I didn’t/don’t own much vinyl – perhaps mostly because I had a tape deck in my bedroom years before a record player – but I’ve felt this pain. And don’t get me started on the videogames I’ve paid for multiple times.
In the Summer of 1995 I bought the CD single of the (still excellent!) Set You
Free by N-Trance.2
I’d heard about this new-fangled “MP3” audio format, so soon afterwards I decided to rip a copy of the song to my PC.
I was using a 66MHz 486SX CPU, and without an embedded FPU I didn’t
quite have the spare processing power to rip-and-encode in a single pass.3
So instead I first ripped to an uncompressed PCM .wav file and then performed the encoding: the former step
was done almost in real-time (I listened to the track as it ripped!), about 7 minutes. The latter step took about 20 minutes.
So… about half an hour in total, to rip a single song.
Progress bar, you say? I’ll just sit here and wait then, I guess. Actual contemporary-ish photo.
Creating a (what would now be considered an apalling) 32kHz mono-channel file, this meant that I briefly stored both a 27MB wave file and the final ~4MB MP3 file. 31MB
might not sound huge, but I only had a total of 145MB of hard drive space at the time, so 31MB consumed over a fifth of my entire fixed storage! Even after deleting the intermediary wave file I was left with a single song consuming around 3% of my space,
which is mind-boggling to think about in hindsight.
But it felt like magic. I called my friend Gary to tell him about it. “This is going to be massive!” I said. At the time, I meant for techy
people: I could imagine a future in which, with more hard drive space, I’d keep all my music this way… or else bundle entire artists onto writable CDs in this new format, making albums obsolete. I never considered that over the coming decade or so the format would enter the public consciousness, let
alone that it’d take off like it did.
If you’re thinking of Gary and I as the kind of reprobates who helped bring on the golden age of music piracy… I’d like to distract you with a bigger show of yobbish behaviour in the
form of this photo from the day we played at dropping half-bricks onto starter pistol ammunition.
The MP3 file I produced had a fault. Most of the way through the encoding process, I got bored and ran another program, and this
must’ve interfered with the stream because there was an audible “blip” noise about 30 seconds from the end of the track. You’d have to be listening carefully to hear it, or else know
what you were looking for, but it was there. I didn’t want to go through the whole process again, so I left it.
But that artefact uniquely identified that copy of what was, in the end, a popular song to have in your digital music collection. As the years went by and I traded MP3 files in bulk at LAN parties or on CD-Rs or, on at least one ocassion, on an Iomega Zip disk (remember those?), I’d ocassionally see
N-Trance - (Only Love Can) Set You Free.mp34 being passed around and play it, to see if it was “my”
copy.
Sometimes the ID3 tags had been changed because for example the previous owner had decided it deserved to be considered Genre: Dance instead of Genre: Trance5. But I could still identify that file because
of the audio fingerprint, distinct to the first MP3 I ever created.
I still had that file when I went to university (where it occupied a smaller proportion of my hard drive space) and hearing that
distinctive “blip” would remind me about the ordeal that was involved in its creation. I don’t have it any more, but perhaps somebody else still does.
Footnotes
1 I might never have told this story on my blog, but eagle-eyed readers may remember that
I’ve certainly hinted at it before now.
2 Rewatching that music video, I’m struck by a recollection of how crazy popular
crossfades were on 1990s dance music videos. More than just a transition, I’m pretty sure that most of the frames of that video are mid-crossfade: it feels like I’m watching
Kelly Llorenna hanging out of a sunroof but I accidentally left one of my eyeballs in a smoky nightclub and can still see out of it as well.
3 I initially tried to convert directly from red book format to an MP3 file, but the encoding process was
too slow and the CD drive’s buffer filled up and didn’t get drained by the processor, which was still presumably bogged down with
framing or fourier-transforming earlier parts of the track. The CD drive reasonably assumed that it wasn’t actually being used and
spun-down the drive motor, and this caused it to lose its place in the track, killing the whole process and leaving me with about a 40 second recording.
