Since coming back to Twitter full time in March, I’ve been trying new things but first, a little history on my Twitter style and how it has changed. I used to reply to everyone. Then, I replied very selectively and never did more than 1 or 2 responses before ending the conversation or taking it off Twitter. Then, I started using DMs. Even if I wasn’t following to someone, I’d only respond via DM and they’d have to send me a public reply in response and that’s how I’d chat. It was easy for people I mutually followed but most people just replied complaining, “you’re not following me back!” That was a bad situation.
At one point, I just stopped paying attention to replies. That totally took the fun out of Twitter. Why this focus on how my stream looks? Why are replies bad?
Well, they’re not. If I reply to Jane and John is browsing Twitter.com and is following me, he will never see that reply I sent to Jane unless he’s following her as well. I like this feature because I don’t care about a person’s replies to people I don’t also follow. This is awesome unless I go to Jane’s profile because browsing the user’s profile will show all of their tweets even their replies to others no matter if I’m following the other people or not. This is where the problem occurs.
I’m always amazed at how I’ll get 5-10 replies a day to tweets that I made over a day ago. See, there are some people out there (my Mom included) who go back and see what I’ve been up to as a sort of moment to moment blog. They like clicking my links, checking out photos and hearing what I’m up to. My stream needs to constantly be curated as a book that can be accessed years from now and be a catalogue of my life.
Back when replies were 80% of my tweets, I look back and find it impossible to publish it. I’ve tried Twitter to Book publishing just as a way to get it done and have those memories from the past 3.5 years but I can’t because half of the tweets are replies and it would be a pain in the ass to edit out.
Additionally, the stream looks better without them and family and those crazies who go back a few days and read my stream back to front get a better experience if I’ve edited out all of the replies.
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Twitter could really resolve this by changing the profile view of pages with a nice little slider that says, “all” or “unique” so I could simply choose to see unique tweets or all tweets & replies. This would eliminate the reason for deleting my tweets.
Ah yes, I need to talk about that. So, lately, I’ve been holding nothing back. I reply to people publicly, things I should be saying in private like, “oh sorry I was in the bathroom” No one sees those especially if it’s something that no one I know is following as well. I will reply to them 20 times and go back and forth for 5 minutes like it’s a chat room then I’ll wait 10 minutes, go to my profile page and delete delete delete until I’m back down to just unique tweets.
I’ve been doing this since March. The level of tweets that my counter shows has only slowly gone up since my page is only unique tweets and no replies. I get more replies from people sometimes days later who go back and read my tweets because they can find what I’m doing much easier.
The only problem. Three people have complained by simply saying, “did you delete your reply?” I don’t know how they knew or found out? Maybe they had push go to their phone with the reply and then went to reply on TweetDeck and couldn’t find it. I don’t know. I think 10 minutes is long enough. For people who keep Tweetie or TweetDeck open, 10 minutes later, it’s cached in the app so me deleting it won’t remove the tweet and they can still click “reply” and it works just fine.
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This is my new system so if you notice how squeeky clean @AdamJackson looks, it’s because I delete the replies. It’s working for now but just like my previous systems, I might change it. This one has been very effective. Open, fluid and talkative conversations w/o censorship or DM issues but also keeping things clean for you weirdos that go to my feed days later to stalk me.
Honestly, no one cares what I think about this. Well, I’ll retract that by saying that my relevance or “voice” in this web 2.0 industry as diminished ever since I canned my “twitter book” and stopped going to every tech conference possible. In actuality, I came to terms with the fact that I’m not ready to be an author yet and realized that “networking” was getting in the way of personal growth but let’s talk about this whole Facebook thing.
So Facebook made some changes recently. These changes affect the privacy of users in a way that most users think is going too far. If you’re reading this blog, I assume you are up on this whole Facebook thing. If not, just google for “facebook privacy changes” and that’ll be good enough. I’m too tired to link it up right now.
That’s another thing. Why haven’t I been blogging? Dude. I’m tired! Brightkite rocks but I’ve been very busy there and haven’t had time to blog. Really! So get off me about it!
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Anyway, I’m not going to delete my Facebook account. If there’s one lesson I learned when deleting my FourSquare account in January is that, you might come back to the service or need to login to the service to do some research and realize you don’t have an account anymore and have to create one. I had to create a new FourSquare account for work purposes. So, that sucked because I had deleted mine that was a year old and had thousands of check-ins.
If you’re pissed off enough to delete your Facebook account, you’re just stupid. Facebook is one of the top 5 sites on the web. You’ve been logging into it and shaping your social graph every day since 2005 and now you’re going to delete it? That’s like being pissed off that your neighborhood street was re-paved with white cement and you decide to just burn your house down. No, you look at your options and simply rent it out or sell it because burning it down gets you NOTHING! Don’t delete your Facebook account. I was very close to deleting my Twitter account in Mid-2007 when everyone was moving over to Pownce / Jaiku. Thank god I didn’t because I’d be sharing my posts with 500 people still using Jaiku and Pownce shut down last year.
You took the time to create an account so unless the service has completely destroyed your livelihood, just lock it down and never come back. Mark all of your privacy settings as “only me”, delete your information, disable all of the connected applications, 3rd party sites and remove Facebook connect from your blog and then walk away! It’s that simple, really. You commit Facebook suicide by never coming back.
My MySpace profile still lives on right here. I log in once a year to update my profile and location then log out. One day, Myspace MIGHT come back. It might be on top again. I doubt it but it’s still a fucking huge site with tons of visitors and is still larger than Twitter. Hell, I still have a Jaiku account because it’s just stupid to delete these things. It doesn’t hurt me to have that account open so why remove it?
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So here’s the deal. If you’re so pissed off about Facebook’s new privacy debacle and takeover of the social graph, then stop logging in. When people ask where you’ve been, just say why and they’ll respond, “okay.” It’s that simple.
