Buzzsonic.com

As an indication of how widespread the phenomena of Podcasting is becoming, early adopters are springing up in the most unlikely places. Father Roderick Vonhogen, Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Utrecht in the Netherlands led Internet listeners on an intimate audio tour that allowed them to pay one last visit to Pope John Paul II before he was laid to rest earlier this month with his podcast show , “The Night the Pope Died” delivered in MP3 format and downloadable from his Catholic Insider website.

Catholic Insider and thousands of other podcasts can be found through directories like Podcast Alley , Podcasting News and Podcast.net while free software like iPodder, Doppler and iPodder X automatically downloads new shows as they become available. Listeners can transfer their podcasts to an Apple iPod or other portable MP3 player, and listen to them when and where they wish.

A recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that one in three U.S. adults who own an MP3 player have listened to a podcast, though the survey’s small sample size of respondents means that figure could be substantially lower, according to some critics. In all, 2,201 people were interviewed, including 208 owners of iPods or MP3 players.

Pew Internet researcher Mary Madden told the NewsFactor website. “Podcasting is clearly a growing online phenomenon,” she says. “It is part of the larger notion of the Internet being a democratizing medium. Anyone who has the basic tools, a basic grasp of technology, can do it. Podcasting is definintely mimicking blogging in a lot of ways,” Madden continues. “In a lot of cases, they are audio versions of someone’s personal rant for the day.”

Related Reading

Podcasting Catches On [Pew Internet PDF]
Six Million Podcasters and Counting [NewsFactor.com]
Podcasting In The Dark [Washington Times]
iPods and MP3 Players Storm the Market [Pew Internet]
Podcasting Tools [Podcasting-Tools.com]

NWA’s 1989 album ‘Straight Outta Compton’ is hailed by many as one of the most seminal albums in the history of rap and greatly influenced countless gangsta rappers. Ice-T and Schooly D were the first gangsta rappers, NWA took it mainstream with this controversial and massive selling piece of profanity. The parental advisory sticker could have been invented just for this album and backlash from the ‘moral majority’ at the time lead to the album being issued with an alternative version, sans-profanity.

Over fifteen years later, Ice Cube is a film star and Dr.Dre is producing Eminem. Technology has also taken a great leap forward and in a humorous about turn Brooklyn design and technology student Evan Roth has cut up the NWA classic and spliced it back together in an edit of the entire ‘Straight Outta Compton’ album with all the adjacent non-curse words edited out. A nod to Steinski but with swearing. Like one of the college radio station WFMU’s blog poster’s comments say, “I haven’t laughed this hard at cursing since I was nine”.

According to the creator, “‘F**k tha Police’ edits down to 42.6 seconds after all the non-explicit material is edited out. This gives it a 12.3% explicit content index (much higher than ‘Straight Outta Compton’ at 7.4%)”.
Now you know. get it here, whilst its still up.

Thanks to WMFU’s Beware of the Blog

Related Links

Napster Dealt Copyright Rap by Dr. Dre [CNet News]
Chilling Effects [ChillingEffects.org]
Illegal Art Audio [Illegal-Art.org]
History of the Cut-Up [Beatmixed.com]
Bastard Pop [Wikipedia.org]

If you’re slow getting started on the MP3 portable player bandwagon, can’t afford an iPod and have a sizeable CD collection just waiting to get squashed into MP3 files and put into your pocket and on the move DAP Review put us on to a deal right now at J&R.com. Actually Amazon are doing the same too.

They are both shipping the 20GB Entempo Spirit for $99.98 and OK, the Spirit is never going to win prizes for the design, in fact they would if there was an award for ugliest hard-drive player ever, but besides that, even as a cheap hard drive back up its pretty impossible to beat at that price. All for less than the cost of the half gig Shuffle.

The blue and white unit comes with integrated FM radio and built in voice recorder, something even the mighty iPod doesn’t offer. There’s the usual USB 2.0 transfer, built in shock protection and WMA and MP3 compatability. The California based Entempo also have the much nicer looking 20GB Rubato which retails for double the price of the Spirit.

Thanks to DAP Review for the lead

MP3 Player Shopping

MP3 Player Love [MP3PlayerLove.com]
Digital Audio Player Review [DAPReview]
Top 10 Portable MP3 Players Guide [About.com]
MP3 Player Buyers Guide [CNet Reviews]

We mentioned Podscope, the search engine for Podcasts last week. Connecticut based TV Eyes, the real-time broadcast search provider behind the venture had promised a launch this month and sure enough they kept their promise.

