ᔥ in Alan Levine: “This tech is cool! mixtape gar…” – CoSocial ()
A collaborative mixtape making site
MixTape Garden is a site built on top of YouTube that allows you to combine videos to create a ‘mixtape’.
Tag: YouTube
When you submit your RSS feed to YouTube, YouTube will create videos for each podcast episode that you choose to upload. YouTube will use your podcast’s show art to create a static-image video and upload it to your channel on your behalf. When a new episode is added to your RSS feed, it will automatically upload to your channel and we’ll notify your eligible subscribers.
Source: Deliver podcasts using an RSS feed
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More possibilities associated with RSS with the ability to publish to YouTube.
Ethan Zuckerman shares some reflections on a recent article focused on measuring how big YouTube is.
YouTube is one of the largest, most important communication platforms in the world, but while there is a great deal of research about the site, many of its fundamental characteristics remain unknown. To better understand YouTube as a whole, we created a random sample of videos using a new method. Through a description of the sample’s metadata, we provide answers to many essential questions about, for example, the distribution of views, comments, likes, subscribers, and categories. Our method also allows us to estimate the total number of publicly visible videos on YouTube and its growth over time. To learn more about video content, we hand-coded a subsample to answer questions like how many are primarily music, video games, or still images. Finally, we processed the videos’ audio using language detection software to determine the distribution of spoken languages. In providing basic information about YouTube as a whole, we not only learn more about an influential platform, but also provide baseline context against which samples in more focused studies can be compared.
Source: Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube by Ryan McGrady, Kevin Zheng, Rebecca Curran, Jason Baumgartner and Ethan Zuckerman
The information is captured in the site that created TubeStats and is updated regularly.
Separately, Ryan McGrady has summarised some key takeaways on the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure site:
- There are about 10 13 billion publicly visible videos
- YouTube is mostly not in English
- Our current best estimate is that 32% of videos where we can detect the language are in English, with 10.5% in Hindi, 8% in Spanish, slightly fewer in Portuguese, and just over 6% in Arabic.
- Most of YouTube doesn’t get many views
Not everyone is participating in the “creator economy”
There are an awful lot of video games
Source: 5 Main Takeaways from Randomly Sampling YouTube by Ryan McGrady
What is just as interesting as the statistics, but how they managed to capture the data through ‘drunk dialing’:
That bit after “watch?v=” is an 11 digit string. The first ten digits can be a-z,A-Z,0-9 and _-. The last digit is special, and can only be one of 16 values. Turns out there are 2^64 possible YouTube addresses, an enormous number: 18.4 quintillion. There are lots of YouTube videos, but not that many. Let’s guess for a moment that there are 1 billion YouTube videos – if you picked URLs at random, you’d only get a valid address roughly once every 18.4 billion tries.
We refer to this method as “drunk dialing”, as it’s basically as sophisticated as taking swigs from a bottle of bourbon and mashing digits on a telephone, hoping to find a human being to speak to. Jason found a couple of cheats that makes the method roughly 32,000 times as efficient, meaning our “phone call” connects lots more often. Kevin Zheng wrote a whole bunch of scripts to do the dialing, and over the course of several months, we collected more than 10,000 truly random YouTube videos.
Source: How Big is YouTube? by Ethan Zuckerman
After reading Jim Groom’s post about an AI Dr Oblivion, I am left wondering about what the numbers really mean.
I dive deep into the new firmware updates for the Roland MC-101 and MC-707 grooveboxes, which offer some much requested improvements and features, including complete sound design from scratch on the MC-101 (the partial tone editor), new effects including phonograph, exciter, and JD Multi, scatter step sequencing, MC-707 sample assign, and more.
I finally got around to updating my MC-101 today after watching Gabe Miller’s walk through. I was circumspect about how fiddly the partial tone editor would be. I found it fine and love the ability to build from scratch. A great addition.
I enjoyed this documentary on the ‘birth of Cool Britannia’. I am not sure I was aware how central Suede was. All I remember was the Oasis vs. Blur saga.
It all left me wondering whether this is a story that could have been told in different ways? There were certain voices not necessarily included, such as Bernard Butler. I also wondered about other artists, such as Pulp, and they place they served? Also, will time tell a different story?
Do you wish Every Frame A Painting was still making videos? Yeah me too.
So this is TRASH THEORY. Not as good as Every Frame but a music essay channel all the same. We encompass the entirety of the pop culture spectrum. A bit of film, a touch of video games, TV every now and again, though mostly it’ll be music.
“You’ll laugh, you’ll learn, you’ll hurl!” – Paraphrased Wayne’s World Tagline
The YouTube algorithm threw up Trash Theory in association with Kate Bush and Running Up that Hill. I binged a number of episodes on:
- Depeche Mode Violator – fascinating to hear Gore’s raw demo of Enjoy the Silence.
