Toluu

City of Bits Blog

Usability, user experience, technology, ethnography, design, the workplace, e-government and public policy, from a UK perspective

Sound and vision These days I'm generating far mo...April 25 2006

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

Windows Live This results display for Windows Live...March 17 2006

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 Env...March 6 2006

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 St...February 28 2006

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 f...February 28 2006

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