The weblog of Lucas Gonze -- archives

Mon, 30 Apr 2007

I have moved my blog over to blog.gonze.com, which is Wordpress. See ya, http://gonze.com/weblog and Blosxom.

Tue, 03 Apr 2007

iTunes/EMI deal

To the record industry, the importance of the EMI/iTunes deal is about raising prices on singles. The industry believes that singles are replacing albums, and that it has to find a way to make a living on a release without being able to sell an album's worth of tracks.

Notice that prices on single songs went up by 1/3, but prices on full albums -- even with higher-fidelity DRM-free files -- didn't go up a single penny.

Mon, 02 Apr 2007

Jay on purple podcasting

Jay Fieberg emailed these comments on my purple podcasting blog entry.

Wrong Notes started before podcasting was called podcasting, and also before XSPF had been spec'd sufficiently and implemented. My original idea was that, since I want to post bunch of audio via a blog, I want to support both the audio / playlist and the blog / feed interactions. So, I've always posted m3u playlists, and entries in my original RSS feed had enclosure elements that pointed to m3u playlists.

Each m3u playlist then listed one or more mp3s. As the author of the site, I am authoring blog entries that point to playlists of audio. And, technically (spec-wise), there is no constraint that prevents the RSS enclosure element from being used in this way.

But, with the rise of podcasting, I basically felt obliged to change my RSS to match the de facto standard for enclosures, which is a single mp3 file. I at first held out for a good while, and campaigned for playlist support in various podcast tools, but by the time iTunes became a dominant podcast client, I couldn't hold out any longer.

So, the MIME type error in my RSS feed that you mention, where I use type="audio/mpegurl" instead of type="audio/mpeg" is due to the legacy of my enclosures being m3u. When I changed it all over to use mp3s, I obviously missed the MIME type. (Thanks for catching that--I'll fix it next time I do a post. Actually, there are several other legacy issues around my original use of m3u, and I won't get to clear them up until I launch a whole new site later in the year.)

In terms of my current process, I create my audio segments as separate segments from the start. They are naturally separate in one way or another, e.g., talking about a song is separate from the song, and one song is separate from another song, etc. With the interviews I've done, I'm already editing down longer conversations into shorter and more focused discussion, so it's also very natural to break up talking segments. And, as a musician, I see these breaks in talking segments as natural places to introduce new musical interludes (which, of course, then are their own segments).

My final podcast publishing process involves:

producing individual WAVs (for archiving, etc.)
merging all of the WAVs into a single file
converting all of the WAVs into mp3s
creating a XSPF playlist listing all of the mp3s
creating an HTML list listing all of the mp3s (inline in the blog entry)
create an HTML reference to the XSPF music player and the XSPF playlist (inline in the blog entry)
create an RSS enclosure reference to the merged mp3 file

It should be relatively trivial to write a script that takes a directory of WAV files (my step 1) and does the rest (steps 2 -7). I am still doing all of this "by hand" (which is part of the reason I post so infrequently), but, to me, it's one right model for publishing music audio in a blog, and it's just screaming for some computer tool support. I think this model would naturally translate to video, as well.

Of course, were it up to me, I'd eliminate the "one big file" requirement--what a waste! We still need podcast clients to support playlists--now, with XSPF as a standard that is widely adopted, it should be a no-brainer!

And, a bigger philosophical issue: the most successfully marketed new formats, like podcastized RSS, tend to find a middle ground between meeting some of people's needs and totally discouraging any similar formats that could meet other of people's needs. What do you do when you are one of the others / have other needs?

Sun, 01 Apr 2007

purple podcasts

I am able to publish a direct link to the worst song ever because Jay Fienberg used an interesting new method to assemble the podcast in which I discovered this very bad song.

Podcasts are, by convention, one long file made up of multiple distinct segments. It is the file as a whole that has a URI, rather than the segments. If the segments had URIs of their own they could be bookmarked, linked, and cached. A highfalutin way to say that this would be good is that An important principle of Web architecture is that all important resources be identifiable by URI.

Jon Udell has addressed this issue several times. In O'Reilly Network -- MP3 Sound Bites, for example, he describes the problem as:

Until and unless we achieve a radical breakthrough in speech-to-text translation--and I'm not holding my breath--we'll need to find another way to make audio content more granular, and easier to consume selectively.

Jon's solution is to define a new URI syntax which allows you to link into an audio or video file. HTML does something comparable by supporting the idea of fragment identifiers. Fragment identifiers are sub-addresses within a document using the syntax http://example.com/thedocument#fragment. For example, this link to the last paragraph of this document relies on the fragment identifier #lastparagraph.

The problem with that approach is that it requires a new internet standard (since the meaning of a fragment identifier must be specified as part of the MIME type for a file format), and this standard must be implemented by many different software developers. This is not doable; I know that because we have tried and failed a very similar angle within the XSPF group. Standards are insanely hard to pull off.

Playlistcasting

A different way to approach the problem is to use playlists.

When a podcaster was putting together their presentation, they would break up the larger document into smaller ones, for example a spoken introduction, a song, an interview, another song, and a spoken conclusion. Rather than concatenating these into one big audio file, the podcaster would leave each part as a separate file. They would put the files up on a web server, then write a simple playlist pointing to each of the files in sequence. Lastly, the podcast client would render the playlist.

And that's just what Jay Fienberg did with his podcast, which looks like this:

Wrong Notes Podcast #02

Talking: Introduction [1:16]

Music: Spy? Music (new, for Wrong Notes) [1:45]

Talking: A Little History [0:46]

Music: New Dawn Coming, by The Light [3:32]

Talking: Segue into Dark Is The Night [0:48]

Music: Dark Is The Night, by The Light (The Worst Song Ever) [7:38]

Talking: Conversation with Dean Fienberg [7:42]

Music: Nostalogia (new, for Wrong Notes) [1:38]

Talking: Colophon [0:24]

Or, play it all now! Here!

(If you're reading this in a tool which strips out embeds, like Bloglines, you're not seeing the embedded player for the playlist in the above text. You might want to check out this blog entry in its original browser form to get a feel for it, including the extremely cool and immediately useful feature that you can skip around within the podcast if you right click on the player).

This may be crude, but it works. There is no audible difference between this method and the conventional one, yet it enables linking and bookmarking within a podcast.

A necessary workaround

Ahem. Sort of. There's a catch -- you'd need support from podcast clients. Many of them would need to be enhanced to support playlist formats, and avoiding this overhead is exactly what this approach is supposed to avoid. To work around that problem the podcast would need to be published in two forms, the monolithic audio file and the separate segments.

And that's exactly what Jay does in his RSS, which references a monolithic pre-assembled version of his podcast:

<enclosure
   url="http://earreverends.com/podcast/02/ear_reverends_podcast_02_all.mp3"
   length="30506007"
   type="audio/mpegurl" />

Jay has a telling mistake in his RSS -- he uses the MIME type for an M3U file, though the file itself is an MP3, which has a different MIME type. That comes out in the wash because the web server returns the proper MIME type, but some podcasting clients will refuse to handle his podcast precisely because they don't support playlist formats.

You might say that this is not really a playlist, just a list of links in the HTML of the blog entry and a separate enclosure containing a single file. That's an overly limited view of what a playlist is, though. Any list of audio or video links is a playlist. In this case the playlist format just happens to be HTML.

How-to

If you're doing an ordinary podcast right now and you'd like to try doing a purple podcast (more on the term in the next section), here is a checklist:

Break your podcast up into logical chunks. These should correspond to sections that make sense and that people might want to access in isolation. For example, if people might want to skip over the weather report and go straight to the sports segment, then give sports its own segment.

Publish each chunk as a separate file. In your HTML make a separate link to each one. For example:

      <a href="chunk1.ogg">top news</a>
      <a href="chunk2.ogg">local news</a>
      <a href="chunk3.ogg">weather</a>
      <a href="chunk4.ogg">sports</a>
      <a href="chunk5.ogg">say goodnight</a>

Publish the original monolithic podcast as a single file. Link to this in the RSS enclosure.
(On a personal level it pains me to not recommend that you link to an XSPF file in the RSS enclosure, but I can't do that until podcasting clients support XSPF, if ever).
Embed a player in your web page.
If you want to allow users to skip around within the player, which seems like a big win to meq:
1. Use an embedded player that supports playlists and makes it easy to skip from one track to the next. Music Player Extended mode is one possibility.
2. Create a playlist of your segments. If you are using an XSPF player, the XSPF quick start instructions may be helpful.
You can also use Webjay to create a playlist and embed a player.

