O'Reilly Digital Media

Apple is renowned for OOBE (pronounced “oobie”), the Out-Of-Box
Experience you get when unwrapping its products. When I bought a PowerMac a
few months ago, I was amused by the typically overengineered plug protectors
the company had stuck on the keyboard and mouse cables. It seemed like a shame
to throw them away.

Then my eyes lit on a capless pen drive I’d been carrying around in a
goofy cloth bag. (The flash-RAM part had screwed into the business end of a
real pen, which died soon after I got it.) A few hacks with an X-acto blade
to remove the plug’s cord clip, and the drive was pocket-safe once more.

Latey, I’ve received some high-end audio software for review, and each
package came with its own capless dongle. Apple detritus to the rescue again!

Here, two cast-off USB plug protectors are enjoying their new life guarding
mobile electronics. In the foreground a pre-surgery cap protects the iLok
dongle that came with Antares
Avox. Behind that is an unprotected HASP dongle for BIAS
Peak. In the back row is the salvaged USB pen drive.

Other USB hacks, anyone?

Let’s face it, artists don’t care about operating systems - they simply want a transparent instrument to create art and a vehicle to freely express ideas. I’m a composer by trade and I don’t care what operating system saves my files or displays images - I just need it to consistently and safely work. All popular operating systems have their strengths, but all have the basics down. Before you start flaming that I don’t get it - I understand it’s a lucrative business, Windows is more than an operating system, <your operating system> has features <the other operating systems> can only dream about, and ground-breaking hardware necessitates its software companion. So, let me put it this way: Perhaps less energy should be focused on rehashing the basics and more on making computers useful for ordinary people.

Visionaries like Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls have dedicated a good deal of their lives enabling machines to help creators realize ideas. Why don’t we hear more about their pioneering work and less about the next version of Windows?

In his 1981 Byte article: “Design Principles Behind Smalltalk” Dan Ingalls said:
“An operating system is a collection of things that don’t fit into a language. There shouldn’t be one.” Smalltalk-80 (which is what Dan was speaking of) and it’s offspring (e.g. Squeak, VisualWorks) incorporate OS facilities such as display, keyboard and file management. But to be deployed and used in today’s world, Smalltalk systems are built to sit on commercial operating systems - what people are handed when they purchase their PC.

What do artists care about? The ability to express ideas with a computer has been a holy grail for decades. Alan Kay’s dynabook design and user interface research focuses on enabling the user to gain authoring comprehension not being a slave to it. Kay’s focus on “learning by doing” parallels learning a musical instrument. A computer’s interface should be an instrument whereby you learn by practice - the more you practice the better you become. Like a musical instrument, it should possess the possibility to create ideas that are infinitely rich in detail and nuances.

I’m not suggesting that the computer should, or could, emulate human expression out of the box. Consider the trumpet: 3 valves, some tubing and a bell - simple. But, it is much more in the hands of a virtuoso. “The music is not inside the piano (Alan Kay).” It is not inside a camera, a paint brush or a trumpet. A computer can extend much wider than a musical instrument, and so it should be designed to assist the artists in the creation of ideas, the authoring of art and alternatively the vehicle in which to deliver your work. But, the artist’s creative thought process must not be continually interrupted by endless cascading menus or popup dialog boxes.

Let’s look at a few who are making a difference.

Check out Craig Latta’s natural language prototype Quoth (make sure your volume is up.) Although not a complete computer system, his demo illustrates a fresh idea on how music can be created… similar to a conversation with musicians in a dynamic setting.

Croquet is a development environment and a delivery vehicle that allows users to collaborate on their work. A personal environment can dynamically connect to any other Croquet space in the world. Since it is built on Squeak, anything in the environment can be changed. And, there is not necessarily a line between developer, artist, user or audience. A great example of an instrument.

Concentrating on the user interface, mezzo follows unique design rules. I find it similar in concept to Traktion where little is hidden from the user and scrolling is kept to a minimum.

If more money was dedicated toward helping people express ideas, then I think we’d see a significant change in computers… and we might see a 180 degree flip of who runs the technical world. Then again, maybe we’re better off that the little guy, in some back room, is dedicated to realizing the dynabook.

What system do you employ to author art? Have you found unique computer systems for artists? What do creators really care about?

Related link: http://economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=S’(X%20*RQ%3B*!%20%224%0A&tranMod…

After years working in high tech media, and having drunk the kool-aid more than once, I’ve come to value dumb questions. And the same dumb question keeps occurring to me when I look at magnatune, weed and other net-based alternatives to record companies: How do you earn rewards without risk?

So far in business history, there’s been a requirement that risk and reward roughly balance. Someone takes on the risk of investing time, effort and/or money, and society rewards them if they produce something of value. The existing record industry, for all its faults (and they are large and many), is based on labels taking on a lot of risk in hope of big rewards. The risk takes the form of trying to create a pop culture phenomenon, which is based not just on musical merit but on a complex mix of music, sex, ritual sacrifice and timing.

Many of the alternative models I’ve seen seem to be based on the assumption that merit is enough: people will hear good music and recommend it to their friends, who will want to buy it. But it’s at that point that the model appears to go risk-free. Peer-to-peer recommendations are supposed to take over from the million-dollar marketing investment that a major label typically puts behind an attempt at a hit song. But that marketing investment is the risk in the risk-reward equation. In particular, it’s the “impresario fee” for finding an artist that is extraordinary in some way and then doing all the things that have to be done to, in effect, modulate pop culture with the image and sound of this artist.

If the risk is eliminated, what are customers paying for? Good music? I’m not so sure. Ask the average jazz or classical musician how much money they make from sales of recordings.

Actually, I don’t think the risk is eliminated–it’s just transferred to the artist. And the artist is unlikely to be able afford to take it on, especially since the same technology that makes the alternative record companies possible also makes it possible for everyone in the developed world to flood the market with content, making it exponentially harder to be noticed.

This is not to say that the aggregators (magnatune et al) can’t make money by collecting all this effectively free content. Even there, the more successful ones will probably be the ones taking on large risks.

In a recent Economist article (subscription required for full text) on magnatune, the reporter notes that “It will only take one rock star born on the internet, after all, for everyone to pronounce the old model completely dead.” This leads to another dumb question: Why so few stars from the net? It’s been a long time now, and in the mean time American Idol and the like, which are based on the old business model with some new twists, reliably produce stars every season.

At myspace.com, the band Hollywood Undead has come from nowhere and gotten hundreds of thousands of plays. But I’d be interested to know how much money that’s generating. As long as there’s no risk behind Hollywood Undead, there may be no money coming.

If that changes, we may really see something new. But I’ve heard that story before…

Standard disclaimer/flame interrupter: I’m questioning, not attacking. I’m a big fan of the democratizing potential of new media, and very aware of the negative effects of the control of media by a few giant corporations.

Many people who produce online media have been socialized to keep file size in mind above all else. Concerns about download time and storage space have left many people I work with perpetually wary of creating files much larger than what once fit on a floppy disk — even if it means sacrificing image and sound quality.

You don’t need to do that.

Compression is still important – the iPod will only play video compressed into one of two specific formats (H.264 and MPEG-4, both described later in this posting) and only the most powerful computers can play uncompressed video without significant glitches. However, these playback limitations are not necessarily due to the amount of memory a file requires (the new iPods come in 30GB and 60GB models, so they can hold some hefty files) instead, limitations come from the processor power required to play video in a digital environment.

As a result, compressing video, or converting it into a form which can be more easily played back by your audience, means adjusting the data rate or bit rate (the amount of information that needs to be processed during each second of playback) as opposed to thinking only about the total amount of memory in the file. This holds true both for podcasting and for online streaming (it also applies to DVD production). Files with a higher bit rate contain more information and are harder for a device (such as an iPod, computer, or set-top DVD player) to process.

Apple and a number of other companies offer a variety of tools to help you compress video into the iPod compatible H.264 and MPEG-4 codecs. (Codec stands for compression/decompression. As a producer you use a codec to compress your media into a more efficient delivery format; your audience then uses the same type of codec, for example H.264 or MPEG-4, to decompress it and play it back.) Apple also offers some great online tutorials for both Mac and PC users.

More important than your ability to use a particular tool, however, is your knowledge of the underlying process and how you can make it work for you as a digital filmmaker. Not all framings and compositions compress equally well. Shots with lots camera movement and detailed backgrounds are often harder to compress than stable shots against a solid color background or a background that contains less fine detail. Close up shots of people’s faces, which I wrote about in my last posting, not only hold up well at small screen sizes but they generally compress well too. (For more information, I cover compression and codecs extensively in DV Filmmaking: From Start to Finish).

Because shots compress differently, and different parts of a video file may require different bit rate settings to play back smoothly, it’s important to use the manual settings in your compression tool, and to experiment: compress your media at a few different compression levels, and then test each on your target playback platform to see which settings work best. If you’re distributing your work as a podcast, test your compression by playing the video back on an iPod to be sure it looks the way you want it to before you make it public for the whole world to see. It takes some work, but the results are worth it when your video looks like a million bucks.

Related link: http://www.zzz.ch/

Zzz Annoying Groove is aptly named. This Mac dashboard widget does nothing
but play an irritating electric bass loop until you quit it or click the info
button—and it has a seemingly endless supply of grooves. (You can download
it here.)

Because the entire widget is only 44KB, I wondered where all that noise was
coming from. Was it a Mod file? So I peeked inside the file by Control-clicking on it and selecting
“Show Package Contents” from the pop-up menu. It turns out the audio
files are actually pulled from the author’s site, www.zzz.ch,
with the line

<embed id="zzzGroove" src="http://www.zzz.ch/zomatix/snd/random_embed.php"
type="text/html">.

The PHP script on that page returns the more detailed embedding code

<embed id='zzzGroove' src='http://www.zzz.ch/zomatix/snd/zom357.aiff'
type='audio/mp3' controller='true' autoplay=true loop=true height='20' width='17'>

…where the random number in the AIFF file name refers to one of hundreds
of audio files. (Refresh the page to hear a new file.)

Exploring the site further, I read that the author is a 30-something physician
named Tristan Zand who creates his bass loops with a Lexicon
JamMan. What really grabbed me was his description
of how the loops came to be: As an experiment, he decided to record a new improvised
bass groove every day for a whole year. “It was real fun, a great exercise,
and something I’m happy I have done,” Zand reports. You can access
all 364 grooves from the previous link, or buy a CD with higher-quality files.

Inspired by the daily grooving, Zand decided to try recording brief improvised
songs every day for half a year—and he did it, as you can hear on this page.
They’re also available on CD.

I am just awed by his commitment to daily creativity, even if the results are
sometimes annoying. It reminds me of what BT
said when I asked him how he was able to stay focused: “I feel like a
really important part of the creative process is follow-through. If you let
yourself off the hook, it deters you from finishing anything. So the most
important thing in my life in terms of creativity is finishing absolutely
everything.” (If you have an Amazon account, you can read
the whole interview passage here.)

Hmm. I realize I started this blog three months ago. Progress!

Related link: http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/trash/

First, we had digital emulations of acoustic instruments—way back in
1961, Max Mathews taught
a computer to sing. Next, programmers used physical
modeling and mathematical
transforms to recreate beloved old analog synthesizers and effects in software
(see below). Watching vacuum tubes on cathode-ray tubes (i.e., computer
screens) was ironic, but resurrecting physical gear in software made sense.
The virtual versions offered stability, repeatability, and significant savings
in cost and space. And the sound was pretty good.

The groundbreaking Propellerhead ReBirth emulated two Roland TB-303
bass synthesizers, Roland TR-808 and -909 drum machines, and some effects
to create a software techno studio. You can now downoad the program for
free at the ReBirth
Museum.

A more recent trend is digital emulations of digital gear. Korg, for
example, makes a software
version of its M1 synthesizer, which shook the world in 1988 but sounds
harsh and rough today. (I remember thinking in ’88, “Wow. This is
the future. I just wish it didn’t sound so bad now.”) I’m
not sure why anyone would want an M1 today, except for nostalgia. Korg cites
the instrument’s distinctive “character,” which is a valid
point in some cases. Several synths, such as the 303, became classics because
they tried so hard to emulate real-world instruments but failed in interesting
ways. To me, though, the M1 came close enough to reality that today it’s
more annoying than expressive.

But that’s the great thing about the explosion of software synthesizers:
Somewhere out there is a musician who just loves the sound of any given program.
Several years ago at the Project
Bar-B-Q computer music conference, ace sound designer Jennifer
Hruska was demonstrating the difference between a $4,000 synthesizer and
the puny one in a cell phone. In her hands, both instruments were amazing, but
the inherent sonic difference was dramatic. One guy in the audience carped,
“What kills me is that somewhere, there’s some kid
who thinks that cell phone sounds good.” Next to me, a talented 23-year-old
techno musician was grinning widely. “I’m that kid!” he laughed.

I thought again about the ironic quest for audio fidelity when, leafing through
a music gear catalog recently, I came across this plug-in:

Izotope Trash: hi-fi lo-fi.

The catalog blurb read, “Izotope Trash is an all-purpose distortion processor
plug-in that uses high fidelity, 64-bit internal processing to selectively add
subtle or extreme distortion to your tracks.” I love the oxymoronic concept
of high-fidelity distortion. But I’ve gotta admit, it sounds
pretty good….

What would you like to emulate?

Related link: http://useit.com/alertbox/weblogs.html

Interface guru Jakob Nielsen as posted his Top 10 of the worst weblog usability mistakes. If I say check it out here, I’m making one of them. Here’s the condensed list:

1. No Author Biographies
2. No Author Photo
3. Nondescript Posting Titles
4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go
5. Classic Hits are Buried
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
8. Mixing Topics
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

Nielsen adds this under point 4: “A related mistake in this category is to use insider shorthand, such as using first names when you reference other writers or weblogs. Unless you’re writing only for your friends, don’t alienate new visitors by appearing to be part of a closed clique. The Web is not high school.”

Related link: http://www.jakeludington.com/project_studio/20051004_windows_media_enhanced_podc…

AAC files are the de facto standard for enhanced podcasts—audio files paired with links and pictures. But outside of iProducts from Apple, AAC is poorly supported.

This clever tutorial explains how to make an enhanced podcast with Windows Media Audio (WMA) files instead. That means that anyone with an Internet connection and Windows Media Player (even Mac users) can enjoy the enhanced playback. You’ll need Windows to make the files, but the process is simple. You simply embed URLs at appropriate points in the audio file using a free software tool. On playback, those links trigger Web pages to open.

When I tried playing these enhanced WMAs on a Mac, I heard brief audio dropouts as the pages were launching, but it was extremely cool to see the pages pop up as the announcer mentioned them.

As the tutorial notes, “The great potential for this feature is to provide people with a walking tour of Websites associated with whatever you are talking about. Many podcasts include show notes with links to all relevant sites mentioned throughout the course of the show, but how many listeners are actively clicking those links as they listen?”

The podcasts that inspired the tutorial are on this Xbox blog, so you can see and hear how it works.

Radio with pictures? What’s next?

The recent release of an iPod that plays video creates a new world of opportunities for the independent producer — to get an idea of the scale, think how podcasting has changed the distribution of audio programs in the past year alone. DVDs and online streaming have long enabled people to make and distribute professional quality video with commonly available prosumer equipment: podcasting your video now enables you to reach an even broader audience.

The translation from creating images for a TV or computer display to working in the medium of an iPod’s 2.5 inch LCD screen, however, may take some getting used to. The place to start is by considering the size of the images in your frame. Just as the shift from theatrical viewing to home viewing (via DVD, VHS, and cable TV) changed the way cinematographers frame their work, the opportunities created by the very small screens of the iPod and other portable devices demand a different type of screen composition.

Wide shots, such as landscapes, look great in a theater, but don’t always hold up as well on a TV screen. Close-ups, especially of people’s faces, look great even on smaller TVs, which is why you may notice newer films feature more close-up shots and fewer dramatic widescreen vistas. As I wrote in my soon to be published O’Reilly book DV Filmmaking: From Start to Finish if the focus of your shot fills your frame it will retain its impact, even at a smaller size.

Case in point, the sandwich shown below:

This image is shown at 320 x 240 pixels, which is a frame size the iPod accommodates — see the iPod tech specs page. A frame of DV is 720 pixels wide, more than twice the size of the image here. Even at this size, the sandwich still retains its visual power (positive or negative depending on your feelings about pastrami and/or the consumption of beef) due to the extreme close-up framing. This image of a sandwich from the world famous Katz’s deli appears in chapter 3, Composing a Shot to Fit Your Output Medium, which covers shot types and screen size in detail. I photographed the sandwich from so many angles (to make sure I got exactly the right composition) that the waiter came over and asked me if I wanted him to take a picture of me and the sandwich together.

If you have a wider framing, and feel the focus of your shot gets lost when you reduce the frame size you can always crop your video. Many video editing and compression programs offer a crop feature that lets you decide which parts of a shot you’d like to retain and which you’d like to leave on the cutting room floor. Cropping your video may do a disservice to your original composition, for example I like the plastic squeeze-bottles of mustard and the assortment of pickles that appear in the background of the image above — if I cropped the shot differently they might not appear in my revised image. At the same time, cropping is a great way to highlight a specific detail and draw attention to a particular element in your shot. I considered cropping the original image of the sandwich from full size down to 320 x 240 so only a detail of the pastrami remained in a super tight extreme close-up, but decided not to because I didn’t want to turn off all the vegetarian members of my potential audience.
Once you’ve got your video composed to fit your target screen size, the next step is encoding it to an iPod compatible format. I’ll save that for another posting.

Stay tuned, and bon appetit.

Related link: http://extra.schematron.com/available.html

“You’re so somatically focussed!” said my mate, a Siberian doctor, over coffee. I had just told him that I felt like something was growing in me. Next night I was in the emergency ward in St Vincent’s hospital, pumped full of morphine, doctors canalizing everything in sight and prodding everything else not insight. And summonsing next of kin. Something was growing indeed in me, but not cancer and not anything any of my doctors and specialists had actually seen before. Dr Dick, my GP, on the first day said “Its not a heart attack, its something funny”, and the diagnosis didn’t get much more useful than that for two months.

Those who saw my talk in Amsterdam at XML 2005 may have wondered why I only talked for for 25 minutes: it was the week before the dramas started.

It turned out to be easily and completely treatable, though only by accident; I recovered a long time before they figured out why I was alive and why the mysterious mass in my chest had disappeared. A sign of the straw-clutching by the doctors was that they even tested me for an infection associated with Siberian bear hunters (jokingly suggested by my aforementioned mate). When another doctor poo-pooed the TV show “House”, I pointed out that it exactly corresponded to my experience: a lot of red herring chases on changing secondaries, with the primary cause remaining elusive, made trickier still by minor complications such as pneumonia and pneumathorax.

So I tidied up my affairs, and I went to recuperate on a banana farm in Coffs Harbour, a resort town in the East coast. The dog chased bush turkeys and wallabies all day, dozens of different birds sang and displayed all day (it is spring), the backyard koala burped all night, and I cooked two of my best recipes:
fresh bug in sesame miso soup,
and fresh mulberry, pecan, almond, ricotta and cumquat marmalade pie. The only entertainment each day was to go to the local beach (which as summer progresses becomes nude) and watch an enormous shark’s head decompose. You have to make your own fun in the country. Oh, one day I saw a seahawk catch a gull; the next day, I saw a gull from the flock attack the seahawk by buffing it underneath. Tough guy. (And absolutely no work; I slipped and posted to XML-DEV once I think: the flesh is indeed weak.)

Now I am debugged, recuperated, relaxed, and feeling like a thirty-year old. (And very grateful to the doctors, nurses and staff at St Vincent’s hospital Sydney.) I have been told there is no reason to expect a relapse.

So I find myself in an interesting inflection point. I have tidied up my affairs: gave up the house, sold the car, left the dog gallivanting after the longsuffering wallabies, and phased myself out of (my software company) Topologi’s day-to-day operations. What to do next?

I feel like I have been given a fresh start, and I want to take it up. So I am free and available for new work. My resume and overview can be found "http://extra.schematron.com/available.html">here.
Tim Bray has given me a nice recommendation
"http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/10/14/Rick-Jelliffe">
here, which was very kind. If you have something that
I might be good at, or you know of someone, please feel free to let them or me know.

Topologi will be releasing a new round of versions of
our utilities and editors before the end of the year, which is pretty exciting for me, and I will still maintain a close involvement with them.

The other thing that has been set back by all this has been my implementation of ISO Schematron. I am starting to work on it again, taking some ideas from James Clark’s Jing implementation; it will be API compatible with the 1.5/1.6 skeleton, and accept schemas with both the old and new namespace.

Buddy can you spare me a dime?

Related link: http://www.tuners.com/

A few months ago I decided to stop griping about technology that frustrates creativity. There are so many bad examples to complain about, and it’s hardly useful to go on and on about them all. More useful might be some encouragement for the good examples out there. So I took it on myself to create the Flow Award, naming it after the concept of creative flow as described by psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. I awarded the first Flow to Masterwriter songwriting software. I have also started to recruit a distinguished Flow Academy–more about that soon. Meanwhile, I present Flow Award #2:

The Intellitouch tuner by Onboard Research reinvents the simple but crucial process of tuning a stringed instrument, making an almost pleasant experience out of what had been a necessary evil. Unlike most other tuners, which require a cable connection or the use of a built-in mic, it’s designed to clip onto an instrument’s headstock, where it can then sample vibrations coming up through the neck in order to determine the pitch of a note (see photo). It turns out that this simple design innovation makes a huge difference, and has led to the Intellitouch being adopted as a standard in kit bags all over the world.

As with all great tools, using the Intellitouch fits seamlessly into the actual activity at hand, in this case playing a guitar, banjo, mandolin or fiddle. There’s a lot of value in just getting the tuner out of the way, since portable tuners often get tripped over or knocked off of stands. More important, though, the Intellitouch fits into the act of performing. It does so by respecting the mysterious value of sight lines.

With previous designs, the player had to make an obvious break of eye contact with the audience, either by looking down at a pedal (and probably bending and squinting at the same time) or by turning around and looking at a rack unit. That may seem like a small thing, but it sends a very flow-disrupting message: “I am now thinking about how I sound and so have transferred my attention to my gear.” It’s kind of like pausing while making love to check yourself out in a mirror.

With the Intellitouch, you just turn your head to the left to glance in the direction of the instrument’s tuning keys. This gesture is subtle, natural and even attractive–the audience sees that you’re tuning your instrument, and it looks to them like you’re merely glancing at the tuning keys while you turn them. The three-quarter profile they see looks reflective, to boot. Amazing that tuning could actually be made graceful.

The Intellitouch also manages to make the animation on its LCD readout feel musical. One to three left- or right- facing chevrons appear on either side of the letter name of the note you’re tuning to, indicating how sharp or flat you might be (in the dark, a single button press illuminates the display). The simplicity, clarity and positive feel of the Intellitouch helps you confidently tune a string in a second or two.

Being able to do it that fast keeps the flow of the performance going. It also makes it likely that the player will tune more often, meaning that, I’ll bet, Intellitouch users play in tune for a greater percentage of the time. And that supports flow too (especially for the audience).