Pretty neat it is too, a very basic front end with just a logo and search box. We did a search for ‘new wave’ looking for a possible MP3 blog that was micro-broadcasting old punk chestnuts from the 70s. Nine results came back. Next to each search result you get a + sign, click on that and a drop down reveals a couple of buttons to play a clip, a link to the podcast site and another link which opens the originating site in a framed page with the choice of playing back the show via Windows Media or Quick Time players. Theres also a link to the RSS feed URL so you can plug the feed straight into your podcast software of choice and a link to download the whole show. We thought it was pretty cool.

Related Links

Podcasting [Wikipedia.org]
iPodder [Sourceforge]
Podshow [Podshow.com]
Podcast Alley [PodcastAlley.com]
How to Get Podcasts and Also Make Your Own [Engadget.com]

Big buzz for us here today as looking at our server stats earlier we realised we got ‘Slashdotted’ yesterday without even realising it (we had a day off !). So, we kind of got a whole weeks traffic in a few hours. We’ve heard of some peoples sites going into melt down when this happens so all credit to our robust hosting company MyAcen, who we rate very highly indeed and kept the fires burning. We just hope some of the Slashdot readers keep paying us a visit !

I know there has been a lot of hype about Firefox, its faster, its this, its that. Its actually not massively faster than Internet Explorer (IE) but its a damn site more secure. Here we’re still using both browsers , simply because its going to be a long time before web design becomes compatible with both browsers by default. Some web sites look absolutely cack in Firefox believe it or not whilst I bet 99% work just fine in IE. A lot of sites load slowly in Firefox too, simply because they were optimised with IE in mind.

Anyway, its not all hype. There’s a little additional search box on my Firefox that enables me to search Google, Yahoo, Amazon, IMDB, the fabulous Wikipedia and tons more without having to use a load of toolbars. Although I have it there on IE by default, the Google toolbar slows things down a tad.

One thing we have noticed on this site (taking in its previous incarnation as MusicbizNews24.com too) and one of our search directories, Floorelevators.net, a short while ago the browser % of our visitors was 80/10 (with 10% using other alternatives) in Internet Explorers favour. From this weeks figures on the server stats there has been a big swing with figures now 52/31% in favour of IE, with the remaining 17% of browsers split between Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, Konqueror and Camino. If people have any doubts that IE could ever be over taken, look at what happened to the original Netscape browser.

Related Reading

Comparison Of Web Browsers [Wikipedia.org]
Are The Browser Wars Back? [Slate.MSN]
Browser Wars [Wikipedia.org]

P2P software pioneer Ian Clarke, creator of the Open Source P2P platforms Freenet and more recently Dijjer has this week quietly unveiled his latest project, Indy.

Speaking to P2PNet Clarke promised that Indy, “does for freely available independent music what Google does for the world wide web.” Indy uses collaborative filtering, a system similar to that used by Amazon to recommend books, etc, to prospective buyers, to learn about your musical preferences in relation to other Indy users.

“Everything it plays is from online indie music freely available on the web and you can rate each piece at between one and five stars. Using that as feedback, Indy will find and download music that’s keyed to what you like as opposed to what you don’t like.”

“We were concerned that even with all of the advancements with online media in the past few years, it was still pretty difficult just to find new independent music that you liked.”

According to Clarke, Indy is inspired by iRate, another collaborative music filtering set-up. As users rate music in iRate it automatically finds more free music that you’ll like by finding people with similar music tastes. Indy is said to have a much cleaner and simpler user interface and it is freely available for Windows OS initially with other platforms in development.

Submit Music to Indy

Related Links

iRate Radio [iRateRadio.com]
Freenet Creator Unveils Dijjer P2P [Buzzsonic News]
Dijjer [Dijjer.org]
The Free Network Project [Sourceforge]
Mobster [Sourceforge]
Collaborative Filtering Research Papers [JamesThornton.com]
Collaborative Filtering Comes To Independent Music Makers [MasterNewMedia.org]
The Music Business and the Big Flip [Shirky.com]
InDiscover [InDiscover.net]

A free new Open Source music samples database has been launched by the Barcelona, Spain based Music Technology Group (MTG), part of the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings and bleeps all released under the Creative Commons sampling plus license.

