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Alexandra IcecreamApps

How to Merge Audio: Online and Offline Solutions - Icecream Tech Digest - 0 views

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    Sometimes, when you wish to use some audio files as background music for your videos, slideshows, or presentations, the audio track might turn out to be shorter than the video. In such a case, merging two or more audio tracks … Continue reading →
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    Sometimes, when you wish to use some audio files as background music for your videos, slideshows, or presentations, the audio track might turn out to be shorter than the video. In such a case, merging two or more audio tracks … Continue reading →
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Download & Streaming : Audio Archive : Internet Archive - 0 views

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    "Download or listen to free music and audio This library contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Many of these audios and MP3s are available for free download. Check our FAQ for more information. Contribute Your Audio Please feel free to upload your audio (Uploaders, please set a Creative Commons license as part of the upload process, so people know what they can do with your audio - thanks!) "
Paul Merrell

Google Chrome Listening In To Your Room Shows The Importance Of Privacy Defense In Depth - 0 views

  • Yesterday, news broke that Google has been stealth downloading audio listeners onto every computer that runs Chrome, and transmits audio data back to Google. Effectively, this means that Google had taken itself the right to listen to every conversation in every room that runs Chrome somewhere, without any kind of consent from the people eavesdropped on. In official statements, Google shrugged off the practice with what amounts to “we can do that”.It looked like just another bug report. "When I start Chromium, it downloads something." Followed by strange status information that notably included the lines "Microphone: Yes" and "Audio Capture Allowed: Yes".
  • Without consent, Google’s code had downloaded a black box of code that – according to itself – had turned on the microphone and was actively listening to your room.A brief explanation of the Open-source / Free-software philosophy is needed here. When you’re installing a version of GNU/Linux like Debian or Ubuntu onto a fresh computer, thousands of really smart people have analyzed every line of human-readable source code before that operating system was built into computer-executable binary code, to make it common and open knowledge what the machine actually does instead of trusting corporate statements on what it’s supposed to be doing. Therefore, you don’t install black boxes onto a Debian or Ubuntu system; you use software repositories that have gone through this source-code audit-then-build process. Maintainers of operating systems like Debian and Ubuntu use many so-called “upstreams” of source code to build the final product.Chromium, the open-source version of Google Chrome, had abused its position as trusted upstream to insert lines of source code that bypassed this audit-then-build process, and which downloaded and installed a black box of unverifiable executable code directly onto computers, essentially rendering them compromised. We don’t know and can’t know what this black box does. But we see reports that the microphone has been activated, and that Chromium considers audio capture permitted.
  • This was supposedly to enable the “Ok, Google” behavior – that when you say certain words, a search function is activated. Certainly a useful feature. Certainly something that enables eavesdropping of every conversation in the entire room, too.Obviously, your own computer isn’t the one to analyze the actual search command. Google’s servers do. Which means that your computer had been stealth configured to send what was being said in your room to somebody else, to a private company in another country, without your consent or knowledge, an audio transmission triggered by… an unknown and unverifiable set of conditions.Google had two responses to this. The first was to introduce a practically-undocumented switch to opt out of this behavior, which is not a fix: the default install will still wiretap your room without your consent, unless you opt out, and more importantly, know that you need to opt out, which is nowhere a reasonable requirement. But the second was more of an official statement following technical discussions on Hacker News and other places. That official statement amounted to three parts (paraphrased, of course):
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  • 1) Yes, we’re downloading and installing a wiretapping black-box to your computer. But we’re not actually activating it. We did take advantage of our position as trusted upstream to stealth-insert code into open-source software that installed this black box onto millions of computers, but we would never abuse the same trust in the same way to insert code that activates the eavesdropping-blackbox we already downloaded and installed onto your computer without your consent or knowledge. You can look at the code as it looks right now to see that the code doesn’t do this right now.2) Yes, Chromium is bypassing the entire source code auditing process by downloading a pre-built black box onto people’s computers. But that’s not something we care about, really. We’re concerned with building Google Chrome, the product from Google. As part of that, we provide the source code for others to package if they like. Anybody who uses our code for their own purpose takes responsibility for it. When this happens in a Debian installation, it is not Google Chrome’s behavior, this is Debian Chromium’s behavior. It’s Debian’s responsibility entirely.3) Yes, we deliberately hid this listening module from the users, but that’s because we consider this behavior to be part of the basic Google Chrome experience. We don’t want to show all modules that we install ourselves.
  • If you think this is an excusable and responsible statement, raise your hand now.Now, it should be noted that this was Chromium, the open-source version of Chrome. If somebody downloads the Google product Google Chrome, as in the prepackaged binary, you don’t even get a theoretical choice. You’re already downloading a black box from a vendor. In Google Chrome, this is all included from the start.This episode highlights the need for hard, not soft, switches to all devices – webcams, microphones – that can be used for surveillance. A software on/off switch for a webcam is no longer enough, a hard shield in front of the lens is required. A software on/off switch for a microphone is no longer enough, a physical switch that breaks its electrical connection is required. That’s how you defend against this in depth.
  • Of course, people were quick to downplay the alarm. “It only listens when you say ‘Ok, Google’.” (Ok, so how does it know to start listening just before I’m about to say ‘Ok, Google?’) “It’s no big deal.” (A company stealth installs an audio listener that listens to every room in the world it can, and transmits audio data to the mothership when it encounters an unknown, possibly individually tailored, list of keywords – and it’s no big deal!?) “You can opt out. It’s in the Terms of Service.” (No. Just no. This is not something that is the slightest amount of permissible just because it’s hidden in legalese.) “It’s opt-in. It won’t really listen unless you check that box.” (Perhaps. We don’t know, Google just downloaded a black box onto my computer. And it may not be the same black box as was downloaded onto yours. )Early last decade, privacy activists practically yelled and screamed that the NSA’s taps of various points of the Internet and telecom networks had the technical potential for enormous abuse against privacy. Everybody else dismissed those points as basically tinfoilhattery – until the Snowden files came out, and it was revealed that precisely everybody involved had abused their technical capability for invasion of privacy as far as was possible.Perhaps it would be wise to not repeat that exact mistake. Nobody, and I really mean nobody, is to be trusted with a technical capability to listen to every room in the world, with listening profiles customizable at the identified-individual level, on the mere basis of “trust us”.
  • Privacy remains your own responsibility.
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    And of course, Google would never succumb to a subpoena requiring it to turn over the audio stream to the NSA. The Tor Browser just keeps looking better and better. https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Media Extractor :: TechnologyTo.com - 1 views

