Get back something physical in this increasingly virtual world. The latest experiment of “I Miss My Pencil” (embedded below) really struck a chord with me. It allows you to store music digitally and still have an analogue way of interacting with them. I had been thinking of ripping my entire CD collection and replacing it with a set of RFID-enabled cards for a while. The idea is that you pick a card, touch it to the reader and the music starts playing. So I set about to figure out what it takes to create an RFID interface.

c60 Redux from IDEO on Vimeo.

It looks like one of the easiest ways to get started is building on the Arduino platform. Arduino allows you to quickly prototype small electronic circuitry. There are tons and tons of tutorials, projects and examples available, and you can get a platform for which you don’t need any kind of additional hardware (no need to solder or any additional interfaces)

RFID allows you to identify wirelessly any object that contains a tag. A tag does not need to be powered if you’re working over short distances. Parallax offers a RFID reader that can be connected to the Arduino.

For about €100 you can buy both an Arduino starters kit and the RFID reader. It won’t give you all the options the C60 project has, but you’ll have a solid foundation to get started which doesn’t require creating your own breadboards and soldering everything together.

If you live in Europe, Antratek Electronics looks like it has a wide range of electronics components (including the two mentioned above). I haven’t ordered with them yet, so I can’t just their customer support.

As you might have noticed, this January on Streamhead is all about gathering ideas. Some I’m going to pursue, some will end up in the long list of “someday/maybe”. This one, I have no idea how it will turn out. My interest in hardware started with the Tandy electronic project kits and continued in my higher eduction with courses on microelectronics and processor design.

However, my job choices have always been in high level software development, where the hardware is hidden away by countless layers of abstraction. It’s certainly not a choice I regret, I slightly regret not having done anything with electronics in the last 10 years. Over the years, I’ve amassed countless of electronics projects that I’d love to do sometime.

2011 might be that time.

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Every one who regularly runs or works out to music has probably thought about this. Wouldn’t it be cool to have the music change according to your training tempo? Well, Synchstep makes it possible. If you have an iPhone/iPod. It’s fairly cheap, it works with all your music and it works as advertized.

Synchstep uses the motion sensor inside your iPod to calculate the moves you make per minute. This is averaged and used as a base BPM to find music that matches. This, I feel, is the most brittle part of the entire application. The default setting is to change the music after 10 seconds if your BPM changes. Either my tempo isn’t steady enough or the beat detection is a little too sensitive, but this didn’t work for me.

I changed this setting to only re-synchronize the BPM after the entire song is played. It isn’t exactly what I would like, but at least it didn’t drive me nuts by constantly changing the song.

Apart from this, I really like Synchstep. Although it’s clear this is still a fairly experimental application it is already very useful.

It starts by indexing the playlists you like. Synchstep gets its BPM data from the net and if it doesn’t find it, you can download a desktop application to calculate the BPM. And if you’re still not happy, you can override the automatic detection and enter the correct BPM.

The interface is minimal but very functional. A start button to start measuring and playing music and a BPM scale so you can override the tempo. It would be nice if this was immediately accessible. Right now it first needs to detect your beat. But I felt it could be nice to just enter the BPM and match your run to the music instead of the other way around.

Is Synchstep worth $4.99. It depends. If you expect a fully fleshed out product that never crashes, no, you’re not going to get what you want. But really, what do you expect for $4.99 anyway? Synchstep is an experimental, yet usable and very promising application. So yes, I would go for it if you’re interested in using your music library in a different way.

Well, it has finally come to this. I’ve put the last batch of vinyl records up for sale on eBay. After that, it’s all digital for me. While vinyl still survives for some, it’s a very distant memory for most. Hence this final ode to great trance and progressive that was once the exclusive domain of vinyl. Now, a lot can be both from iTunes or specialized stores like Beatport. And I’ve got a Grooveshark widget to prove it.

For me, the highlight of this list is most certainly BT’s Remember. It shaped trance and even progressive. Ranging from the straight-on Paul Van Dyk dancefloor madness to the afterhours deepness of the Mood II Swing mix. It’s all brilliant. But you don’t have to believe me, you can listen for yourself.

If you don’t know Grooveshark, it’s a great service that lets you manage and stream your playlists. The choice is incredibly wide and deep. You can’t download music, but if you like something, there are links to buy it on one or more sites.

It’s a great service.

A few of the tracks I couldn’t find. For instance, Jam&Spoon’s “Don’t call it love” LP or some of the mixes of Resistance D’s “You were there”. But really, I don’t think any one can offer everything that was ever released.

It’s time for some shopping.

For a long time, I’ve maintained a guide featuring some of my favorite online radio stations. Over the last 2 year, however, it had become a bit neglected. So today, I’m proud to present the updated 2010 version of the guide. I’ve purged the defunct stations, added a few new ones. I’ve also cleaned up the layout and added a little bling. So if you haven’t checked out the guide, or even if you have, now is the time to click through.

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About 10 days ago, De Morgen, a Belgian (Dutch) newspaper, published the 60 best dance tracks of the last 10 years. 6 DJs and radio celebrities take their pick of what was good in the last 10 years. Unlike what you might expect, the lists where not littered with fluffy pop stuff. Most of it is quality material. Pleasantly surprised, I think this was a great idea. The only problem is that it’s quite difficult to listen to the lists as they are all embedded as separate tracks. So I’ve put them in a few YouTube playlists, which make them a lot more manageable .