Purple numbers

As with most interesting things related to contemporary technology, Doug Englebart has been here before, in this case with a concept called Purple Numbers. There is a bastardized but simplified version of Englebart's vision by Eugene Eric Kim. There is related discussion on Tim Bray's blog. Mark Nottingham argues that addresses within a document that aren't linked to the semantics of a document can lead to brittleness and loss of utility. Mark's argument, if you buy it, suggests that Jon's time-based clipping would be improved by having clips be defined by the podcast creator, as Jay's method does.

Purple podcasting would have benefits for the web as a whole. Because of the ability to use fragment identifiers within HTML, third parties are able to annotate web pages published elsewhere. Similarly, this method would allow third parties to talk back to, elaborate on, or otherwise respond to audio and video files. They might even post their responses in audio or video, and these responses themselves might contain addressable fragments. Taken together these documents would constitute a new web of interlinked audio and video.

Tue, 27 Mar 2007

I'm checking out the beta of something called mxplay. It's a lot like Songbird from what I can see so far, except that it's not as heinously buggy and it has a nifty 2-D pan control.

Fri, 16 Mar 2007

the motive for killing webcasting

Everybody knows who killed webcasting, the question is why?

Small Internet radio hit by new royalty rates - Yahoo! News

After a two-year proceeding, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has set rates for commercial and noncommercial webcasts and Internet simulcasts, which some executives say will put them out of business.

Why did the record industry want royalty rates for webcasting to go up so high that it may force many webcasting outfits to go under? Because this may also cause on-demand licensing rates to go up.

Webcasters in the US are legally able to play music from the major labels because of a compulsory license. Most other online uses of music require one-to-one negotiations between a record company and the publishing site. These 1-1 negotiations include virtually all big-budget music distribution, such as at the Rhapsody, Napster and Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscription services and the iTunes pay-per-download store.

Rates paid under the webcasting compulsory are the floor under these negotiated rates. Rhapsody et al always have the choice of dropping back to webcasting. They negotiate only because they want to offer enhanced services such as on-demand downloads.

Rates for on-demand downloads are the point here. If the lowest price possible -- the webcasting compulsory -- rises, the prices for on-demand services should also. Or at least that is the plan.

To the major labels, revenues from webcasting royalties are not significant in comparison to revenues from the iTunes store and comparable online distributors. The iTunes store, mainly. If the webcasting industry disappears from the face of the internet, that is an acceptable level of collateral damage as long as revenues from premium services like iTunes rise enough.

I imagine the labels modeled this all out in great detail before going for it, since nuking the webcasters is a risky move, not to mention as hardball as it gets. But then again, getting to show that they have balls of steel was probably considered upside.

Two points that you'll have to accept as assumptions for this all to make sense:

The new royalty rates cannot be supported by the webcasting industry. The webcasters aren't just working the referee.
The CRB rate decision was controlled by the major labels.

Thu, 08 Mar 2007

patronage follow up

On February 12 I gushed that the Mercedes-Benz Mixed Tape site was a great example of the patronage mode for funding music. It turns out that things are not nearly so perfect. Janko Roettgers tells me that Unfortunately it isn't that great of an example for patronage because the artists in fact don't get paid. All they get is exposure.

Mon, 26 Feb 2007

shark jumping at Myspace

I just friended my barbershop.

I heard about their Myspace while I was getting my hair cut today.
The image floating on the side of this blog post, if all goes well, is
the poster on the wall at the shop.

They were talking about getting a new USB cable for one of their
iPods.  Your people make those said the Mexican barber to the
asian customer in the other chair.  No way, said the customer.
You guys make them.  We design them. The barber
chuckles.

Oh yeah?, says me, the middle aged white man.  They stop
talking and look over at me.  My people buy them.  We're
the ones over at Frye's picking up a USB-powered blender.

The four of us cracked up hard. My barber had to cool it with the
clippers for a bit.

You had to be there, I realize.

Tue, 20 Feb 2007

twitter day


follow lucas_gonze at http://twitter.com

Sat, 17 Feb 2007

Semantic web content resolution

In a comment on my recent post about content resolution and the MTV playlist archive, Danny Ayers brings in the semantic web toolkit:

Weaving a XSPFing yarn

I suspect a GRDDL/RDF/SPARQLing hammer could hit this nail on the head too

I'd love to see that done. Though, GRDDL requires XML input, and since the original data isn't in a XML-ish format (yet) it would have to be converted to one, and that XML format would probably be best as XSPF itself. These tools are complementary, not mutually exclusive.

The chain of transforms would be:

source document -> (custom scraper)
XSPF -> (GRDDL) ->
RDF -> (SPARQL) ->
songs

The relationship between SPARQL and content resolution is new to me. It's an interesting similarity. The one reservation I have is that content resolution has an aspect of computational linguistics which would be hard to do in SPARQL. (Given my very limited understanding of SPARQL).

About using GRDDL to convert XSPF to RDF, that's completely in harmony with the design of XSPF -- we always intended it to be an intermediate format facilitating transfer, sharing and repurposing. That it's in the middle of the chain of transforms above is no surprise.

Fri, 16 Feb 2007

archive of vintage MTV playlists

altmusictv - 120 Minutes archive - Playlists

Welcome to the 120 Minutes playlist archive project on altmusictv! This archive tracks the legacy of MTV's 120 Minutes over the years, from the first episodes in 1986 to the last episode on May 4, 2003.
The goal here is to create a retrospective of alternative music like nothing ever seen before. Anyone can send in 120 Minutes playlists.
With the help of our contributors, we currently have 342 playlists, going all the way back to 1986

This is a fantastic case for a content resolver:

We expected a new kind of software called a content resolver to do the job of converting XSPF to a plain old list of files or URIs. A content resolver would be smart enough to keep your playlists from breaking when you move your media from /oggs to /music/ogg. It would be able to figure out that a playlist entry by the artist "Hank Williams" with the title "Your Cheating Heart" could be satisfied by the file /vorbis/hankwilliams/yourcheatingheart.ogg. It might even know how to query the iTunes music store or another online provider to locate and download a missing song.

That is, if we could convert those text listings into XSPF, we could then pass them through something like Paul Lamere's Playlist Resolver to make it possible to fetch all the tracks from Undeadster.

Thu, 15 Feb 2007

lightnet #14

alexbarnett.net blog : The Lightnet Revisited

was curious to see how the lightnet meme has been doing so I did some searching around.

Building an Relationship Economy | Linux Journal

What can we do -- as music lovers, or as customers -- to find, use, and even pay for, licensed work? Some mechanisms are there, but nothing yet that is entirely in our control -- that reciprocates and engages on the demand side what Creative Commons provides on the supply side.

Doc seems to be approaching the lightnet concept, but from a different angle -- how can listeners take control of their relationships with musicians? My answer is that they start by taking responsibility. There should be a sort of inverse Creative Commons license where the listener takes the initiative to be respectful and can demand to be treated reasonably in return.

I got a lot of reactions to my quickie blog entry on going to the Grammys, mainly annoyed that I did such a half assed job providing details, so here's more detail.

Brett asks how where the Police? (They reunited for a live performance that night). Well, it was incredible to see them doing their thing as a live act, and it definitely was live because they broke out into a space jam for the mid section of "Roxanne". They were ragged and not especially together, but who cares. Stewart Copeland played in that loping and loose style he's known for, Andy Summers did that sadistically understated sound that you've heard a billion times on the radio. Sting tried to be a bit more rock than normal, which is good because he is on my lifetime Most Hated list. All snark aside, it was great and I gushed about it to my seatmates.

My dad asks tell me more about the Grammy awards. ... I feel like a Kalahari pigmy who wants to know what riding a New York subway feels like. Ok, so realize first of all that Stevie Wonder and other pop royalty are not wandering around the lobby, where I had access. Out in the lobby it's people like myself who are modestly esconced in the Bizness, The Bizness contains a wild variety of subcultures, and each of these subcultures is known for having a distinct personality. About half of the people, presumably the business half, were wearing their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and trying not to stare. The other half, presumably the creative types, were dressed to get stared at.

Out of this second half you could almost always figure out their angle instantly. The country people were whacko country, like the guy with squirrel fur braids. The emo bands were instantly recognizable for the slicked down hair style. Also, they mainly skulked rather than pranced. The star fuckers showed an absolute maximum of skin; it was an asymtotic relationship to public nudity. There was a waif model female who was so thin I thought she was going to drop dead. Truly scary, not sexy at all. The hip hop wing was acutely fashionable, and you'd expect, and the thug faction wasn't even remotely scary. There were a disturbing number of child stars in Disney-ish outfits like ball gowns or white suits.

