Dan Q

Tag: audio

Why Apple’s move to video could endanger podcasting’s greatest power

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

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So it was inevitable that Apple would add video support to their podcasting apps. And it makes sense for Apple to update the technical underpinnings; the assumptions that were made when designing podcasts over two decades ago aren’t really appropriate for many contemporary uses. For example, back then, by default an entire podcast episode would be downloaded to your iPod for convenient listening on the go, just like songs in your music library. But downloading a giant 4K video clip of an hour-long podcast show that you might not even watch, just in case you might want to see it, would be a huge waste of resources and bandwidth. Modern users are used to streaming everything. Thus, Apple updated their apps to support just grabbing snippets of video as they’re needed, and to their credit, Apple is embracing an open video format when doing so, instead of some proprietary system that requires podcasters to pay a fee or get permission.

The problem, though, is that Apple is only allowing these new video streams to be served by a small number of pre-approved commercial providers that they’ve hand-selected. In the podcasting world, there are no gatekeepers; if I want to start a podcast today, I can publish a podcast feed here on anildash.com and put up some MP3s with my episodes, and anyone anywhere in the world can subscribe to that podcast, I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission, tell anyone about it, or agree to anyone’s terms of service.

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When I started my pointless podcast, I didn’t need anybody else’s infrastructure or permission. Podcasts are, in the vein of the Web itself (and thanks at least in part to my former coworker Dave Winer), distributed and democratised.

All you need to host a podcast is an RSS file and some audio files. You can put them onto your shared VM. You can put them onto your homelab, You can put them onto a GitHub Pages site. You can put them onto a Neocities site. Or you can shell out for a commercial host and distribute your content across a global network of CDNs, for maximum performance! All of these are podcasts, and they’re all equal from a technical perspective.1

Video podcasts could be the same. Even if – as Apple suggest – HLS is to be mandatory for their player2, that doesn’t necessitate a big corporate third-party provider. Having an “allowlist” of people who can host your podcast’s video is gatekeeping.

Also, it’s… not really podcasting any more. It’s been pointed out that before “platform-exclusive” podcasts (I’m looking at you, Spotify) are not truly podcasts: if it’s not an RSS feed plus some audio files, it’s not a podcast, it’s lightly sparkling audio.

Can the same analogy be used for a podcast player? Is a player that only supports content (in this case, video content) if it’s hosted by a particular partner… not-a-podcast-player? Either way, it’s pretty embarrassing for Apple of all people to turn their back on what makes a podcast a podcast.

Footnotes

1 Technically, my podcast is just a collection of posts that share a ClassicPress “tag”; ClassicPress gives me “RSS feed of a particular tag” for free, so all I needed to do was (a) add metadata to point to my MP3 files (b) and use a hook to inject the relevant <enclosure> element into the feed. There are almost certainly plugins that could have done it for me, but it’s a simple task so I just wrote a few lines of PHP code and called it a day!

2 This is… fine, I guess. I’d rather that an <enclosure> be more-agnostic. If I only want to provide a single fat MP4 file, then it’s up to my listeners to say “this is shit, why can’t I stream this on my cellular data, I’m gonna listen/watch somebody else instead”. But even if HLS is required, that’s not difficult: I talked about how to do it last year while demonstrating variable-aspect-ratio videos (in vanilla HTML)!

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My First MP3

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Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

Somebody shared with me a tweet about the tragedy of being a Gen X’er and having to buy all your music again and again as formats evolve. Somebody else shared with me Kyla La Grange‘s cover of a particular song .Together… these reminded me that I’ve never told you the story of my first MP3…1

Screenshot of tweet by @bewgtweets posted Oct 17, 2021, reading: If you want to know why Gen X’ers are always mad it’s because we had to replace our record collections with a tape collection that was then replaced with a cd collection that was then replaced with MP3’s and damn it how many time must I pay to listen to grunge
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.

Dan, as a teenager, sits at a desk with his hand to his chin. In the foreground, a beiege two-button wired ball-type computer mouse rests on the corner of the desk. Dan is wearing a black t-shirt with a red devil face printed onto it.
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.

A young man in jeans and a blue coat stands on the patio in the back garden of a terraced house, dropping a half-brick onto the floor. In the background, an unused rabbit hutch and a dustbin can be seen. The photo is clearly taken using a flash, at night.
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.

5 No, it’s clearly trance. They were wrong.

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Human Tapestry – Episode 1

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

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.

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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!

Go listen over there or right here.

All Noise, No Product

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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