of about a thousand lines containing the full description of multiple products (audio plugins from Plugin Alliance in my case). The file starts like this:

249
19.99
Mixland
Vac Attack★★★★★
A warm harmonically-rich optical limiter for compression with tube saturation that’s great on vocals, drums, basses, and your stereo bus.
Hardware EmulationsHidden GemsPA MembersSale

89.99
29.99
Woodlands Studio
VOXILLION★★★★★
A stunning and sophisticated, and complete vocal chain in one streamlined workflow. Featuring a high-end blend of a tube-driven preamp, two types of compressors, Nasal Dynamic EQs, Harmonics and more
Hidden GemsLimited Time OnlyPA_EXTSale

279
39.99
ADPTR AUDIO
Metric AB★★★★★
The mastering engineer’s best friend: Compare your mix to your favorite reference tracks. See,hear and learn even more with new expanded features.
Hidden GemsMasteringSale

and ends like this:

FreeDownload
PA FREE
bx_shredspread★★★★★
Intelligent M/S width for doubled riff guitars. Auto-avoid common phase problems, and sound extra-wide and tight!
FREEGuitar & BassHidden GemsM/S InsideMade by BX

FreeDownload
PA FREE
bx_tuner★★★★☆
Accurate tuning for guitar & bass with useful features like volume dimming. Tune up right before you hit the record button.
FREEGuitar & BassMade by BXSale

FreeDownload
PA FREE
bx_yellowdrive★★★★★
Warm to crunch to shred with this classic “Yellow” pedal in plugin form.
Creative FXFREEGuitar & BassHardware EmulationsMade by BXSale

What I wanted to do was to split the long file of a thousand lines into smaller files, each containing the lines corresponding to one plugin only.

Fortunately, the plugins were separated by an empty line. After some searching, I stumbled upon a Stackoverflow post of someone having the same issue and I settled on this solution enhanced by this comment:

gawk -v RS= '{ print > ("plugin-" NR ".txt")}' plugins.txt

As explained in the solution, “setting RS to null tells (g)awk to use one or more blank lines as the record separator. Then one can simply use NR to set the name of the file corresponding to each new record”. As explained in the comment, this will fail with the basic version of awk as it cannot handle too many open files at the same time (only 252 files were created with awk). Switching to gawk works great and now I have 277 files which I can further process.