I just had a surreal experience with some of my best friends from high school. Even though we all live in different states, some in New York, others in Texas, still others in Seattle and California, and myself in Boston, we were all occupying the same space tonight as we watched a live stream of the band God Street Wine. This was the band that defined us in High School and now when we all have other priorities that keep our lives apart it still was able to evoke a kinship as we live commented on the performance over Facebook. This reminds me of the power of Open Source communities which are drawn together through social means as well as technical. Some of the first social networks happened over forums, mailing lists and irc. The biggest issue we face is we are an exclusive club. While we pretty much invented the social Internet our exclusivity pretty much means that any innovation is looked at with an air of suspicion leaving propitiatory companies like Facebook to fill that vacuum. The question going forward is how do we turn our social know how into areas of general interest instead of just technical pursuits? How do we open up our technology to a wider audience without “selling out”?
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]August 10, 2012
November 2, 2009
Quick video using Jokosher, PiTiVi and my Canon digital camera
Rome.ogv
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License
Above is a song I was writing for my sister’s wedding. Unfortunately I never finished it and logistics got in the way of me bringing a guitar to Italy (namely I didn’t want to lug a guitar all around Italy). I thought I would record it using my Cannon PowerShot camera and edit it with Jokosher and PiTiVi to see how far our tools have gone.
I have to say it was fairly easy but I still ran into issues. As far as UI Goes PiTiVi is much easier to use than Jokosher in terms of organizing what I wanted to do. I really only needed Jokosher to tweak the sound a bit but it was still a bit of trial and error to get something decent. I used the high and low pass filters to filter out background noise and echo from my room. Jokosher lacks a basic noise filter effect which can be implemented manually in most other editors by taking a sample of the ambient noise and phase shifting it 180 degrees so the ambient noise is canceled out. Unfortunately the solid bar UI which departs from the usual wave graph makes it impossible to do this by hand. In any case the low and high pass filters worked fairly well to get the most annoying twangs and hisses out.
Another issue is not being able to mark cutin and cutout points and have PiTiVi sync the video with these point. I essentially had to do minimal processing in Jokosher so I could easily sync the video to the edited sound in PiTiVi. It would have been nice to trim the audio in Jokosher and when I imported it into PiTiVi, had it sync up to the correct points in the video. Manually doing that in PiTiVi is hard because of the timeline scale and the fact that it is exclusively drag and drop. It would be nice to be able to enter exact values or load markup metadata so I could snap to my cuts. Once the audio is in PiTiVi we are stuck with PiTiVi’s audio tools which will never be as complete as Jokosher’s (assuming Jokosher gets some development love). It would be nice to be able to jump back and forth between the two.
All that being said, once I planned out what I wanted to do it took no time at all to do it for a video as simple as this. It might not be all roses and honey yet but it is much better than it has been. The next step is to start multi-tracking in Jokosher and syncing it to a video. We shall see.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]January 4, 2008
What’s not to love about Red Hat’s new CEO?
From Matt Asay’s interview with our new CEO:
Tell me a little bit about yourself. What are the last three bands you listened to on your iPod?
I don’t have an iPod (or a Zune). It won’t play Ogg Vorbis files.
This is from a guy who knows a thing or two about generating profits and value. It is an exciting time to be a Red Hat employee.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]November 14, 2007
What’s in a Name?
Getting in touch with my Italian roots while running around Florence was great fun. Thank you Dorothy and Karl for getting married and sharing the moment with all your friends and family. I’m busy uploading all of the photos which I managed to save after my camera started corrupting the memory card. More on my time in Italy later. Now it is time to go and check out buzzgrinder.com – a music blog one of the guests at the wedding maintains.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]March 29, 2007
Blast from the Past
Before I became a Frontman for the Drooling Macaque Band I headlined for an independent band out of White Plains, NY called Torque. Fresh from being digitized on YouTube, footage from the White Plains High School battle of the bands where Torque took home gold in 1994 is now online. This includes our grand entrance, the crooning original rock balad Hour Glass and rocking rendition of Come Together. Looks like my friend and fellow band mate Aaron is posting the whole show piece by piece so check back on his YouTube page for more.
Ahh, now I can laugh and cry any day of the week. Crazy kids.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]February 8, 2007
DRM music vs DRM-free music
Jon Lech Johansen has an interesting take on the iTunes music store
It should not take Apple’s iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users.
In a market where both DRM and DRM-free music is available via easy legal purchase from the same location and assuming there are enough content providers who would release without DRM as to reach critical mass, which side would generate more money over the long haul? It is an interesting question. Would we see market forces pulling people to more indie labels willing to release non DRM material which would cause pop labels to follow after losing sales? Or would trafficking in unauthorized copies of non DRM music cause more artists to flock to DRM?
I say let the content creators decide which way they wish to license their content and let the market sort it out.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]January 31, 2007
Calling all Drooling Macaques
One of the D-Bus developers, Matthew Johnson was asking about the Drooling Macaque Band in refrence to packaging up Frets on Fire. Frets is very much like DDR, Guitar Hero, or any other of those games in which you hit buttons in time with a beat or music. Unfortunately the songs it uses I hear are in some way in conflict with distribution.
There are a number of people in the community who already record studio quality songs. It would be great if they would contact the author and offer their songs. What would also be cool is if we could get the Drooling Macaque band together sometime before GUADEC to write and record a few songs.
This would take a bunch of logistics to pull off, including finding instruments and cheap or free studio time which is why I am throwing the idea out there now to see who is interested and what kind of resources we can pull together.
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