Honestly, if you were really concerned with privacy, really concerned with decentralization of data and really passionate as an in touch social media guru, then you would have deleted your Google Account back in 2008. If you still have a Google account, Facebook is the least of your worries.
I did a tweet earlier about the new iPad and really wanted to do a dozen tweets and since I’m waiting for the Caltrain home, I decided to throw up a few lines about the experience.
It’s larger than I expected but web browsing and watching movies will be great on the iPad. Contrary to what many are saying, it’s perfect for one handed book reading or web browsing. You don’t need two hands but then again, I’m 6′3″, 240 pounds with very big hands. So big, that people see me typing on an iPhone and wonder how I can use that small keyboard with my freakish thumbs.
1.5 pounds is perfect. It shouldn’t be any heavier than that. I wish it was lighter.
After 5 minutes, I was touch typing in landscape mode with both hands just like I do on a normal keyboard. I wasn’t doing 70 words per minute but I was doing about 20 WPM and that’s only after a few minutes.
Typing with your thumbs in portrait mode is dumb. This thing was meant to sit on your lap in landscape mode when typing.
I wish it had a camera (front or rear-facing). It’s thick enough that a camera would fit no problem. I don’t know why Apple didn’t include that.
The thing was fast! Everything was instant. I was amazed at just how fast everything was. What an awesome experience.
iPhone apps look like crap. At 1x or 2x, they look bad. I won’t be using any iPhone apps on this thing even though iPad apps are so expensive, I don’t care. It’s just bad. Trust me.
Reading books was great but the full color, ultra bright screen means my book reading isn’t private. Basically if I’m on the train or subway, everyone around me can read the book too. A kindle is harder to glance over. I’m afraid that if I buy, “biography of a playboy bunny” or something else racy or perhaps the biography of Glen Beck, my San Francisco public transit friends will look at me with disgust. It’s a similar situation if I bring my boom box on the train and play U2 tracks from 1989 at full blast. Sure, one could blame them for being nosy but with the Kindle, that isn’t a problem. Maybe I’m taking this one out of proportion.
The speakers are okay
The volume control feels cheap
The screen is gorgeous
The iPad apps are pretty cool. I’m sure they’ll improve over time. I can’t wait to see what games developers come up with.
The iPad feels great! Looks Great! Performs Great! I honestly love it.
I have a feeling I’ll be using my iPhone and MacBook a lot less. I don’t think it’s going to make me go online or use technology more, I’ll simply use less of the rest of my devices. Instead of waking my iMac up from sleep, grabbing my Macbook or straining to type / browse on that tiny iPhone, I’ll just grab the iPad. The long battery means i won’t always have it fully charged.
I’m excited. After 30 minutes of use, I’m really happy.
All photos taken by me last week on my trip to Miami
More and more am I hearing of the connected youth and how we are always carrying one or two cell phones, a digital camera and laptop computer. Even scarier is when I hear stories or see photos of a concert, rally or public function that shows dozens, if not thousands of people holding an electronic device in the air taking a photo, streaming video, audio or simply tweeting that, “this is such an awesome concert!”
I’m guilty of this but I have an excuse.
I’ve missed the past two Ultra Music Festivals in Miami. I was either moving or had just moved to San Francisco so I couldn’t find the time or funds to go to Miami just to party. WMC is an older crowd (the conference / party aspect of Miami’s techno lovefest) but UMF is a younger crowd, as it’s an all ages event with a daytime focus. Twitter was around and YouTube was around so I spent weeks after UMF in both 2008 and 2009 trying to find info, twitpics, videos and photos from the event so I could at least get the feeling that I was there. I searched and searched and found maybe a dozen videos and 100-200 photos from UMF for each year. What? Why didn’t anyone post any rich media content from the event? UMF is a younger audience of “technology carrying youth” so where are all of the videos and photos?
This year, I saw a staggering amount of people with their cameras and video cameras in the air. People were recording entire DJ sets on their Blackberrys and someone had an iPhone just taking photo after photo which meant I didn’t even see the entire Swedish House Mafia set due to his phone being in front of my face the whole time. Where did his photos go? Why didn’t he post them? Because I saw the photos and they fucking sucked.
There’s a reason why old media will be around for a long time. Very few new media people or “citizen journalists” produce any content worth looking at, much less, paying for. I wouldn’t pay to see Johnny’s iPhone TwitPics because they suck. I don’t care about Jenny’s tweet that says how awesome Carl Cox’s set was at UMF this year and how his remix of Coldplay’s “Trouble” was so awesome. I don’t care despite the fact that I was very interested in the event and keeping up with everything that was happening.
First Things First:
I desperately want all citizen journalists to start producing great content. I really want great content to start happening. You have all of the tools now and they’re freaking affordable. You have 3G/4G network connections to make that data go out to the masses faster and you have unlimited free storage on Flickr and YouTube to post that content. Heck, every Mac and PC comes with software to help you edit those photos and videos to make them look good.
Your content sucks. It’s not even Twitter worthy! Your photos wouldn’t even make good TwitPics. That’s how bad they are. Hey. I suck as a photographer. I completely suck. My photos are finally something I share with my Mom and not feel like I’m wasting her time. Your TwitPic or Flickr upload from your Blackberry was a total waste of time. That video you shot on your Blackberry and uploaded direct to YouTube w/ auto-post to Twitter & Facebook sucked. The 15FPS couldn’t capture the light show accurately, you used the LED flash on the Blackberry which forced a fast exposure time which made the image too dark and the little Blackberry Mic completely choked on the 12,000 watts of Bass going into it which meant the audio was completely unbearable.
That’s just my unprofessional opinion.
I don’t dare upload photos from my iPhone from concerts or festivals and then have the balls to put those on Flickr. If it’s past dusk, you won’t even see me with my iPhone out because I know the photos will suck. This goes for all phones. Shoot wisely.
