Slashdot Mirror
Shawn Fanning's New Venture
prostoalex writes "We've read about Justin Frankel, but what are the other heroes of the MP3 revolution up to? News.com.com.com tells the story of Shawn Fanning's new company. SnoCap (which changed its name from Open Copyright Database) is currently developing file-sharing mechanisms that would allow the music industry to earn money."
If people are sharing-files in some form of triangle scheme for sharing profits-- who controls the quality of the music bought? I refuse to pay for music that cannot guarantee high-quality bit-rate. And, what happens when only part of a song is downloaded that was paid for and it becomes impossible to resume the download, because the person(s) whom you were grabbing a copy from disconnect?
Snocap has been working on ways to identify songs, as they are traded through a file-swapping network, including using a technique called "audio fingerprinting," which monitors the sonic characteristics of music files.
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shawn $ fingerprint_id_test test_files.txt
LOADING INPUT TEST FILE: beethoven.mp3
Identifying
100% Match: Beethoven, Ludwig Van, classical
LOADING INPUT TEST FILE: coltrane.mp3
Identifying
100% Match: Coltrane, John, Jazz
LOADING INPUT TEST FILE: chembros.mp3
Identifying
100% Match: Chemical Brothers, electronic
77% Match: Daft Punk, electronic
75% Match: Noise, industrial-moise-recording
LOADING INPUT TEST FILE: britspears.mp3
Identifying
100% Match: Spice girls, teenage pop
100% Match: N'Sync, teenage pop
100% Match: Backstreet Boys, teenage pop
100% Match: Hilary Duff, teenage pop
100% Match: Maris Willson, teenage pop
100% Match: Holly Valance, teenage pop
100% Match: Mandy Moore, teenage pop
100% Match: Vitamin C, teenage pop
100% Match: Christina Aguilera, teenage pop
100% Match: Five, teenage pop
100% Match: Jennifer Lopez, teenage pop
100% Match: Aaliyah, teenage pop
100% Match: Rachel Stevens, teenage pop
100% Match: Pink, teenage pop
*** Endless recursion error. Core dumped ***
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Justin recently announced that he has resigned from AOL and Nullsoft:
/home/deadbeef - - - - Shell: /usr/local/bin/tcsh
.plan, but I might find myself updating the .plan of justin@blorp.com.
Trying landoleet.org
Attempting to finger justin@landoleet.org -
Login: justin - - - - - - - - - - Name: Justin
Directory:
Never logged in.
New mail received Thu Oct 9 15:07 2003 (PDT)
- - Unread since Mon Mar 10 12:28 2003 (PST)
Mail forwarded to: justin@blorp.com
Plan:
Jan 22, 2004
Well, it took a bit longer than I (or likely anybody else expected), but after four and a half years, I've resigned from my position at AOL. Yay/sigh/etc.
This will likely be the last time I update this
peace out.
eof
-
End of finger session
Fortunately, this won't really result in a loss of quality with future Winamp versions. their two main coders, "Francis and Christophe," Will be taking over most of the development. From what I've heard, they did most of the work with Winamp 5. And as most of those who've taken the time to really check out Winamp 5... It really whips the llama's ass.
One thing you cannot ignore is that napster brought P2P to the public eye. Sure we'd have P2P networks now, and they probably wouldn't have the RIAA trying to put them down. The reason why is because almost no one would be using them.
I don't like the RIAA tactics, but you have to admit that P2P is forcing them to change their business model. Would iTunes Music Store exist if P2P wasn't so wildly popular? Furthermore would we have access to so many portable music devices if it weren't for the popularity of napster and hence the popularity of digitized music (aka MP3 files)?
Not to mention that P2P gives me hope that one day artists will be able to directly reach their audience without the RIAA.
Fanning was really the first to let the gennie out of the bottle so to speak. You may think Fanning was an idiot for putting out a program designed only to steal music. I think he was pretty smart for putting out a program that finally allowed us to have something to fight the media giants with, and changed the way many people obtain their music. No longer do you have to record crappy quality tracks off the radio, nor do you have to buy 15 songs of crap for $18 to get one song you like.
P2P is a force to be reckoned with and it's because of napster that this is true.
You know most people here seem to be of the opinion that Napster was an obvious concept and anybody here couldhave come up with it. The Next step in everyone's misguided logid is that Shawn is therefore no smarter than the average slashdot reader..... then jealousy kicks in and people start calling him names for getting all the attention.
Well, at the start of 2002 I ended up out of a job and managed to get a position in Napster, long past the days when they were running the full service. There was the Beta test for the pay service running as well as a few potentially groundbreaking court cases. Turns out I was the last engineer Napster hired.
Anyway, I'd studied the napster setup in great detail and I pretty much had the same opinions - I figured that Shawn was an average geek who had got lucky. I didn't expect he'd much from him, hey, I'd spent 10 years in academia, I'd spent years 'saving the world from killer asteroids' (http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm), and....
I'd wrote and released the first mp3 radio software and then watched Justin Frankel and winamp get all the credit for 'inventing' it a year and a half later. I went to napster expecting that Shawn wasn't anything special.
Boy was I wrong, he is a genuinely smart guy, yes he was also lucky - just like I'm a smart guy who wasn't so lucky. I think a lot of technical people underestimate him and sometimes this is working to his advantage.
So, lay off the assumption that luck == stupid - smart people get lucky all the time too.