October 2008 Archives

In light of the race for President, I would like to highlight a pretty neat non-profit project called MetaVid, which is a freely available archive of US Congress video clips, complete with semantic metadata, transcriptions and annotations in a wikipedia style.

It allows for great searches for things like John McCain's and Barrack Obama's speeches that mention Iraq. Or just about any other topic that you find interesting.

The project uses lots of free software including Theora, MediaWiki and Annodex technologies. It also provides a nice little javascript library ala swfobject that helps with creating compatible playback of video and has support for the upcoming video element in HTML5. Theora and the video element support should land in FireFox 3.1

It is a really nice project that shows you where video will be heading over the next couple of years. With in addition things such as SVG, the canvas element, combined with HTML DOM manipulation, you can create some very powerful interfaces such as this SVG Video demo by Chris Double. Of course, since this is all early pre-release code, there is little to no hardware acceleration done. Hopefully this can be added over time, so it will playback nice and snappy, just as fast as native plugins can.

It will be great to see things such as Dirac be standardized as VC-2, the addition of SVC to AVC and see how that opens the playing field. So far the web and offline video have diverged quite a bit, so it will be an interesting thing to see if convergence will happen. Right now it is looking like the patent restricted AVC and AAC are the front runners for the new frontier, but hopefully there is still time and room for these free formats to take hold.

If you are excited about the Metavid project and have some time to contribute to it. Consider helping the project by improving the associated metadata and therefore also increase the relevance of the search engine, as it will be able to locate related content easier.

As we get into political debates between the candidates for the white house, it is pretty clear that the keyword these days is change. I do not think it stops there though. Change is afoot everywhere and with the current economic crisis this is only accelerating things, by having people looking at other ways to accomplish their tasks. Either for less, in a more green way or in whatever way is most important to them.

For musicians, artists and the music industry as a whole, change is on the forefront as well. First with iTunes and the iPod, now with things like Spotify, we are moving to a more connected world. Where it used to be about the actual songs themselves, it is much more around the experience created by it and its associations, be it cover art, videos, blogs or even interviews. Even the ability to interact with the music, such as Splice, Remix.nin.com, CcMixter and even with video this is more becoming the case, where I think things like the features of Eyespot are becoming standard must haves for sites. We are very much a remix culture these days.

It is one of the reasons, why I am still confused as to why some people are still holding on to the past and saying sampling is not allowed. People are still trying hash out out how this all fits in the world of mash ups and the general derivative culture.

The way people are being entertained is changing, in addition to how people consume media. Although there are still a lot of people playing music using acoustic instruments, but just as recording of those tracks has gone digital. So have most of todays instruments. Sometimes, they do not even really look like instruments any more. The big question is always, if we do not make money off our songs, then how? Some say concerts and performances, but even how that is done is changing.

DJs for example are still in love with the way vinyl works, but having waveforms that represent the grooves is providing most of what they are used to and tons more real-time control that was never possible with vinyl. Some forward thinking DJs have started taking advantage of this, such as DJ Sasha. Below find an interesting video where internationally respected DJ and musician, Richie Hawtin, talks about his current DJ setup and how it has changed what he focuses on during a set and how it is much more about creating mood and his interaction with the fans on stage over the age old beat matching.

Overall it is very exciting to me how technology is turning the world upside down and making it easier for us to communicate, share and entertain. There will be a lot of trial and error, but in the end I think we will be a better world because of it.

Change is a good thing, even if what is changing is change itself.

If you haven't heard about SoundCloud, you will very soon. It has been described as the Flickr for professional musicians, or a Yousentit replacement, but actually it is much more than that. It is an easy way to digest and share new tracks with others, unlike how Splice has and is more focused on mashups of complete tracks. You could almost say that SoundCloud has analogies to Twitter, with the way the dropbox and your soundcloud inbox works.

Although, you could use it for partial tracks, as it provides you ways to privately share the original recordings. I do not see it provide the VST or ProTools/Logic settings to go with it. I find that to be the main issue with all these online collaborative services. I tend to do most of my work on my DAW and therefore making it hard to share with others unless hey have similar software that understands the configuration files. Otherwise we could spend hours tweaking configuration settings until everything is linked and buttoned up. Doing this without a settings template can be a real pain.

I find BoJam lacking in the same way. It is nice to have a way to see a video clip of the person I am jamming with, but how about exporting all his tweaks and adjustments in a format that I can easily integrate with modern DAWs. Most studios are not directly connected to the internet anyways, and I do not expect them to be. These computers are setup with a specific purpose in mind and have specific I/O points that are strictly monitored for security among other reasons.

I do find the SoundCloud interface pretty slick and I especially like the waveform with annotations. The first time I saw a waveform based audio player was with the launch of the bleep music store. It was an innovative concept then, and i still think it has a lot of merit today. More and more musicians are starting to get used to looking at their music in the digital domain as waveforms, FFTs, etc. It is a useful tool to be able to confirm what you thought your monitors were screaming about, by seeing a little blip show up on a frequency diagram.

Overall, I must say that SoundCloud is a welcome edition that is going to put pressure on others to improve the music creation and collaboration side of the business rather than the legally entangled delivery and licensing aspects.