Stop using your flash! Just stop! The flash does not help. Drop the aperture to f/2.8 or f/1.8 (maximum setting), set the ISO to the 2nd to highest level and then try to use the fastest exposure you can afford to use. On your 5th or 10th snap, you might get a photo good enough for Flickr. I shot 2,000 photos both days at UMF and uploaded 200 of them. I suck as a photographer but I go out every single day and shoot with my Canon G11 and then I try every setting possible to find out what I can do with this camera and even then I spend hours editing, deleting and processing photos for Flickr. Then, I tag, geo-tag, catalog, title and add those photos to Flickr Groups related to the event I attended. I spent 4 hours after getting home from Ultra doing all of that because I care.
You? I honestly don’t know. I’m assuming most mobile phone users might MMS it to their friends or just keep it on the phone till they get a new one. Some users might TwitPic is or upload to Facebook it. Those of you with digital cameras are going to get home and realize you shot 400 photos of complete grainy crap and throw them all away. Both processes are a waste of time.
I laughed when a guy with a video enabled iPod nano had it high in the air for over an hour capturing the Tiesto set. Seriously? That audio and video quality is crap! Good luck putting a one-hour video on YouTube cause it has a 10-minute limit which means you’ll have to edit it down. Oh you don’t know how to do that?
A Disclaimer:
I’m realizing that I sound like a complete asshole in this post. I do but I wouldn’t be making such a big deal about it if these two things hadn’t occurred.
1. Everyone in the audience had a mobile device in the air taking photos & videos
2. 2. It’s been 5 days and there are only 1,000 photos and 50 YouTube Videos online from the event. Half of these completely blow.
So you’re telling me that over 17 thousand people attended an event, took hundreds of thousands of photos and only a few hundred are actually good? I’m not angry that people suck at taking photos or shooting video. Just like I’m not pissed off that everyone sitting next to me at the office can’t go build a house perfectly. Most people just aren’t talented at everything. I know I lack a lot of talent and manage to barely get by with photography.
What’s pissing me off is that you’re all fucking wasting your time! John took an hour of video on his iPod nano and snapped over 100 photos on his Blackberry Bold. Now what? You saw the entire Tiesto set through a stupid iPod nano screen because you HAD to record it and now you realize that it was jumpy, off-center, low-quality and has audio that makes you play the whole thing on mute. Why did you piss off everyone behind you who couldn’t see and cease to see the event as it was happening just so you could cherish this crap video you recorded? Honestly!
How I Record Events:
I should be the one talking, right? My crap photography skills where I had to take 2,000 photos just get maybe 50 good ones is sad. That means I was also a jerk which his hands in the air. Here’s my statement. If all 17 thousand people at the event took photos all freaking night and ended up with 1 good one, I’d be happy but you didn’t. All of you took crap photos because I’ve searched every photo-hosting site and I don’t see any photos from the event!
I snapped 1,000 photos a day and here’s how I did it. I looked up at the stage, the crowd, the building or whatever subject matter I was trying to capture and got an idea of what setting I needed for the camera. I then looked down at my camera and set the appropriate settings on manual mode. Then I shot the camera up in the air, took 1 second to stabilize my hands from shaking and then I shot the photo and then a 2nd one. This process of actually annoying people behind me with my hands up took 3 seconds. Half of the photos I took weren’t taken while in a crowd listening to a DJ set. They were taken in-between sets from grassy knolls or hanging from trees where I wasn’t in anyone’s way.
The important thing is that I went home and spent hours focusing on the quality shots.
On Sunday afternoon, I looked on Flickr and searched for “Ultra Music Festival” and organized by date. Every single photo for pages and pages was I. I was highlighted on Flickr as the person to go to for all UMF photos because I properly tagged and organized the photos. Every single photo was processed and, in my opinion, the cream of the crop.
I was very proud of my photos.
I shot a couple of videos and then took the time to write this blog post that explains how much the G11 sucks compared to the G10 at shooting video. So not only did I waste everyone’s time by shooting bad video, I took the time to warn others about the issue by blogging about it so another dedicated content producer wouldn’t make the same mistake.
For the Future:
From here on out, don’t waste your time. I’m serious. I can deal with your hands in the air or being distracted from a laser show with 1,500 Blackberry screens in the air but what I can’t stand is the fact that you all wasted your time and missed half of a $200 show trying to take pictures or video when the content is complete crap and goes to waste.
Number of SLRs at a typical “headliner performance” – 10. That’s such a low number. Most of the good photographers or real photographers had press badges and weren’t in the crowds.
I’m very happy with the shots I uploaded. Seriously. I don’t feel that my 10 minutes per one hour set spent setting up and shooting photos was a waste at all. In fact, I should have shot more but I was too busy dancing my ass off and enjoying the festival I spent over a thousand dollars to attend. That’s what it’s all about. Enjoy the moment, capture it quickly then go back to enjoying it. Spending all day staring into your screen is just wasting everyone’s time.
All photos taken at Ultra Music Festival last week in Miami by me
Hey kids. You don’t have to party so freaking hard! I rocked my butt off in Miami for 5 days, sometimes for 24 hours straight to my favorite DJs of all time. I sent a tweet out that listed 4 of my favorite DJs and the sad thing is, they were all playing within 100 yards of the other at the same time. Never did I think I’d have to choose which one of my 4 favorites to go listen to. This was the incredible awesomeness of WMC / UMF. There was something that consistently bothered me about what I saw while in Miami.
The kids did too much drinking, too many drugs and were having entirely too many free love moments throughout the week. Electronic music inspires love and good feelings. I am at my happiest when listening to my favorite electronic song, especially when surrounded by 15K people in a park with laser lights and 2 story high speaker systems. Did I have to be high on ecstasy, making out with a random girl and doing shots of tequila to be even happier? No way! It seemed that the kids thought that’s what it was all about.