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    "A Firefox extension to extract the original audio file embedded in video files usig FFMpeg command-line tool. This extension can extract the original audio file out of video files and hence the original quality audio will be obtained. It is also possible to convert the extracted audio files to the famous MP3 format."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

The Linux Digital DJ - 0 views

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    "BeatForce a computer DJ system for two players with independent playlists, song databases, mixers, samplers, et cetera BpmDj very interesting set of programs for the Linux DJ DBMix software DJ digital audio mixing system DJ Krazy a neat MP3/CD mixer for the Linux DJ in us all... DJPlay "aims to be a high-class live DJing application for Linux" Final Scratch pro-audio computerized DJ system from Stanton Magnetics GDAM Geoff & Dave's Audio Mixer, a new mixer for the Linux digital DJ Jay'O'Rama cool DJ tool for PCM/MP3/OGG playback and manipulation Mixxx a cool DJ mixer from the Andersen brothers MP3Mixer a system for mixing multiple MPEG audio streams in realtime Oolaboola virtual turntable fun with Eric Tiedemann's "open-source cyber-shamanic noise-maker" OpenJay dedicated site for open-source DJs OpenJay Development Krew Forum a site dedicated to discussing "...problems, code, techniques, tips & tricks and all issues related to the computer DJing world" UltraMixer very cool virtual DJ mixing software, requires Java terminatorX enables hip-hop style "scratching" of WAV files "
Paul Merrell

