audio

Live moves pretty fast…

February 13, 2010 By Dan Thornton

What a week – mostly spent in my case preparing for the launch of six new digital and mobile applications on four platforms on the same day!

The list is:

Absolute 80s iAmp, Absolute Classic Rock iAmp and dabbl iAmp for the iPhone

The Absolute Radio iAmp Widget for websites, blogs and social networks.

The Absolute Radio Player for Nokia S60 3rd edition phones.

The Absolute Radio Player for BlackBerry – the 8800, 8900 (Curve), 9000 (Bold) and 9700 (Bold) handsets.

A reasonable amount of projects to tie together across four platforms and to launch on the same day, you’d have thought. And dcespite a few inevitable minor hiccups it all went pretty smoothly.

And that’s despite the same day being chosen to make another small announcment – that Absolute Radio will have live commentary from the English Premier League from August!

And that’s just one day at Absolute Radio at the moment! Since the start of February we also became the first European radio station on the Kindle, and we’ve already tested and displayed our iAmp application on the Apple iPad simulator.

Great, if tiring, times!

Start the week with a great guide to multimedia journalism

September 7, 2009 By Dan Thornton

There are increasing numbers of journalists and bloggers utilising every channel in multimedia to convey their stories and information, but whether you’re contemplating starting to embrace digital multimedia, or you’ve engaged in mixing text, audio, video etc for a while, you’re bound to pick up at least a couple of new tools and ideas from Mindy McAdam’s Reporters Guide to Multimedia Profiency.

It’s the single PDF compilation of her 15 excellent blog posts on the subject.

And worth reading if you’re publishing anything online, whether or not you’d define yourself as a journalist or editorial staff.

Former colleague (although we never met in person), Adam Westbrook has also been doing some brilliant guides to using multimedia and video.

And for interesting inspiration, I tend to look at Christian Payne, and spend some spare time trying to persuade friend and former colleague Angus Farquhar to spend more time doing crazy stuff and blogging about it.

New musical solutions to social humans

January 18, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I’ve been reading a bit about the discussions happening at the MIDEM event taking place in Cannes at the moment, which is a big business 2 business event for the music industry.

Highlights include the fact that the bags for the event have been sponsored by Napster (as captured by Mr Herdmeister, Mark Earls).

The other highlight I’ve enjoyed is the presentation by Gerd Leonard, who is moderating the panel at which the Herdmeister is speaking.

Compensation Not Control Music 2.0 Gerd Leonhard Midem Net 2009 from Gerd Leonhard

And in the meantime, I’ve also been having my stab at the future of music, thanks to the People’s Music Store (Found via Springwise).

I’ve always been a closet librarian when it comes to collecting music in physical form, and always had a soft spot for the idea of owning my own record shop (Even before I read High Fidelity!)

It’s not completely revolutionary – basically you can set up your store, share recommendations and reviews, and anything sold through your store earns you 10% as reward points to spend on new music via the store.

Interestingly, I’ve just spotted Amazon has released an MP3 widget for affiliates, which helps you to earn a 10% fee for anyone buying someone from the store.

But the next step is also to include user-generated audio for sale.

It will be interesting to see if the People’s Music Store can emulate the feel of ‘your favourite local independent record store’ enough to differentiate itself and offer more than an affiliate mechanism. In the meantime, I spent five minutes on the site and came up with the start of my own music store.

And there are plenty of other interesting music services out there for buying or even investing in music:

Amie Street
Sellaband
SliceThePie

I’m not sure I can conclude with more than starting to wonder about the filter and recommendation mechanisms, and how mainstream media might better fit the future. But the evolution of media and entertainment seems to becoming more like Moore’s Law every week, and not just in terms of technology.

Listening pleasure and Twitter earnings…

September 2, 2008 By Dan Thornton

I received a good response after yesterday post on Virgin Radio becoming Absolute Radio…thanks to everyone that Stumbled, Dugg, or Twittered it, or came along and had a look.

I must have audio on my mind, because although I’m not a huge fan of podcasts, there are a couple I felt I should mention. I’ve never been a fan of talk radio, so I never really gave podcasts as much of a chance as I probably should have done – especially with a commute that’s done in about 20 minutes.

But maybe that’s partly down to hearing subjects I want to actually listen to – until podcasts it was reserved for the vary occasional audio biography or documentary about my favourite musicians.

Now I’m spending a lot of time walking around comforting a young child, podcasts make a lot of sense – and the fact they’re devoted to technology, social media, public relations, or any interest I want to indulge unsurprisingly makes them rather enjoyable.

They aren’t exactly unknown, but I’ll recommend the collection of series at Twit.tv and For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz report as two I’ve been enjoying immensely. Twit (This Week In Tech) is an enjoyable round table around whatver has cropped up in the course of the week – and after a couple of weeks I’ve even warmed to the constantly grumpy John C Dvorak.

Meanwhile, For Immediate Release (FIR) is far more focused on the likes of Public Relations and Technology. It also features a Transatlantic partnership between two people I’ve followed in text for a while, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson.

The irony being that there’s a huge, huge difference between the style of Twit and FIR. Twit host Leo Laporte is far more…’American’ in his presenting style (not saying that’s good or bad), whereas FIR is far more relaxed and akin to a Radio 4 programme. I’m becoming a big fan of both shows – but I can’t imagine any analogue, or even digital radio station likely to play two shows at such stylistic difference to each other – let alone one after the other as I sometimes do!

(Bearing in mind I use my laptop for listening to more and more Podcasts, anyone with autoplaying music, or any video or advert that autoplays on your website or blog is instantly registered as annoying… please don’t. And in case someone spots that type of advert on a Bauer Media site – I don’t book the adverts, I’ve registered my feelings strongly on several occasions, and I don’t pretend to speak for everyone!)

I doubt I’ll be making the jump to audio any time soon – my last foray into video was shamefully wooden.But I am continuing to balance two blogs on top of my day job. You can see my latest thoughts on microblogging – particularly the new Twitter advertising site, Twittads.