The project is also part of the forthcoming International Computer Music Conference hosted in Barcelona this coming September where sounds taken from the database will be part of live performances at the event.

There’s an increasing amount of audio projects adopting the Creative Commons licence idea including ‘Wired’ magazine who issued the ‘Rip.Sample.Mash.Share’ compilation CD with the November issue of the tech geek bible in association with Creative Commons. Readers were invited to remix and mash-up artists including David Byrne, the Beastie Boys, DJ Dangermouse and the Thievery Corporation.

Creative Commons also have a collaborative community music sharing /remixing site CC Mixter featuring songs licensed under Creative Commons, where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want. There is an ODB remix contest coming up soon and a Magnatune remix contest, with a recording contract for the winners.

Related Links

Creative Commons [CreativeCommons.org]
The Wired CD [Creative Commons]
CC Mixter-The Remix Family Tree [CCMixter.org]

Everyone who is anyone now seems to have a ‘Podcast’ or is name dropping some obscure micro broadcast show nowadays. Others are already looking at the possibilities of “broadcatching”, put simply, podcasts with video besides just compressed audio content delivery.

Broadcatching refers to the use of RSS feeds and BitTorrent peer to peer file sharing as an alternative to distributing multimedia content on the Internet. Podcasting meets Tivo said some wise spark, other people have already labelled it Vlogging, or the self explanatary ‘video blogging’.

Latest sofware app for Windows users is a beta version of ANT which was released last week. ANT is an video RSS aggregator and player that has been available for Mac for a while now and has already been incorporated into a hack with the Sony PSP.

ANT can playback any media format and will sync audio with iTunes for playback on any MP3 portable. You can subscribe to any ‘Podcast’ or RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures and ANT will automatically download any audio and video content. ANT is currently freeware and still in Beta for both Mac and PC.

Thanks to Scobleizer

Related Reading

Experimenting With BiTTorrent and RSS 2.0 [Blogs.Harvard.edu]
How To Create Your Own Podcast [About.com]
PSPcasting on Your Mac [Engadget]
Video Blogging [VideoBlogging.info]
Ready For Your Close-up? Here Come The Vlogs [MSNBC]
Bloggers Add Moving Images to Their Musings [NY Times]
RSS meets BitTorrent meets TiVo [ScottRaymond.net]
BitTorrent and RSS Create Disruptive Revolution [eWeek.com]
BroadCatching Using RSS + BitTorrent to Automatically Download TV Shows [Engadget]

Seems nobody and nothing is sacred in the world of the bootleg remixer, the bastard pop purveyer or the mash-up DJ/remixer. Impeccable coincidence it seems in light of Steven Speilbergs forthcoming (June 29th in the US) Tom Cruise starred remake, but latest opus to get the once over is Jeff Wayne’s 1976 ‘rock musical concept album of the film’, ‘War Of The Worlds’, courtesy of one Grafyte (aka Alex C) Dundee student by day, DJ and Masher by night.

Thankfully he edited the whole thing down to less than half an hour and threw in a bunch of breaks and the like from Leftfield, Faithless, Led Zeppelin and the Prodigy to liven up the prog rock classic and make it into one of the best mash-up projects I’ve heard in many many months. A bit of a keeper and handled with great respect for the original it has to be said.

Download from here

Trailer for Steven Spielbergs remake of ‘War Of The Worlds’ here.

Related

War Of The Worlds Trailers [Apple.com]
The Complete War of the Worlds [WOTW.org]
Study Guide for H. G. Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898) [Washington State Uni.]
Get Your Bootleg On [GYBO.org]
Yet More Beatles Mash Up Mayhem [Buzzsonic News]
Music For the Bootleg Generation [Buzzsonic News]

As a dance music producer myself and someone who has humped around boxes of 12 inch vinyl records all in the name of DJing in the past I’ve seen the ‘death’, or more accurately, the steep decline of vinyl for years. Instead of backbreakingly heavy piles of vinyl, a handful of CDs can take their place. With MP3 music compression it hasn’t stopped there however, why bother with CDs when you can carry all your music on a device the size of a box of cigarettes. The end of vinyl getting lost in transit for the DJ jetsetter, everything fits in your pocket. The only minus point about DJing with an iPod in the past has been the lack of pitch control. Not anymore.

