Envisioned BlackBox, got iShuffle

Almost exactly two years ago, I was predicting that Apple would do a palmtop computer in 2005. Sadly, I was wrong–and here I am in 2005 with an iPod Shuffle in my pocket. It’s a bare bones mp3 player, nothing more, almost less. But, aside from not being a fully featured 3G handset+PDA+media station, it does what it’s supposed to do very well. There are only three annoying things about it:

• Updates through iTunes–an application that I otherwise love–are sluggish. I know that updating other iPods isn’t sluggish at all, so probably it has to do with the fact that the shuffle uses a flash memory. But it’s annoying nevertheless since it keeps you from updating it. Apple should figure out a way to multi-thread things.
• The headphones that come with it have a plug that sticks straight out about 10-15 mm–that’s way to much, and I’m wondering how they can have missed out on this. It’s bound to break the connector sooner or later (I was already close). Luckily I can use my beloved HD-25 with it (with a custom made plug).
• There is no way of fixing the headphone cord to the lanyard the way you can with e.g. the Jens of Sweden players, which is also unbelievable. With Apple being against cords, I can’t see why they messed this up.

That said, it’s still a neat piece of hardware. Now it’s up to Apple to save 2005 by releasing a subnotebook. I imagine a plain 12” book, no CD/DVD, half the weight of the current 12”. All the other players have one, and Apple would be stupid to ignore such a large segment of businesspeople and students, who would want a device like this from it. Hell, even I, a mac user for 20 years, have cravings for the Vaio 505 extreme…

 March 31st, 2005 | 2 Comments »

Beatport 2.0 Comments

Beatport is a fairly new online music store for dance/electronica, created by my favorite music software company.

The problem is that Beatport — in it’s current state — sucks pretty badly. Since I’m such a fan of their music production software, and since they actually sponsor me with products, I thought I should give them some honest feedback from a consumer/web developer point of view. And to really make them hurry up with implementing my proposed changes, I publish the mail I wrote to them here:

“Hi,
I greatly appreciate the beatport initiative. There is a huge demand for good online stores for electronic music and dance music.

Beatport got even better with the recent 2.0 release, but I still feel it didn’t address some of its most important inherent problems. I’m probably quite an optimal customer — I love electronic music and mp3s, and I’ve got a credit card loaded with money to spend on good music! Even so, I got fairly frustrated when trying to use your store the other day. So I though I’d better give you some comments and advice, from a developer’s and customer’s point of view.

1) I quickly discovered a track on beatport that I wanted to point a friend to. Too bad it turns out there is no way of doing so! There seem to be no permanent, unique links attached to each track/release/artist/label! That effectively shuts out the whole community of people who put up their thoughts online and who pass valuable links to each other (bloggers 20m+, special interest groups etc) which in turn has a sizable impact on your sales! Recent research shows that this community is indeed very important for online stores, and to neglect its existence is arguably a very stupid business decision.

Don’t believe me? Read this.

Talking about links, I believe they should be pretty. That is: beatport.com/artist/photek/release/1 or beatport.com/label/basic_channel/ is much better than beatport.com/track_id.cgi? id=23967764234&viewmode=artist&a=photek

Also bidirectional links (a.k.a. trackbacks) are nice (and the main reason why blogs work). Let users trackback, rate and comment on the beatport releases and your sales would increase, maybe double.

2) After I signed up on beatport, I started getting annoying news mails with long ‘top lists’ of tracks that didn’t interest me. please provide a number of rss-feeds for relevant topics instead (new releases in each genre, new releases by a specific label etc). Think about building a recommendation system.

3) It doesn’t remember my username, and it doesn’t keep me logged in (by using a cookie).

4) Improve the search function. Not my intention to sound rude, but it is broken as it stands today.

“Flash does away with the whole browser interface paradigm, in effect creating a new application within the application”

4) Lastly, it is still my opinion that Flash sucks. It’s a good idea, but given the implementation and the current state of the web, it sucks. And I’m not saying this because I don’t know how Flash works nor because I never worked with it. On the contrary, I did a few projects with Flash and I’ve learned to appreciate it for some tasks, but *far* from all.

