tingilinde

more music loses

This time at Warner Music.

I don't know if they do reasonable social research, but you think they would get a clue on the sort of things that won't work.  Finding things that will is more difficult, but these were tone deaf given how music is used.

navigation on a very small music player

Apple's VoiceOver on the new iPod Shuffle.

Back when we were doing small music players (aac players for what its worth) in the late 90s we worried a lot about navigation when people would have thousands of tracks.  Our solutions weren't very elegant. 

Devices like this make you stop and think about the amazing progress in the cost and size of a transistor. Our first home computer had 128 kilobytes of RAM when most had about 64 kilobytes.  In the late 90s I wrote a paper that predicted a 100 gigabyte music player/video repository for $199 by 2010.  The tech people of the day didn't consider that out of the question.  What we were worried about was how to manage the bits given the device would fit in your pocket.

slight change in apple's drm free policy

-- I tried and about three albums were nuked - no update and the old album erased.  Also some singlet tracks are gone

Apple recently let you convert your iTMS purchases to DRM free/256kbps AAC for thirty cents a track.  The trick was it was all or nothing.  Now you can do it one at a time.  The interface could be a bit better and it is something of a tax to pay extra, but a move in the right direction.

update

WARNING!  DO NOT UPGRADE

the death of audio drm

Audio digital rights management is nearly dead with Apple's announcement of DRM free iTunes.  Subscription services will probably still rely on it, but they are not heavily used.  

DRM on video seems to be getting stronger - enforced even at the hardware level.

nice music interface

Check out Anita Lillie's Media Lab masters thesis project (video here) - a neat digital music interface called MusicBox.

One would have to play with it.  I find myself taken with the gee-whiz interfaces like this only to lose interest after a few days  This one looks a lot better than most.  I hope she releases it - maybe it is a keeper.  I'd love to see a scaled down version on the Touch/iPhone.

the best audio improvement for your money

Headphones are usually the best place to spend money if you want better music from your mp3 player.  $30 units are vastly better than what comes with most players (any iPod or Zune) and moving towards $100 can give better sound than $1000 speakers.  A few hundred dollars often exceeds the capabilities of your ears.  There are many examples - here are a few.

Apple has some new $79 in-ear phones that are getting good reviews - they seem to be as good as many in the $100 to $150 range.  It also seems to work with the iPhone, so I'll probably given them a try one of these days.

i'm sure they know they're worth every penny

RIAA's top executives have nice salaries -- about $1.5M a year

snip

RIAA chairman and chief executive Mitch Bainwol pulled an annual salary of nearly $1.5 million in 2006, according to IRS documents obtained by Digital Music News. The filing covers the annual period ending March 31st, 2006, and specifically reveals a Bainwol salary of $1.46 million, plus $17,175 in benefits. The payout was easily rivaled by president Cary Sherman, who pulled a base salary of $974,231, plus benefits totaling $584,287.

The salaries represent a significant raise from 2005, according to an earlier filing. During that period, Bainwol was paid $1.23 million in base compensation, and $117,522 in benefits. Sherman received a similar bump from a base of $920,000, and benefits of $104,482.

it is difficult to offer a comment... one wonders what performance goals were met?

really old computer music

pre-Bell Labs ... very neat

snip

The first programmers of the CSIR Mk1 were Geoff Hill and Trevor Pearcey. Geoff Hill had perfect pitch and came from a very musical family. Hill was the first person to program the CSIR Mk1 to play a musical melody. It was played publicly for the first public exhibition of the computer on the 7th to 9th of August in 1951, at the inaugural Conference of Automatic Computing Machines in Sydney.

The sound production technique used on the CSIR Mk1 was as crude as is possible to imagine on a computer. Raw pulses of the computer's data words were sent to an audio amplifier with a speaker attached. However, this occurred when there were no digital-to-analog converters, there was no digital audio practice and little in the way of complete digital audio theories. In addition, the CSIR Mk1 produced music in real-time.

improvements in aac

Stan is a friend and old colleague who happens to be the aac lead at Apple

This thread has lots of info on changes in Leopard ... (skuo is Stan's id, so follow those)

among other things:

A new AAC-LC codec is available in the new Mac OS X 10.5 (code named as Leopard) which will be released in Oct. 26. It has some significant sound quality improvement and bitrate mode enhancement. Since iTunes and QT use the AAC codec built natively in the OS X, these enhancements will be reflected in these Apple applications as well (doesn't matter you have upgraded these individual applications or not). You can also use the following commandline tools available in the OS X 10.5 to access the codec:
$> afconvert - perform various audio file conversions, including AAC encoding and decoding.
$> afplay - play back an audio file (compressed or uncompressed).
$> afinfo - display information about an audio file.

and

The newly released Apple AAC encoder offers four encoding modes:
Constant Bit Rate (CBR)
-- Recommended for live streaming --
This mode achieves a constant target bit rate and is completely compliant to the CBR mode specified in the MPEG-4 standard. This mode is suitable for constant-bit-rate network transmission when decoding in real-time with a fixed end-to-end audio delay.

Average Bit Rate (ABR) - Default Mode
-- Recommended for controlling file size --
A target bit rate is achieved over a long term average (typically after the first few seconds of encoding). Unlike CBR mode, this mode does not provide constant delay when using constant bit rate transmission, but this mode provides almost best global quality while still being able to strictly control the resulting file size and with less complexity than the CBR mode.

Variable Bit Rate (VBR)
-- Recommended for controlling the audio quality --
The audio signal is encoded with constant (and settable) quality and virtually no bit rate constraints. This is the best mode to achieve consistent audio quality across many files with the smallest file size to achieve that quality. It also has the lowest complexity of all the encoding modes.

Variable Bit Rate But Constrained (VBR_Constrained)
-- Recommended as a compromise between VBR and ABR --
This mode is similar to VBR but limits the average bit rate variation. The lower limit is the user-selected bit rate. Higher bit rate is adapted for difficult tracks and can generate up to 10% larger files than the ABR mode.

Note that QuickTime and the commandline tools on Mac can access all these four encoding modes. However, iTunes can only access ABR and VBR_Constrained.

the amazing clueless music ceo

Wired on one of the power centers in the music industry.

I've had some contact with the music industry since the mid 90s and the level of cluelessness never ceases to amaze. It is clear why -- their main business was controlling a very elaborate distribution machine, the musicians and the taste of the consumer. When new mechanisms emerged to counter these business "strengths", they reacted without imagination.