Sorry, I can't tell you who all the famous people were. I just don't care about musicians at this level. The only one I recognized in the lobby was Joan Baez, there for a lifetime achievement award.

My seat was way up in the rafters. The show was clearly about television -- there was an announcer who came out and told the stars in front that they had to sit down before the cameras went on; there were long breaks for commercials; etc. I could tell where the big stars were sitting because camera crews would swarm them.

After the show I had to go straight home to walk my dogs, so that was it. People-watching in the lobby was the point of the thing for me, and it did not disappoint in any way.

Mon, 12 Feb 2007

shut up and fiddle

I got to go to the Grammy Awards last night, courtesy of the fact that Yahoo did the main Grammy web page. Highlights:

Seeing core members of the various music industry factions -- emo, cowboys & indians, gangsta -- standing next to each other in the line for $6.50 hotdogs.
The Mary J Blige performance really moved me. Her presence was incredible.
Evening gowns mean cleavage, cleavage, cleavage. It's a contest between rich cupcakes to see who can get the most naked.
Ornette Coleman won a lifetime achievement award to universal puzzlement in the hall. Few people in hall even knew that there was a thing called "free jazz", much less that Ornette founded the genre. Even so, during the Red Hot Chili Peppers performance a little later they had up an improvised sign spray-painted on a bed sheet -- "love to Ornette."

About the specific choices that the awards represented, there's no point in ragging on the recording industry about being out of touch. Being out of touch is what the Grammys have always been about. Shut up and fiddle.

spiff at Magnatune

buckman's magnatune blog: XSPF playlist standard now widely supported

Magnatune now fully supports the XSPF standard, which a very large number of software programs can play. XSPF is nice, because it allows the player to show album art, and a "click for more info" URL, among other things.

Thu, 08 Feb 2007

ongoing death of CDs

Duke Listens! : Weblog

I went to the local shop to pick up the new Deerhoof CD - but it was not to be found - and outside of the dreaded Best Buy, the CD was probably not to be found in a 20 mile radius of my home. And so I finally decided to try out eMusic.

Mercedes-Benz Mixed Tape

An amazingly direct example of the patronage model: Discover Mercedes-Benz Mixed Tape -- exclusively selected music available as free downloads

When you go there what you get is a playlist that renders in the browser via a Flash app. The visuals are sparse and clean in an upscale eurotrash style with the Mercedes logo displayed prominently but not garishly. Visitors can download any or all of the tracks as unencumbered MP3 files; if you hang on to the songs, you will presumably continue to associate them with Mercedes.

The musicians are getting paid, their patrons have a realistic revenue model, and there's no DRM, CD industry, or compulsory licensing. Not bad.

Tue, 06 Feb 2007

XSPF part of Gentoo

Per Robert Buchholz on the XSPF developers mailing list, we are now supported by Gentoo out of the box:

libspiff is part of the official Gentoo tree for some weeks, living in an overlay maintained by myself for some time before. Also, PEAR-File_XSPF is part of Gentoo already.

For an average PC user this is completely meaningless, but as an internet developer and a product of unix culture, I feel great about having played a part in it: our work is being absorbed into the background set of computing resources.

Fri, 02 Feb 2007

Virgin: "Stop calling us a record store"

Music 2.0: Confusion, Opinions On The Future Of The CD, Physical Retail

There is no killer app that will bring digital-era shoppers into brick-and-mortar retail, and retailers would rather shift the product mix than use innovation to sell more music. The economics of the CD are its biggest liability. Music offers low margins. How does one succeed with a low-margin product? Volume. How to increase the volume of music sales?

Thu, 01 Feb 2007

death of CDs tag team

David RD Gratton: More Bad News For CD Prices

It wasn't that long ago when new CD released were $20.00 and the discount baragain bin CDs with abysmal one page liner notes were $11.00. Now one of our industry's biggest stars is selling their new CD for $11.00!

dorksta rap

Media: 7" Eva-Tone Soundsheet
Catalog: Eva-Tone 104540-1S
Credits: National Fuel Gas Distribution Corporation
Date: 1988

MP3: Rappin' With Gas (3:53)

Courtesy of Beware of the Blog and via fistfulayen.

more ragging on CDs

Lefsetz Letter >> Blog Archive >> Some E-Mail

Music is no longer a product. Peer-to-peer file sharing has virtually made CDs for people of my generation pointless. Now it is about the experience. If my friend or a blog I read says that I should hear a song. It is no longer about going to the record store to find the track it is about the fastest and easiest way to hear it. I don't care about what the CD case looks like I want to hear the song, the music.

I don't agree with that commenter's feeling that file sharing is the only way to go from here, but I do agree that the sense of songs as a product is fading away. Is it a service now? A subscription model? A personal interaction? A brand identification? I don't know what the new way is, I just know what it isn't.

Wed, 31 Jan 2007

Q: What is Alf Eaton using iTunes for?

A: to buy singles that bands aren't releasing on CD.

Amazing -- bands are already doing commercial releases where they don't even bother with a CD. When a market collapses it happens fast.

I remember the moment when CDs did that to their own predecessor. I had to buy Sonic Youth's "Goo" on CD because it was not available on vinyl, and since I didn't even own a CD player yet I had to go out and buy one to be able to play the CD.

your clever screen name is not clever

I don't know who Mr. w00tie is, or whatever screen name you are using. I can barely remember your actual name, so if you want to be known as Mr. w00tie or Angel2348 online, you'd better introduce yourself that way offline.

Some sane person: Hi, I'm Bob. You: Hi, I'm LandOLeet.

Your clever screen name is like a tattoo. It's a way of going in to work without changing clothes from the acid party where you spent the evening. There's a time and place for a penis decal on your forehead and the Monday morning staff meeting is not it.

Mon, 29 Jan 2007

Ed Felton on DRM framing

Freedom to Tinker >> Blog Archive >> Record Companies Boxed In By Their Own Rhetoric

The record industry has worked for years to frame the DRM issue, with considerable success. Mainstream thinking about DRM is now so mired in the industry's framing that the industry itself will have a hard time explaining and justifying its new course.

(link courtesy of Unmediated)

Sun, 28 Jan 2007

the beer can collectors

 
Click To
Play
 An anecdote
about a business deal I did when I was 11, done to make to a point
about multimedia aggregators.
This story is slightly
fictionalized so that I can get my point across better.

apocalypse nigh

David Gratton has a terrifying and apocalyptic vision of the near future of CD sales:

CD Sales are about to collapse in the next 12 - 18 months. I don't mean by 5 or 15% (which is bad enough) they are going to utterly collapse. They are going to get destroyed. There will be a 30-50% collapse in music sales in less than 18 months.

I found this extreme picture surprizingly convincing. My own reasoning is that ownership of file-based devices like iPods will reach critical mass very soon, if it hasn't already, and when that happens the majority of listeners will actively dislike CDs.

Thu, 25 Jan 2007

the musician industry has never been better

Toys for making noise - Los Angeles Times

While the U.S. recording industry continues to slide [...], the other side of the music world businesses catering to those who create the music has nearly doubled over the last decade to become a $7.5-billion industry.

The back story here is that the music industry has generally been split 50/50 between people who sell recordings and people who sell equipment for making music. What this story is saying is that the part of the industry which caters to music makers is in rude good health. And what are all those people buying instruments doing if not making user generated content?

The [...] above originally said that "the U.S. recording industry continues to slide under pressure from illegal downloaders and file-sharers", which is too wrong for me to repeat without this qualifier: the reason the industry is in trouble is that the people who run it aren't up to the job.

They should be in the business of selling songs to singers, not singers to listeners.

Wed, 24 Jan 2007

Deerhoof day

The new Deerhoof CD came out yesterday; I'm going to see them at El Rey tonight.

Tue, 23 Jan 2007

Listening: Frailing

I'm listening to samples on the Frailing Guitar Homepage, which is a page documenting a fascinating approach to acoustic guitar based on a classic folk banjo style. Most of the samples are probably only for guitarists interested in learning this technique, but I came across one killer full song:

Cluck Old Hen played by Steve Baughman.

See also the Wikipedia page on the clawhammer style.