Needless to say, I was quite disappointed when I loaded up beatport 2.0 for the first time and realized that now *everything* is Flash. (it is still better than the godforsaken flash-multi-framesets it replaced though.)

But it still sucks, for the following reasons (among others):

• The GUI doesn’t fit on my screen (1024*768 12” powerbook), so I have to scroll up and down constantly.
• It doesn’t flex, and there is no way of using the keyboard for navigation. very frustrating, especially when browsing long lists of artists.
• It does away with the whole browser interface paradigm, in effect creating a new application within the application (that means re-learning the navigation, back buttons etc.)
• You lose the benefits of standard things that web browsers do for you (like remembering usernames, passwords on sites, there goes another part of your sales, due to users who forgot their passwords. You can’t search the page for info, something people who search for e.g. a track on the web often do — and you can’t bookmark things. Bookmark?!! Yes, bookmarks are coming back in a big way, I’m using del.icio.us myself. )
• search engines won’t index your catalog
• It’s slow and buggy on Firefox for Mac OS X (yes, even with the latest plugin) and it doesn’t work well on Linux.

Here I’d like to put in a good word for simple no-frames XHTML+CSS with a bunch of nifty javascripting on top. Nowadays all major browsers support background loading of data (used to be one of the major advantages of using Flash). Since you are only using pixelated graphics (the text is usually annoyingly small, and there is no way of changing that, again due to Flash), users would hardly notice the change in terms of visual experience. In fact there is hardly nothing you couldn’t do with HTML (provided you are using a nice server technology like j2ee or so) that you are doing with your Flash app now (yes, you could still use a little flash-applet for the track preview-thingie).

All in all, I think beatport is a great initiative — I surely hope I didn’t sound too negative! I really like your other products (already eagerly awaiting the new Kontakt 2.0 release, which seems brilliant).

So finally, I wish you good luck with the future development of beatport.com, and I really hope you take some of my views into account!”

 March 28th, 2005 | 18 Comments »

Around the world

I’m in the middle of some kind of tour. As I’m writing this, I’m on a plane to Osaka, Japan. Siberia is on my right.
Recently I visited Switzerland, played at the Montreux Jazz Festival on the World Wide night with DJ Ghe. People in the business say this is one of the most professionally arranged festivals in the world. At least I haven’t experienced anything better. We had a beautiful view from our hotel balcony. Our set was filmed, streamed and shown live on big screens all over the festival. We got served Champagne right after. I hanged out backstage with Jamiroquai and Roy Ayers. Stunning women everywhere. Even the girls who interviewed me were pretty damn good looking.

It all made you feel like a star for a day.

Forss in underwear, Alex from Jazzanova in
Montreux.

Then I paid a visit to friends in Zürich who run west95, a newly opened atelier/showroom.

“I have to work on my attention span…”

They made a cozy party there, where I had the opportunity to play. The beat from Journeyman just kicked in when the PA broke down. I managed to snap a photo of the surprised crowd, while a replacement amplifier was arranged for.

It’s the first and hopefully not the last time I take down a sound system.

In the meantime, I don’t get things done — and it’s frustrating. Neither the new site nor the philosophy essays are done. Can’t focus, especially not when there’s wifi around — which there will soon be on planes too.

Instead I consume articles and papers, read blogs, check out sites and applications. It seems I’m not alone with this problem.

Surprised crowd at west95 after sound system
failure.

It is clear I have to work on my attention span, but it’s also clear that computers need to get better at aiding the user to stay focused. I want to be able to tell my computer on a global level that I’m working on this project, that needs to be done at this date, involving these people etc. The computer could help me stay on focus by simply filtering out mails, IMs and documents based on these criterias.

Unfortunately, this involves changing quite radically a lot of the current application frameworks and interface paradigms.

