Lots of work going on around here, so please bear with us whilst we move things about a bit!

Sound and vision

These days I’m generating far more data on Flickr and on Last.fm than I am here. Does that say something about a change in balance between the visual, sound, and the written word, in my current interests?

Probably. I recently acquired a Squeezebox 3, and that’s definitely had an impact on how much I’m listening to music, what I’m listening to.

I hope to blog something more extensive about it here shortly, but in summary, it changes everything, but the interface to large music collections really needs addressing.

If you have 1,000+ albums, numerous loose tracks, and so on, seeing a collection through ‘browse album’ (one at a time) is laborious to say the least. There’s a loss of context going on. It’s easy enough to flip through a bunch of physical objects – CDs, vinyl – with hyper-rapid recognition. Having to *read* text takes more time. And there’s a loss of context: items that ’sit next to’ one another, for example. Tagging with ‘genre’ and so on is all well and fine, but requires somewhat more application than messing around with a pile of physical objects. And genres are of course all or nothing, whereas physical objects can have transitions, gradients, gradual movements from one into another.

The Squeezebox search function is weird: it doesn’t seem to work on ‘initial letter’. So an artist search on ‘K’ will not throw up Kasabian or Kate Bush among the first items, but rather a load of items with ‘k’ in the artist tag text.

So the Squeezebox is a great leap forward but there’s a long way to go.

Hope to come back to this.

Windows Live
This results display for Windows Live Beta is questionable. The ’scroll bar’ to the right seems to be a little short of the usual functionality. How do I know where I am? There doesn’t seem to be enough visual info to enable me to instantly make that assessment.

Cambridge conference in April

The Intelligent Environments Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge has organised the International Symposium on Intelligent Environments for 5-7 April. The keynote speaker is Don Norman (hurrah!), and there are plenty of other interesting people involved.

Registration – online – is free of charge (see the link above), and accommodation is available at Homerton College for the reasonable sum of £60 per night.

DRM = bad user experience

Interesting piece at Sterophile of why DRM is a bad idea for everyone including consumers, in their coverage of a speech by Dave Goldberg, general manager of Yahoo Music, at the Music 2.0 conference in Los Angeles.

…the part that caught our attention was his analysis of how DRM discourages consumers from purchasing legitimate music files, since it imposes restrictions on the use of that music that illegal alternatives do not.

“We believe that music should be in my car stereo, in my home, on my phone—anywhere but on my PC, where it could crash on me,”

said Goldberg.

This was exactly the same point I made in January to the All-Party Parliamentary Internet Group inquiry into DRM the UK. If you make using legal products into a consumer nightmare by using DRM, you’ll drive consumers further into using illegal ones. DRM is a great way to alienate your customers, and also an excellent way of losing sales. And David Goldberg of Yahoo Music, part of the very industry that is foisting DRM upon us, has now said so. Cool.

Audio transcription utilities

Researchers often find that standard tools don’t meet their needs: digital audio devices that can record are often designed primarily for sound reproduction of prerecorded material, with recording an afterthought (poor quality, risible quantity). And for transcribing recordings, most tools offer insufficient precision for dealing with voice rather than music. We are seen as consumers rather than producers, and it shows.

Mads Rydahl, husband of anthropologist Kathrine Kroijer Hoersted, has just put together a transcribing tool for ethnographers, so it has some features that are particularly useful. As Katherine says,

you operate the play back of your sound file using keyboard shortcuts while transcribing in Word. When you press “pause” and then a little later “play” it automatically rewinds 5 seconds. You can also adjust the playback speed… and it is very simple to use.

Visit the TransScriber page to download. (Windows only at present.)

Other tools now available include another called Transcriber (MacOS, Windows, Linux), primarily aimed at speech researchers but of much wider application, Listen & Type (MacOS), Transana (Windows, Mac version in preparation), which also handles video.

Doors of Perception 9

John Tahackara has just announced that the next Doors of Perception (Doors 9) will take place in India in 2007.

PAS 78 launch

PAS 78: Guide to Good Practice in Commissioning Accessible Websites, commissioned by the Disability Rights Commission, will be launched at an event in Hammersmith, London on March 8.

…”A very limited number of free places available (sponsored by DRC) and once those have gone the remaining places are subject to a fee. So if you are interested in attending, book your place now. Call BSI on 020 8996 7620″

Remote controls

The Squeezebox 3 is a lovely product, but I wonder what possessed them with the remote (left hand side). It’s an integral part of the product, but doesn’t seem to have been treated with the same tlc as the Squeezebox unit. No rhyme or reason to relative button size, shape and position. Following a formula perhaps? Feels tacky. Lessons to be learned from the Sky remote here…

Blog falls apart

Yes, the archives are a complete mess. I am also, as always, highly dissatisfied with – the lack of – certain developments at Blogger HQ. So what was with the great Google takeover? I’d rather see improvements to the platform than blue hoodies mailed out from Mountain View (blue is not my colour).

Thinking about a migration to Wordpress…again.