WG Review: Internet Wideband Audio Codec (codec) - 0 views

  • According to reports from developers of Internet audio applications and operators of Internet audio services, there are no standardized, high-quality audio codecs that meet all of the following three conditions: 1. Are optimized for use in interactive Internet applications. 2. Are published by a recognized standards development organization (SDO) and therefore subject to clear change control. 3. Can be widely implemented and easily distributed among application developers, service operators, and end users. There exist codecs that provide high quality encoding of audio information, but that are not optimized for the actual conditions of the Internet; according to reports, this mismatch between design and deployment has hindered adoption of such codecs in interactive Internet applications.
  • The goal of this working group is to develop a single high-quality audio codec that is optimized for use over the Internet and that can be widely implemented and easily distributed among application developers, service operators, and end users. Core technical considerations include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following: 1. Designing for use in interactive applications (examples include, but are not limited to, point-to-point voice calls, multi-party voice conferencing, telepresence, teleoperation, in-game voice chat, and live music performance) 2. Addressing the real transport conditions of the Internet as identified and prioritized by the working group 3. Ensuring interoperability with the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), including secure transport via SRTP 4. Ensuring interoperability with Internet signaling technologies such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Session Description Protocol (SDP), and Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP); however, the result should not depend on the details of any particular signaling technology
Alexandra IcecreamApps

Best Free Audio Converters for Windows - Icecream Tech Digest - 0 views

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    With great power comes great responsibility and with fast development of media technologies comes a wide variety of media formats. Each audio format has its own significant features: some maintain excellent quality, some offer compact size, some can be played … Continue reading →
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    With great power comes great responsibility and with fast development of media technologies comes a wide variety of media formats. Each audio format has its own significant features: some maintain excellent quality, some offer compact size, some can be played … Continue reading →
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

How to use FFMpeg to do simple audio conversion - 0 views

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    "Here's a simple FFmpeg how to that will cover just a portion of the framework's abilities. We will see how you can use the terminal to perform simple conversions of various audio file types including all popular and widely available formats"
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    "Here's a simple FFmpeg how to that will cover just a portion of the framework's abilities. We will see how you can use the terminal to perform simple conversions of various audio file types including all popular and widely available formats"
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Sub Pop artist creates music-streaming site to mock Pandora, Spotify | Ars Technica [# ... - 0 views

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    "On Tuesday, Josh Tillman, the lead singer and songwriter of the band Father John Misty, announced a phony, satirical music-streaming service called Streamline Audio Protocol, or, better put, SAP. ... On the site, Tillman calls his music-delivery system "a new signal-to-audio process by which popular albums are 'sapped' of their performances, original vocal, atmosphere, and other distracting affectations so the consumer can decide quickly and efficiently whether they like a musical composition, based strictly on its formal attributes, enough to spend money on it. ..."
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    "On Tuesday, Josh Tillman, the lead singer and songwriter of the band Father John Misty, announced a phony, satirical music-streaming service called Streamline Audio Protocol, or, better put, SAP. ... On the site, Tillman calls his music-delivery system "a new signal-to-audio process by which popular albums are 'sapped' of their performances, original vocal, atmosphere, and other distracting affectations so the consumer can decide quickly and efficiently whether they like a musical composition, based strictly on its formal attributes, enough to spend money on it. ..."
Paul Merrell