I will write more about these issues in future articles, but for now I’d better just learn meditation instead.

 July 31st, 2003 | 3 Comments »

Caching Music, Cashing in for Music

This essay was published in the Aula Exposure Book. I’m proud to be in such good company!

It was long since I bought my last record. Actually, as far as I can recall, buying music over the last years was driven by my social rather than musical interests — either I bought the record of some artist who’s gig I just attended, or I might have bought a CD or an LP for somebody’s birthday just for the sake of being able to hand over something tangible.
Buying music for me, as the poor student I am, has become something special — something I do to gain social credibility in some context.

Caching music

In the meantime I’ve accumulated a rather large library of music files on my hard drive. But to call it a library actually gives the wrong impression — it works much more like a sort of cache. Since my Powerbook doesn’t have enough space on its hard drive, I am forced to constantly overlook this music “cache” so that it stays within its limits. As the cache is fed with new material, I have to consider what to delete in order to make space. This is a sort of evolutionary process where I review one track after another, trying to estimate a “track value”. I might think not only “Do I like this track?”, but also “Do I know anybody else who has it?” or “is it rare or not?” or “Did I make a considerable effort in acquiring it?” before “trimming the cache”. I also look at play counts — a low play count means “dead bytes”, but conversely a high play count might tell me I ought to delete the track to make way for some variation.

I’ve established a sort of client-server way of thinking about music consumption. All in all, it’s about accessibility; a track on the local drive is instantly available, while a track on my friend’s server takes a few minutes to download. If a track is not available there, file sharing networks will do the trick. Buying music seldom comes into question.

It happens that I backup music, but I never actually use those backups — mainly because it would probably take longer to find something there than to find it on Direct Connect. Actually, if I lost my machine today, I’d probably just start rebuilding the musical cache from scratch.

The death of the record collectors

Sadly, the powerful combination of love, nostalgia and hunter-gatherer instinct that drives many traditional record collectors, does not apply for digital. The love definitely gets a different, weaker character when there is no tangible object to love. Nostalgia suffers because digital is essentially timeless, anti-nostalgic. The hunter-gatherer instinct gradually evaporates as search engines evolve — it becomes clear that there is nothing left to hunt for. Hunting, which used to be exciting, is replaced by a not very dramatic “getting”.

The romantic era of the record collectors is over. Records stores are going. Instead most of us are transforming into overloaded, sloppy and half-enthusiastic musical consumers. We’ve forgotten about the bliss of ownership — at best we maintain well-sorted local nodes of the Great P2P Net, which is basically self-organizing anyway. On-demandness, always-onness and intangibleness naturally annihilates exclusiveness, intenseness and hapticness; but the latter are all highly valued properties of musical experience.

In short, the era of physically packaged music is over — and this affects our relationship to music in general. As a counter reaction, the packaging — the framing which is a presupposition for the emergence of value — desperately tries to find new forms. It is being artificially reconstructed; over empathized and broadened. A wall of hype and merchandise is built around a musical core that, at least in its digital form of today, looses market value the more you copy it.

Then why pay for music?

Now, I am not saying this development is unhealthy and ought to be stopped. I think most of the possibilities new technology bring for music are good. I think it’s the paradigm shift — the critical time when new values replace old ones — that hurts our feelings.

Still it’s a fact: neither me, nor my friends, have the money to pay the artists. It’s quite clear why; we already spent our cash on technology and communication. Computer manufacturers, telcos and ISP:s are getting the money we once gave to the music industry. But this might also be a subject to change. As infrastructure matures and storage resources saturates our needs, then the market will stagnate and we’ll again have cash for music.

But to get me to pay, there has to be something even better than the iTunes Music Store.
It’s hard to compete with file sharing apps today because of their simplicity — most searches are sub second and download times are short. It took me longer to find and download an Eminem album on the iTunes Store than it took me to get it off Direct Connect. And yes, there was cover art to go with it on DC too, plus I got some inspiration from browsing around the guy’s song library.