DJ gear specialists Numark unveiled a prototype iPod DJ mixing console a few days ago at Frankfurts Musikmesse exhibition. Though camera shots of the unit were apparently shielded at the show, German HipHop website WebBeatz managed to grab some shots, one of which we have here the other is being shown at Engadget.

Details are sketchy right now but Engadget are reporting that Numark aims to put out a consumer model in the next couple of months, retailing in the $250-350 range, to be followed with a pro DJ version with pitch control and other goodies required by the pro mobile DJ. Both versions will feature the dual iPod dock with crossfaders and transport controls.

Another turntablist website, Skratchworx were showing the same leaked pictures.

Thanks to Engadget

Related Links

Prototype Numark iPod DJ Mixer [CreateDigitalMusic.com]
iPod For DJs [DJZone.net]
Playlist iPod DJ [iPod-Dj.com]
With iPod, Who Needs a Turntable ? [Wired.com]
Downloaded and Ready To Rock [Washington Post]
iPod Lounge [iPodLounge.com]
Everything iPod [Everythingipod.com]
NoWax [NoWax.co.uk]
Playlist Mag [Playlistmag.com]
The iPod DJ Revolution [Methodshop.com]

Fairfield, Connecticut based TV Eyes, the real-time broadcast search provider which has been indexing television and radio broadcasts since 1999, will debut a Podcast search engine called Podscope later this month. Every word within an Internet podcast will be made searchable which is equally applicable to video blogs and personal videos. Podscope will crawl the web to look for podcasts, when it finds one, it will create an index against every word within the content. Podcasters are also able to submit url(s) for crawling.

“With a looming explosion in such user generated rich content as Podcasts and video blogs, there is a growing need to empower consumers to find and subscribe to programs that meet their diverse interests, commented Allen Weiner, Vice President and Research Director at Gartner. “Searching and indexing these varied audio and video programs will not only benefit content-hungry consumers, it also adds legitimacy and velocity to this burgeoning space.

Podscope isn’t the first speech recognition search technology. HP’s Speechbot has been online for years in demo form using speech-recognition technology to create a searchable transcript. BlinkxTV which we featured here last December also uses speech-recognition technology to create searchable text transcripts.

Related Links

Podscope: New Search Engine Will Allow You to Keyword Search Every Word Spoken in a Podcast [SearchEngineWatch Blog]
Pod Catch [PodCatch.com]
BBC To Massively Expand Podcast Trials [iLoveRadio.org]
Podcast Lab [PodcastLab.com]
Podcast Alley [PodcastAlley.com]
Busy Podcasters Guide [iPodder Sourceforge]
Podcasting (aka How To Get Podcasts and Also Make Your Own) [Engadget.com]
Podcasting Power [MercuryNews.com]
A Look At Other Video Search Tools [SearchEngineWatch.com]

We ran a report on the uber-fast Internet2 college broadband network back in November last year. At the time the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) were said to be in tentative talks with the administrators of Internet2, hoping both to test next-generation video delivery projects and to monitor peer-to-peer piracy on the ultra high-speed network.

No great surprise that today the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed lawsuits against 405 students at 18 colleges in the U.S. , alleging that they are using the private-research network to trade pirated songs. According to the RIAA, students with access to Internet2 are increasingly using a file-sharing application called i2hub to “steal copyrighted songs and other works on a massive scale,” the organization said in a statement released yesterday.

“Students find i2hub especially appealing because they mistakenly believe their illegal file-sharing activities can’t be detected in the closed environment of the Internet2 network,” it continued.

To connect to this extremely fast network students need to download a free client from Direct Connect who’s website states, “Unlike other impersonal, server-driven file-sharing networks, Direct Connect offers a community-oriented, open, user-controlled network.”

Internet2 is part of the Abilene network and is essentially a vastly faster version of the Internet, a proving ground for high-bandwidth technologies. Speaking to Tech Republic last year Steve Corbato, the director of backbone network infrastructure for Internet2 said, “Abilene has become a necessity for research universities,and it’s not just about building a really fast network. University members rely on it to collaborate with colleagues and students around the world.”

The network used by Internet2 was launched in 1998 by a nonprofit consortium of 206 universities, 70 corporate partners (including IBM and Microsoft) and a number of government agencies, including the Library of Congress, to develop the next generation of Internet technologies.

The RIAA has sued more than 9,000 people for distributing songs using peer-to-peer software like Grokster and Morpheus in the past two years.

