There are a number of features and applications that need to know where sounds are in the middle of MP3 files. For example:
- Audio search finds words and phrases in audio files and keeps track of where they are.
- Our own Clip feature likewise works on the basis of offsets by time.
These are great features, but they’re plaugued by another new development: they dynamic assembly of MP3 files to include promos, commercials, etc. The problem is that when MP3s are re-assembled with components of different lengths, any previously identified sections will now be earlier or later in the file than previously determined. In other words, if a show is reassembled and therefore made longer or shorter, the location of a clip or segment will move and the search engine or clip feature will return incorrect results.
I’ve been working on a solution to this problem, and although it isn’t perfect yet — and maybe never will be — I want to get it out there to see if others would be willing to support it. We need buy-in from those who assemble shows or insert spots, and we need buy-in from the audio search engines as well.
My idea is to place into an ID3 frame information that will allow search engines and clip processors to understand what has been inserted or removed from the file so that these tools can deliver consistent results. Some possibilities include:
- ID3 “Event Timing Codes” (ETCO frames)
- ID3 “Position Synchronisation” Frame (POSS frames)
- A custom ID3 frame
I haven’t figured out how POSS frames work, so they may have no relevance whatsoever. But one way or another, my idea is to somehow put offset information into ID3 frames, which can then be updated when the position of components within an MP3 file are changed.
We filled the hall with 160 ehnthusiastic students for Podcast Academy 2, at and co-produced by Boston University. Thanks to the support of an amazing team at BU, there are already many online resources:
Don’t forget: The next Podcast Academy (PA3) is just a few weeks away, June 15-16 at Yahoo! in Santa Clara.
Looks like some early activity in the eBay auction of the sponsorship of Tech Nation with Dr. Moira Gunn for the month of June. Will someone get a *really* good deal? Could that someone be you?
Sorry I didn’t post thie before, but i didn’t know. Boston University is streaming the Podcast Academy live. We’re done with Day 1, but Day 2 is tomorrow. Check it out! The link is on the right-hand side of this page: http://www.bu.edu/com/
Here’s my latest personal podcast with news from IT Conversations and The Conversations Network. And don’t miss Phil Windley’s IT Conversations Highlights as well as his newsletter. (It’s part of free membership in The Conversations Network.)
There’s an interesting discussion underway on the web site of the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), hosted by Stephen Hill. Great questions/comments in particular by Barry Rueger of Community-Media.com. My most recent post to the discussion:
Barry’s questions and the implicit answers are right on target. I believe this is a classic case of Clay Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma in that the established players can only perceive the change from their own perspective. Stations and networks still (and may always) see the Internet as something that is happening to them or as a new opportunity to extend what they do today. Christensen suggests they can’t escape this perspective.
Listeners and viewers, on the other hand, aren’t limited to that perspective. They see public media as just one of the many types of content they can reach using their preferred access technology. It’s not so much “How can I hear my favorite program?” as much as it’s “What is there to hear on the Internet?” Substitute “on my iPod” or “on my TiVo” or anything else. The audience is picking the platform first and the content second.
The long-tail phenomenon means that listeners/viewers have access to content that is much more interesting to them than what can economically be delivered by ‘broadcast’ transmitters. The economics of media are shifting rapidly from the fat head (my term) to the long tail. The size of the audience is relatively constant, but there will be more choices and a smaller audience for each program. We can’t fight this; we must embrace it. Lower production budgets and profits are an unavoidable consequence. Success will come to those who recognize this and can find ways to produce and distribute programs at a much lower cost. The Citizen Journalism movement is the extreme end of this spectrum.
The TWiTs — This Week in Tech — will record their show live on June 16 at Podcast Academy 3 in Santa Clara, California. Want to see how the ultimate pros produce their show (including video)? Register for PA3 now.
TWiT, with host Leo Laporte, is *the* most popular podcast, with more than 250,000 listeners per month.
Yahoo! has been a terrific supporter of the Podcast Academy, and now they’ve stepped up to not only sponsor Podcast Academy 3, but to host the event at their facilities as well. PA3 is now slated for June 15-16 at Yahoo!’s facilities in Santa Clara.
We only have room for 110 people and it’s filling up quickly, so register online now to guarantee your seat.
The curriculum so far:
This is dangerous…very dangerous for broadcast-hardware geeks. At 3pm EDT this Thursday, PBS is auctioning off equipment that’s being left behind in their move to new studios. And it’s a LOT of gear: Ten items close every minute. My wife is very glad that I can’t be in Virginia this week to examine, bid and rent a truck! (Anyone there who wants to check things out for me?)
Every seat and folding chair at Podcast Academy 2 — April 28-29 at Boston University — is filled, so we’re closing further registrations. See you at BU in two weeks!
The official announcement will be forthcoming shortly, but I’m currently putting together the curriculum for Podcast Academy 3, which we’ll hold June 15-16 in Sunnyvale, California. Take a look at the curriculum for PA2, coming in two weeks at Boston University, and tell me what’s missing. What classes would you like to see? What particularly dynamic speakers would you like to have as instructors?
Update: Registration ($275) is now open, and if our experience with PA2 in Boston is any indication, PA3 will sell out early. Details and more info.
Now that Phil Windley has take over the reigns of IT Conversations, we need to reorg our podcasts, blogs and newsletters.
- Phil publishes the newsletter for members of The Conversations Network. (Registration is free!)
- Phil now posts info re IT Conversations on his blog.
- My weekly podcast has shifted its focus from IT Conversations to The Conversations Network at large. Here’s today’s edition.