“I’ve established a sort of client-server way of thinking about music consumption”

Now, if file sharing apps would implement the cache model and rareness indexing I’m currently emulating manually, so that songs I never play are purged automatically from my local node and downloaded again at will or automatically when their rareness indexes drops below critical, and if they could implement a way of auto-discovering other people with similar tastes by comparing my collection with theirs, it would make it even harder for commercial alternatives. Not to say if they’d come up with a cross-P2P search engine working on Google principles — “Yoodle”!

Cashing in

But, there are things you can only do with legal, DRM-enabled systems, and those things are definitely the ones that should be played upon by the providers.
For me, there are four key reasons for buying music instead of copying it. In short, it’s about karma, credibility, quality and community.

Karma is about feeling good by doing the right thing; to help poor artists and struggling labels by giving them my money. But before giving, I tend to estimate: how established/commercial is the artist/label? On the web, where I have the option of not paying, this estimation is crucial — and this means small artists/labels are more likely to get cash.

Credibility is the darker side of Karma — it’s my payoff for supporting the artist. It would be great if there was a way of leaving a note with my transaction saying “Hey guys, you rock!” followed by a link to my site. This would work especially well with smaller bands, where the number of buyers can be counted in hundreds. Reading these “oneliners” can be amusing and helpful, both for artists and fans.

Quality is something I would pay money for. If I could get a 96KHz/24Bit/512Kbs version of a track I would pay more. I’d also pay more for an album if there were additional value adds such as exclusive interviews, videos, interactive content, liner notes, PDF covers and so on. Being able to get multiple formats of a track on demand would be useful, especially when network infrastructure matures (listen.com are currently working on an audio streaming service for 3G).

Community — If there was a way of establishing a more intimate relation between me, the artist and other fans, I’d be interested. What if I got access to a special community site when I bought an album? I’d be able to ask questions, get access to musical raw material so that I could experiment with remixes, get exclusive previews and offers. In general, the intangibleness, anonymousness and isolatedness of digital has to be tackled.

What the future holds

There are numerous proposed ways of dealing with the dilemma the music industry is now facing, ranging from ultra strict DRM to ISPs-as-distributors to pay-by-default to tax-driven models. There is not one solution in sight, and I hope it stays that way. It would be wonderful if all these systems could coexist. After all, each of these models have their own problems, and they’ll probably all get hacked and tweaked as we go.

In the meantime, I’ll keep on caching music,
cashing in from record sales and hopefully I’ll be able to spend some cash on good music as soon as there is a decent way of doing so…

 June 30th, 2003 | No Comments »

Back to the future

Finally back in Stockholm after two years, writing an essay on future GUIs at the Faculty of Philosophy, Södertörn University College.
The album is done. Promo copies are going out.
Have been working like a dog the last month–and I’ve lived like a dog too for that matter. A nomadic dog.

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to meet Mark, who convinced me to mix every track on the album from scratch in his studio.
It has been a lot of work–but it has really saved the sound of the album, so I’m nothing but happy about it.

Doglife.

Mark has a wonderful combination of digital and analog equipment. We have beefed up numerous beats by running them through his API with wild eq settings. You just can’t do that with digital. If you try, very quickly things starts sounding like representations of the real thing.
“Oh, that sounds like a tape delay”, people who listen to music will say, because they often know how a tape delay works. They know that there is a vintage, slightly unreliable mechanism involved in the production of the delayed sound. They can tell the difference between a real tape and a mimicked one–just like most people can tell the difference between fake marble and real.
That’s the whole dilemma of digital–it tries to, and it has to, mimic analog counterparts that has a long tradition with them.

Say you want to achieve distortion–in the analog world you can do it in many ways, basically it means sending an over-driven signal into something, so that when it comes out, it will be distorted. The distortion will get a different color and body depending on what you send the signal through.
With analog, there are no bandwidth or dithering problems. You can use really extreme settings and it will sound extreme–but still “good” in the sense that you won’t end up with a “reduced” or “flattened” sound that “sounds processed”.

