A new supercharged digital audio technology has taken a broad step closer to becoming part of the evolving MPEG-4 digital multimedia standard. The Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) body voted last week to finalize the specification for “aacPlus,” a digital music standard based on work from a company called Coding Technologies. The recommendation still must be voted on by various national standards-setting organizations, but is now close to becoming part of the MPEG-4 audio specification.
AAC is a high-quality digital audio standard that has existed through several revisions of the MPEG group’s work. The addition of the “Plus” technology allows audio files to be compressed to roughly half the size of the previously compressed file, without substantial loss in sound quality. MP3Pro, an update of traditional MP3 technology, uses this Coding Technologies technique, as do the audio signals transmitted by the XM Satellite Radio service.
Rip From 2 sources?
How can I rip albums from my CD collection with two sources? I’d like to use both the internal drive and the FireWire CDR drive I have. Seems impossible in iTunes for now anyway.
HIT SONG SCIENCE
A Barcelona company says it has “developed an artificial intelligence application that could analyzed song and determine its potential to become a hit,” reports Neil Strauss in The New York Times. Really. Executives of the company, called Polyphonic HMI say that when they “loaded every song in the Billboard Top 30 over the last five years into the program, they found that “lo and behold, they all had something in common.”
Of course. They all sucked. They need a computer to determine this? Polyphonic sees things a bit differently, naturally. They think their killer app, which they call Hit Song Science, will help “raise the bar for music,” as suggested by Tracie Reed, vp of Polyphonic’s North American office. “We empathize with the people who buy a CD and only like two songs. Let’s get better music on more CD’s,” she says. Originally, the company thought their software could be used to “offer CD shoppers recommendations based on their favorite songs.” Now, however, they are promoting its use among record companies as a way to determine whether or not a song should be released. Several major labels, including Sony Music, RCA and Universal UK, “are either using it or considering the option.”
Jordan Berliant of Tenth Street Entertainment says he doubts a machine could measure the emotional content of a song, “in particular the lyrics.” Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and musician, meanwhile dismissed “the science side of the application” as “sloppy.” He added: “As for the music side of things, I doubt pop music could get any worse, so using even a meaningless tool like this might result in some improvement.”
[Reveries]
Pseudo spins hip-hop TV show on Kazaa
Digital broadcaster Pseudo.com is turning the tables on Hollywood, with plans to release a weekly TV show hosted by rap star Ice-T on Internet file-sharing network Kazaa. [CNET News.com (20 stories)]
A little AppleScript goes a long way…
I just used a couple of freely available AppleScript widgets to enable auto-import into my iTunes library on a shared volume on my home network!
I can now transfer music I rip/share, at a friends house, at the office (we have a system with many CDs), where ever… to my home machine via ftp into a folder, which then enables iTunes to import automagically! Once the import is complete, I then have immediate access to tunes in SliMP3!!
What you need…
From Apple –
1. ScriptMenu
2. Folder Action Scripts
3. Add to iTunes Folder Action (scroll to the bottom)
Follow the instructions with each part – takes about 5 minutes…
This saves the double effort normally required to copy to the folder, then import into iTunes. I still go in and tweak certain ID3 tag pieces, but I can be jamming to the new tunes while that happens.
LA Times: Apple to launch music service
A story in today’s LA Times (free registration required) reports that Apple is planning to offer an online music service for Mac users, and only Mac users, that several record labels approve of… [MacMinute.com]
a music business case study
This case study of how much a fictional million selling band actually pockets is hilarious. And as far as I know, pretty accurate. [Adam Curry’s Weblog]
Sad, sick and “true” – it is a fictional band after all… but makes you think that if the music business gave a shit about the customer or the artist, they would have collectively figured out how to reduce the cost of an album after all these years (perhaps eliminate a few layers in their reality distortion fields), which might then get people more interested in buying their mass market krap. We then also might have a viable option for subsccription services…though I guess we will just have to see what happens with AOL…
SliMP3 = streaming music in my living room
My SliMP3 arrived today… in 10 minutes (with one hand! Seriously, my right arm is in a cast…) I was able to set this baby up, connect through my (also new) Linksys WET11 and BAM – streaming tunes to the living room on my stereo!! Sound quality is excellent!
