digital-music on S Anand

Streaming audio to iOS via VLC

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 15:50:59 +0000

You can play a song on your PC and listen to it on your iPhone / iPad – converting your PC into a radio station. As with most things VLC related, it’s tough to figure out but obvious in retrospect.

The first thing to do is set up the MIME type for the streaming. This is a bug that has been fixed, but might not have made it into your version of VLC.

Go to Tools – Preferences.

Click on “All” to see all the settings.

Under Stream output – Access output – HTTP, set Mime to audio/x-mpeg.

At this point, you should restart VLC.

As I mentioned earlier, you might not need to do this if you have new enough a version of VLC that auto-detects the content’s MIME type.

Re-open VLC, and go to the Media – Stream menu.

Click Add and choose the file you want to stream. Then click on Stream.

Click Next.

Select HTTP and click Add.

Select Audio – MP3 and click on Stream.

At this point, the audio is being streamed at port 8080 of your machine. You can change the port and path in the menu above. (To find your local IP address, open the Command Prompt and type ipconfig.)

Open Safari on your iPhone or iPad, and visit http://your-ip-address:8080/

I haven’t figured out the right codec and MIME type to do this for videos yet, but hopefully will figure it out soon.

Comments

Shibu 19 Sep 2014 10:12 am: You should try out any of the light weight DLNA servers….

Playing sounds backwards

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 12:00:00 +0000

You can play a video backwards and still recognise the scenes quite well. Can you do that with sound?

I tried it on this Bryan Adams clip of Summer of ‘69 (mp3). When played backwards (mp3), it almost sounds like Arabic!

Instruments sound weird backwards too, like the guitar played backwards and drums played backwards.

It’s seems obvious once you see the wave file. The picture below shows the guitar. The sounds are clearly not symmetric left to right.

Whereas this guitar is a lot more symmetric, and doesn’t sound too different backwards.

So how come we can’t recognise sounds played backwards, but can recognise video played backwards? (Initially, I thought it was a trivial question. But I couldn’t find a trivial answer. The question may be subtler than it looks.)

Comments

B anand Prasad 25 Sep 2006 12:35 pm: its nothing to do with the technology Mr. Anand let me give an example dnana ….you just spell it… it sounds something like (d-na-na) now if we know that reversing it could(possibly) result in Anand — dnanA, then we could recognize all backward sounds its just that we r not acustomed to hear sounds backward. now practice daily some words which are often used like “good morning” “thanks” now say them to someone in a correct situation…90% of them will recognize it.. thats it my friend….sorry for reversing “Anand” name….its my name too
S Anand 25 Sep 2006 1:48 pm: Anand, if I’ve understood you right, we don’t recognise sounds backwards because we’re not used to hearing them. Agreed. My reasoning was: we’re not used to seeing things backwards either. How come we’re so much better at recognising those? A part of the answer is, we recognise sounds mainly by their movement in time, but images by their spread across space. But I wonder if there’s more to it…
ND 26 Sep 2006 3:07 am: I think this may have to do with the fact that seeing consists of detecting multiple facets like motion, pattern etc. The brain may have more data points decompose and “meaningfully” analyze backward. While hearing consists of analyzing the frequencies and amplitude implying lesser data points to “meaningfully” analyze backward with the same speed as visual stimuli. Caveat - Just my guess!
S Anand 26 Sep 2006 6:23 am: Hmm… ND, that’s a possibility! Certainly, in terms of information content, there’s more coming in visually than aurally.
ND 27 Sep 2006 12:42 pm: I asked three intelligent folks (an american, a german and an indian) to read “eye”, “racecar”, “malayalam” and “never odd or even” and waited for their reaction. Got blank stares! But it was sitter when explained. Guess some humans find it difficult to recognize a palindrome while reading and speaking. Taking a few million huge steps to infer humans normally normally don’t even try to process sound or reading alphabets backward. Is it easier to recognize a popular word like one’s name or a tune like Happy B’day when spoken or sung backward? A related front and back concept - I have always wondered why the bar showing s/w installing moves from left to right. And the same when uninstalling also. Is it convention? Why not show something more perceptive like a container getting filled or getting drained?
Sudeep Nair 20 Nov 2006 5:40 am: Anand, I feel that the fundamental difference between a reversed text and reversed sound is that the text is still completely visible to the eye at once, and so there is a subconscious process where the brain is able to decipher the text by trying out some permutations, whereas in case of sound, the individual notes reach the ears and disappear. They do not remain “static” or “stationary” for the brain to be able to try some reverse permuations of individual notes and identify the original sound. This reminds me of another observation that in case of English text, the reader is able to decipher the words if the first and last letter of every word is kept fixed and all other letters in between are jumbled. Msot raeedrs wlil be albe to udnreatsnd tihs snetncee atlohugh the lteerts are jbulmed.
Anonymous 20 Nov 2006 6:15 am: If we extend this logic from text to video, I think there is some degree of “persistence of vision” which allows the brain to “refer back”, unjumble and make sense of video images, but there is no persistence of sound. So in addition to anand prasad’s point about “familiarity of words”, and ND’s point about “more meaningful data points”, I would think that “persistence of images” is a major factor helping us understand visual images better than sound.

