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Rory Cellan-Jones

Time for an audio revolution

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 23 Mar 09, 09:30 GMT

Here's a funny thing about working with digital media - it's an awful lot easier to play around with video than with audio.

If you're an amateur film-maker you'll almost certainly have a free video editing package on your computer - and once your masterpiece is complete, then YouTube and plenty of imitators make it very easy to get it hosted, and shared with the world.

And if you want to grab other people's video and embed it in your own blog, then the sharing sites usually offer you the code to copy and paste - and even we at the 大象传媒 are now allowing users to embed our video.

But if you want to make a podcast or simply put some audio online, that seems altogether harder. There is a free open source editing programme called - though it is pretty basic. And there are places where you can upload and share your music, your podcasts, or, in my case, your radio work with others. But it's fiddly and time-consuming, in complete contrast to the very user-friendly business of sharing video.

Now though a whole range of applications are suddenly arriving on the scene - so perhaps 2009 could be the year of audio?

I've started using a couple of audio hosting sites, and , the latter after it was recently.

Screengrab of MixcloudRight now, Mixcloud seems a bit less user-friendly - it won't for instance let you upload a single track (or radio package in my case), insisting that you have at least five tracks per upload. Its creators tell me they have plans to make it more useful for speech radio, but right now it seems to be aimed at aspiring DJ's, wanting to create their own radio shows.

Soundcloud is more intuitive, with an interface rather like YouTube's. As far as I can see, it's aimed mainly at the music industry, boasting that it "takes the daily hassle out of receiving, sending and distributing music for artists, record labels and other music professionals."

As an experiment, I've uploaded some of my old radio reports. Here, for instance, is a from May 2007, where one of the presenters mentions "Faceback".

What was still missing was an application to broadcast live - or at least almost live - audio. Something like , and , which allow mobile phone users to stream live video to the internet.

may be the answer. It's an application developed by a small company in London for Apple's iPhone. The idea is that you record anything you fancy on the phone, then press "publish" and it's uploaded into the "cloud", that is to AudioBoo's website.

I used it at the Millennium Stadium on Saturday to record and share the crowd singing the before the Wales v Ireland clash. If you link your AudioBoo account to Twitter or Facebook, your friends get a notification and can click and play your "boo" - as the fragments of audio are called.

It's quite crude right now - you can't edit the audio or store it locally on the phone. And you can't upload other audio material you may have stored on your computer. But when I got in touch with Mark Rock, the man behind AudioBoo, he explained that it was very much a work in progress. "The plan is to make it available on any device that can record audio and connect to the internet." So it should appear on other phones.

You may eventually be able to upload existing audio files - though that will mean a lot of wrestling with copyright issues of the kind that have dogged YouTube.

What is less clear is quite what AudioBoo is for. Mr Rock thinks it may be used by podcasters and ultra local journalists - he said one citizen journalist had used it to report from outside council meetings - but saw a whole new category of web activity being created: "It's what I call 'social audio' - capturing the sound of your world and then sharing it with the world."

But he freely admits that he isn't really sure what it is all about. There again, the founders of YouTube didn't have big plans - they just wanted an easy way to share videos amongst their friends.

So SoundCloud and AudioBoo may herald a new audio revolution online, with a wave of new applications following in their wake. Or we may find that the reason that video, not audio, has been faster to take off online is that a picture is worth a thousand sounds.

Comments

  • Comment number 1.

    With plain audio, one needs to tend towards compelling, enriching prose, opinions or musical talent if they expect anyone to actually listen. Audio tends to demand full attention upon itself.

    And people simply don't have much interesting to blether about, their opinions will always be outsmarted by intelligent writers flanked by a flurry of editors, their musical endeavours will always be outmatched by highly able professional musicians.

    Any idiot, however, can point a camera at their cat pouncing on a motorised mouse, and expect the resulting viewing audience to be significant.

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  • Comment number 2.

    I got Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 bundled on my PC (nearly 3 yrs ago) and agree with your comments: it's a lot easier to edit video than sound with say Audacity. But having mastered PE, I now use it for my sound editing: ignore the video tracks and export "Audio Only" after editing. I still need to run the resulting file through Audacity to convert it to MP3. Audacity can also do a global volume level adjust and/or dynamic range compression while I'm doing the MP3.

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  • Comment number 3.

    It鈥檚 true that pointing a camera is easier than composing a tune, but no-one鈥檚 ashamed to make a wobbly video that鈥檚 far from Hollywood standards. Affordable video cameras and sites like YouTube should have led to a boom in amateur composition, yet most people just reach into their CD or MP3 collection when they want a soundtrack. Yes, most of it would be as wobbly as the video, but at least it鈥檚 our own, and we鈥檙e all supposed to be creative nowadays, or at least to want to be.

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  • Comment number 4.

    I think we're also confusing the processes of creation and curation, which require very different skills and have significantly different barriers to entry. GarageBand has tried to push its Podcast tools quite actively; maybe not everyone wants to create their own Podcasts?

    This is a great analysis Rory, and I agree with the overall theme/question of why online video has hit the masses in a greater way than audio. There is definitely an opportunity to do audio in a "consumer-friendly" capacity - e.g. self expression using shared playlists, or Blip.fm - Twitter for music.

    Mixcloud, however, is not trying to do this, and that explains some of the limitations. We want it to be a platform for professional DJs/radio hosts to get their content distributed and heard more effectively. Our focus is on extended audio, not songs. As you rightly say, we are very keen to expand into the talk/speech space, but don't want to rush into this as we'd like to ensure we have to correct tools to help listeners filter the content to find relevancy.

    The great thing about music shows is that the tracklist provides immediate, rich metadata. Talk radio is slightly more challenging.

    In that sense, we are not so much like YouTube as our objective is not necessarily to lower the barrier to entry, but rather to tap into the collective wisdom of the experts.

    Would love to hear people's thoughts on this.

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  • Comment number 5.

    There are two issues

    1 The quality of the audio generated, no one wants to listen to dozens of telephone conversations. MP3 is useless, MP4 not much better. We need to use a better standard for the audio uploaded CD or DAT digital standards might be acceptable. We also need to clarify how recordings are made. There are many very acceptable video cameras, but few digital audio recorders and decent microphones are in the hands of users

    2 There is a piece of software not mentioned, that is Apple's Quicktime Broadcaster. This can be used to broadcast Audio (and Video) on the internet

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