Wed, 17 Jan 2007

How it is that music will flow like water

Duke Listens! : Weblog

Some websites will provide playlists (last.fm in this example), some websites will provide services to resolve these playlists to a particular catalog or catalogs (the XspfResolver in this case), and other sites will provide the music (like Napster is doing here). It's all part of the new emerging music ecosystem.

Mon, 08 Jan 2007

deer explosion

Yay! fresh Deerhoof! Ew! It sounds like Jon Spencer!

Sun, 31 Dec 2006

compound documents

Marc Canter's response to my post on true multimedia documents:

Lucas Gonze is blogging about a new medium - of true multimedia documents. We used to call those things 'compund documents'.

I think that these new things are different from compound documents in the sense that the underlying medium which the technology will have to support hasn't reached its final form yet. Whether they act more like record albums, plain old MP3s, or something completely new, they'll have a set of application-defined functionality which goes beyond what a generic format like a compound document can do.

I don't mean to say that the generic technology isn't critical, but that the social practices it is intended to support have to come first. RSS came after blogging, for example.

Wed, 27 Dec 2006

I'm realizing the core theme of most of my posts is the question "Is recorded music really music"? And I think I'm trying to make the argument that the answer is no, that music truly only exists in its live performance, and that recordings are shadowy, pseudo-musical reminders of what a performer once did on one highly controlled occasion.

The problem with that way of thinking is that it leads you into nonsense problems, like denying the presence of music in the room at the moment you are reading this.

One way out of this problem is to say that a recording isn't a method of replicating music, it's a composition for speakers.

true multimedia document

Blogged audio is a new wrapper for an existing medium. An audioblog is a new medium.

Ryan Shaw >> Embedding Audio and Video in Text

I like the way the New York Times is embedding audio in their frontpage now. The result is a true multimedia document (combining print and audio) not just multiple documents in different media (a podcast or its transcript).

That's the tricky thing about digital albums -- a digital version of a record album is one thing, the medium that happens as a result of the digitization of record albums is another.

My prediction for 2007: it will be the year when that new medium happens.

Thanks to the Cruxy crew, there is now an XSPF player in Second Life:

If you come by our virtual pad, you'll notice a number of musician posters on the wall. Clicking on any of these will trigger a call to the old-fashioned radio in the room that is actually a XSPF music player under the covers.

What's cool is that this is an open gateway between XSPF files on the web and Second Life:

You can load *any* XSPF playlist into the player by just saying (aka typing into Second Life chat window): "xspf " or, for example: "xspf http://webjay.org/by/chromegat/theafricansoundsproject.xspf" will load a playlist from webjay.
You can jump around tracks by saying "track " and open the tracks info link by saying "info ". (We decided to make it a "voice" based interface as opposed to a visual dialog as that seemed the most Star Trek-way to do it.)

Now the only things missing are a authoring tool in Second Life, so that you can say "add song to my playlist", and the ability to embed an XSPF player anywhere in SL.

more sheet music online

My main source of fresh, not to mention free and legal, sheet music is Mutopia. Over the Christmas break I found two new sources:

XSPF lore day

The NPR show This American Life is using an XSPF player on their web site when you choose the option to stream a podcast MP3 online for free.

What strikes me about this player is the way they take good advantage of the meat-and-potatoes features of XSPF: for each MP3 to be streamed, they have an image, an annotation, and a link to get more info. I am struck by this because of the way that these specific features of the format, and then of Fabricio's Flash player, and then of all XSPF players, are becoming a standard practice.

That feature set originated as a SMIL hack back in the days before XSPF existed, when the playlist hackers were still experimenting with SMIL to see if it could be made to work as a general purpose solution for playlisting. People fiddled around with features like multiple images per song and multiple audio clips per image, but SMIL players were so buggy and unpredictable that the most complicated feature set which could be implemented with any kind of reliability was very small.

The one-image-per-track feature originated with my SMIL version of the Work playlist. The info link happened in response to a blogged comment by Alf Eaton: "I'm a little worried about bandwidth costs for the people whose songs get included in these playlists (mostly epitonic.com in this one), as there's no central caching and they don't get to display their adverts"; being conscientious about supplying a link back to the host of an audio item was a way to pay them back.

I adopted the info link and image features in the SMIL produced on Webjay, added the idea of a free-text annotation on each track, and when we did XSPF I brought these three features along. When Fabricio Zuardi did the first version of Musicplayer he implemented that feature set, and then the MP3 players influenced by his player also adopted it.

At this point I suspect that a new MP3 player which didn't do XSPF would probably try to do those features anyway. Out of the whole universe of possible new metadata you might want for a multimedia file, these items have the best cost/benefit ratio. They're easy to implement in almost any context, they introduce a bare minimum of new technology, and they enable both the world of visual experience and the world of hypertext.

The This American Life coders did a good job with the technical work. They got the MIME type right -- application/xspf+xml, thank you very much -- and they made correct use of the meta element for adding extensions.

Here is sample source for one of their XSPF files:


<?xml version='1.0'?>
<playlist version="1.0" xmlns="http://xspf.org/ns/0/">
  <title>Soundcheck: Matisyahu  (December 11, 2006)</title>
  <info>http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/2006/12/11#segment70151</info>
  <tracklist>
    <track>
      <location>http://audio.wnyc.org/soundcheck/soundcheck121106b.mp3</location>
      <annotation>Matisyahu </annotation>
      <info>http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/2006/12/11#segment70151</info>
      <image>http://www.wnyc.org/images/flashplayer/soundcheck.jpg</image>
      <meta rel="http://www.wnyc.org/ns/xspf/dlright">false</meta>
    </track>
  </tracklist>
</playlist>

There is one error here -- the element named "tracklist" should be named "trackList".

trackList vs tracklist is really a fault in the XSPF spec, since we don't use mixedCase anywhere else. For example, we don't say "playList", we say "playlist". How that happened was that Robert Kaye supplied the mixedCase trackList example in an informal conversation about the proposed element, I copied and pasted his example into the working text of the spec, and nobody caught the discrepancy until well after the spec had been ratified and frozen. Oops.

Thu, 21 Dec 2006

playlists as modular albums

In a posting to the XSPF mailing list, Jay Fienberg wrote:

I am working on some "modular" music with the idea that people will be able to "assemble" their own albums using XSPF playlists. Individuals can have multiple albums (multiple playlists), and will be encouraged to share them with others.

This is a form of commercial packaging which is waiting to happen. That playlists are the successor to CDs, LPs, and albums of 78s doesn't mean that they should replicate the limitations of those older forms. A CD or album has to be a single set of songs in a single sequence, but playlists are mutable and fluid.

Imagine that Jay makes 14 songs available. For people who only want the flawless songs out of a 14-song collection, there could be a 3-song playlist. For people who have already gone through the 3-song playlist and are looking for more, there could be a 14-song playlist. For people who hate three of those songs, there could be an 11-song playlist.

Sometimes the hit song from a CD is a surprise. On Sonic Youth's album "Washing Machine", the hit turned out to be "Diamond Sea", a long jam that was understandably buried at the end of the CD. The original CD sequence probably needed to be rewritten after the CD was out, so that the hit could be at or near the front of the sequence.

    
      I'm digging the song New Slang by
      The Shins.
      Here's a freebie version of the Quicktime video for the song --

Wed, 20 Dec 2006

Wolfgang's Vault: c ya

Led Zeppelin, Doors members sue concert video site - Yahoo! News

Wolfgang's Vault offers thousands of recordings of rare audio and video music performances collected over 30 years by Bill Graham, a famous concert promoter who died in 1991.

On Monday, major rock names including Grateful Dead Productions, Carlos Santana and members of Led Zeppelin and The Doors, sued the current owner.


That's really too bad, because the concerts are fantastic, but there's no point in bitching about how this is yet another instance of the RIAA beating up the little guy.  The guy operating Wolfgang's Vault is a bigtime operator with plenty of seed money and a realistic product line, so just let it go.  It was nice while it lasted.

Sat, 16 Dec 2006

acoustic guitar recording, 12/3/2006

This is a solo acoustic guitar version of a 19th-century Mormon
hymn, "The
Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning". Authorship of the tune
(though not the lyrics) is unknown.  I learned it from sheet
music at Mutopia.

I like this recording because it has a good flow of improvisation
without wandering too far from the song. I also like that the playing
is clumsy and crude in one way but fancy in another.

Since I'm doing a series of religious songs I should say that I am
an atheist, and my song choices are purely for musical reasons.
That's why I changed the song title.  Well, that and my desire to
emphasise the loose and bloggy way in which I did the recording.