This is by far the coolest consumer gadget I have purchased in a long time. The display is easy to read (especially in the large size) from my sofa. The remote is simple to use… debating on shelving it after adding the device to my Pronto, since it may be easier to just use their unit. “Wife acceptance factor” and ease of use may also play a key role here… Home theater systems are daunting enough.
Now what lies ahead is of course re-ripping music to 192, from 160…argh – only a few hundred albums. Fortunately I have the SliMP3 synced with iTunes so anything I add there is instantly available. I guess this means my orginal iPod will need a new friend to compensate for the additional storage I will now need.
A WiFi or Bluetooth capable PDA, I could access the SliMP3 via a browser and have an amazing remote in hand when at home.
Just realizing how sick it is that minutes after I get a new gadget, I am way ahead thinking about what else I need to support this purchase.
bless the internet…
Doing a fair bit of file-sharing this evening…
As I import Disc 1 of Tosca Delhi 9 (promo copy) into iTunes, I realize that the album (encoded at 192!), which I pre-ordered at Amazon, is not even scheduled to ship until between 3/4 and 3/10. Yes I did still keep my order. I am a collector after all. Disc 2 is almost here as well. Should be perfect train listening for my trip to Philadelphia tomorrow…
Automatic iTunes playlists
AgentArts has release a pair of iTunes scripts that automatically sort out your MP3 library. “Make Playlist Like” is a script that will build playlists of MP3s by artists similar to a selection; “Cluster Artists” will make a series of playlists based on all the tunes in your library. Both rely on AgentArts’s database of artist similarity, which also powers the back-end for eMusic’s recommendation system. I couldn’t get Cluster Artists to work on my 5400 MP3s, but I’m sure they’ll address that eventually.Link
Very Cool indeed! Can’t wait to integrate this with my iTunes / SliMP3 set-up… have to do that tonight!
The Joys of Ripping Your Music Collection…
I love strolling through my music collection and ripping albums into my digital library. It lets me pull time back with some solid tracks. Right now I am listening to u-Ziq In Pine Effect which is one of the earlier albums in my conversion to electronic music. Thanks to my job at the time, I had access to a serious amount of music… Labels like Astralwerks would send CDs to me directly…. Thinking about that now, it’s amazing what can divert your attention from the fact that you are not earning a salary that you can actually live from.
play music through iPod to Computer…
don’t ask why you would, but I just realized that when your iPod is connected in manual mode you can hit play and the music there plays through…
Select your iPod from the Source list… you should see the tracks on it. pick one and hit play. This just happened to be by accident actually but after trying it on a few tracks, it really does seem to work. I checked out the same songs in my main library file and they were not playing while the iPod was.
Sharing iTunes Libraries across users…and with SliMP3!
As I have already discussed, SliMP3 rocks! One of the coolest features for Macs is integration with iTunes. This means that you can have it read your iTunes library file as the way it sees how your music is catalogued. (You can also just have it scan your folder with music as well…)
I was having an issue with how to work this since I want SliMP3 to read the library file of a user that is not normally logged into our home computer (me vs. my wife). SliMP3 has no issue actually reading the file, there is just no way to update the library if you rip a CD or add tracks through the other user. I discovered this tip at Mac OS X Hints, which recommended user aliases to a publically accessible shared folder.
While this totally works for sharing the library between users, it did not allow for SliMP3 to see the alias…until I changed it to a Symbolic Link. They are basically the same in purpose, but unix (and as it happens…SliMP3) likes symbolic links better than aliases.