- Pulp’s Common People – love the idea of writing something on a new instrument, even if it is a Casio keyboard.
- Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy – hard to appreciate the sacrifices sometimes, including selling a car to pay for the strings as the sampled ones just did not sound that good.
I like the way in which the video essays choose a particular focus and tie everything back to that. I also like the way in which the text for the quotes are also placed on the screen.
A simple bookmarklet to find the RSS feed for a YouTube channel. On a YouTube channel’s page, like this one, tap the bookmarklet and you’ll be redirected to its RSS feed.
I remember reading about how to capture the YouTube feed, but always found it cumbersome. Colin Devroe’s bookmarklet makes it all so much easier. I really should make more of an effort to collate my feeds reclaim my YouTube consumption.
As someone late to the Disco Machine, I enjoyed watching Disco ex Machina. It mixes live performances with various backstage snippets from their 2015 nation wide tour. Some highlights include Cowell discussing his indulgence in having two drummers:
Two drummers … like eating two Golden Gay times at once
Also his commentary on the push to have TISM represent Australia at Eurovision. It is kind of like Radiohead’s Meeting People is Easy, without all the depressing bits I guess.
Not sure why this has been released now and not in 2015, but as always with Damian Cowell, we will go with it. With the lack of any opportunity for actual live music at the moment, it is some light relief.
In light of the 20th anniversary of In Search Of, DZ Deathrays cover Rock Star. They end their performance with a serve to ‘Scotty from Marketing’:
“These white collars took our industry and fucked up that. So I stay with it with my finger to them stuck up trash…”
“They’re letting 50k up in them footy stadiums. When I can’t sell these tickets to half the people that want to pay for them.”
“I think that Scotty needs a blindfold, he’s all filler, how you gonna father a nation? You ain’t no father figure.”
I remember seeing N.E.R.D. play at The Forum in 2004 with Spymob. It was one of the strangest experiences to see the same band seemingly transform their sound palette. I will also never forget Pharrell’s minder taking taking his bling off him as he sang this track. Epic.
In this episode of Reclaim Today, Tim OWens speaks with Dr. Pete Rorabaugh about some of the steps and challenges associated with with extracting your data and habits from Google. On the one hand, Rorabaugh was left inspired by reading Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record, however as Google starts putting a ceiling on what you can actually do, it is becoming a practical problem. They discuss moving email to something like ProtonMail, messaging to Signal and storage to Nextcloud. One of the challenges I feel is faced with any swap is there is always compromises or sacrifices, this is something that came up in Alex Kretzschmar’s investigation of open source options to Google Photos:
Our perhaps unsatisfying conclusion to this seven-app showdown exposes an important truth: the photo management software world is too complex for a one- or two-person dev team to properly handle. Unless we see some of these app-makers start to pool their resources together, it could be a while before we get a truly excellent self-hosted option to pry many of us away from Google.
Personally, I am interested in exploring Nextcloud as a space to store my photos and probably should move my email. I am also interested in the idea of storing all the images associated with my blogs in one spot and referencing them from there. This is something Jim Groom has touched upon.
I threw out half a loaf of bread this week after watching this.
I had not heard of any of these albums.
2:38 Really From – Really From
3:41 Vijay Iyer, Linda May, Han Oh & Tyshawn Sorey – Uneasy
4:42 Sweet Trip – A Tiny House, In Secret Speeches, Polar Equals
6:17 For Those I Love – For Those I Love
7:17 NyX, Gazelle Twin – Deep England
8:24 Black Country, New Road – For The First Time
10:13 Hannah Peel – Fir Wave
11:29 Skee Mask – Pool
12:41 Armand Hammer & The Alchemist – Haram
14:32 Black Midi – Cavalcade
15:51 The Armed – Ultrapop
17:37 Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders – Promises
Clearly I have some listening to do.
The company says it’s adding more control over autoplay in the YouTube Kids app.
Rebecca Heilweil takes a look at the way in which YouTube Kids and the autoplay function acts as a gateway to questionable content.
Trahan says she’s worried the default autoplay setting is a manipulative design tactic meant to keep children online for as long as possible, a concern she raised with Google CEO Sundar Pichai during a March hearing about misinformation. She’s not alone. A recent letter to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki from the House Oversight Committee’s subcommittee on consumer and economic policy, which has launched an investigation into the platform, says the app is harmful because it “places the onus on the child to stop their viewing activity, rather than providing a natural break or endpoint.”
One of the concerns raised is that, unlike YouTube, there is no ability to turn the autoplay function, which limits how parents can control the app.
In some ways, this touches on James Bridle’s concern about the algorithmic nightmare associated with YouTube Kids.
I wonder if this is what something like Gogglebox is meant to be?
Tame Impala return to their beginning by playing Innerspeaker again in full at the house where Kevin Parker recorded it:
00:37 It Is Not Meant To Be
06:25 Desire Be Desire Go
12:17 Alter Ego
17:56 Lucidity
22:37 Why Won’t You Make Up Your Mind?