In a seperate action announced yesterday the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the world governing body for the international music industry said they were launching the biggest wave of legal actions against internet music file-sharers yet. New cases were launched against 963 individuals in 11 countries across Europe and Asia. Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, Iceland and Japan pursued illegal song-swappers for the first time

Related Links

RIAA Targets New Piracy Epidemic On Special High-Speed Campus Network [RIAA]
High-Speed US Net ‘Pirates’ Sued [BBC News]
RIAA Sues More Than 400 College Students Over Internet2 Downloads [MTV]
New Wave of Lawsuits to Hit ‘Illegal File Swappers’ [the Register]
Music File Sharers Face Biggest Round of Legal Actions Yet [IFPI]
Internet 2: 2004 And Beyond [Tech Republic]
MPAA Eyes Internet2 P2P Traffic [Buzzsonic News]

Quite a few things that we’ve missed whilst we’ve been ‘away’, even since the end of January and the last proper posts here under the old URL, the buzz surrounding ‘Podcasting ‘ has gone from a speculative whisper to a very loud shout, to the point where the grassroots internet broadcasting+P2P+RSS craze has even spawned its own Expo , ‘The Portable Media Expo’, which will debut in California this November.

Weblog pioneer Dave Winer probably explains it best here:

“Think how a desktop aggregator works. You subscribe to a set of feeds, and then can easily view the new files from all of the feeds together, or each feed separately. Podcasting works the same way, with one exception. Instead of reading the new content on a computer screen, you listen to the new content on any capable mp3 player on the computer or hardware player such as the iPod. Think of your player with podcasting as having a set of subscriptions that are checked regularly for updates.”

The latest variation on the Podcasting ‘theme’ is ‘Skypecasting’ which has been picking up mentions over the last few weeks on various websites with many people pulling their quotes from a spartan mention on the News Target website. Though the word seems to have been originally penned by Stuart Henshall on his Skype Journal back in December of last year where he revealed a straight forward how-to.

“The SkypeCasters’ recipe is simple and we have written it up in detail. Add together Skype, Virtual Audio Cables, Windows Sound Recorder, a simple Wav to mp3 converter MT_Enclosures and iPodder and you can be Podcasting later today! The solution will cost you $40.”

The Skype software was founded by Niklas Zennstr�m and Janus Friis, the creators of Kazaa and boasts 29 million users. Skype is the largest of the new breed of companies offering voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, which lets Internet connections double as telephone lines by treating calls no differently than e-mail.

The new development is being done without Skype’s active input. But Skype has made some of its source code public so developers can tinker with new applications, such as Skypecasting, Skype spokeswoman Kelly Larrabee told CNet, “We’re aware of this and encourage developers to help facilitate it,” she said.

Related Links

VoiP Gets the Podcast Treatment [CNet News]
Hot Recorder [HotRecorder.com]
Skype + Podcast Recorder = SkypeCasters [SkypeJournal.com]
iPodder [Sourceforge.net]
Skype + Podcast Recorder = SkypeCasters ( 8 page PDF instructions download) [Henshall.com]
Adam Currys Weblog [Curry.com]
Pod Show [PodShow.com]
iPodder Podcast Directory [iPodder.org]

There’s seems to be a split amongst the search engine cognoscenti as to wether Google has lost its crown to Yahoo, now that the expanding search giant has pulled up its socks with the purchase (in December 2002) and fine tuning of Inktomi. Here we’re not so sure as we tend to use both and keep an eye on the newly tweaked MSN Search too.

Still, Norwegian Asgeir S. Nilsen started search engine forums gossiping at the beginning of the month with an April fools joke that has taken on a life of its own. YahGooHoo!gle started as a post on geek news bible Slashdot announcing a Yahoo/Google merger.

The search site actually could be the answer to many web researchers prayers, comparing search results between the two market leaders and splitting the results across a framed results page. How long the site stays up without Yahoo and/or Google pulling the plug or setting the legal bulldogs onto the useful comparison site is anybody guess.

Related Search Resources

YaGoohoo!gle Blog [Yagoohoogle.com]
Comparing Google and Yahoo Search Results [Langreiter.com]
Search Wars are About to Get Personal [CNet News]
GoogleGuy [Googleguy.de]
Google vs Yahoo, the War of the Search Engines [MSNBC.com]
Search Engine Watch [SearchEngineWatch.com]