Microsoft Demos Real-Time Translation Over Skype - Slashdot - 1 views

  • "Today at the first annual Code Conference, Microsoft demonstrated its new real-time translation in Skype publicly for the first time. Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft's VP of Skype and Lync, compares the technology to Star Trek's Universal Translator. During the demonstration, Pall converses in English with a coworker in Germany who is speaking German. 'Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition.'"
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    Haven't yet explored to see what's beneath the marketing hype. And I'm less than excited about the Skype with its NSA tendrils being the vehicle of audio translations of human languages. But given the progress in: [i] automated translations of human texts; [ii] audio screenreaders; and [iii] voice-to-text transcription, this is one we saw coming. Slap the three technologies together and wait until processing power catches up to what's needed to produce a marketable experience. After all, the StarTrek scriptwriters saw this coming too.   Ray Kurzweil, now at Google, should get a lot of the pioneer credit here. His revolutionary optical character recognition algorithms soon found themselves redeployed in text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition technology. From Wikipedia: "Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer Kurzweil K250 capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition." Not bad for a guy the same age as my younger brother. But Microsoft's announcement here may be more vaporware than hardware in production and lines of executable code. Microsoft has a long history of vaporware announcements to persuade potential customers to hold off on riding with the competition.  And the Softies undoubtedly know that Google's human language text translation capabilities are way out in front and that the voice to text and text to speech API methods have already found a comfortable home in Android and Chromebook. What does Microsoft have that's ready to ship if anything? I'll check it out tomorrow. 
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Apps/EasyTAG - GNOME Wiki! - 1 views

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    "EasyTAG is a simple application for viewing and editing tags in audio files. It supports MP3, MP2, MP4/AAC, FLAC, Ogg Opus, Ogg Speex, Ogg Vorbis, MusePack, Monkey's Audio, and WavPack files. And works under Linux or Windows. "
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    "EasyTAG is a simple application for viewing and editing tags in audio files. It supports MP3, MP2, MP4/AAC, FLAC, Ogg Opus, Ogg Speex, Ogg Vorbis, MusePack, Monkey's Audio, and WavPack files. And works under Linux or Windows. "
Alexandra IcecreamApps

All You Need to Know about WebM Format - Icecream Tech Digest - 0 views

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    WebM format was first introduced by Google in 2010. Since this video format is based on the Matroska container, it manages to support great video quality. As for the audio streams, it supports Vorbis audio. WebM format is initially designed … Continue reading →
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    WebM format was first introduced by Google in 2010. Since this video format is based on the Matroska container, it manages to support great video quality. As for the audio streams, it supports Vorbis audio. WebM format is initially designed … Continue reading →
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

YouTube launch royalty-free audio library - Music Industry - The Music Network - 0 views

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    "27 September 2013 by Nastassia Baroni Sick of uploading that awesome video of your living room twerking only to see is indiscriminately taken down before the likes start rolling in? YouTube has a solution. The company today announced a new royalty-free audio library that allows filmmakers to select and download tracks without risking copyright infringement."
Paul Merrell

Exploring HTML 5's Audio/Video Multimedia Support - 0 views

  • Because HTML 4.0 essentially was a "frozen" version, the specific mechanism for displaying content has been very much format dependent (e.g., Apple QuickTime Movies and Flash video) and usually relies upon tags with varying parameters for passing the relevant information to the server. As a result, video and audio embedding on web pages has become something of a black art . Its perhaps not surprising then that the <audio> and <video> tags were among the first features to be added to the HTML 5 specification, and these seem to be the first elements of the HTML 5 specification that browser vendors implemented. These particular elements are intended to enable the browser to work with both types of media in an easy-to-use manner. An included support API gives users finer-grained control.
  • Theoretically, the <video> and <audio> elements should be able to handle most of the codecs currently in use. In practice, however, the browsers that do currently support these elements do so only for the open source Ogg Vorbis and Theora standards.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