It’s not.
If you’re in your teens or twenties and love techno, trance, trip hop, house, electronica, drum & bass or any other dance music styles, why do you like it? What inspires you to buy the latest album from your favorite DJ or travel thousands of miles to see those DJs perform live in festivals like San Francisco’s LoveFest or Miami’s Ultra Music Festival? Is it for the music or the ability to simply let loose?
I figured as a young person that there would always be someone who had to need drugs or alcohol to have a great time. I was never one of those people. ¬In fact, when electronic music was present, I didn’t need any stimulation at all, not even Red Bull. It was all about the music as the bass flowed through my body and set my heartbeat off just a few milliseconds.
It was when the 10th golf cart mock ambulance plowed through the thick crowds carrying yet another passed out teenager to the hospital that I simply felt bad for everyone there that was doing drugs. At the last set of the day at UMF, Deadmau5 took the stage and a kind man revived and force fed water to two kids who were over dosing on ecstasy and as the set wrapped up, two people’s random drug fueled make-out session caused me to have body paint all over my new white tank top among other body fluids that I won’t even dare to write on this blog.
Am I just being a grouch? Maybe. Maybe I’m just that old man who yells at kids to get off of his lawn but my feelings were dead on as I rode 6 hours from Miami to St. Augustine with my friend Victor who is more of a techno freak than I am. Victor agreed and said all he needs for 24 hours of dancing is water and Gatorade. He said that some people don’t come for the music. They come because the music only makes their trip even better. They were already doing the drugs and the music, lights, crowds and bass just intensifies it.
So I’m not a grouch, only naïve? Yeah, that’s it. I just don’t know about these sort of things. What are we going to do about it? I guess nothing since everyone at the festival around me was high except for me and my friends from the hostel. I was surrounded by tons of people high as a kite wearing 3-D glasses that were wearing mini LED lamps on their fingers and staring at their hands like they’d just discovered that they had fingers while jumping up and down to some insane bass. I guess that’s their version of a night out.
I am mostly concerned for these kids in the future. I mean, if you’re in your teens and already doing hard drugs, what does the future hold for you? I’d like to meet a club kid fast forward 10 years later and see where they ended up and if they really truly enjoy techno without being high on something.
While at UMF, I tweeted that these are my people as I danced in a crowd to a new Tiesto track but after writing that, I saw that I was the only person not high and realized that these weren’t my people. These were just kids that came out to get high and I was there to enjoy the music.
There’s no real solution or point to this post. It’s just a bit saddening that people would travel and pay good money (over $200 per ticket) to get high and end up in the hospital.
Hey kids. Do less drugs, drink less and your party days will last longer. You’ll have more fun and remember more of it. Don’t waste your youth high as a kite and or waste your money on drugs that only ruin your life down the road. Your parents, employers and future children will thank you.
It’s very rare that I talk about audio and music. I’m not an expert or an audiophile. I don’t have formal training but I’m a HUGE fan of music overall. I have nearly 20,000 songs in iTunes and each one of them is in perfect quality or at least up to my standards. I can tell you what kind of file and what the kbps is just by listening to it. By the way, “kbps” stands for “kilobits per second” (not kilobytes).
Pre-Blog Post Note: I’m not a professional and most of this is “assumptions” based on my 10+ year love of music. I don’t speak for anyone, including BT. This is just my opinion -Adam
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A History Lesson
When iTunes was introduced to the world on April 28th, 2003, the highest kbps for purchased music was only 128 and this was acceptable to most but audiophiles complained that 256kbps music was needed as 160kbps generally translates to “CD-Quality” and ripping at 128 would result in loss of that quality. Then again, Apple touted that 128kbps AAC (the codec used by the iTunes Music Store instead of the more popular MP3) was more efficient at compression and thus CD-Quality MP3s were 160kbps but in AAC, 128 was acceptable. Confused? It’s not important, just a little bit of history.
Anyway, on May 30th, 2007, Apple introduced iTunes Plus. This was a response to two things. One, the consumers that wouldn’t use iTunes due to DRM restrictions set by Apple’s store and that 128kbps was too low quality. iTunes plus tracks generally cost $1.29 (30 cents over the standard price) and came without DRM and were double the quality of Apple’s 99 cent tracks. The users were happy! In 2009, Apple announced that he entire store would become iTunes Plus enabled by the middle of the year and all tracks would be 256 and without DRM and variable pricing would be put in place. Basically, this was a response to labels demanding some tracks be sold for $1.29 and Apple didn’t want to budge.
Today, when you browse the iTunes Music Store, every track is encoded at 256kbps (above CD-quality) and DRM-free and tracks range from 79 cents to $1.29. Consumers are happy, labels are happy. Oh, one other technical side note; If you rip a CD at 256 KBPS, you won’t always get that much quality out of it. You’re ripping more than you need to. I’m going to share with you why iTunes isn’t the place to buy music that you truly appreciate or music that you want longevity out of.
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Why iTunes Isn’t The Best Place to Purchase Music
Today, Brian Transeau’s (aka BT’s) latest album, “These Hopeful Machines” has landed on Amazon, iTunes and your local record store. Brian’s music is fantastic, wonderful, celebrated and timeless. I listen to tracks he created over 12 years ago and the songs might as well be a couple of weeks old. Every track he has created is delivered in a way that you can experience each album back to back without the feeling of boredom and, honestly, his music inspires me. My ex-girlfriend, Laura claims that I have a “man crush” on Brian for his art of music and I admit it. The crush is real. His music has helped me write over 50% of my blog posts for the past 10 years. He’s helped me get through good times and bad and helped me through a 16 hour car ride across state lines. His music has lifted my appreciation and awareness to new levels and it has brought me down to the level of realization that we’re so tiny in this huge universe. Brian makes electronic-audible art.