My recording is under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
license, which as similar to the Gnu General Public License as you can
get with music.  I'm pretty sure that this allows anybody to make a
derived work.

The song file itself:
Lucas Gonze -- 12-3-2006 (flac)
Lucas Gonze -- 12-3-2006 (ogg vorbis)
Lucas Gonze -- 12-3-2006 (mp3)

Thu, 14 Dec 2006

Audio-based audio search

Owl Multimedia is an audio search tool which uses only acoustic data for matching. You specify what to search for by selecting a portion of an audio file, and the results show songs with similar audio.

It only searches for Creative Commons music, presumably to avoid getting mugged by the major labels and lackey press.

Some uses I can imagine for this:

Remixers could search for samples to fit something that they're imagining.
People whose music may have been used as a sample.
Multi-lingual audio search, for example using input sound that matches a mood.
Exploring acoustic space for purely sensual reasons.

The idea of exploring acoustic spaces for its own sake strikes me as the most interesting. You'd be hopping from one piece of sound art to the next based on sections which share acoustic features like tempo or timbre. It would be a kind of hypertext where the link structure followed purely from sound.

Wed, 06 Dec 2006

Listening: Cold War Kids

(
  echo "<playlist version='1' xmlns='http://xspf.org/ns/0'><trackList>"; 
  lynx -dump http://coldwarkids.com/news.htm 
    | tail -6 
    | awk '{print "<track><location>"$2"</location></track>"}'; 
  echo "</trackList></playlist>";
) > coldwarkids.xspf





Meh.  Lotta work to make that happen and the music really isn't great.  Their Robbers & Cowards CD is a lot better.

Sun, 03 Dec 2006

Free Kevin('s playlist)

Kevin Smith
is a famous guy with a studio publicity department, so he got asked to do a
celebrity playlist for the iTunes store. He took this
duty dead seriously:

While folks like to use the Celebrity Playlist as
a promotional device, I can't approach it as lightly. Putting
together a playlist is incredibly personal and lays the author
naked. It's the modern day equivalent of making a mix tape for
someone you're crushing on: you run as much risk of winning
her/his heart as you do firmly ensconcing yourself on their
"Avoid At All Costs" manifest.

The result is an excellent mixtape. First off, because so
much thought and care obviously went into it, this playlist
inspired the living fuck out of my group at Yahoo. Second, I
have to admit that Kevin Smith is a fun guy:

Track: Straight Outta Compton

Artist: NWA

Album: Straight Outta Compton

"Jesus, do these guys need a hug..."

Third, the thing is personal and human, which is saying
quite a lot for a celebrity playlist. The track selection is
completely insane -- he doesn't just have Bill Hicks, he
doesn't just have Sting, he's got Sting and Bill Hicks
together. This makes the risk of Avoid At All Costs very
real, and that's a chance that Puff Daddy or John F. Kennedy
Jr. would never take.

(iTunes store)

As it turns out, the risk of being heard (or read) was
limited by the particular design of the iTunes store, which
couldn't support Kevin Smith's exacting demands:

"This is a great playlist," Darin from Apple
wrote. "Too great, actually. We don't have the space for
comments that run that long. Will he be OK with us editing
them (significantly) or would he prefer to do that himself?
Two sentences for each track is a good outline."

I imagine that Darin was thinking of something like this
unloved celebrity playlist by George Benson:

In iTunes a playlist is just a list of songs. The creator
can customize and communicate by selecting songs, by setting a
screen name, and by selecting the playlist title.

Compare this to how expressive an MP3 blog is. An MP3 blog
not only allows bloggers to talk at length about each song, it
allows them to make personal comments that are unrelated to
the songs, to post a picture or a set of pictures, to set the
page layout and mood, and to develop their ideas slowly over a
long period of time.

An iTunes playlist is all about iTunes. There isn't much
room for the playlister.

(per-piece playlists)

Nevermind that a pay-per-download experience is
fundamentally incompatible with playlisting, since playlists
can easily get long enough to break the bank. Playlists at
Webjay are often 50-200 tracks, while celebrity playlists at
the iTunes store clock in at about 12-13.

(Cruxy response)

Enter Nathan Freitas of Cruxy and ionDB:

It seemed ridiculous that the iTunes playlisting support was
so limited that it could only support two-sentence
descriptions. [...]

I figured I would try to create the ultimate XSPF
playlist by turning the great work of art Mr. Smith had
created into a compliant, validating and very rich XSPF
playlist. I looked up album art using Last.fm, found
30-second mp3 previews from those russian pirates at
allofmp3.com (finally good for something!), and used
Google to come up with a suitable
permalink for each track. It ended up being a bit of a
mashup monster, but it mostly came together after some
grueling work.

Nathan not only liberated the full playlist from Apple's
smothering embrace by creating an
XSPF version, he dropped his XSPF into a killer new XSPF
player that Cruxy is working on: XSPFView.

What's special about this player is that it gives most of
the page over to the currently playing item, so that the
writing, album art and info link for each track have tons of
room to stretch out. It's not just that there can be more
than a couple of lines worth of text, it's that the page is
all about whatever the creator was intending to communicate.
XSPFView is technology in the service of creativity, where
iTunes is the reverse.

Once the hard work of converting a document from a proprietary
format into an open onehas been done, you can take advantage
of any tool which supports the standard. For example, you can
feed Nathan's XSPF into Paul Lamere's content
resolver and get a
pretty-printed version of Kevin Smith's playlist with a
completely different style than XSPFView.

(rug's don't work playlist blog on playlist blogging)

Why does it matter? According to the sage words of the rugs
don't work, it's because:

Playlist blogs have really become the liner notes for digital music.

A playlist on the iTunes store which wasn't submitted via
the VIP program is called an iMix, or more exactly an iTunes
iMix. iI will not slag on the iBranding tic because I am
writing this on an iBook and it won't let me.

You can't look at an iTunes iMix via a normal web browser.
However you can get an RSS document for the iTunes iMix via a URL
like http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/RSS/imix/imixid=149950149/sf=143441/xml".
You can also embed a viewer for an iTunes iMix in an external
page using Flash. Here is what that looks like:

Sat, 02 Dec 2006

Joint Radio

Joint Radio is a distributed playlist aggregator. It takes RSS bookmark feeds from a social bookmarking service (del.icio.us currently tested) and creates a playlist (XSPF, but that's not important here). Further, members can aggregate other user's playlists into a master playlist or use the whole site playlist.

This is a nicely implemented piece of work, however the instructions sabotage the value of social bookmarking by suggesting that users should get music into the system by uploading their own files to a web host. Doing this will ensure that the same underlying songs have an infinite number of different URLs. Social bookmarking makes no sense whatsoever if shared objects have different URLs.

Also, I don't want to sound touchy on this issue but it's flat wrong to say "(XSPF, but that's not important here)". The ability to casually hook up a decent quality pre-existing player with a decent quality pre-existing playlist was hard won. When we started the XSPF project you would have had to write your own Flash player and your own playlist format. Without XSPF this project would have been dramatically more labor.

XSPF version 1 final

The absolute last revision ever of the XSPF version 1 specification is now up.

This revision was a major project which wouldn't have been possible without Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves's work to reformat the old horrible HTML and Sebastian Pippings's careful proofreading. It needed to happen because a formal mime type requires a frozen spec, and there were errors in the spec which had to be fixed eventually.

Because the emphasis here is on a completely 100% frozen spec, I want to be very clear on what that means: it means that the spec is completely 100% frozen. If there are still problems, they're not fixable. The thing will never ever ever change for any reason whatsoever.

Joanna Newsom video

Courtesy of Drag City, a disturbingly excellent use of the harp in pop --

click here to download

Thu, 30 Nov 2006

Today's tuneage while I'm working is an Elvis Costello / Attractions show from 1978, courtesy of Concert Vault.

Elvis Costello
Winterland
San Francisco, CA
06/07/1978

# of Tracks: 16
Total Time: 57:40

Technical point: if you sniff the stream to see the URL, you'll find that they're using a Flash player but not exposing MP3 to the web. It's a Flash-native stream format which would require a stream ripper to cache.

Tue, 28 Nov 2006

Teusday is Sabbath day

Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath
Convention Hall
Asbury Park, NJ
08/05/1975
# of Tracks: 16
Total Time: 85:18

Today's listening is a killer Black Sabbath live set at the peak of their abilities, on a good night in 1975. Case in point: even the 8 1/2 minute guitar solo does not suck.

