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Music Streaming Snapshot
Monthly Users According to Facebook - January 2012 Service Launch Date Monthly Users Spotify Oct 2008 13,200,000 Pandora Jan 2000 8,900,000 SoundCloud Oct 2008 2,500,000 Grooveshark Jan 2006 1,100,000 Bandcamp Sep 2008 990,000 MOG Dec 2009 200,000 Slacker Jun 2007 150,000 Rdio Aug 2010 70,000 Rhapsody Dec 2001 50,000 Google Music Nov 2011 1 (again, [...]
Universal's Audible Watermark
A while ago I posted my confusion about Weird Spotify Compression Artifacts. It turns out the artifacts are not due to compression, but a result of audio watermarks that Universal Music Group embeds in all of their digitally distributed tracks. This includes tracks resold in lossless formats. The artifacts appear on UMG tracks at Rdio, [...]
WFS Paper Presented at AES 131
I presented a short paper derived from my thesis work at the 131st Convention of the Audio Engineering Society in New York City. The paper is titled Wave Field Synthesis in Three Dimensions by Multiple Line Arrays. The paper focuses on subjective assessment of a modification to traditional wave field synthesis. I met Dr. Frank [...]
Mac OS X Speech Synthesis Markup
I put a Sound Blaster 16 in my first computer. It came with a CD-ROM full of goodies like Dr. Sbaitso, the talking psychologist. One app was called TextAssist and it had a special syntax that let you string together phonemes, specifying pitch, duration, even vibrato. I spent hours composing weird robot jingles. Itsy Bitsy [...]
Gaze-Enhanced HDR Viewing
Someday, Walmart will sell TVs capable of blinding you. But until then, we have to deal with weak displays that cannot reproduce the sun's luminosity. And High Dynamic Range images will have to be viewed by proxy. Tones that fall in the HDR range of the histogram are tones that are impossible to display on your [...]
OpenCV 2.1 and 2.3 with Visual Studio 2010 Quick Start
I am using OpenCV 2.1/2.3 with the newer C++ style OpenCV interface. There are a few tricky parts and changes that aren't mentioned in the cheatsheet. Hopefully the OpenCV documentation will continue to improve as it grows. Anyway, here is a quick start guide that might help beginners out. Camera Capture in OpenCV 2.x #include [...]
Google Latitude is Cool
Google Latitude is starting to look a lot like my original Stractor location tracking concept work. They have pie charts that illustrate where you spend your time; work, home, out and about. Google Latitude: Stractor: Okay, that's nice. Here are some other Stractor concepts...maybe we'll see some of these soon: http://www.butterscotch.com/news/168/Google-Continues-To-Improve-And-Streamline-Maps-In-New-Update
Music Smasher: Streaming Music API Mashup
Music Smasher is a smash up of popular music streaming service APIs. I developed it to simplify the task of searching across Spotify, Rdio, Grooveshark, and other catalogs to find out who has the music you love, giving you more information for choosing a streaming service. Music Smasher is currently hosted at mattmontag.com/smasher. Note that [...]
Weird Spotify Compression Artifacts
Spotify Artifacts Showcase I love Spotify. But I've noticed some weird artifacts on a few albums. It sounds like a fluttery warble noise in the midrange. It's most noticeable during big string or choir sections with broad spectral content. The problem seems limited to certain albums. The worst album I've come across is this Pascal [...]
Exact MP3 Recompression
Let's say you have a library for decoding MP3* streams, and your library exposes some API methods that provide access to the resulting uncompressed PCM audio stream. It's meant to hide the original MP3 data, so people can't save it to disk and rip you off. Is it possible to "reverse engineer" the PCM data [...]
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