GNU Gnash - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF) - 0 views

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    "GNU Gnash is the GNU Flash movie player - Flash is an animation file format pioneered by Macromedia which continues to be supported by their successor company, Adobe. Flash has been extended to include audio and video content, and programs written in ActionScript, an ECMAScript-compatible language. Gnash is based on GameSWF, and supports most SWF v7 features and some SWF v8 and v9." [installing GNU Gnash http://gnashdev.org/?q=node/11]
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    "GNU Gnash is the GNU Flash movie player - Flash is an animation file format pioneered by Macromedia which continues to be supported by their successor company, Adobe. Flash has been extended to include audio and video content, and programs written in ActionScript, an ECMAScript-compatible language. Gnash is based on GameSWF, and supports most SWF v7 features and some SWF v8 and v9."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Where in the world is Richard Stallman? - Free Software Foundation - working together f... - 0 views

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    "President and founder of the Free Software Foundation Richard Stallman has an extensive travel schedule and frequently gives talks about free software all over the world. If you would like Richard Stallman (RMS) to speak at your event, please contact rms-assist@gnu.org. If you would like RMS to come to your school and speak, try asking professors in IT-related departments if they would like to bring him. They can contact rms-assist@gnu.org. You can find video and audio recordings of many of Dr. Stallman's speeches and lectures at audio-video.gnu.org."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Denegada judicialmente la primera orden del Ministerio de Cultura de cierre d... - 1 views

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    "El pasado martes se celebró la primera vista en España para decidir el cierre de una web que el Ministerio de Cultura había declarado ilícita. El bloqueo completo de la web goear.com, con los 4.000.000 de archivos de audio de todo tipo que aloja, ha sido denegado por el juzgado que debía ejecutarla. La petición de la Comisión Sinde-Wert, de haberse aprobado, habría supuesto el bloqueo de miles de audios difundidos por partidos políticos, emisoras de radio online, asociaciones y organizaciones no gubernamentales. Habría supuesto también la retirada de la música de más de 50.000 artistas de todo el mundo que usan Goear para la difusión de sus propias obras."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Open Source Replacements for Audio/Video Apps - Datamation - 1 views

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    "The best open source apps for audio and video, whether you're creating or consuming multimedia content."
Paul Merrell

Opinion: Berkeley Can Become a City of Refuge | Opinion | East Bay Express - 0 views

  • The Berkeley City Council is poised to vote March 13 on the Surveillance Technology Use and Community Safety Ordinance, which will significantly protect people's right to privacy and safeguard the civil liberties of Berkeley residents in this age of surveillance and Big Data. The ordinance is based on an ACLU model that was first enacted by Santa Clara County in 2016. The Los Angeles Times has editorialized that the ACLU's model ordinance approach "is so pragmatic that cities, counties, and law enforcement agencies throughout California would be foolish not to embrace it." Berkeley's Peace and Justice and Police Review commissions agreed and unanimously approved a draft that will be presented to the council on Tuesday. The ordinance requires public notice and public debate prior to seeking funding, acquiring equipment, or otherwise moving forward with surveillance technology proposals. In neighboring Oakland, we saw the negative outcome that can occur from lack of such a discussion, when the city's administration pursued funding for, and began building, the citywide surveillance network known as the Domain Awareness Center ("DAC") without community input. Ultimately, the community rejected the project, and the fallout led to the establishment of a Privacy Advisory Commission and subsequent consideration of a similar surveillance ordinance to ensure proper vetting occurs up front, not after the fact. ✖ Play VideoPauseUnmuteCurrent Time 0:00/Duration Time 0:00Loaded: 0%Progress: 0%Stream TypeLIVERemaining Time -0:00 Playback Rate1ChaptersChaptersdescriptions off, selectedDescriptionssubtitles off, selectedSubtitlescaptions settings, opens captions settings dialogcaptions off, selectedCaptionsAudio TrackFullscreenThis is a modal window.Caption Settings DialogBeginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Ardour 5.0 Open Source DAW Officially Released with Tabbed User Interface - 0 views

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    "Now available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows OSes Aug 12, 2016 18:40 GMT · By Marius Nestor · Share: Currently one of the best cross-platform, open-source and freely distributed DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software pieces, Ardour has received today, August 12, 2016, a major milestone that introduces a multitude of new features and countless improvements."
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