Now I have A SINGLE library file shared between the user accounts that continuously updates the SliMP3 server. This is killer…
Because my wife and I will be sharing the same library file, I wanted to make it easy to see what had been added recently, other than sorting by date added. Thanks to smart playlists in iTunes, we now have the option to see what was added this week, the past two weeks and the last month. All of these are accessible via SliMP3 – immediately as they change!
btw – the SliMP3 is hard at work on many additions to the software including a potential overhaul to the Web UI, based on an email from a user (to the user list) yesterday. The note was passed to the dev list and has already caused quite a stir. Check out the proposed revised look…
This is how things are supposed to work. Customer interact with companies who listen and encourage improvements to products based on how people use them.
The Real SliMP3
Would you like to stream your music collection to yourself, regardless of where you happen to be, home, work, internet cafe? I know I would… and now I can. The best part is that it was free and easy to do.
There has been a lot of talk about different tools to control iTunes from a remote system, but they all involve playing the music back out on the server, not where you are. SliMP3 solves that issue and takes it even further!
Here’s what you need for this project:
Dedicated, connected machine (Mac,Linux, or Windows) with MP3 collection connected or inside another computer, with an internet connection and an MP3 player and browser you might also consider the SliMP3 hardware which connects directly to your stereo…(you will need additiional networking gear, like a wifi bridge for this)
The app installs as a preference pane in OS X and can be set to run on login or startup, making it possible to access your tunes even if the machine is waiting for someone to login. Once it is installed, things get configured and run through your browser. If you have the hardware, you can remote control the hardware with the browser, or the supplied remote control. (I don’t have it yet…waiting on the digital-out version.) Once you set the location of your tunes, either with the location of you iTunes library — which it reads for Playlists! — or simply your music directory, you can begin a queue. In iTunes, you can open a new stream
That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. You can create massive random shuffle lists by artist, genre whatever. It rocks!
A comprehensive overview was done by Tom’s Hardware, which covers the hardware and software in fantastic detail… There are also user and dev groups at Yahoo Groups — search for slimp3.
Hip Hop plushies
Matt sez, “a hip-hop video for DJ Format’s ‘We Know Something’ featuring plushies breakdancing. It’s the best thing ever.”Link
[Boing Boing]
absolutely hilarious!
Mocean Worker at Apple SoHo tonight
Adam Dorn AKA Mocean Worker will be doing a music demo tonight at the Apple SoHo Store
UPDATE – I am really glad that I made it out for this. Adam was great even through technical difficulties with the Apple store set up. It’s always nice to see an expert use tools that you have messed around with but really weren’t sure what to do… Adam gave an overview of how to use Recycle and Reason and then move everything into Pro Tools. Totally cool. I just wish I had more talent!
Earphoria: Rendezvous music sharing for iTunes
A new app called Earphoria allows you to share your iTunes library over Rendezvous. It automatically discovers all the Earphoria users on your network and allows you to stream their MP3 collections.
Scrobbler collaborative filtering for iTunes
iScrobbler is a MacOS X port of AudioScrobbler — the media-player plugin that collaboratively filters your playlists with other users. It’s still under development, but it looks like it’ll be available for download RSN.
Verizon continues to fight RIAA
Here is a statement from John Thorne, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for Verizon.
“Verizon will use every legal means to protect its subscribers’ privacy. The recording industry brought this case as a ‘test case’ of its aggressive legal theories. We are seeking a stay so that the Court of Appeals can issue a final ruling on the critical legal issues before we are required to turn over our subscriber’s identity.
iCommune Lives!
From [MacSlash]
Here’s what the next version will be:
a stand-alone application that manages network accessible music libraries able to generate and manage playlists for your favorite mp3 player able to communicate with and control your mp3 player using AppleEvents Rendezvous-enabled built with a robust indexer and XML format that properly handles non-ASCII characters completely free of any Apple proprietary code or interface use completely open source under the GPL
more at iCommune.net