Mon, 27 Nov 2006

Republican Tools Calendar

 The 2007 Republican
National Committee calendar is now available.  I sense that there
is a possibility of hilarity if this were combined with the Ridgid
tools calendar.
 

Sun, 26 Nov 2006

new XSPF software

Ampache, a PHP-based tool for managing, updating and playing your MP3/OGG/RM/FLAC/WMA/M4A files via a web interface. It allows you to save playlists, create user accounts, and share your music catalogs with other Ampache servers.
FMP is a Flash-based player.
MP3-o-Matic is a Wordpress plugin for embedding Jeroen Wijering's Flash XSPF player in a blog.
Pod Pager is a screen scraper that accepts HTML as input and creates XSPF or RSS as output.
Thomas Boutell's XSPF Player With Autoresume Support is a Flash-based application for playing music in web pages, derived from Lacy Morrow's version of Fabricio Zuardi's Flash XSPF player. Distinguished by the ability to keep its place when a user clicks through from one page to the next, as long as both pages have the same player and playlist.
I love the creativity and insight of this improvement. It shows the tension between the stateful nature of music and the stateless nature of hypertext. You want the song to flow on within its own timeline, and at the same time you want to traverse the web, including the music web, according to the familiar rules of browsing.

I also love the way it sets up Lacy's player as a new progenitor node in the XSPF family tree. There have been many players based on Fabricio's, but this is the first one (as far as I know) to become a parent in its own right. Forking open source software is generally a taboo -- you're supposed to contribute back to the original project rather than start your own project based on your modified version -- but Fabricio doesn't seem to mind in any way, and this has led to an interesting lineage of related software.

There is now enough XSPF software that it is a hopeless job to try to catalog it all in the XSPF.org applications list. We need something on the order of a directory (e.g at dmoz) or mini-portal.

Thu, 23 Nov 2006

SpotDJ is a service for voiceovers between songs

SpotDJ describes itself this way:

Who or What is SpotDJ?

SpotDJ is a service that adds a something new and, frankly, !*#$@ing awesome to your music listening experience. You listen to your music just like normal, but every once in a while, SpotDJ will play a "spot" between songs.

A spot is simply a short snippet of audio about the song you were listening to. It could be basic information about the song, a story about the artist, an interpretation of the song, news, gossip, recommendations, whatever!

Wed, 22 Nov 2006

ZPL

Josh Kinberg kindly forwarded me a tip about an obscure playlist format that he came across. I recognize that my obsession with these things is not unlike an inappropriate level of devotion to Hummel figurines, but it's a little too late to do anything about that.

The following is a rundown in the style of my playlist format survey. I'm not going to update the survey itself, though. That would open a can of worms.

ZPL
Description:	A flat file syntax similar in design to .ini files. According to the maker, "Consists of text tags, each on it's own line (to make parsing faster). Each file entry ends with a special break tag."
Example:	AC=myvideo.avi NM=welcome.jpg FD=5 BR! NM=1.avi TT=The first video! BR! NM=2.avi DR=60 BR! NM=myvideo.avi BR! NM=4.avi BR!
Mime type:	None. ZPL files are not intended to be shared over a network.
Distinguishing features:	Novel syntax.
Definition URL:	http://www.inmatrix.com/zplayer/highlights/zplformat.shtml
Originator:	Inmatrix
Implementations:	Zoom Player
Metadata support:	Work duration and title.

I'm drinking an unspeakably chocolately and creamy beer tonight -- Young's Chocolate Stout. Chocolate is pretty common in craft beers, but it's usually in the background rather than the foreground.

Mon, 20 Nov 2006

Content resolver mashup

Paul Lamere, a staff engineer at Sun Laboratories' Search Inside The Music project, has created a new XSPF content resolver.

It will take playlist in XSPF format and generate a new version of the playlist. Right now the playlist resolver only does a couple of things. It will look at the track information and attempt to find information about the track at MusicBrainz, and augment the track with any missing information. This may include:

The MusicBrainz identifier

The track name

The album name

The artist name

Backtrack a little -- what's a content resolver? From the XSPF spec:

XSPF is an intermediate format. We expected a new kind of software called a content resolver to do the job of converting XSPF to a plain old list of files or URIs. A content resolver would be smart enough to keep your playlists from breaking when you move your media from /oggs to /music/ogg. It would be able to figure out that a playlist entry by the artist "Hank Williams" with the title "Your Cheating Heart" could be satisfied by the file /vorbis/hankwilliams/yourcheatingheart.ogg. It might even know how to query the iTunes music store or another online provider to locate and download a missing song.

How does it work? In a post to the XSPF mailing list, Paul explained that the hard work is all done by musicbrainz. He converts the low-quality metadata in the XSPF file into high-quality metadata by using the low-quality stuff to do a fuzzy match query against the Musicbrainz web server, which returns high-quality stuff.

The last step in this process is to convert each Musicbrainz reference into a fetchable resource, like an iTunes store song URL or a path in the local filesystem.

If you want to do that against your local files, that's really really easy, since Musicbrainz has a wealth of tools for converting song files into Musicbrainz IDs. All you have to do is run the Musicbrainz tagger against your local collection and save the results in a catalog. Then, when you get back a result from Paul's service, you look it up in your catalog.

If you wanted to fetch the results from the internet, you'd need to take each of the results Paul got you and do another query. You might run that query against Yahoo audio search, for example, and that would be able to tell you which of about 20 online music stores had a given song for sale, which web sites linked to an MP3 version, etc etc. And needless to say, Paul's resolver could do this call for you.

The dang thing would be one of those whatchamacallit web 2.0 mashups.

Wed, 15 Nov 2006

Microsoft is paying Univeral Music Group about $1 per Zune. What does this tell us about the cost to fill a device with music?

UMG says this is to cover content on the devices which comes from filesharing. Nielson says that about 18% of music on iPods is from filesharing. UMG has about 1/3 market share.

So let's do the figures. If 100% of music on iPods were from filesharing, UMG would want about $5. If UMG were 100% of the market instead of just the dominant player at 1/3, they would want about $15.

That is, Universal Music Group just set a price for monetizing filesharing via a levy on devices: $15 per device.

Wed, 01 Nov 2006

This arrived in my mailbox this morning from Mystrands, aka Musicstrands:

You are receiving this monthly newsletter as a courtesy from MyStrands.com. To unsubscribe, simply set your e-mail preferences in the e-mail notices page under Account Preferences, or by using this link.

Notice that it doesn't even mention opting in or out, getting rid of it requires me to take action instead of them, and the action I have to take involves logging in to their site, which they hope will get me to spend time there.

This is really bad practice. It's a coercive way to monetize me, and all it did was make me hostile.

Songbird for transient media experiences

In reaction to my why you need more music blog entry, Mike Scullen wrote to say:

I'm really impressed in what the Songbird project is doing
to promote music as a transient media experience rather a media
object.  I know that I'm more likely to fire up webjay or an MP3 blog
in Songbird than play anything I've collected and am familiar
with. I've also never used Songbird's save to disc function despite
listening to lots of new music I've really enjoyed.

I'm having the same experience with Songbird.  The only time I
saved to disc, it was an accident.  On the other hand I love it for
browser-based music.  For example, today I fired it up to listen to mixter pages that didn't have a
built-in player I liked.  I'm actually excited by it, which
is saying something.

Spiff in Songbird

Songbird 0.2 didn't come with XSPF support. I'm ok with that because it's still buggy as hell and they need to concentrate on the basics, but I'm happy to say that XSPF support has been marked as a P1 issue for the next (0.3) release. It's on the way at last.

I like Reich

James Nachlin found a trove of Steve Reich recordings from the Whitney Museum's Reich concert on October 15, 2006, then hooked up a version Webjay form.

For your in-browser listening enjoyment, voila a player:

XSPF on Rails

Thanks to Pau Garcia i Quiles, there is now a toolkit for using XSPF in Ruby on Rails and other Ruby applications:

URI

  http://xspf.rubyforge.org/


SYNOPSIS

  XSPF for Ruby is a pure-Ruby XML Shareable Playlist Format parser
  and generator.


HISTORY

  Current version is 0.4, which adds XSPF generation. It is even able
  to eat its own dogfood.


STATUS

  XSPF parser mostly complete and working for 95% of uses (see
  'Current limitations')

  XSPF generator mostly complete and working for 95% of uses (see
  'Current limitations')

  Exports XSPF to M3U, HTML, SMIL and SoundBlox

  100% code coverage thanks to its extensive test suite

  Current limitations:

    - For 'link', 'meta' and 'extension' elements, only the first one
      is parsed and only one can be generated.