With digital you never know exactly what you get–professionals talk about a “Black Box”-effect.
They refer to the fact that there are undocumented algorithms in most plugins that might alter the fundamental character of your sounds in a very dull, predictable way.
An example: the highly regarded Waves Renaissance plugins; because they all are all based on the same internal architecture, they all narrow and distort the stereo image of your sound in a very characteristic way as soon as they are applied–even when they aren’t doing anything!

“The whole dilemma of digital–it tries to mimic analog counterparts that has a long tradition with them”

Another example: Logic (before version 5) deducted 1 bit in the global mix-engine for every extra bus that you added to your mixer, which would gradually reduce sound clarity. It wasn’t documented, so people got gradually more disappointed with their mixes–without knowing why!

My music already lacks context. It suffers from a kind of post-modern sickness, with sounds coming from many disparate sources. Some people can’t listen to it because they start to focus too much on the individual sounds–they desperately try to identify and classify them. I’m not saying this is a bad thing–I think that is an interesting part of the music. That’s what got me hooked on sampling in the first place.
But I’m not sure I would have coped with contextlessness of my old mixes. So thanks again for the hard work, Mark!

Anyway, I’m looking forward to spring in Stockholm–and live gigs in summer. Will do a serious update of the Forss Official Site when the album is released in June.

The 21 jun, 03 my blog participated in the “Blog Ta Musicque” event organized by these guys!
More than 60 bloggers will participate. Some examples will be interesting : Kill Me Again will create a song for this day and will post it on his blog, Philippe Allard will cover the Music Day in Brussels by moblogging, and on a Wiki page Christophe Ducamp will create a collaborative page about Joe Strummer.

 April 17th, 2003 | 3 Comments »

Interview for Berliner Gazette

This an english translation of an interview I did for Berlin based e-zine Berliner Gazette (only available through e-mail).

How did you end up in Berlin and what are you doing here?

The main reason why I decided to go to Berlin was because I was promised a record deal at Sonar Kollektiv when I was here in summer 2000. Since then, I knew I would move here as soon as I had finished my studies in Stockholm.

After I came here in the beginning of 2001, I worked at gate5 as an interaction designer for a year.
I soon realized that it wasn’t realistic to produce an album while working full time, so I decided to save up and go for the on-the-road option instead. During 2002 I travelled around in Europe for 9 months and when I came back (in November last year) I had about 90% of the album done. I’m really happy now that I took my time and did something different. In our society it’s easy to get absorbed by comfort — and that leads boredom and lack of inspiration. Basically I tried to artificially break out of that (if only for a year), by putting myself in strange — sometimes awkward — places and situations. I still remember sleeping on the street in Milan, Powerbook close to my chest…

Aside from making music I’ve been promoting the Indyfund, our “project funding community”. Basically we are a bunch of people (about 170 now) supporting each others projects.

As I write this, the album (entitled “Soulhack”) will be mastered in a week. When it’s done, I will go back to Stockholm and write a paper in the philosophy/computer science field.
I will return to Berlin this summer when the album is released, and then I will probably go on tour over summer.

On the Forssfolio you mention that you are interested in philosophy — how does it come into play in your projects?

Studying philosophy is a luxury. It makes you to think hard about interesting questions/problems which are avoided or forgotten in everyday life.

The idea of Indyfund formed during discussions we had when I was studying. I do not think the idea would have come to life otherwise, because we wouldn’t have had a possibility to think so deeply about organizational forms/social problems as we had then.

“I still remember sleeping on the street in Milan, Powerbook close to my chest…”

Philosophy definitely plays a part — but In the end I think realizing projects is about 10% inspiration/philosophy and 90% down-to-earth work.
I’m looking forward to do research on more computer science oriented philosophy. I really hope to be able to create an interesting overlap.
Probably that means my future work will be more influenced/tied to philosophy.

How/when/why did you start Indyfund?

