Practical Mac / Glenn Fleishman
Hair dryer to the rescue

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At 2 weeks old, our little Ben was still rough around the edges when it came to sleep. Another mother mentioned to my wife, Lynn, that the sound of a hair dryer knocked out their baby.

Sure enough, at 1 a.m. one yowl-filled night, Lynn turned her hair dryer on at a low setting, turned it facing away from Ben, and he became quiet, fell asleep, and slept for hours.

We spent a few nights falling asleep while holding the hair dryer until I thought of cutting an audio CD of hairdryer noise. You can buy these baby-soothing discs commercially for about $16, but I have blank CDs that cost me a nickel each.

Using my PowerBook's built-in microphone, I grabbed about 30 seconds of good, clean hairdryer noise. If you don't have a mike on your computer, you can use an iSight or get an inexpensive USB add-on.

I recorded the sound with Sound Studio (www.felttip.com/products/soundstudio/, free trial, $49.99 to unlock full version). GarageBand — part of the $49 Apple iLife '04 package that includes iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD — can record and edit sound, too, but I found Sound Studio more flexible.

But I did switch to GarageBand to make the full "song": GarageBand lets you easily repeat synthesized or recorded sounds.

GarageBand comes preset to a 200-measure song, which translates to about six minutes at the default 120-beat-per-minute tempo. I had to extend this to make a continuous track of about 20 minutes. (Scroll to the far right of the mixer board, grab the purple triangle that appears at the end of the scroll, and drag that to as far right as 600 measures. You might be limited by system memory to less than 600.)

I now dragged an AIFF audio file of hair-dryer noise into a new GarageBand file. Dragging it in creates a track for editing. Moving the cursor to the right edge of the sound waveforms changes the mouse pointer into an arrow pointing in a circle, or the repeat symbol. I dragged this all the way out to just above 600 measures, making my 20-minute song.

From the File menu in GarageBand, I chose Export to iTunes to create the final AIFF file. In iTunes you can create a Playlist that repeats this song as many times as will fill an audio CD, and then choose Burn Playlist to Disc from the File menu.

iTunes's method of creating discs lacked the fine control I wanted for transitions, so I switched to Roxio Jam, the audio disc recording part of the Toast + Jam package; Toast handles data discs (www.roxio.com/en/products/toastwithjam/, $169.95).
 
For my hair dryer disc, I used Jam to put a two-second fade-in at the start and end of the disc, and a zero-second transition with no fade between the tracks. Some CD players will burp briefly between tracks even when set to zero seconds; others will play continuously.

The fade-in and -out at the start and end ensures that when the disk repeats you don't hear, "BRMMMMMM [silence] BRMMMMMM." That abrupt cut-off and rush back to full volume can wake the baby — and you.

My disc is a success, leading to other recordings such as "72 Minutes of Rain." In fact, I've become Johnny Hairdryerseed, handing off copies of the disc to an East Coast buddy with a baby four weeks younger than Ben, a doula we know and other friends. Reports indicate that our hair dryer is a big hit in the under-3-month set.

We initially had to play the white noise quite loud, although listening to a hair dryer all night is definitely better than the song "Ben Screams Because He Can't Sleep." (Secret: Adults get put to sleep by hair dryers, too.)

We hope to transition him soon to John Cage's "4'33" " — a piece composed entirely of silence.

Mutt and Jeff: And guess which one is Mutt? Jeff Carlson did such an able job during my paternity leave that I and my editor were eager to keep his voice in this space; from now on, the two of us will split the column and occasionally collaborate.

Both of us have a background in graphic design and desktop publishing. Jeff's focus is multimedia, including using iMovie and iDVD, as well as digital photography and Palm organizers. Regular readers know I write largely about the Internet, wireless networking and business applications.

Between the two of us, we hope to serve you even better and more practically.

Glenn Fleishman writes the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to gfleishman@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists