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Review: Looptastic Electro

February 17, 2009 // Posted in Audio Hardware, Audio Software, iPhone stuff (Tags: , , , , ) |  No Comments

Sound Trends is a new music software company from the founders of MixMeister Technology.  Sound Trends recently released an application called Looptastic Electro.  It’s an application designed for aspiring electronic music producers and performers and includes a great library of loops created by the award winning composer Midihead.

As an Lose Weight Exercise to familiarize myself with iMovie and the iSight camera, I created this review of Looptastic.

Buy Looptastic Electro from the iTunes Store.

– Adam Smith-Kipnis

Interesting application of speech analytics

February 13, 2009 // Posted in Audio Software, iPhone stuff, Security, Software  |  1 Comment

Pluggd

Pluggd

A while back, I heard about Delve Networks, a Seattle based company which developed an audio search engine named Pluggd.  Pluggd scans audio and video podcasts for keywords and embeds them with searchable markers.  These searchable markers tag the individual words and subjects within an audio file.  The user can type any word or phrase into their search engine and instantly locate all podcasts with that word or phrase in it.  Pluggd will even highlight the exact location in each podcast where the phrase was spoken!

Yesterday I stumbled across an application named Utopy SpeechMiner.  SpeechMiner analyzes recorded conversations for keywords as well as emotion and organizes the results into a searchable database.  SpeechMiner was created as a tool for large scale statistical analasis of customer service phone calls.  The intent is to determine common issues and track customer satisfaction.  SpeechMiner also has an API that enables the software to be integrated into websites and other applications.  What I find most interesting, is that these speech analytics are being applied to phone conversations.

In a discussion with someone who used to work for the government about the recent warrantless wiretappings of american civilians by the NSA it was explained to me that the government has the capability of gathering and storing huge amounts of personal data but they have no idea what to do with it.  I maintain that if they haven’t already figured out the alchemy of changing vast quantities of data into usable information it’s only a matter of time before they do or someone else does it for them.

Free 8 Bit Plugs

November 15, 2006 // Posted in Audio Software, Software, Uncategorized  |  No Comments

There are two soft synths that I’ve become a fan of recently. The first one is Magical 8bit Plug by YMCK. This one sounds amazingly close to the original Nintendo sound chip. Closer than anything else I’ve ever heard from software. It’s easy to use and is pretty lightweight on the processor load. It’s available as a VSTi and Audio Unit plug-in.
The second soft synth I’ve been enjoying is Chip32. It also has an 8 bit sound similar to the NES sound chip. One cool feature of Chip32 is that it gives the user the ability to draw the waveform, updating it in real time. Brad from New Grey Area turned me on to this one and I’ve been using it for a number of electro tracks I’ve been working on. Also available as a VSTi and Audio Unit.

chip321