His music never should be consumed at 128kbps AAC, MP3 or WMV. Even at 256kbps, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice. Go ahead and enjoy your Smash Mouth album at 256k but music from artists like BT, U2, The Beatles and Moby (and many more) should be played in a different way outside of the iTunes Store restrictive quality model.
For a while, audiophiles have begged Apple to provide variable pricing for different qualities. 96kbps can be purchased for 49 cents and AIFF / Apple Lossless should cost $1.50-$1.99. Audiophiles will pay $19.99 for an album in Apple Lossless because they know the advantages to paying more for that file format. However, Apple keeps things simple and only provides 256K music.
Before I continue, let me stop and say that if you use Apple’s included earphones, then just stop reading and purchase Brian’s new CD on iTunes for a few bucks and listen away. You’re not going to get anything out of this if your earphones cost less than $99 (Apple’s earphones cost $29 and even then, they’re a ripoff).
My earphone of choice is the Shure SE530. I currently own a pair of Bose QuietComfort 2 cans (which totally blow at $299 they’re a ripoff), Etymotic ER-4, Shure SE420 and the Shure SE530 earphones. The Shure SE530s retailed for $599 when I bought them. Those died outside of the 2 year warranty and guess what, I bought a new pair for $449 (their current price). Why? They’re totally worth it. Earphones, headphones, cans and monitors are all different kind of devices to help you listen to music. Each have their own advantages and pricing does matter. I just saw that Ultimate Ears, a subsidiary of Logitech, released a 6 driver pair of earphones for $1350 and if I had the cash, I’d buy them. I don’t understand by people pay $300 for an iPod and buy thousands of CDs for $12.99 each and then plug in a pair of $29 earbuds. It’s stupid and you’re not enjoying music the way you should.
Long story short, if you’re not in a pair of earphones that cost at least $99, then just stop reading. For young and newbie audiophiles, the SE115 (link) are a great starter pair of earphones. They’re only $115. My first pair of “good” earphones were the SE110 and I never looked back and every year I upgrade because it’s worth it!
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Ok….Back on topic
Brian’s new album comes out today. Do not buy on iTunes (unless you want to). I’m sure he would love you to purchase a digital and analog copy of his music but hear me out. I’m lazy so I went to Wikipedia and searched for AAC, MP3 and Apple Lossless. Below are the descriptions.
The use in MP3 of a lossycompressionalgorithm is designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording and still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio for most listeners. An MP3 file that is created using the setting of 128 kbit/s will result in a file that is about 1/11th[note 1] the size of the CD file created from the original audio source. An MP3 file can also be constructed at higher or lower bit rates, with higher or lower resulting quality.
The compression works by reducing accuracy of certain parts of sound that are deemed beyond the auditory resolution ability of most people. This method is commonly referred to as perceptual coding.[5] It internally provides a representation of sound within a short-term time/frequency analysis window, by using psychoacoustic models to discard or reduce precision of components less audible to human hearing, and recording the remaining information in an efficient manner.
AAC:
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossycompression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates.[1]
AAC has been standardized by ISO and IEC, as part of the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 specifications.[2][3] The MPEG-2 standard contains several audio coding methods, including the MP3 coding scheme. AAC is able to include 48 full-bandwidth (up to 96 kHz) audio channels in one stream plus 16 low frequency effects (LFE, limited to 120 Hz) channels, up to 16 “coupling” or dialog channels, and up to 16 data streams. The quality for stereo is satisfactory to modest requirements at 96 kbit/s in joint stereo mode; however, hi-fi transparency demands data rates of at least 128kbit/s (VBR). The MPEG-2 audio tests showed that AAC meets the requirements referred to as “transparent” for the ITU at 128 kbit/s for stereo, and 320kbit/s for 5.1 audio.
AAC’s improvements over MP3
Advanced Audio Coding is designed to be the successor of the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, known as MP3 format, which was specified by ISO/IEC in 11172-3 (MPEG-1 Audio) and 13818-3 (MPEG-2 Audio).
Blind tests show that AAC demonstrates greater sound quality and transparency than MP3 for files coded at the same bit rate.[1]
Up to 48 channels (MP3 supports up to two channels in MPEG-1 mode and up to 5.1 channels in MPEG-2 mode)
Arbitrary bit-rates and variable frame length. Standardized constant bit rate with bit reservoir.
Higher efficiency and simpler filterbank (rather than MP3’s hybrid coding, AAC uses a pure MDCT)
Higher coding efficiency for stationary signals (AAC uses a blocksize of 1024 or 960 samples, allowing more efficient coding than MP3’s 576 sample blocks)
Higher coding accuracy for transient signals (AAC uses a blocksize of 128 or 120 samples, allowing more accurate coding than MP3’s 192 sample blocks)
Apple Lossless data is stored within an MP4container with the filename extension.m4a. It is not a variant of AAC, but uses linear prediction similar to other lossless codecs such as FLAC and Shorten.[1] All current iPod players can play Apple Lossless-encoded files. It does not utilize any digital rights management (DRM) scheme, but by the nature of the container, it is thought that DRM could be applied to ALAC much the same way it can with other files in QuickTime containers.
Apple claims that audio files compressed with its lossless codec will use up “about half the storage space” that the uncompressed data would require. Testers using a selection of music have found that compressed files are about 40% to 60% the size of the originals depending on the kind of music, similar to other lossless formats. Furthermore, the speed at which it can be decoded makes it useful for a limited-power device such as the iPod.[2]
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Summarizing The Content I Pasted Above:
Yeah, I know that was pretty “techie” but here’s the gist. AAC is leaps and bounds above MP3 in so many ways! AAC is a great codec to use in the iTunes Music Store. Small file sizes, increased quality and flexibility. However, Apple Lossless is true lossless audio. Meaning, you don’t lose the quality. Apple Lossless is just like AIFF or WAV but where those two file formats turn a 3 minute song into 30 megabytes, Apple Lossless has the same quality as those file formats but brings it down to only 10 megabytes. Less space = more songs stored on your iPhone / iPod but without losing the quality like you would with with MP3 or AAC.