6 DJs entered their choice, and here they are:

• (Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)
• (Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)
• (Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)
• (Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)
• (Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)
• (Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)

If you clicked through (come on, you know you want to try it), you will have noticed that they open in a nice JavaScript popup. Originally, I wanted to create the code to make that happen myself. jQuery with a few plugins make it possible to quickly create something like this. However, it turns out some one already did the work: the pb-embedFlash plugin for WordPress is the perfect solution if you want to embed Flash, but also other media types. With tons of options, this is really a one-stop-shop, which I hope will see continued development.

BTW Surprisingly enough, if you buy the Trentemoller chronicles, you’d already have a bunch of those tracks. It looks like there are more people that like him.

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Alcatraz’ The Bastardo EP on eBay

Surprisingly, I hardly ever bought something I didn’t like. Quite to the contrast, I found a few gems I would have never bought if I had done the research.

On the music front, I picked up Eat Static’s Science of the Gods because I had heard about the group somewhere somehow, I had no idea what music to expect. But I was amazed and my musical world expanded. I bought Jef K’s My House compilation because I really liked the image (seriously) and I’ve never heard better house since. Authechre, Orbital, Ken Ishii, etc would never have entered my cd rack if I hadn’t experimented.

Amidst those many positive experiences, the negative ones are far and few between. So I hardly ever bother reading reviews, I tend to go with the flow. If I watch a movie, I usually read the reviews only after I’ve seen it.

This post is about one of those negative experiences. I bought the Bastardo EP by Alcatraz at a record fair, back when I was still buying records. The most important reason I brought it home was that I got a discount when I bought 5 records and I only had picked out 4. I though it was going to be an ok trance record, but it turned out to be a bummer. A cross between the hardest of trance and borderline boring techno (not all techno is boring, mind you). It’s a style, that, for some reason, has become popular again lately. I don’t know why, but the record seems to be pretty sought after.

Here’s one track from the EP, so judge for yourself:

If you like it, I’m currently selling it on eBay

After I decided to sell off my LPs, almost 2 years ago, I sold exactly one record. Sad but true, I procrastinated and in the end nothing happened. There are some memories associated with some records, so those might be a little painful to sell, but most of them, I’ve only played a few times over the years.

photo credit: MarkyBon

So here’s to second chances. First up, are my Orbital records, those hold, for me at least, the least value, because I have them all on CD, so it’s not like I won’t be able to listen to the tracks again. There’s some good stuff in there so if you are interested, why not take a look.

The should appear on my eBay page, but right now, that doesn’t seem to be working. So here are the individual LPs:

• Are We Here? (including Rabbit in the Moon mixes)
• Are We Here? mixes (this one includes a very disturbing special print, if I find the time, I’ll scan it)
• Chime, the remixes
• III
• Omen
• Radiccio 1 (every one even remotely interested in Orbital should hear the tracks on this one: Halcyon and The Naked And The Dub)

There you have it, a little piece of history that has been in my closet for too long. If you buy them, please play the records a little more then I did.

• This Week in Tech is the granddaddy of tech podcasts. Its a weekly show that features a bit of all the tech news. It’s like reading Gizmodo or Engadget, only you do it in the car.
• The Personal Finance Hour discusses all things personal finance. It’s not as news driven as many podcasts, so there’s more depth. The topics discussed are pretty broad (financial consequences of pets, loans, …) so I tend to skip an episode now-and-then, but overall this is a very informative radio show, even for non-Americans.
• The Harvard Business Ideacast are usually short (10 to 15 minutes) interviews with leading business experts. The range of people interviewed is broad, but always business focused. And the interviews aren’t too long, so people without MBAs (me) don’t get bored.
• Rebel FM is my favorite games related radio show.
• The podcast for A State of Trance is only a shortened version of the actual show,  so you might want to download the show instead of the podcast. It depends on how much trance you can handle.

Feel free to leave your favorite podcasts in the comments.

However, now that I wanted to pick up the MP3 DJing once again, I noticed that the program hasn’t been maintained or upgraded in years. And the replacement has become pretty expensive for some one who is going to use this program once or twice a year.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I ran into Mixxx. It is a little more bare-bones, but it has all the features I need: output to multiple channels or soundcards and beatmatching. The BPM algorithm seems to be a little less sophisticated than the one Virtual DJ is using. But if you’re not happy with the automatic one, you can always tap your own rhythm.

It doesn’t do sound effects and some other fancy stuff, but I hardly ever used them anyway.

So I’m off to hook up my mixing panel and spin those beats.

photo credit: Alejandro Amador

I did however look for a little help. Yov408′s explanation on GameDev is an exceptionally well tutorial and introduction into beat detection. If you read the article, you’ll notice that the first thing you need is the energy of the music file. So I added an energy calculating filter to my architecture.

photo credit: wenzday01

See the Google Docs spreadsheet with a visual representation.

Afterward, I wanted to get some insight into the algorithm, so I took some random samples and put them in a spreadsheet. My test song is one with a very very clear beat, so if my beat detection algorithm works on anything, this will be it.

I did have to expand the algorithm a little, to calculate the actual BPM. The document only describes beat detection, but once you got that far, BPM calculation is fairly trivial (just count the beats and divide by the time).

If you open the spreadsheet, you’ll notice that I got lucky with my first sample. Immediately I calculated a pretty good BPM of the song (it is about 128 BPM), however, when I tried another sample of the same song, the result was completely wrong. But you might notice that if I did not use the adaptive algorithm to calculate the threshold value C.

See the Google Docs spreadsheet with a visual representation.

I tried to implement that, and although the theory sounds good, the results were even worse. I’m pretty sure I need to go over it one more time to figure out the best values for the constants (I have a different input range then the article). But it’s a start.

Next week, I’ll try to tune that adaptive algorithm and hopefully publish my code. If you have some experience in BPM calculation, I’d love to hear what algorithm you used. Because there are as many theories out there as there are people calculating BPM counts.

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