26:05 Solitude Is Bliss
30:53 Jeremy’s Storm
36:30 Expectation
43:02 The Bold Arrow Of Time
48:55 Runaway, Houses, City, Clouds
55:45 I Don’t Really Mind
This reminded me of what Radiohead did with In Rainbows:
What was interesting was the blend of the old and new.
In 2020, Korg reissued the legendary ARP 2600. First released in 1971, this synth has been used by massive musicians like Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, Edgar Winter, Pete Townshend, and many, many others. We at Reverb partnered with Korg in the wake of this exciting news to produce a short documentary about this history of this stalwart semi-modular synth, featuring interviews with figures across the synth world.
With Korg’s rerelease of the ARP 2600, Reverb speak with a range of people, past and present – Richard Devine, Marc Doty, David Friend, Brian Kehew, David Mash, LaMar “Kronick” Mitchell, Dina Pearlman, Ariel Rechtshaid, Robert Stambler and Edgar Winter – about the creation of the synthesiser and its legacy.
One thing that I was intrigued by was the ability to control the synthesiser with the guitar.
Guitar into ARP 2500 synth envelope follower.
Pete (December 1971 Crawdaddy interview with John Swenson, “The Who Puts the Bomp”):It’s become the instrument which is almost like a voice, there are different sort of sounds that are made from different ways of playing and it’s like . . . you can recognize guitarists.
So there’s always that bit of humanness, if you like, but it’s only a breaking off point because a guitar is not that much just a guitar, but once it becomes electrified it’s turned into a giant instrument which can play to 60,000 people. It can also do a lot of other things, a guitar can be the control center for a synthesizer. A guitar can go into a synthesizer and have its sound taken apart and put back together again in a different form, so that you’re playing the guitar, but the actual sound that comin’ out is a completely different thing. On the album, on Who’s Next, there’s a very simple one which we use with the ARP synthesizer called an envelope follower, where you plug the guitar in and you get a sort of fuzzy wah-wah sound.That’s on Going Mobile. So that’s how you get that incredible sound.
But the guitar itself was controlling the amount of filter sweep. When you hit the note the filter went Bwaaumm! And when the string stopped the filter closed so you got nothing.
I wondered this when I bought my Korg Volca Modular. However, after reading about this question in regards to Moog’s, I wonder if my initial issue related to my amp/preamp:
Many of our instruments have a 1/4 input that will accept guitar level signals. The most immediate and direct way to use a guitar or other string instrument (that has a pickup) with a synthesizer, is to plug it into this EXTERNAL INPUT jack, to take advantage of the built in ladder filter found on most of our instruments. Keep in mind, that in this scenario, you are using the synth like a guitar pedal or studio effects processor to do things like roll off the high frequency content, add resonant feedback, or achieve tremolo like movement.*
In response to being asked to give a lecture about adventuring, Beau Miles decided to walk the 90 km to work as a point of stimulus. By slowing down, he captures aspects of the environment that often get overlooked. This is interesting watching alongside Austin Kleon’s collection of books on walking and Will Self’s discussion of psychogeography.
ᔥ in Walking 56 Miles to Work ()
For many music producers, a loop is often the starting point of a new composition. But how can you give a loop-based composition structure, add tension and release, and turn it into a performance? In this Ableton artist documentary we meet Binkbeats, a music-maker whose whole approach has grown out of answering these questions.
I came upon this video (and artist) while looking for different covers of Aphex Twin. His unravelling of Windowlicker is amazing in the way he jumps from one instrument to another like an orchestra of one.
In a video for Ableton, he unpacks his live setup. This includes his use of Max for Live to create aspects of automation.
This music reminds me of Kawehi.
A Mashup of the 25 biggest hits from 2020 in the USA.
24Kgoldn and Iann Dior – Mood
Ariana Grande – Positions
Billie Eilish – Everything I Wanted
BTS – Dynamite
Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion – Wap
Dababy and Roddy Ricch – Rockstar
Dan featuring Shay and Justin Bieber – 10000 Hours
Doja Cat – Say So
Drake – Toosie Slide
Drake and Lil Durk – Laugh Now Cry Later
Dua Lipa – Don’t Start Now
Future and Drake – Life Is Good
Gabby Barrett – I Hope
Harry Styles – Adore You
Harry Styles – Watermelon Sugar
Jack Harlow – Whats Poppin
Jawsh 685 and Jason DeRulo – Savage Love (laxed – siren beat)
Justin Bieber and Quavo – Intentions
Lady GaGa and Ariana Grande – Rain On Me
Lewis Capaldi – Before You Go
Maren Morris – The Bones
Megan Thee Stallion – Savage
Roddy Ricch – The Box
The Weeknd – Blinding Lights
Tones and I – Dance Monkey