    - The content of the 'attribution' element is not parsed (the XML
      content is returned)

    - The content of the 'extension' element is not parsed (the XML
      content is returned)

EXAMPLES

  See the USAGE page in the RDoc and the test cases to find lots of
  examples

Tue, 31 Oct 2006

Why collective licensing will never happen

Collective licensing as I'll use the term here means the idea that any member of the recording industry will be required to license to any and all listeners in such a way that filesharing is paid for. For example, there might be a tax on digital audio devices which is distributed among recording businesses according to a census of recordings which are popular on filesharing networks.

There has been zero progress towards collective licensing over the past few years. This idea has been around for quite a while, but aside from a few social democracies it seems to have no legs. I don't mean a tiny or imperceptible amount of progress, I mean absolute zero.

That's not a surprise, since the whole idea of collective licensing is about going from zero to sixty in one moment. It's a binary thing. One day filesharing is illegal, the next it's legal. Boom! Problem gone!

But you'd think that there would at least be pressure building up in support of it, and in fact the pressure is decreasing. Why is the pressure decreasing? The indies are extremely open to the internet, and they are becoming larger at the expense of the majors. The majors are willing to do deals like the YouTube shenanigans. Users and businesses are moving away from filesharing networks and to the web, where DMCA safe harbor allows many disputes to be resolved peacefully. User-created content has become a substantial part of the media ecosystem over the last few years, and it doesn't need collective licensing to exist.

Collective licensing is very pretty. Very very pretty. It's so pretty that it's almost, well, lisp. Or strong AI. Or the uppercase Semantic Web. Talk about elegant! But talk about failed, too. Those ways of doing things might be better in theory, but in practice they were worse than the alternatives. Ditto collective licensing. It's perfection and elegance have attracted many smart people to believe in it and at the same time have prevented its fans from realizing that it's never, ever, ever going to happen.

Incremental solutions virtually always win. Collective licensing is a monolithic solution. There exists an incremental alternative, and it is drip-drip-dripping along very nicely.

Sun, 29 Oct 2006

Listening oct 29 2k6 - electronica set by Minilogue

Minilogue :: June 2006 at Ostgut / Panorama Bar, Berlin (mp3). Recommendation courtesy of Tom Coates, mp3 courtesy of Minilogue web site.

Sat, 28 Oct 2006

why you need more music

from Wired -- The Day the Music Died:

I thought at first I had misheard him. "... library of 90,000 songs, and iTunes can't handle it." [...] I had no idea people were amassing collections of this size. My own paltry iTunes library runs just shy of 500 songs -- a little over a day and a half of music -- and that includes every selection from Pipes of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Now, I spend a lot of time listening to music, but like most people I tend to play my favorites a lot.

Research I have seen supports that writer's number. 500 songs is about the average.

I remember times in my life where I had a strictly limited music collection, and I kept things fresh by listening at finer and finer levels of detail. Those days should be over for most of us, though. It's important for individuals to grow their collections past the "enough" marker, whether that's 50,000 songs or even just 500, because at that point you stop listening in the old way.

The new way is to treat music more like a newspaper than a book, so that a continuous stream of fresh content is intrinsic to the media. If you hear a good hook somewhere, the next day you should find that hook remixed into another song. You should never again, post 20th century, post the era when music and manufactured goods were synonomous, think of music as something so static that 500 songs could encompass it.

The idea that a 500 song collection makes sense is based on a misunderstanding of the medium. Maybe you'll only have 500 songs on hand at any one time -- that makes sense. But which songs those are should be a constantly rotating subset of a gigantic collection which lives out in the cloud.

What I'm listening to today is the song collection at CC 365.

Wed, 25 Oct 2006

playlists and embedded player considered key

David RD Gratton: From the horse's mouth

We had no idea that playlists and the Opus Player was going to be the key features people were interested in with Project Opus until people started using it. Or not using other parts as the case may be.

I was also surprised by how important the embedded player for Webjay playlists turned out to be.

XSPF in feeds

Marc's Voice >> Blog Archive >> And what about the Aggregator Vendors?

Why hasn't some new hotshot aggregator play come along - that does everything a news (read: TEXT) reader does, but also elegantly for media - as well?
Well I bet a major reason is that we haven't coalesced around standardizing HOW we embed media into feeds.
Lord knows That microformats does NOT take on this problem.
So what does? Can Media RSS do what we need it to do?
I myself would like to see a format called XSPF brought to bear on this problem. We need XSPF to be a playlist format - for not just Audio - but ALL media - even sldieshows.

The way that I envision the relationship between XSPF and feeds is that an enclosure would point to an XSPF document rather than contain an embedded XSPF document or other extension format.

For example, RSS enclosures can only have a single media item. This prevents you from having, for example, the same video in multiple different formats. You can't have a Quicktime version for Apple users, a WMV version for Windows users, and an Ogg Theora version for free software users. XSPF does allow this, so you can solve the problem by having the RSS enclosure point to an XSPF file.

Another type of functionality that pointing to an XSPF document enables is to stitch together podcast-like compilations of songs, voiceovers and ads at the client side. This would allow a show to be put together more easily and cheaply.

That's not to say that Media RSS isn't also a good solution, or even a better solution. It's just the way that XSPF fits into the picture.

Wed, 18 Oct 2006

Memorability measurement conjecture

Here is a conjecture: domain names are purchased in rough order of memorability. If that is true, the first domain name to ever be used is a more memorable string than the 1000th domain name.

That is interesting because it allows us to measure the relative memorability of those strings which have been used as domain names -- just ask when the domain name was registered. And measuring memorability is useful because it allows us to study names, which are an important kind of thing.

Some techniques for pretty URLs

One of the successes of Webjay is that the URLs are pretty. Here are the rules I followed.

Use domain names when you need data to study.

Let's say you have a question about whether one naming style is more friendly than another. How can you research the answer? Use real-world registrations of domain names.

This works for a number of reasons.
1. There is enough data. If you use another data source it is unlikely that you will have enough data for it to be statistically significant.
2. The data is easy to come by. You can use tools like whois, dig, and web search to get the data.
3. The domain name system is old enough to have been thoroughly explored by trial-and-error. It takes time for all the possibilities to be worked out, and domain names are one of the oldest parts of the internet.
4. Market pressures keep the data clean. It costs money to hold a domain name, and cost is guaranteed to be a disincentive to holding domains. Though it is true that domains are cheap enough for semi-worthless names to be hoarded by speculators, any speculator who purchased domains without regard to their value would quickly go out of business.
Form multi-word phrases by concatenating and lowercasing.

Let's say you have a two-word fragment to put in your URI. Should you phrase it as /two-word, /twoword, /twoWord, /TwoWord, /two_word, /Two-Word, /Two_Word? You can find out by asking which phrasing would be a more valuable domain name.

So let's do the exercise. whois two-word.com yields No match for "TWO-WORD.COM". whois two_word.com yields No match for "TWO_WORD.COM". whois twoword.com yields a registration from 2001. This data indicates that dash-separated and underscore_separated phrases are less friendly than noseparator phrases.

Whois doesn't have data to research whether you should use lowercase, interCaps or InitCaps; for that question I rely on this reasoning:
1. interCaps involves an extra keystroke for the shift key on the uppercase 'C'.
2. InitCaps involves two extra keystrokes for shift keys.
3. Nobody can remember whether the convention is initCaps or InterCaps.
Conclusion: lowercase.
Use a broad and flat tree rather than a deep and structured one.

Do:
1. http://example.com/foobar
2. http://example.com/someotherword
3. http://example.com/yetanothertreeroot
Don't:
1. http://example.com/foo/bar
2. http://example.com/some/other/word
3. http://example.com/yet/another/treeroot
This also follows from observing patterns in domain names. It would be cheaper for buyers of domain names if they could buy sub-domains of generic .coms, but they prefer to spend the money on compound names. For example, foo.bar.com is less likely to be taken than foobar.com. My guess is that hierarchical structures add additional information to be memorized, and memorization is at a premium with domains.
If there is user-generated text in a URL, avoid putting anything after it.

Do http://example.com/yourtext/theirtext.

Do not do http://example.com/theirtext/yourtext.

The reason is that user-entered text will have to be converted into a form that is safe for a URI. Your code to do this will have to try to preserve the intent of the original string. That will involve subtle tradeoffs, which are the weakness of computer programs, and this conversion will be a bug-prone feature. If you put the really essential parts of a URI before this bug-prone portion, the inevitable bugs won't cause as much damage.

