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Title:

Making Music Sound Better Online: Improving Flow and Presentation

Your vote:
Level:
Advanced
Type:
Panel
Category:
New Technology / Next Generation
Presenter:
Rusty Hodge, SomaFM.com internet radio
Description:
Most music services present music like a jukebox, not a professional DJ. Songs stacked serially, not flowing together for various reasons: tonal balance, loudness levels, speed and intensity. We discuss improving that presentation: automated mixing and segue tools; "harmonic key mixing" tracks; improving sound quality of MP3s and alternative Codecs; audio processing systems keeping subjective loudness and tone consistent.
Rusty Hodge
on 8/8/08
Audio Processing is something that all terrestrial radio stations use. Companies like Orban and Omnia develop very sophisticated real-time DSP systems that can be used to tailor the sound to be consistent. You all have noticed that one MP3 might sound much louder or softer than another. When you're listing to music in the background, you want the level to remain constant (but you don't necessarily want the dynamic range drastically reduced). We'll discuss ways to tailor the sound to specific audiences: someone listening on a home stereo will want a cleaner sound, while someone listening on cheap multimedia speakers at work may find things sound better with more aggressive audio processing. And we'll talk about audio processing for mobile devices as well, and even get into how pre-processing sound prior to running it through a CODEC (e.g. mp3, aac) can make the codec sound much better.
Rusty Hodge
on 8/8/08
I'm interested in hearing more comments from developers of "audio presentation tools". You know, software for playing back music; music scheduling tools, etc.
Chad Pranke
on 11/8/08
With so many different music formats and sources, I see this becoming an increasingly important topic. I also found it interesting that you mentioned harmonic mixing, as our Mixed In Key product detects the key of songs to facilitate this process. While we currently market to the club DJ community, it would be interesting to see if there were a way to apply our harmonic mixing software and techniques to internet radio.
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