Tag Archive for 'mp3'

Zen audio hack

Published on 08/07/2011 in Blog. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Awhile back I acquired a Creative ZEN Stone mp3 player. It was a a little scuffed around the edges but otherwise a perfectly functional mp3 player. For some time I was using a pair of regular headphones but then I tried using in a pair of iPhone headphones (and then later HTC headphones). The results are somewhat weird. Take a listen:

Listen!
Original song: Fade to Daft by Look What I Did (download for free from here.) I had to record this by placing my headphones on my microphone for reasons that I’ll explain later.

You may not be able to hear it but it sounds like one of the channels is being muted, whilst the other sounds like it has an echo effect. Also, it sounds as though the bitrate has been reduced to about 24kbps!

At first I couldn’t understand why this was happening so I consulted fizzPOP (who have just started hack sessions again) and it’s apparently due to the rings on the headphone jack.

Headphone hack

Wikipedia, which is so obviously a reliable source, informs me that this is a TRRS plug, the extra ring being used for the microphone/control button. This extra ring is obviously interfering with the devices and making it sound glitchy. Naturally my first instinct was to record it, but this presented many problems.

First, in order to record the output of the player I needed a male to male 3.5mm cable that uses TRRS plugs. A quick Google search revealed that these don’t exist so I had to make my own.

Headphone hack

Some of thinnest wires in the world evar!

As I had discovered earlier, the headphones capable of reproducing this glitch are iPhone headphones so I soldered two of the cables for these together, essentially creating a male to male 3.5mm cable with TRRS plugs. Happy times! :-)

Or so I thought.

The problem I now still face is that the socket on my laptop is obviously capable of accepting TRRS plugs without glitches so the audio comes out clear when recorded via Audacity (well, it would be clearer were it not for my crappy soldering skills!).

This is where I require help from those more adept with audio than I. Is there a way to record the glitchy sound in the same “quality” as it is output from the mp3 player? The recording above was made by holding my headphones to my laptop microphone, which doesn’t faithfully reproduce the truly weird audio experience (though does produce a lo-fi aesthetic).

Hello Glitch

Published on 29/12/2009 in Art. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Using the same svg glitching techniques that I’ve come to love, today, with the help of Twitter folk, I created this rather short animation that compliments my new deviantART ID

My initial aim was glitch the video file itself but then I figured it’d be quite different to glitch each frame individually. To do this I created the original text in Inkscape and then created 52 copies of it. I then opened up the file in a text editor and began messing around with the numbers!

After the 17th or so version of the file it became hard to try and randomly replace numbers, so I turned to Twitter for some help.

I asked people to give me two random numbers, each between 0 and 99. I’d then modify an image using only those two numbers. Within minutes of asking I already was given quite a lot of numbers, so I began work on glitching. In the end I sporadically used the numbers that were given on each image. All of the results can be seen below:

Hello Glitch (by hellocatfood)

All but two of the frames from the animation in no particular order

The amount of variation you can get by just replacing a few numbers or changing a number from a negative to a positive is quite amazing.

For the sound I ran an mp3 file through MPeg Fucker, which is a nifty little script for warping sounds.

Songbird

Published on 06/12/2008 in Blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

There’s been a lot of hype surrounding the release of Songbird, the “…non-proprietary, cross platform, extensible tool that will help enable new ways to playback, manage, and discover music”. The reviews I’ve read all point to the customisation aspect of Songbird that makes it appealing.

Long ago I used FoxyTunes in Firefox to fetch song information and, more importantly, lyrics for my current song. This was great until Yahoo! acquired FoxyTunes and made the lyrics point away from the LyricWiki website to their own database of lyrics. I can understand why they’d do this as lyrics are owned by the respective record companies and as such you need to gain permission to reprint them. I can imagine LyricWiki being under a bit of pressure to legalise its database and I’m sure Yahoo! after acquiring FoxyTunes, wouldn’t want to bear the burden of being sued by everyone and their uncle. So, the LyricWiki association in FoxyTunes was removed I couldn’t get lyrics for lesser known artists such as Self, Kemopetrol or Reuben.

Songbird changes all of that. Through a third-party extension I can now browse the lyricwiki database amongst a whole host of other features. Like FoxyTunes you can browse pictures from flickr, videos from Youtube and recieve news from Google, but from within the music player itself. As it’s built from Firefox code it has the same browsing capabilities built in. Add to that the ability to download all available tracks on a page with a single click and what you essentially have is a Firefox based around music, in the same sense that Flock is Firefox with social networking.

Other features that I really like is the last.fm integration, global hotkeys (a reason I’d been using Winamp for so long) and iPod support, though not sure how long that will last as its legality is questionable.

On the flipside Songbird has a few problems to sort out. Like Firefox it eats RAM for breakfast, it is prone to freezing if you search through songs too quicklky and it can’t scrobble tracks from Shoutcast Radio stations, though this may be a problem with last.fm and not Songbird.

My overall view of Songbird is that which I have on all open source projects. It’s like a newborn child: in it’s early years it’ll take and take and give very little in return, but if you help it develop it’ll grow to be a mature, working piece of software… or child… or whatever.