4 Yes, that filename isn’t quite the correct title. I was wrong.
For the first episode of the Human Tapestry, I talked to Dan, a bisexual man who lives in Oxford, England, with his partner and her husband in what he describes as a “polyamorous
V-shaped thingy”. Listen as we talk about relationships, identities, the “bi-cycle”, and various forms of vegetarianism.
…
Fellow Automattician Mike has just launched his new podcast, exploring the diversity of human experience of relationships, sexuality, attraction, identity, gender, and all that jazz.
Earlier this year, I volunteered myself as an interviewee, but I had no idea that I’d feature in the opening episode! If hearing people in your ears is something you like to
do, and you’re interested in my journey so-far of polyamory and bisexuality, have a listen. And if you’re not: it might still be worth bookmarking the show for a listen later on – it
could be an interesting ride.
Possibly SFW, depending on your work. Specific warnings:
Some swearing, including use of a homophobic slur (while describing the experience of being a victim of homophobia)
Frank discussion of my relationship history (although with greater anonymity than appears elsewhere on this blog)
Annoying squeaky chair sounds in the background (I’ve replaced that chair, now)
Skimming-over-the-details of specific events, resulting in an incomplete picture (with apologies to anybody misrepresented as a result)
Caveats aside, I think it came out moderately well; Mike’s an experienced interviewer with a good focus on potentially interesting details. He’s also looking for more guests, if you’d
like to join him. He says it best, perhaps, with his very broad description of what the show’s about:
If you have a gender, have attractions (or non-attractions) to certain humans (or all humans), or have certain practices (or non-practices) in the bedroom (or elsewhere), we’d love to
talk to you!
I’ve just come across a product called SonicNotify, and I’m wracking my brain to try to find a way to see it as a good idea.
I’m struggling.
SonicNotify. You spray red noise into your audience, and their phones become infuriating. Or something.
The world is just coming to terms with spatial advertising and services that “link” to their mobile devices. I’ve quite enjoyed playing with QR codes, but there are plenty of other
mechanisms enjoying some amount of exposure, such as Bluejacking: in the early days of Bluetooth, some advertisers experimented with devices that would push out Bluetooth
messages to anybody who strayed within range. Now that most Bluetooth devices capable of receiving such messages “switch off” Bluetooth after a couple of minutes, they need to be
coupled with a visual medium that says, for example, “turn on Bluetooth to get our business card”, or something, which is slightly less insidious.
SonicNotify works by having a smartphone app that passively listens for high-frequency sound waves, which act as carriers to the marketing message. These messages can be broadcast at
live events over existing PA systems, embedded in traditional media like radio or television, or transmitted from localised devices concealed in billboards or alongside products on
shelves. Lady Gaga tried it out in a concert, in order to – I don’t
know – distract her fans from actually listening to the music by giving them things to play with on their phones, instead.
Buy Doritos? I never would have thought of that on my own! Thanks, SonicNotify!
Let’s stop for a moment and think about everything that’s wrong with this idea:
I have to install a closed-source third-party app that runs in the background and keeps my microphone open at all times? We’ve got a name for that kind of device: a
bug.
This app would presumably need to run the whole time, reducing battery lifespan and consuming clock cycles… and for what? So that I can see more advertisements?
Thinking about the technology – I’m not convinced that mobile phone microphones are well-equipped to be able to pick up ultrasonic waves with any accuracy, especially not once
they’re muffled in a bag or trouser pocket. I can’t always even hear my phone ringing when it’s in my pocket, but it expects to be able to hear something “ringing” some distance away?
For that matter: television and radio speakers, and existing PA systems, aren’t really designed to be able to faithfully reproduce ultrasound, either. Why would they? A good
entertainment system is one which sounds best at all of the frequencies that humans can hear. Anything else is useless.
And let’s not forget that different people have different hearing ranges. Thinking back to the controversies surrounding anti-youth alarm The Mosquito: do you really want to be surrounded by sharp,
tinnitus-like noises just on the cusp of your ability to hear them?
No thank you, SonicNotify. I don’t think there’s mileage in this strange and quirky product idea.
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