I’ve found that even Onboard’s technical support is flow-worthy. The on-off button on my unit became intermittent a few months after I bought it. It was one of those irritating but not fatal problems that you might let slide for a while, and I did, for a year or more. By that time I was unsure what if any warranty coverage I might have, and too busy to go digging for the information. I emailed Onboard about it, and they responded immediately with word that I could send them the unit and a check for $20. They’d discover its warranty status when they opened it up, and either cash the check or mail it back. As it happened, in no time I had a working tuner and my $20 back. Pretty great service on something that cost $49 to buy (list price is $69.95 as of this writing), a price that you might expect would put it in the disposable category.

Related link: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmedia/2005/10/05/audio-vide…

If you’re trying to get your iPod (or any other digital media device) connected to your car radio, you should read this article.

Related link: http://www.samplenet.co.uk/

Several weeks ago, I wrote “7,079 Free Sounds . . . and Counting,” an overview of the Freesound Project. (That collection is now up to 7,551 sounds, by the way.) I liked the site’s preview feature and huge collection of sound effects, but its licensing terms are a bit unwieldy: You need to credit each sample you use commercially, and you need to secure permission from individual authors to use the sounds in advertising.

UK sampling granddaddy Samplenet, however, basically says, “Go for it.” Its collection of 4,000-plus free samples doesn’t have a preview function, but all the ones I came across were MP3 format, so they load into a Web browser quickly.

Samplenet also focuses on musical sounds, with categories including Bass, Breaks, Claps, Classic Keys, Effect, Guitar, Hi-Hat, Kick Drum, Orchestral, Pad, Percussion, Sax/Flute, Sequence, Snare Drum, Stab, Synth, and Vocals. That’s a good complement to the Freesound Project’s SFX emphasis. And with contributions from professional developers such as Loopmasters, the quality is more consistent. Give it a try:

(Thanks to Sonic State for the tip.)

Related link: http://www.ning.com/

Mark Andreessen’s new project, Ning, went live a few days ago. If you haven’t seen too many opinions about Ning, it’s because Ning is a little hard to grok at first glance. I made an attempt to grok it, and here’s what I came up with:

There are a lot of clusters of social networking apps on the net right now that do very similar things. For example, there are a lot of websites that are similar to Am I Hot or Not. At lunch, my friend Geoff likes to come up with interesting variations on Am I Hot or Not. “I have an idea!” Geoff enthuses, “how about a site called ‘Who’s the bigger asshole?’. We’ll put up two pictures of sportcars, and you get to vote on which one is driven by a bigger asshole!” Geoff has dozens of these ideas.

Now if Geoff had the patience, he can probably find a free collection of PHP scripts somewhere that allows him to set up a clone of Am I Hot or Not, but it may not be exactly what he needs, and it will take him some time to learn the particular idiosyncracies of that particular software. Plus he has to take out a domain name, find a host, install the software, yada yada.

I use Am I Hot or Not as an example, but there are tons of other sites which are also cloned heavily. Craigslist, Zagats guide and so on. Some of these sites are not so much cloned so much as they create subcommunities that people would like to copy or emulate, such as the groups on Flickr. The vast majority of successful “Web 2.0″ apps tend to have a social component — they tend to rely on content which is created by a large community of visitors to the site.

So what’s Ning? Ning is an uber-authoring tool that enables people to build these kinds of sites. The Ning folks have built an authoring tool, and built numerous copies and variations of many of the more successful kinds of these sites. They’ve built an “Am I Hot or Not” clone, they’ve built a Craigslist clone, they’ve built a Bookshelf, etc. They’ve captured a large part of the feature set that drives a lot of these apps, including message boards, polls, tags, RSS and so on…

As a Ning developer, you can find a site on Ning which is pretty close to what you’re looking for (and this will get easier as Ning grows), and then you can *clone* it. After you clone it, you get access to the source code, and you can change just the parts you need to change to implement your own crazy idea. So, instead of “Choose the prettiest Cat”, you make “Choose the prettiest Llama”, or whatever. As soon as you clone the site, it immediately goes live, and you can create a URL such as llamas.ning.com.

If Ning is successful, it will end up being a hub for a huge collection of interesting (and not-so-interesting) social sites. The more people that create apps on Ning, the more apps there will be to clone. Successful Ning sites will foster imitation. Ning could very well end up being the “Hypercard of Social Sites”. This has both good and bad connotations. It’s good in that Ning would provide a common, easy-to-learn system for creating new social sites. It’s bad in that if you remember Hypercard, you may also remember that “All Hypercard Apps look like they are made in Hypercard” - Ning may suffer from the same problem in that most early Ning apps will have a “cookie-cutter” approach.

If the system is as flexible as they claim it to be, there should be room for more talented “Ning-artists” to produce more innovative ideas that aren’t just clones of other sites. It is very promising that Ning allows users to author in PHP (how they are managing to give all their users access to PHP authoring without huge security holes is an interesting question, and I imagine we’ll be revisiting this issue soon…). At any rate, the good ideas will get noticed and people will clone the good ideas. So hopefuly, Ning will be a kind of crucible in which good ideas for social sites will float to the top and multiply. Well,
maybe not so much “good” as “successful.” I’d like to think this “survival of the fittest” approach will help cancel the Hypercard-effect, although the 225-pixel sidebar that Ning reserves on each page doesn’t help. The Sidebar is necessary for Ning’s revenue model, no doubt. At any rate, most of the existing Ning templates are pretty boring looking. Let’s hope the visual uniformity changes.

Oh yeah… revenue. So how does Ning make money? In short: ads. It sounds like Ning intends to inject ads and such into Ning sites — probably via the Sidebar, although right now, the Sidebar is free of ads. Ning does not allow users to add their own Google Adsense ads into their templates. I don’t know if they prohibit affiliate links to other sites (such as Amazon affilliate links in “bookshelves”) but I would imagine they may eventually want to control those to. On the other hand, if Ning were to allow user/authors to get a little pocket change from their Ning sites, they will probably attract a far greater number of users. Nonetheless, there are probably lots of potential user/authors who are perfectly happy to build Ning sites for free, and those numbers will go up if Ning becomes a successful online community. Fame/notoriety is it’s own reward.

