Recently, Apple open sourced the original encoder and decoder for the Apple Lossless audio codec which is written in C/C++. ALAC is, as its name implies, a lossless codec, which means that it is compressed but does not lose any quality. When decoded, ALAC audio files are bit-for-bit identical to the original uncompressed audio file.
When our team at ofmlabs saw ALAC open sourced a few weeks back, we thought it might be fun to try to port it to JavaScript so one could listen to ALAC files in the browser. After all, some of us were also on the team that brought you JSMad, the JavaScript MP3 decoder a few months ago.
Badass JavaScript: Introducing ALAC.js: An Apple Lossless Audio Decoder in JavaScript
The Card Speaker, designed by IDEA International, is a portable speaker system that operates for up to 5 hours on a 2-hour charge. No bigger than a credit card, the sleek speaker connects to any device with a 3.5 mm headphone plug, and charges via USB battery charge cable. Colors come in gold, silver, or black.
ThinkBigChief: Card Speaker
In order to give you an idea of what’s going on in a song at a glance we are doing research on new techniques for visualising the variability, or structural changes of rhythm, harmony and timbre in a song.
Last.fm: Audio Flowers: Visualizing the Sound of Music
A group of electronic artists have worked on a “ruined” version of the Beatles’ classic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Designed to accompany and contrast with the “…Ruins Pet Sounds” release from earlier in the year, this ruined release exists to be compared and contrasted to the original album and its artistic competitor Pet Sounds. The original classic is recontextualised through the humour and vision of these artists whose approaches to the tracks aims to re-examine Pepper’s through a filter of 2005 technology.
The finest radio drama of the 1930’s was The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman. In its brief run, it featured an impressive array of talents, including Agnes Moorehead, Bernard Herrmann, and George Coulouris. The show is famous for its notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, but the other shows in the series are relatively unknown. This site has many of the surviving shows, and will eventually have all of them.
The Mercury Theatre on the Air
Politics is the practice of doublespeak. Fortunately, through the magic of creativity and relatively cheap digital audio editing tools, the speech of political creatures can finally be unspun, and the truth laid bare.
These are galleries of translations of popular politicians as made by audio collage artists from around the planet… Those who are easily offended by heavy doses of irony should probably leave now.
DIYmedia.net: Truthful Translations of Political Speech