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Why All of This is Important:
Apple only gives you AAC 256kbps music when you purchase from them. Brian Transeau will spend weeks, months and years on an album perfecting each chord, bit, byte and second. He plays back these songs over and over in the original quality and he plays it back on monitors (both large speakers and in-ear monitors) and then he sends that music to the record company to distribute.
AAC 256kbps is “adequate” for most music. I think it’s offensive to your ears and to Brian’s passion and creativity to buy music from Amazon or iTunes in that lousy file format and lousy compression.
My suggestion. Buy BT’s album at your record store. In iTunes, choose “Apple Lossless” as the default Import method and enjoy Brian’s the music the way its meant to be heard.
I had purchased every BT album on iTunes, then when I bought my $600 earphones, I went to Amazon and bought the physical CDs. I reimported all of them in Apple Lossless and the benefits were incomparable! Every song, note, sound was detailed and real. The music came to life and so I began doing this for all of the music that I truly loved at 128 / 256 kbps. Now, 25% of my music is encoded in Apple Lossless. The file sizes are larger than AAC (10 megabytes compared to 4 megabytes) but it’s very much worth it.
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My Advice:
Buy Brian’s physical album (Amazon Link), purchase the SE115 from Shure and enjoy music the way it was meant to be heard. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by buying Apple’s crappy quality. This isn’t Smash Mouth (no offense), this is Brian Transeau. He’s been working since 2006 on this album and it’ss meant to be heard the best way possible.
Further Reading: Macrumors.com Forums “AAC versus Apple Lossless” LINK
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Finally, here are some videos and Photos I shot of Brian’s last three performances in the bay area (San Francisco Area). He performed at iPhoneDevCamp and RubySkye.
It sucks being an Apple consumer right now. It really does. Apple clearly hates Adobe Flash, publicly and privately acknowledges that Flash was the leading cause of OSX Leopard Application and system crashes and they even modified Safari to not crash when Flash decided to fail which is a sign that they are having to do workarounds because Adobe Flash simply sucks on OSX. It’s clear that Apple has abandoned Flash entirely because many of us thought it was performance and battery issues that kept Flash from appearing on the iPhone OS devices. Now, with the release of iPad, it’s obvious that Apple won’t be adopting the standard on mobile devices.
Prior to the iPad announcement I was angry at Apple for their lack of support for Flash and I wasn’t alone. Hell, YouTube was forced in 2007 to create a mobile site for smartphones that played video in H.264 because many handsets didn’t support flash. Apple even worked with YouTube to deliver a custom application for iPhone prior to its June 2007 launch and, once again, the videos play in h.264, not flash. There are still times when browsing the YouTube app for iPhone that I get errors about a video not being available for my mobile device because there’s no h.264 version available.
However, last month (before the iPad came out), YouTube flipped the switch on HTML5 video. Prior to this new video standard, we were stuck with Flash. It was the default technology behind slideshows, games, video and even banner ads. Much of what we enjoyed about today’s web was powered by a system that was closed, non open-source and owned by one company (sound familiar to Apple but let me continue). Apple’s closed systems continue to improve but Flash on the Mac has been broken for years and Adobe won’t push the technology forward. On a PC, flash requires very little system resources which equals battery savings for mobile devices. On the Mac, playing Hulu video on my MacBook cuts the battery life in half, maxes out my CPU and forces the internal fan to come on to combat the heat needed to play a simple standard def video.
Silverlight came to popularity in 2008 and it may be a better way to get video, it’s not native on the Mac and aside from partners such as CBS, Silverlight never really broke through. The reason.. Google & Apple didn’t go with it. Apple didn’t start preinstalling Silverlight on its computers and Google didn’t support it on their video properties. Flash remained king.
For the next two years, the consumer will suffer but I have hope because it’s for the best. See, Google’s switch to HTML5 video on YouTube and Apple’s unwillingness to support Flash on its iPhone OS devices will force web developers to reconsider what system they use to deliver multimedia to users. In a few months, the amount of web devices that don’t have Flash and will never have Flash will surpass 100 million (that’s just Apple devices) and that’s a huge number of 3G & Wi-Fi connected users that will be unable to enjoy content.
In 6 months, it will be clear that there are 100 million potential users who aren’t getting your content and most of the top 5 video sites on the web will be using HTML5 instead of Flash (crossing my fingers that Hulu jumps on board as well).What does this mean?
It means three things.
1. Content creators will be forced to adopt HTML5 for content (video, interactive media)
2. Adobe will have to improve their product or Flash is dead
3. Internet Explorer 6 will finally die.
Right now, YouTube will display HTML5 video only to users of modern browsers (Safari, Firefox & Chrome). IE users are left in the dust but YouTube kindly shows Flash video to those users because it’s a pretty big chunk of people that still visit YouTube with the archaic browser. Soon, more sites will start ditching Flash and going strictly HTML5 and for once, our iPhones and iPads will show us videos and content across the web while Internet Explorer users will see a glaring “missing plugin” icon that we have grown so accustomed to. They will feel our pain.
This process will be slow. It will be painful to us early adopters. Eventually, our notebooks will have longer battery lives, our phones and mobile devices will crash less and have lower CPU utilization and Microsoft + Adobe will have to improve or die. I know Adobe and Microsoft have other revenue streams but I look forward to the day that Google & Apple lead the pack and we, the consumer will benefit.