Ning allows user/authors to set up permanent URLs to their apps, which take the form XXXX.ning.com. I imagine there will be a bit of an initial landgrab as cybersquatters grab up some of the more obvious ones. It would be nice if Ning had a policy in place to deal with this, but I imagine, with a project this ambitious, their plates are pretty full — and this leads to what I think is the most flawed aspect of this idea — it’s just too damn big. If successful, Ning has the potential to be a host, provider, authoring tool, and community hub for a huge chunk of web content. The question is, can the company successfully do all these things and do them well? Managing successful communities is a tricky business, and the downside is that when the users get pissed off, you’ve already provided them with an excellent channel for mouthing off about it (for the inevitable whiners, this is an excellent time to reserve “ihate.ning.com” and “ilovewhi.ning.com”).

One thing the Ning FAQ doesn’t make mention of is sex, which is a, uh, huge driving force behind (and on top of) many social networking sites. Judging from some of the example Ning sites that are currently being promoted on the Ning Pivot (the inevitable page devoted to “hot” Ning sites), I imagine Ning hopes to profit from the huge amounts of energy people put into sex, without getting their hands dirty by remaining as “content agnostic” as they can. We’ll see how far that takes them. The evolutionary model they are using will certanly cause more sexually explicit sites to rise to the top. The ones that manage to be titillating without getting deleted will certainly be successful.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing the authoring capabilities in greater detail, I’ll post again if/when my developer status gets approved and I’ve had a chance to get my hands dirty in the sandbox, er, playground.

UPDATE: I was granted developer status about an hour ago. It took me about 30 minutes to create three simple apps - pretty impressive! It took me another 10 minutes to figure out how to modify my new bookshelf to use my own affiliate tags instead of the default “24hourlaundry” (Answer: Edit class.AmazonHelper.php).

I am impressed by the degree of control the PHP source provides, and also intrigued by the potential chaos this may create.

Oh, and Geoff - here’s one of your great ideas… Oh, I’m so ashamed…

Have you messed with Ning yet? What are your thoughts?

Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7956

Man, are public libraries a fantastic resource! In addition to the expected
books and magazines, my local library has a surprisingly good collection of
CDs and DVDs. Because the discs are in such great demand, though, finding ones
I wanted to try had been an exercise in serendipity.

Then I discovered that by entering my library card number and PIN on the
library’s site, I could search for and reserve materials from the entire
county library system. The items I request are shipped to my local library,
which sends me an e-mail when they arrive. I then have a week to pick them up.
It’s like getting NetFlix or Amazon for free, although you have to return
the materials after three weeks. (Actually, in many cases, you can renew the
materials online as well, so you get more time.)

Today, I checked the site to see when my books and discs were due, and discovered
that two DVDs I’d borrowed last week had already expired. Apparently they’re
so popular that they only lend for seven days. Because you can’t
renew overdue materials and I didn’t know when they’d show up again,
I decided to copy them to my Mac. That will save the library the time and expense
of reshipping and storing the discs for me. It will also allow other library
patrons to see the discs sooner.

After I watch the movies, I’ll delete the copied files; I have no interest
in piracy, just time-shifting. As Matthew Russell pointed out in “How
Intellectual Property Laws Can Drain Your Battery’s Juice,” watching
a DVD from your laptop hard drive saves energy as well.

Copying the commercial DVD was free and simple. I fired up MacTheRipper,
selected “RCE 1” from the RCE Region menu, and hit Go. (Even though
the program creates files that will play in any region, you need to specify
the disc’s native region if it exists already.) Fifty-seven minutes later,
the DVD and all its bonus features were converted to files in a 4.36GB folder
called VIDEO_TS on my hard drive.

Those files were unplayable, so I used another freeware program, DVD
Imager, to package them as a disk image. When I subsequently double-clicked
the disk image, Apple DVD Player launched and played the movie. Had I wanted,
I could have burned the image to a blank DVD-R, but as I said, I wasn’t
interested in pirating the disc, just watching it once at a convenient time.
However, I’m sure I’ll be using this simple two-step system to make
backup copies of my own discs. Many of the library DVDs I check out are so scratched
they’re barely playable.

What are some other ways to use the files in the VIDEO_TS folder? How about DVD backup utilities for Windows or Linux?

Related link: http://www.artima.com/rubycs/index.html

Artima has just now released a new site covering the Ruby programming language. The site is called “Ruby Code and Style”. The first few articles are on modular architectures, PDF generation, and Linux clustering.

I’ve been on the board for a while and contributed a few articles. If you have tried Ruby and like it, you should write an article or two for the site. Progress is made by those that contribute.

Are you a Ruby enthusiast? What do you think about this new site?

As day three of the Web 2.0 conference proceeds, I’m hearing a number of interesting conversations. Some are part of the official conversations on stage and many of them are between sessions, over lunch or over the plethora of drinks being poured. Regardless of the conversation, there are a number of recurring topics that I’d like to touch on.

The first conversation I’d like to mention focuses on the cost of creating new start-ups. Compared to the 90’s, hardware has become cheap, open source software is (nearly) free and the only major cost to starting a company are people. I’ve heard this bantered about a number of times and coupled with the comments that VCs are investing a lot less money per company into new companies this makes much sense. This also dovetails into the “less is more” conversation. Joe Kraus also attributed outsourcing and search engine marketing as factors that drive down costs of starting a new company.

Another conversation that transported me straight back to 1999 focuses on business models. I was hoping to never hear the phrase “We haven’t figured out the business model yet” ever again. Silly talk like this was IMHO largely responsible for the last Internet bubble. Yet, I’m hearing this talk again — why did you start a company when you didn’t have a clue how you plan to make money? I guess there is always the acquisition strategy and some people here clearly act as if this is their primary business model. Well, I guess the buzz is back in the valley — for better or for worse.