As I mentioned above, there was an interesting situation back in 2000 with many creative, young and idealistic people in one place. I merely collected good ideas and arranged them/us.
The reason we started thinking about organizing ourselves in the first place, was because we were annoyed by the difficulties involved in running independent projects. We quickly identified that the most important external factors in succeeding with such a project was good context/community and adequate funding/resources.

It’s a sign of our time that people avoid becoming part of organizations. This applied to us as well — so we found it very important to not create yet another “underground” organization with vague goals, regular meetings, traditional board etc. Instead we wanted:

• An organization as non-obtrusive and discreet as possible — Indyfund doesn’t have a logo, and we avoid talking excessively in public about it.
• A platform that would augment people’s social networks
• To fund projects in a non-beurocratically way. Today we fund projects in real time using direct democratic methods (more on this here).
• To enable people to work with projects more efficiently
• The framework/organisational form to be clearly set and formulated from the start (so that we wouldn’t have to deal with endless discussions on “how to develop/organize ourselves” etc.)
• An international network with “sub-communities” forming sporadically.
• Minimal administration. Indyfund is entirely web based and is administered by a handful of people (and they spend only a few hours time a month).

Luckily enough we were a couple of people who were already developing web applications, so we decided to get together and create the web platform. In early 2001 we got funding from Future Culture Foundation in Sweden and then work started for real. We put together a project group, including two skilled programmers. I did the site concept/design.
Indyfund V1 was launched 31st of March 2001.

The 2nd generation of the site was launched here in Berlin the 2nd of February 2002.

Where is Indyfund drifting to nowadays?

There are many possible ways for Indyfund to go from now.

First and foremost, I’m happy that the project is still up and running and that it looks like it can continue running without major efforts. We have funded about a dozen projects in 2002, and there are more being funded right now.

“I merely collected good ideas and arranged them/us.”

It’s really important to emphasize that Indyfund is really about people and projects — not the fund or the organization itself. I’m happy for each project we can finance in “our way”, and I know the members are too.

There are of course some inherit problems in the organization today - e.g. due to the fact that you have to be “invited” in order to become a member, our member base have grew slower than we have expected (we will try to address this issue by simplifying invitation procedures…). There are also issues connected with paying the membership fee (EUR4/month, 95% of which are used for projects), because currently it can only be done over subscription based credit card payment internationally (other options involves much administration, but we can take cash if there are no other possibilities).

There are also other, more radical, plans:

• A small group of members might be trying to pitch for EUR100000 from Future Culture Foundation in 2003. If we get the money it would definitely mean a big boost for the whole project. Basically we would split the money so that as much as possible would be used directly for projects and the rest for development/administration.
• There are organizations/people who are interested in buying the platform as-is, to be able to run their own Indyfunds. Due to the circumstances, I can’t give more details on this at the moment.
• We have been thinking ourselves about creating different instances for different needs/purposes/subgroups. It’s definitely an interesting possibility, and it’s quite doable. There could also be a possibility for the different instances to communicate with each other in a peer-to-peer fashion…
• We also have plans for a major site update, with the addition of more advanced communication features.

 March 16th, 2003 | No Comments »

Bye, Bye SoundEdit

SoundEdit has a hard time nowadays.

Sometime in 96, Macromedia stopped updating SoundEdit. That was a very, very…puzzling decision. In the meantime SoundEdit has gotten cult status and is still widely used.

I use it to quickly create multi-channel sound textures — something that I can’t do in the otherwise excellent Peak. And it takes too long to do in Cubase or any of the other heavy players (Yes, I tried Deck)!

Unfortunately, SoundEdit has gradually become buggier for each and every new version of Mac OS released, and since X it’s hardly even usable anymore. The screenshot on the left is from when I tried to record under OS 9.2.2.

I’m amazed by the fact that nobody simply copied the killer features of SoundEdit and built a shareware app out of it.

That person would probably be rich by now…



Update: Well, there are some pathetic attempts…

 January 20th, 2003 | No Comments »