The only problem, this won’t be a quick transition and for now, you’ll have this to look forward to when you are browsing the web with your iPad or iPhone. (photo credit)
Tonight, a friend told me that my online life is huge in a way that I share every single moment. Not only is the level of data simply enormous but my sharing causes confusion and leads to negative attention. In a blog post from last month titled, “Embracing The Hate” I wrote about the situation If find myself in much too often. I wrote:
This value greatly exceeds the loss of giving people more crap to throw at me. Sharing selectively has been my goal ever since AdamsBlock happened. Share less, more often which results for a lot of unusable information like linking to a news story or a funny video. This info isn’t leveraged for hate and only serves as filler for the really important stuff.
That’s how it’s been lately. I do share a lot but most of it is useless bullshit that no one should really care about like links, photos and tweets about nothing. I try to imagine if members of my family tweeted like me and how that would paint them. What I realize is we as humans all have regrets, faults and “aspects” of us that would be considered unacceptable in modern society.When is the last time a married man looked at a beautiful woman or a married woman thought about her life with that other guy that she knew in college or how often does a guy think about quitting his shitty job and simply tells a friend later over beers. Everyone has these moments that aren’t shared or spoken to anyone other than our own self-conscious and that’s where they’re supposed to remain.
I disagree because I believe honesty and being translucent is an enabler to great things. Most of you that have started following me in the past year have really seen the Adam who is censored. That’s pretty hard to believe but it’s true. The last 12 months have been full of censorship and I’ve had many people who I knew 3 years ago upon joining Twitter who told me things have changed and asking me if I’ve changed or just my tweets. The answer is both but I consciously leave tons of things out and I’d rather not.
Twitter has been a tool that did a lot for me. Twitter is responsible for 80% of my blog’s traffic, 45% of my Flickr photo views. My friend Scott Beale posted a tweet linking to my resume for my move to San Francisco and helped me land a great job. Another fellow san franciscan sent me a link to an awesome apartment that I live in now. A friend helped me get free tickets to shows in Vegas, another give me a place to crash for the night in a Los Angeles Hotel and another random Twitter friend bought me a beer in Seattle. Nearly 75% of my income is based on Twitter related work and, until just 3 months ago, all of my relationships were based on people who I met through social networks. I did realize the problem with that and fixed it.
Lately, everything I do doesn’t start with Twitter and it has lead to some great projects and relationships but I admit that there are so many opportunities that never would have happened had I not joined Twitter back in 2006.
If Twitter makes life so awesome, why am I contemplating walking away? The main reason is relationships and people. I have realized a few things. Going back to my first point about humans and how flawed we are, I realize that the micro-celebrity concept is applying to me. The more I share, the more people have things to hate me about. Think of it like dating. The first date is attraction based on their looks or “replication value” that you assume they have (money, personality, beauty). As you go out a 2nd and 3rd time, you learn more about them and soon realize how incompatible or different you are from that person. There comes a time when you deal with it which would make you shallow and fake or you are honest and tell them that things aren’t really working out.
Twitter is the same way. You see my follower count and tweet count or you like a photo that I post and you follow me. Soon, you learn I love coffee, my family and that I don’t like crowds or partying. I don’t like certain kind of music and I tweet about my dates and how they went. You learn everything that I am willing to share and soon you follow me for different reasons. Either it makes you feel good or bad and sometimes you’ll just unfollow me.
This relationship I’ve had with Twitter and the people that follow me is very interesting and it’s something I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around but what I do realize is that more people don’t like me or rally against me and what I do based simply on what I tweet. This is terrible and it’s something that I can’t really help. I have no way of taking each follower out to lunch and sharing with them truly what’s going on. I can’t say hi in person and get to know them. This is the fatal flaw of online social networking.
One big life change that happened recently really opened my eyes to this. I realized that so many people assumed a lot and said a lot and spoke of me a lot in conversations simply based on what I said on Twitter & my blog. It’s human nature to talk about other people but too often do people talk about others with an ignorant mind. I’m ignorant to so many things and I try my best to not talk about things I don’t know anything about. This is an effort I fail at way too often.
So I could curse those who don’t understand me and don’t understand what I’m really doing but I can’t because I gave them no reason or tools to know the real me.
So why would I leave Twitter? To put a stop, once and for all to the confusions, doubts, gossip and failures to understand the real me and what I really have to say. There is so much that you and I could learn from each other but we can’t do it in 140 characters and we can’t do it over email. It has to be in person with a handshake and a hug and until that happens, we’re just assuming we know what’s up and only getting 5% of the story.
I might still be on Twitter by sharing interesting links and photos and blog posts but the concept of sharing “what I’m doing” may soon come to an end. I hope this post cleared some things up. Thank you, as always, for reading.
I read this story today in the Washington Post. As you all know, I love bringing a bit of reality to my friends via writings and posts about humans and our interaction with the universe as well as the disconnect that’s growing each day.
Please click through and read the entire post HERE by author, Adrian Higgins.. I’ve copied it below because it’s simply amazing.
You know you have crossed the river into Cyberland when the guy coming your way has his head buried in the hand-held screen. He will knock into you unless you get out of his way, and don’t expect an apology. It’s as if you aren’t there.
Maybe you’re not.
Technology has drawn us into our interconnected webs, in the office, on the street, on the park bench, to the point that we exist virtually everywhere except in the physical world. Robert Harrison, a professor of Italian literature at Stanford University, laments that when students pass through the school’s visually stimulating campus, iPhones, BlackBerrys and all the evolving devices and apps draw them into their blinkered personal realms. “Most of the groves, courtyards, gardens, fountains, artworks, open spaces and architectural complexes have disappeared behind a cloaking device, it would seem,” he writes in his book “Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.”
This retreat from the natural world is most evident in the young, but it is not a generational phenomenon, he argues. Instead, the ubiquity of the computer is changing the very essence of the human animal. We are in the midst of a historical change in “our mode of vision,” he says, “which is bound up with our mode of being.”