Joe Kraus, during the Web 2.0 alumni discussion talked about his mistakes in the last year. He feels that his new company JotSpot stayed in beta for too long and that his team internally underwent a culture shift. People were looking for validation in the wrong areas and consequently the wrong metrics were being watched. Joe suggests to skip the beta step and go straight into general release and focus on generating revenue right away. While I welcome the straight talk about focusing on revenue, I still think the prolonged beta (as Google has a habit of doing with its projects) is a good way to telling your customer that you may not have figured out all the angles just yet — some areas of the project may still have sharp edges. Given that, I don’t think that doing a beta and focusing on revenue right away are necessarily mutually exclusive — I suppose that internal culture can be managed in other ways.

Data is the next intel inside. I strongly believe in this — if the open source revolution shook the foundations of the tech market, open data platforms are going to have a much farther reaching influence. In order to use and generate data you don’t need to be a programmer as you do in the open source space. Data can be consumed and created by everyone and harnessing data from many people into a cohesive and useful body of data will yield a new generation of applications that we can even imagine yet. Wikipedia, collaborative filtering and geospatial annotations are really just the tip of the iceberg.

AJAX is getting a lot of talk here at Web 2.0 — however, most of the talk focuses on the various type of mapping mash ups. A few people showed various office type applications running in the browser, but so far no real Microsoft Office killers are on the horizon. While AJAX is the hot topic at the moment it seems that the true calling of AJAX hasn’t arrived yet. I think people’s imaginations have been awakened, but it will take some time for the real killer AJAX applications to come out. Given what I am seeing today I’m excited to see what is next for AJAX.

These are are just some of the recurring topics here at Web 2.0 — but now its time to jump back in and catch the closing of the conference. More later…

If you’re at Web 2.0, what recurring conversations are you hearing?

Related link: http://www.dontcrack.com/

Before it got clogged with ads and nonsense posts, I used to explore Shareware
Music Machine for interesting new music-production software. More recently,
I’ve been grazing VersionTracker
and KVR, but getting to
the downloads still requires lots of clicking (and often waiting).

Don’t Crac[k],
a new site I just found through MacMusic.org,
seems to be the cleanest-looking of them all. There are no overbearing ads,
irrelevant visitor reviews, or lengthy descriptions to distract you from choosing
software to try. And if you do want more information, a simple click takes you
to the developer’s site instead of leading down a slow, lengthy tunnel
of redirects.

In addition to its dedicated freeware section, Don’t Crac[k] sports a
straightforward online store for independent software developers. (See below.)
The forum section is currently underpopulated, but I’m sure that will
change as more open-minded musicians discover the site.

Pizza
Synth, a Windows VSTi with hilariously unique controls, is yours for
just $9.99 at the Don’t Crac[k] online store.

Where do you browse for music software?

Please indulge me in this fluffy post, but the conference schwag at Web 2.0 is really killer. Forget cheap ass shirts — I really dig the WiFi finder!

The list includes:

• Inc Magazine, Fast Company Magazine
• MAKE Magazine
• Car PC Hacks Book
• Web 2.0 book bag
• O’Reilly Connection Carabiners
• AttentionTrust Token
• Yahoo WiFi Finder
• Mints
• Google Ice Cubes from the Google party.

Let me tell you, collecting those Google ice cubes was hard work — I had to throw myself on a number of stiff drinks to collect those! :-)

What other good conference schwag have you gotten?

One of the High Order Bits presentations today resonated with me and appealed strongly to the KISS (keep it simple stupid) believer in me. Jason Fried’s presentation on how to do more with less (let’s set aside the old UNIX jokes about less being more for a second) perfectly stated my feelings on the benefits of being, staying and thinking small.

Jason points out that today competitors are constantly one upping each other. True enough — take a look at how Google and Yahoo constantly try to out perform each other as an example. This cold war like mentality is painful, expensive and yields bloated software. Companies should stop outdoing each other and instead attempt to underdo each other — beat your competition with less.

He outlines his thoughts in five points:

1. Less money: Don’t write a business plan and then attempt to raise money to cover the business plan. You’ll never be able to attain the goals in your business plan anyway. And raising money only gets you into debt and more people. Since hardware is cheap, and software mostly free, people tend to be the major cost for companies.
2. Less people: You need three people, no more. Don’t scale the headcount to match your features — instead scale your features down to meet your headcount of three. Have one designer, one programmer and a sweeper person who can go back and forth between the two people to provide a bridge.
3. Less time: More people also waste more time. Instead, if you work less, you will be more conscientious of how you spend your time and therefore use your little time more wisely. Overall, work less — don’t work 50 hours a week. Only work 30 hours and get everything done in that time.
4. Less abstractions: Build things, don’t talk about building them. Don’t write specs that will be outdated and totally unrelated to your final product. Don’t create the technology and then slap a UI on it — instead build the UI first, iterate and learn from your mistakes. Then, once the UI is done, put the actual technology behind it. Let the UI screens be the specification for your technology.
5. Less software: Create fewer features that require less documentation and therefore less support. Google is a good example here: Before they rolled out their minimalistic search page, most pages were cluttered with tons of crap. And most software is bloated with features that no one ever uses, so why create them in the first place? Solve the everyday problems first, then work on solving the harder problems later.
6. More constraints: With everything being less, you need to care about what it is you do. Putting more constraints in place will keep you focused on the most important features of your project.

Of course, Jason presented these points in rapid fire succession, therefore making more of less time. A lot of these points are pretty radical, I have to admit. But, having been part of a three person team that out engineered a 35 person team, I fully see the value of what Jason points out. His philosophy on less and therefore needing less money also makes sense for start-ups. If you need less money, chances are that you can bootstrap the company yourself without requiring VC funds. Taking on VC money gives you less control and in this one exception, less is no good.

I’ll have continue pondering these points to see how I can apply them to my life.

Can you make do with less?

Related link: http://www.midi.org/newsviews/hdmidipr.shtml

How many digital music standards are more than 20 years old, still in version
1.0, and yet in daily use on untold millions of devices? Controlling everything
from cell phone ringtones to Las Vegas extravaganzas, MIDI (the Musical Instrument
Digital Interface) would have to be near the top of that short list. Still,
musicians have been clamoring for greater MIDI resolution almost since the beginning.

