Moved blog

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Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?

If you don’t think you can, you should definitely try.

The idea behind Shutdown Day is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate.

Links:

• http://www.shutdownday.org/

Live Sound gets automated one more step

Part of the Queen Mary University of London, Departement of Electronic Engineering, the Centre for Digital Music works on Automatic Mixing Tools.

Let’s see how they describe their project:

The Automatic Mixing Tools project aims to implement several independent systems that when combined together can generate an automatic sound mix out of an unknown set of multi-channel inputs. The research explores the possibility of reproducing the mixing decisions of a skilled audio engineer with minimal or no human interaction. The research is restricted to non-time varying mixes for large room acoustics. This research has application to live sound music concerts, remote mixing, recording and postproduction as well as live mixing for interactive scenes.

The automatic mixer research distinguishes the engineering mixing from the subjective mixing. Therefore the current research is focused on a constrained rule mixing layer and a subjective mixing layer. The rule-based section is based on engineering constraints while the subjective layer is based on a target mixing style. This target style can be extracted from previously mixed songs based on feature extraction. Two approaches are under study. One is a modified automatic mixer, whose settings can be adapted based on target features and the other is based on a multilayer feedback network. The target mixing methods rely on output feature similarity to the reference features of the target mix. It is the current belief of the author that the use of expert training data can be used to increase the convergence rate of the system.

Currently automated mixers are capable of saving a timeline of static mix scenes, which can be loaded for later use. But they lack the ability to adapt to a different room or to a different set of inputs. In other words, they lack the ability to automatically taking mixing decisions. In the current research approach the starting point is a target mixing style, rather than a fixed prerecorded setup. This has the advantage of being able to blend a mixing style of a completely different song into an unknown set of inputs.

The justification of this research is the need of non-expert audio operators and musicians to be able to achieve a quality mix with minimal effort. Currently mixing is a task which requires grate skills, practice and can be sometime tedious. For the professional mixing engineer this kind of tool will reduce sound check time and will prove useful in multiple music group and festivals where changing from one group to another should be done really quickly. Currently large audio productions tend to have hundreds of channels, being able to group some of those channels into an automatic mode will ease the mixing task to the audio engineer. There is also the possibility of applying this technology to remote mixing applications where latency is too large to be able to interact with all aspects of the mix.

This research is pursuing the knowledge required to develop automatic mixtures comparable in quality to those performed by professional human mixing console operators. Implementation, subjective comparison and error distance measure between a target mixture style and the automatic mixture will measure the success of the results. By style we refer not only to a certain genre of music but also to a producer or engineer subjective contribution to a mix.

Future end for sound engineers? Although automated mixing consoles such as pioneering Innovason’s digital audio mixing consoles have brought extreme flexibility for live events how will this translate into usability? Future will tell.

Links:

• Automatic mixing tools for audio and music production

HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray

And the winner is… Blu-Ray!!!

It was just another battle between formats, remember the BetaMax vs VHS war.

Since Toshiba, the main driving force behind HD DVD, recently announced it would no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players, we’re settled for Blu-Ray. OK! But is it really the end? Is Blu-Ray really the winner? And for how long?

This war, maintaining confusion in the customers’ mind and thus delaying possible mass adoption, has helped a third party actor, online video, to move-up. While online video is still not a strong actor, it will probably challenge DVD and Blu-Ray pretty earlier than planned.

Let’s have a look at what happened and happens on the music market and let’s try to learn from it.

The story is quite different but the outcome may be the same. While the audio industry was happy with the Audio CD, new formats have been introduced to fight against piracy. SACD on one hand, DVD-A on the other but no one really cared about what the consumer wanted, access to a lot of music at a reasonable price. Downloadable music answered the need, legally or not. We now have a situation where “hardware” music sales drop down every year. And the only lacking step for downloadable music to win the battle is the definition of a true standard for each change of player.

While music can be listened to several times, this is less true for movies. Therefore, downloadable video or online VOD will probably win the battle even faster, probably as soon as the proper broadband Internet access bandwidth allowing it will be widely available. An EC report forecasts that, by 2010, almost 90 percent of Europe’s home Internet users will use broadband, among which 33 percent will be connected using fibre optic networks. With download bandwiths up to 100 Mbits/s allowing for HD TV to be streamed in realtime, no doubt the fibre optic network customers will switch to downloadable or online video rapidly.

So I’m afraid the golden days of Blu-Ray won’t last long. Once again, everything is in the hands of the content providers. Will they try to protect their old fashioned business model as music majors did? Or will they manage to take customers’ expectations into account and come out with updated business models? It caused severe damages to the music industry not being able to do the right choice in the right time…

Get “Free” for Free

You are living in the United Stated? Get the March 2008 issue of Wired magazine for free. (I don’t see much to add to this!)

PMA08: digital cameras connect to photo sharing (at last)

For sure, recent PMA was the opportunity for numerous announcements. Quite logically, my interest went to digital camera manufacturers showing photo sharing connectivity.

The first pretty impressive was the Samsung GX-20 with its optional battery pack featuring Wi-Fi connectivity. Demonstrated at the show was upload to Picasa. Flickr also showed up in the menus but not done due to contractual reasons.

Lumix previewed a nice implementation allowing both upload to Picasa and sending by e-mail.

My preference goes to Eye-Fi, a small SD card featuring 2 Gbytes of storage and an automatic Wi-Fi based upload of the photos either to my computer or to photo sharing sites. Once connected to the defined Wi-Fi network, the card automatically uploads the pictures as defined. The list of supported photo sharing sites is already impressive. No doubt that KoffeePhoto will be added soon.

Links :

• Buy the Eye-Fi from Amazon.com

Free Camtasia studio

Looking to include video screenshots on your web site or your blog? In United Kingdom, PC Plus Magazine offers a free license of Camtasia Studio 3, screen recorder software, until January 7th.

Links:

• Download Camtasia
• Register and get your license key from TechSmith.com

RivalMap, a new online market intelligence tool

I just started using RivalMap, a powerful online market intelligence tool provided by RivalSoft. “RivalMap is web-based collaboration software that gives companies a central place to share and address information about competitors and their industry. If your company spends any time watching competitors and their activities, RivalMap will make the management and communication of competitive information much easier and more effective.“

A great tool for collaborative analysis of competition. Free for up to three users.

Links:

• RivalMap Market Intelligence tool

The beauty of old digital pictures

People ask me what kind of processing I used to get the picture I’ve placed on the home page of this blog.

Well, believe it or not, none!

In fact, it’s a picture taken with my last century’s digital camera, a Konica Q-M100… Low resolution and low speed (when I pressed the button, there were no cars). But I really like the result.

The picture was taken at a traffic light on South Lasalle Street in Chicago in October 2002 with the Chicago Board of Trade Building in background.

Android, better than words

Android introduced by the people from Google. Really looks awesome… Let’s see how Microsoft will react to this.