Winamp 5.1

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 12:00:00 +0000

WinAmp 5.1 leaked. Actually, the features were. The good part is, we will have 8X CD ripping in the free version, and ability to create WMA files. Wonder how the Predixis Smart Playlist Generator works. (It says “Mix your tracks based on what they sound like!”)

Comments

Dhar 31 Aug 2005 12:56 pm: Jet Audio too does some mixing based on what they sound like. Let me see if I can dig up that data. On the other hand, why use WinAmp for ripping? DB-Power-Amp is the way to go. Allows you to rip in various formats and no restrictions on the ripping speed.

PC iTunes downloads

Wed, 22 Oct 2003 12:00:00 +0000

PC iTunes hits 1 million downloads.

Apple also announced a promotion with PepsiCo Inc. starting in February in which 100 million winning bottle caps on certain Pepsi drinks grant the winner a free song.

When I read that, I said, “That’s 99 million dollars!”
Then I said, “No, it costs just the royalty… which may be a fixed cost anyway.”
Then I figured, “Lots of people will buy Pepsi. Maybe Pepsi paid Apple for it.”
Smart move, Jobs.

Apple iMusic store sells 1 million songs

Wed, 07 May 2003 12:00:00 +0000

Apple’s music store sold over 1 million songs in a week. To Mac users alone. At 99c (Rs 50) a song, I don’t see how that happened. Or why it’s better than P2P. via MetaFilter

Music swapping continues

Tue, 15 Oct 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Music-swapping continues. An RIAA spokesman says,

The problem would have been far worse if we had not stopped Napster. We would have seen far more venture capital companies taking a shot (at P2P sites) if Napster had succeeded.

However,

consumers are continually becoming more accustomed to downloading music for free

KaZaa’s the most popular right now, but not for long, perhaps.

KaZaa also faces a possible Napster-esque end. The recording industry has sued the service and court date looms in December

Download and burn songs on a CD

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 12:00:00 +0000

The music industry has taken a step away from the ridiculous. Now, on pressplay.com, you can download and burn songs on a CD for a fee. (The big deal is that, earlier, you could only stream and listen. For a fee.)

Real Jukebox

Sun, 01 Jul 2001 12:00:00 +0000

I listen to radio on Real Jukebox’s Radio Tuner. They offer 2,500 channels, including business talk channels and western classical (my interests).

Napster must pay up

Mon, 12 Feb 2001 12:00:00 +0000

Napster must pay.

MP3 CD players

Thu, 25 Jan 2001 12:00:00 +0000

MP3 CD players. The next big thing? It’s basically got a hard disk where you can put in any MP3s, and listen to it like a walkman. Why bother with cassettes?

I bought a tamil MP3 CD

Thu, 07 Dec 2000 12:00:00 +0000

I bought an MP3 CD from Tamil MP3 CD. You get about 150 songs for about Rs. 900, including shipping. Of course, you can only listen to it on a computer.