- For now, there’s no newsletter for The Conversations Network, and there’s no podcast for IT Conversations. But let us know what’s important to you.
I forget to mention that I was a guest on the March 17, 2006 edition of the Podcast Brothers’ podcast. Tim Bourquin asked me about The Conversations Network new free Guest Membership to expand the participation on our social systems.
When we last opened the doors for new members of the production team at The Conversations Network, we got the usual flood of applications and quickly had to close the door. That was about two months ago, and we’re once again ready to hire. We’re now accepting applications for apprentice Website Editors, the people who write the show descriptions and bios, and track down and process the photos. To qualify, you must be capable of writing *good* English and have the ability and tools to crop and resize jpegs. After a two-show apprenticeship, you’ll receive $15-$30 per show, depending upon whether you’re getting the help of a Series Producer or not. For more info and to sign up for the program, go here.
Lot’s of discussion and debate surrounding Apple’s beta of Boot Camp, which allows dual booting of Windows and OS X on the new Intel-based Macs. There are many opinions from people way smarter than I am, but here’s a pragmatic and personal example. I need to buy a new laptop to run a specialized application that captures video through via a USB device. This particular application runs only on Windows, and I will only need to run it on rare occasions: perhaps once a month. I’d prefer not to travel with both my Power Book and a Windows laptop, so as Doc Searls suggests, Boot Camp and a new MacBook Pro might fit the bill just fine.
As Jon Udell pointed out, Amazon’s S3 service is filled with potential. But I’m looking for an enhancement, which if they implemented it would add instant scalability and reliability to hundreds of thousands of applications. I didn’t invent caching or CDNs, but I’ve been a huge fan of this architecure for many years, and I wish it was more common in the web-hosting industry. Here’s a copy of a post I just left on the Amazon Web Services Developer Connection forum:
I wonder if there’s a way to use S3 as a cache or content-delivery network (CDN)?
We, like others, have an application containing a large number large objects. The challenge is that while each of them may be modified each day, relatively few of them are downloaded by the public on any given day. Pushing new versions of each object to S3 each day would be very wasteful of bandwidth, since most of the updated versions won’t be accessed.
This is why we like caching/CDN architectures, and it’s something I’d love to see S3 support. It’s an extraordinarily cool architecture that painlessly gives small-server apps large-server scalability. Here’s how I imagine it working:
- We (the S3 customer) upload an object using the APIs.
- Along with this upload, we specify an “Origin Server URL” on our own servers where we have stored the original copy of the object.
- We publish the S3 public URL of the object for external access by the public.
- When S3 receives a request for the registered object, it first sends an HTTP HEAD request to our origin server to see whether the object has changed.
- If the object has not changed since the most-recently uploaded version, or if the origin server doesn’t respond promptly for whatever reason, S3 delivers the object to the public requester.
- However, if the object on the origin server is newer than S3′s copy, S3 fetches the new copy from the origin server and, while doing so, delivers that version to the requester.
If you’ve ever used a CDN or even a standard cache (like Squid) you know how brilliant this architecture can be. As I mentioned above, it *instantly* adds scalability and reliability to a small-server application. (If S3′s HEAD request fails for whatever reason, it returns its most-recent version of the object to the requester.)
An app developer can then simply write new or modified objects to his local low-capacity, low-cost server then use the APIs to upload to S3. That’s it. Done. Got an update or new version? Just write it to the origin server. Your local server goes down? No problem. The S3 infrastructure keeps on ticking.
S3′s pricing of $0.20 (USD) per GB of traffic is actually very good. It’s extremely good as compared to commercial CDNs. If you have to upload all your objects every day, even if they’re not downloaded by your visitors, however, the economics rapidly deteriorate. Caching solves all of that.
Okay, so Dave Winer probably didn’t draw it on a napkin, but it’s fun to see my name on his podcasting growth curve and timeline. Yup, IT Conversations’ three-year anniversary is next month. The timeline with Bloggercon milestones is about right.
[My wife came up with that phrase, and I just haven't been able to come up with a better title for this blog post, even though she pleaded with me to drop it. ]
One week from today, on April 11, we will start an auction on eBay for the sponsorship of the podcast edition of Tech Nation, featuring Dr. Moira Gunn. It’s a cool idea. The bidding will start at $12,000 when the auction opens at 1 PM PDT on April 11. The auction will run for 10 days, closing on April 21. Check here for details.
After running IT Conversations for nearly three years, it’s time for me to hand it over to a new Executive Producer as I focus my attention on growing The Conversations Network. Having worked with him on a variety of project, I knew who the best candidate for the EP role would be, and I’m thrilled to announce that he accepted my offer.
Effective today, Phil Windley is the new Executive Producer of IT Conversations. You probably know Phil through his blog, his program on IT Conversations (Technometria) and his articles for InfoWorld. Welcome to the team, Phil. It’s an honor to be working with you.
Phil will be publishing the IT Conversations Newsletter, and I will be starting a new one for The Conversations Network. The content of my weekly podcast (MP3) will focus more on the network and less on topics unique to The Conversations Network.
As presentations become increasingly visual, and as presenters learn to get away from just reading their bullet-point PowerPoint slides, The Conversations Network will be experimenting with video in addition to audio. We’ve just released our first such experiment: a video version of Michael Geohegan’s Podcast Academy class: Making Money Beyond Podcasting. The MPEG-4 video has been formatted for iPods and also plays well on desktops using the QuickTime player. We’re looking for any and all feedback. Just leave a comment here. (Special thanks go to Paul Figgiani for all the post-production video work that went into this one.)