According to a recent landmark study of viewing habits, adults spend an average of nearly three hours a day interacting with computer screens. Add TV viewing and you get a screen time of about 8 1/2 hours. “People are spending more time in media and especially screen media than anything else they’re doing in life,” says Bill Moult of Sequent Partners, one of two organizations that provided the study.
But you don’t need numbers to know how absorbed we have become by screens and their mesmerizing qualities. In October, two Northwest Airlines pilots who flew their jet 150 miles past their destination told investigators they were distracted by their laptop computers. Walk the streets of downtown Washington and you will see many people, a majority perhaps, plugged in to a two-dimensional world. Peer into the vehicles, and tally a scary number of drivers on hand-held cellphones, even texting. This may be illegal in the District, but the temptation is too great. We have become digital zombies.
Actually, we have become symbionts, says Katherine Hayles, author of “How We Became Posthuman.” Just as a lichen is the marriage of a fungus and an algae, we now live in full partnership with digital technology, which we rely on for the infrastructure of our lives. “If every computer were to crash tomorrow, it would be catastrophic,” she says. “Millions or billions of people would die. That’s the condition of being a symbiont.”
Hayles is among a number of intellectuals who see this dependence as not necessarily bad, but as advancing civilization and, above all, just inevitable. “From Thoreau on, we have had this dream we can withdraw from our technologies and live closer to the natural world, and yet that’s not the cultural trajectory that we have followed,” says Hayles, a professor of literature at Duke University. “You could say when humans started to walk upright, we lost touch with the natural world. We lost an olfactory sense of the world, but obviously bipedalism paid big dividends.”
In the Computer Age, “we are making our environments more responsive to humans’ needs and desires than ever before.”
Adriana de Souza e Silva, assistant professor of communication at North Carolina State University, says the widespread acceptance of public phoning, texting, surfing and tweeting on mobile devices has changed our lives so that we exist in a duality of the physical and electronic worlds.
“What we are witnessing now is a different kind of public space composed of people who are physically there [but talking to] people who are remote,” she says.
She argues that this has actually made us more aware of our surroundings because so many devices are driven by their location and the user’s awareness of place. “The BlackBerry might be looking for a local restaurant and a person two blocks away, not overseas. If you’re walking downtown and you can access information that’s been tagged there, that information suddenly becomes part of that location.”
The difficulty, Harrison argues, is that we are losing something profoundly human, the capacity to connect deeply to our environments.
Landscape designers talk about bestowing on a garden its genius loci, or spirit of the place, that bubbles up into your consciousness if its presence is strong enough and the visitor meditative enough to receive it.
Harrison says a garden truly reveals itself only when its own depths and those of the beholder flow together. But that takes time. “For the gardens to become fully visible in space, they require a temporal horizon that the age makes less and less room for.”
He is captivated by the Czech writer Karel Capek, who gave the world the robot in his play “R.U.R.” and in it warned that technology would be our ruination. But Capek was also a passionate gardener who wrote “The Gardener’s Year,” published in 1929. “No one knew better than Capek that the cultivation of the soil and cultivation of the spirit are connatural,” Harrison writes. He believes gardens hold the key in leading us back into the visible world, because they are three-dimensional and made of living plants that speak to our “biophilia.”
“Gardens are the best place to begin this reeducation,” he says. Without it, he fears that the prophecy of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Duino Elegies, will become so. “Earth, isn’t this what you want; invisibly to arise in us? Is it not your dream to be someday invisible? Earth! Invisible!”
As many of you know, I’ve decided to sell my MacBook Pro [BLOG LINK], [EBAY LINK]. There have been quite a few inquiries as to why I’m selling my nearly new MacBook Pro. Great question!
The MacBook Pro 17″ w/ 3.06Ghz Processor was released the 2nd week of June at WWDC. I bought it on the 25th so it is only 4.5 months old. Apple will, most likely, be updating the MacBook Pro once the christmas shopping season is over and after Macworld Expo in February (which Apple won’t be attending) which puts me around March. Now, at the 5 month mark, the resale value goes from a slow down-tick to a fast plummet and when new models come out, it’s even worse.
I’ve experienced heartache with the wait and see approach before like my last 15″ MacBook Pro at 2.93Ghz got about 20% less than I thought it would because Apple added SD slot and a built-in battery about 2 months after I purchased it and bumped the clock speed up a bit. This change greatly affected the resale value.
Given that the next MacBook Pro is nearly certain to have Core i5 mobile chips (like the iMac does today), this means the resale value will be even lower because not only will they be updated but they’ll have a brand new processor generation (like the jump from CoreDuo to Core2Duo) and after 18 months with the same graphics subsystem, this will see a bump as well.
The iMacs, as you all know already have the Core i7 with a faster front-side bus and glorious beautiful 27″ monitor. The new iMacs will retain their current value at a 2-3% resale value drop each month until around May of 2010. At that point, Apple would have already released a brand new MacBook Pro w/ new processors and yours truly can sell the iMac and switch back to MacBook Pro.
It sounds to you like Adam is wasting a ton of money. No I’m not actually because with extras like AppleCare, a case, some vintage Apple Stickers and some other goodies that will boost the resale price. Without giving away actual numbers, after eBay collects its seller fees and after shipping I always come out even on what I paid for the machine. That’s right. EVEN. Every 6 months I get a new machine and I never invest any money into it except for the rare times when I went from MacBook to MacBook Pro or MacBook Pro 15 to 17 and so on.
Is it worth the trouble? It is for me but in the past 5 years I’ve owned about 13 Apple computers by doing this so yeah it takes work to follow trends but it’s nice having the latest machine especially when I’m not losing a lot of money in the resale transactions.
-Adam