Yesterday, the MIDI Manufacturers*
Association, stewards of the spec, released a teaser
announcement called “MIDI Industry Investigates Major Update to MIDI
Protocol.” At the AES convention
on October 8, the MMA will discuss High-Definition MIDI (HD-MIDI™). The
press release refers to HD-MIDI as a proposal under discussion, but the trademark
sign makes me believe the group is thinking seriously about this.

“This major update to MIDI would provide greater resolution in data values,
increase the number of MIDI channels, and support the creation of entirely new
kinds of MIDI messages,” continues the announcement.

Current MIDI resolution for most control
changes is just 128 steps (7 bits), although receiving devices can interpolate
between those for smoother playback, and there are other workarounds, such as
ganging contollers for 14-bit (16,384-step) resolution. Likewise, the stock
number of channels (which typically correspond to individual instruments in
an ensemble) is just 16—a mighty small orchestra.

One of the reasons MIDI has lasted so long and been so successful is because
its backward compatibility. You can plug a keyboard controller made yesterday
into a synth from 1984 and—assuming the latter is working—still
play it. The flip side of that compatibility is that the transmission hardware
is locked at a speed comparable to that of a 28kbps modem. Even if a new controller
generated high-resolution data, the pipeline couldn’t carry it.

With the advent of software synthesizers, MIDI messages are being transmitted
completely inside computers, so the speed limit has eased, but there are still
many areas where greater resolution and more channels would allow increased
expressivity.

Way back in 1998, I moderated a brainstorming
group charged with outlining MIDI 2.0. Some of our hopes were:

• More controllers (especially non-keyboard controllers)
• 3D spatialization control instead of just basic panning
• Looping information in MIDI files
• Peer-to-peer “discovery” rather than blind data transmission
• Sample-accurate sync, and
• Better marketing

That last item is especially interesting. When most people hear the word MIDI,
they think of the annoying tunes that wheeze out of mid-’90s Web pages.
Contrary to popular belief, MIDI doesn’t “sound
bad”—it has no sound at all. It’s simply a communications
protocol. No one says Postscript looks bad; the output quality depends
on the printer.

Similarly, a well-crafted MIDI file played through a high-quality synthesizer
sounds great. That’s something you hear every day, whether you realize
it or not. Still, the world has changed a lot since 1983, and it’s exciting
to see this important spec advancing.

__________________

*The lack of an apostrophe after “Manufacturers”
always bugged me until I discovered that the word is attributive
(descriptive) rather than possessive. [Back to article]

What do you want to see in MIDI 2.0?

As an avid fan of O’Reilly conferences, I’ve gotten accustomed to their standard format of organizing conferences. Web 2.0, which O’Reilly and MediaLive put on together, aims to please a different group of attendees, so the format is a bit different. While the workshops earlier in the day were more of the typical O’Reilly conference format, the afternoon plenary sessions were all held in the large ballroom, with all attendees all paying attention to the one single track. On one side, there are no session conflicts where you want to attend two (or more!) sessions that are all happening at the same time. On the other hand you lose some choice as to what sessions to attend and there is less depth for any given topic.

I usually like to pick a session and try and convey as many nitty gritty details as I can, but I’m having to change my pace here because a lot of the plenary sessions are more like casual conversations, as opposed to full on technical detail assaults that you might expect to find at OSCON or even ETech. So, please bear with me as I try and adjust to the new format. I’ll let you know what I think about this conference format when I wrap up my blog coverage on the weekend.

I got my final clue that this conference is different when Tim O’Reilly showed up on stage in a suit. Uh oh. What’s happened to our fearless leader? I think this is in part due to the changed feeling in the Bay Area — as people have been saying lately: “The buzz is back in the Silicon Valley!” There are plenty of suits running around here and the VCs have emerged from their long hibernation. Companies are getting funded again and people are starting to throw business plans around, though VC’s are nowhere near their late 90’s glory. Companies used to get multiple millions of dollars for seed rounds where VC’s are now routinely talking about much smaller amounts — usually around $500k. Personally, I hope that a level of sanity can be maintained this time around, since too many useful innovations died when the Internet bubble burst a few years ago.

One of the major talking points this year has been the trio of web companies: Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft (MSN). These three companies are the big sponsors of the Web 2.0 conference and outside of the conference these giants are engaging in stiff head to head competition. This also plays itself out here at the conference — a lot of panels compare and contrast the approaches of these three giants. In the “Mash-Ups 2.0: Where’s the business model?” workshop the nuances between Google’s maps approach vs Yahoo! approach were examined. Yahoo! has been touting that acquired companies like Flickr and Upcoming will remain open and that the rest of Yahoo is working towards making the other parts of Yahoo! as open as possible. Yet a Yahoo! based maps mash-up is hosted on a Yahoo! server, whereas Google ends up giving more control (and the associated hosting burden) by letting developers host the mash-up pages themselves. These types of comparisons are being touched on left and right as people compare the approaches of the three major sponsors of the event.

Another trend here at Web 2.0 are events — there is a lot of talk about companies like Eventful, Upcoming and the newly launched Zvents. Each of these companies tries to bring some cohesion into the jumble of events (conferences, concerts, exhibits and even personal events) that occur daily. Each of these companies has an open API that allows third parties to access and enter events into their database, hoping to capture the same spirit that Flickr captured for online photo collections. Its clear that the market can’t support three event solutions, but given that Yahoo! just purchased Upcoming, maybe Google and MSN will snap up the other two solutions. In any case, I hope that these open event solutions will gain some serious uptake. I could see small bands trying to establish themselves and find audiences for their music be the big winner with these event solutions. Of course, this is also good for consumers who will have more event choices than ever before. I’m excited to see how this will play out.

Now its time to dive back into the conference…

What do you think of the triad of search giants and event solutions? Speak up!