Faux’s Blog

I was involved in a discussion a few days ago about my favourite track featuring a guitar.. and I realised that I really don’t listen to anything with guitars in. All of the music I listen to tends to lack guitars, and, in fact, stringed instruments of any kind (I’m including the piano here).

Further than that, it tends to lack instruments that I can’t distinguish between whilst it’s playing. To pick an extreme (aha) example, Straight Ahead (Hardcore remix) ( sample: as .ogg ), despite sounding awfully chaotic, contains “clearly” distinguishable instruments (I count seven), each of which are on their own “channel”.

When I say “clearly”, I mean that you can work it out, not that it’s easy to do so. It takes me a depressingly long time. I’m using the MOD definition of “channels”, ie. if you have a set of audio samples (snippets), you can only have one playing on any given channel at a time.

This raises a couple of interesting (at least, for me) questions:

• Can you teach a computer to take it back to samples and a playing order? Assuming this is insanely hard to do, can you do it for a restricted set/layout/etc. of songs, and/or with human interaction?
• Would the sampled version offer better quality/compression? This depends on loads of things, like track length, repetitiveness, how well you can store the samples themselves (lots of little dissimilar files tend to be harder to compress than a long one), etc.
• Assuming it does, and the artists are in on it (ie. you don’t have to do the conversion), would this help with music distribution? How small can you get a 70min CD?
• Can people with “different” hearing to me distinguish between guitars/other string instruments in anything but the simplest of songs?
• If so, does people’s varying ability to “focus” on the music change their enjoyment of it?
• What would you do with partially discrete instruments like pianos, where more than one key can be held at once, producing a subtly different sound. 88 samples or one sample and fiddle the frequency? Fading off over time? Fall back to what’d have to be done with voice: try and seperate out “verses” of piano, and have them as a sample? Piano Track would be particularily susceptible to that.
• Could one design a game based on people’s ability to pick out instruments/number of channels? It’d have to be more fun than DDR and Guitar Hero.
• Do I really think that I can rate tracks simply on the number of channels they’d require to compose, ie. their compressability? ie., for ogg, Chris Lake – Changes (generated by oggspot and sed).
• ..and so on.

This unfocused ramble was sponsored by Lasse Gjertsen’s Ameteur (two channels).

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I was looking through the Bink video files (player) in the \Oblivion\Data\Video directory, and noticed something strange in CreditsMenu.bik…

Anyone who has played Oblivion will probably notice that Sutch doesn’t exist in the game, and is certainly not where it’s shown in this video.

Also, the name suggests that this video is shown from the main menu’s “credits” option.. it isn’t, the credits just scroll over the existing background (“Map loop.bik”), which seems to avoid Sutch’s location.

My guess is that the city was planned and removed. I wonder if the credits video is shown at the end, or if it was an accident to include it?

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Phantom calls never used to be a problem for me.. adopting a simple “if you don’t recognise the number, don’t answer it” policy works fine.

This policy, however, is starting to break-down now I’ve started putting my mobile number on important documents.. things like CVs, not the kind of phone-call you want to miss.

Assuming you’re not insistent on answering every phone call, you can just silence it and allow it to ring out, leaving you with the caller’s number. You now have a (software-scale) long time to decide whether you want to call this person back.

For instance, I got a call from 01792474700, Google finds a post on 3g’s forum suggesting that they’re trying to sell me a new phone.

Assuming that I was sitting at a computer with a reasonable speed internet connection I could have found that out while the phone was ringing, and decided not to answer it… a strong negative, attained quickly using only the internet, something you could possibly train a phone to do.

This is, unfortunately, not quite as obvious as it sounds.. it took me two google searches (second attempt was with a space) to find this result, and I’d never heard of 3g’s forums before, I have no idea if it’s a valid source, if it’s a company or an individual with their contact details on the page, etc. You’d have to train your app to work out what context the message was in. This is feasible on PCs, but maybe not in java on current mobile phone processing power in ~3 seconds.

The majority of the calls you receive are unlikely to be strong negatives (when using google as your source, at least), strong positives are unlikely, too. The chance of being rung from the main company reception when being contacted about a job offer is relatively low, it’s more likely that you’ll be rung from someone’s desk, which’ll probably have a unique outside line.

The solution? As always, the solution is over-engineering.

Someone with a small volume of technical skill writes a small java app (and possibly some platform specific (ie. windows mobile) variants) that looks at your ‘missed calls’, ignores all the numbers in your address book and asks you about the numbers. The reply would be something in the range of Private, Unknown, Legitimate and Spam.

• Private: Things only of interest to me. In theory these should be in your address book anyway.
• Unknown: Numbers that you don’t recognise and can’t otherwise determine the purpose of, and that you don’t feel like chasing up (ie. ringing back).
• Legitimate: Numbers that you’d never ring, but rang you at your request/with your permission. ie. ring-backs.
• Spam: Numbers you know to be malicious.

To answer with either of the final two options you’d need to give a reason/reference/name.

These details are instantly shared with everyone. When querying the service you’d be given the total votes for each category for the given number.

Assuming you require users to have an account to submit, and this account is locked to a uk-mobile-number, the system is relatively hard to abuse.

The technology to do this is available now, the majority of current phones have java and GPRS (the cost would be minimal, the actual amount of data transfered is tiny). As mentioned above, platform-specific versions could have additional features (ie. the windows mobile version adding the votes to the “phone ringing” screen).

If anyone wants to implement this.. be my guest, I’m just too busy right now. If you can think of a way to get any commercial gain from it, good luck to you, at least you’ll spend some of the returns advertising the service, it grows in power as it’s user-count goes up.

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Having previewed the new Annual from the Ministry of Sound, and christmas having passed, I thought it was time to go buy it.

Unfortunately, thanks to the Ministry of Sound’s infinite wisdom, the box that looks like this contains completely different cds to the box that looks like this.

Can’t spot the difference? Have a look at the track list, according to DreamUniverse against Amazon’s attempt. Ah.

I was after the version DreamUniverse are selling, for it’s version of Hi Tack – Say Say Say, but I’m not paying for a company I’ve never heard of to ship me a cd that they probably don’t even have a reliable track list for.

Back to ’sampling’ it is for me, congratulations, Ministry of Sound, you just lost yourself another sale.

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The iRivers completely murdered the iPod’s in reviews this christmas..

When the sales figures come out it’ll be really interesting to see what percentage of the population care about functionality over percieved-style/advertising.

Having spoken to a few (female) friends from school who were yet to actually hear of “mp3s”, so were completely uninterested in “mp3 players” that wern’t iPod’s, I’m not particularily hopeful.

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