The only machine-generated text after user-entered text in a Webjay URI is a file extension, which absolutely must be at the end.

Tue, 17 Oct 2006

Why would UMG sue?

Universal Music Group sued Grouper and Bolt.com for unauthorized distribution of music videos uploaded by their users. Here are a couple guesses why:

Because Google has great lawyers and will win, establishing precedents that will hurt UMG in the future. Better to sue somebody with shallow pockets.
Because UMG has a deal with Youtube that increases YT's operating costs quite a lot, so Youtube/Google made it a condition of the deal that UMG force its competition to pay those fees too. That's right, I'm suggesting that Google may have asked UMG to file these suits.
Because Sony owns Grouper and it's cool to get to sue your competitor.

Mon, 16 Oct 2006

Listening 10/16

Sprites - I Started A Blog Nobody Read. Power pop with lots of references to blog culture. [MP3 link]

powered by ODEO

Fri, 13 Oct 2006

libSpiff upgrades

Two improvements to libSpiff, the C++ XSPF library by Sebastien Pippin:

It builds on OS X
There is a a tutorial for using libSpiff.
Welcome to the short libSpiff integration tutorial. I recommend using this tutorial together with the code samples in the examples folder; one of these two sources is likely to answer your questions. Drop me a line if you need further help and will see what I can do for you. So on with the the tutorial.

more on lowering your standards

It is so easy to get lost in the hardware and the software and strive for perfection like we see at the movies. But this is the way to never release anything, never find your style, never innovate. Just get making and throw it at an audience to see what happens.

The one time when just lowering your standards doesn't work is when you have a weird vibe. You can be out of tune, but you can't be overbearing.

XSPF improvements in Yahoo! Music client

A new point release, 2.0.1, of the Yahoo! Music client software is out. This is a fit-and-finish update, and among many other fixes the XSPF it generates is now valid when you have a local file in your playlist. No more "C:\some directory\some file.mp3" -- you get a legal "file://C:/some directory/some file.mp3" URI.

Thu, 12 Oct 2006

Whizzy Spiff creator

Lacy Morrow created a slick wizard app for embedding his XSPF player in a web page:

So many people were having trouble getting playlists and the players to work, and the lack of good documentation did not help. I have created a small playlist and html generator for the Xspf Player. This generates a playlist file, a variables.txt, the deconcept SwfObject javascript file, and your html code to embed. This also breaks the IE 'Active Content Update', so no more, 'click on the movie to activate' bubbles. Just download the player, fill in your info in the generator, and anyone can have a music player in under ten minutes. Use it Here.

Getting these players to work is a frustrating and mystifying process for many people, so this is a great idea.

A validator at last

Thanks to Sebastien Pippin, there is now an XSPF validator. This is a major milestone for the project. I can hardly overstate the impact and the ultimate benefit.

The validator found errors in XSPF generated by Webjay, by the way. What a great debugging tool!

Fri, 06 Oct 2006

10/6

The Wikipedia entry on mixtapes is the best Wikipedia writing I've ever seen -- long, informative, tightly edited.

Courtesy of dnb-sets.de - Drum & Bass mix search engine and bassjunkees.com, I'm listening to a party mix entitled PatchieC TrainWreckMix (Aug06)01.

Courtesy of Robert of the Radish, 13 YMU playlists for Halloween.

Tue, 03 Oct 2006

Q: How to be a musician on the internet?

Wired News: Justin Frankel Rocks On

The secret for making quantity of music is just lowering your standards. That's it. Play a lot and experiment and don't be afraid to post something that's bad, because there'll be good things about it too. And also, I always encourage people to collaborate -- even if it's online. Post some music you made and see if someone wants to rap on it. It can be great; people can come back and add things you would have never thought of, and amaze you.

A: lower your standards.

Mon, 02 Oct 2006

Java XSPF library

JSpiff is a Java API for reading and writing XSPF ("Spiff") open XML playlists. Tired of Winamp M3U playlists? So are we! JSpiff provides two different mechanisms for reading and writing XSPF playlists. A JAXP implementation which is simple and only requires JDK1.5 or higher to use. A JAXB implementation which has some Dependencies but is a newer API from Sun for binding XML to Java. Examples and test cases are provided for both API's.

This is actually the second Java API for XSPF. The first is in I/ON.

If you look closely at the logo, you'll see a little Xiph fish hanging out by the ankle of the Java guy.

XSPF has great momentum lately.

Sun, 27 Aug 2006

XSPF news: Musicmobs content resolver for Rhapsody

Tody Padilla of Musicmobs stopped in at the XSPF mailing list to make this announcement:

Using our REST api, you can open any XSPF that contains <creator><album><title> elements at the track level in Rhapsody's web player. I've tested this out with Musicmobs XSPFs and some Last.fm XSPFs.

Explanation ---

An important part of the XSPF design is the idea that a playlist entry is not so much an exact locator for a song as it is a collection of metadata that a kind of software called a content resolver can use to locate an instance of the song. For example, you might have a track listing containing nothing but a song title, and the resolver would look up that song title in the MP3s on your hard drive to see if you had it available.

Here's an example of that kind of track listing, courtesy of Audioscrobbler/ Last.fm:

<track> <title>The Pusher</title> <creator>Steppenwolf</creator> <duration>350000</duration> </track>

Musicmobs long ago shipped software that allowed you to do this relative to the iTunes store; what they have done here is allow you to use Rhapsody's catalog.

Currently, XSPF is rarely used with abstract track listings. The most popular XSPF software is Fabricio Zuardi's Musicplayer, which knows how to fetch a link and play it, but does not know how to do a lookup. A track listing that Musicplayer could do something with would have to specify a location:

<track> <location>http://example.com/thepusher.mp3</location> <title>The Pusher</title> <creator>Steppenwolf</creator> <duration>350000</duration> </track>

So where does the XSPF for Musicmobs to throw against the Rhapsody catalog come from? In this case, Last.fm/ Audioscrobbler, which publishes listings in the more-abstract style of things. An example XSPF file is 50 most played tracks from a music profile.

Here's an example of how the pieces would fit together.

Alice installs the Audioscrobbler software which tracks her listening.
Alice spends a month listening to songs which she got from the iTunes store, which she uses because its files can be played on her iPod.
As time goes on, Alice's Audioscrobbler software compiles a listing of her most-played tracks and posts it to the Audioscrobbler site.
Bob does not have an iPod or an Apple computer, so he can't play tracks from the iTunes store. Normally he would not be able to exchange playlists with Alice, because her playlist would point to content exclusively playable with an Apple device. However, he likes Rhapsody's music service, and he can now use Musicmob's software to listen to Alice's playlist using Rhapsody.
Alice's top tracks file is at http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/Alice/toptracks.xspf (*example only*, not a real URL), the Musicmobs service is at http://www.musicmobs.com/player, and they are combined as http://www.musicmobs.com/player?xspf=http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/tag/Rock/toptracks.xspf.
Bob goes to that combined URL.

In practice I couldn't get it to work on my Mac, because Rhapsody's software didn't install properly, but hopefully you get the idea.

If you want to check this out a bit more, check out the Musicmobs blog entry on the subject.

Thu, 24 Aug 2006

What should I blog about now that so many of my goals have become reality? Multimedia on the internet is in a radically different and better state than when I started writing about it on a daily basis here.

Many of the points I might make are redundant with points that non-specialist bloggers would make, and I don't write just to hear myself speak. That's ok; I'm happy to have been right, but now that things have played out I need to find a new place for myself.

Don't be surprised if you see the scope of things spreading out a bit while I experiment.

Tue, 22 Aug 2006

misc Aug 22 Y2k6

listening

EMusic doesn't have any Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Google has a nifty set of information displays which includes everything but audibles. Yahoo Music Unlimited has a complete set of audibles but you need a subscription and the link is broken in any normal browser.

Good thing the plain old web just keeps chugging away, delivering the goods day in, day out, because I was able to find plain old music on the band's own site.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

from http://www.clapyourhandssayyeah.com/news.php

a concert listings site

sonic
living Sonic Living, which is a concert listing site, popped up in my email with a hearty recommendation. People are digging the many thoughtful touches and the overall workmanship of the user interface.

code

Apple's developer site has a nifty article on parsing the iTunes XML database with PHP.

Sat, 12 Aug 2006

Walkman W810i review

    
      lots of features, great looks, confusing interface, proprietary cables, slow cop