ResearchBuzz

In my job I’ve been spending a lot of time looking up this or that application, figuring out if it would be best to do something with a Web-based or a desktop app, trying to balance out functionality and convenience. And periodically I’ve come across a site called Aviary, at http://aviary.com/.

Aviary had lots of mentions in a variety of places because it offers several different image editors. The tools available include an image editor (also a vector editor) as well as a color editor and even a screen capture tool.

I didn’t look deeply into Aviary because for my image editing needs, I use GIMP. And I love GIMP. But my attention was taken back to Aviary today when I read on its blog that it had released an audio editor. So I looked a little closer, and — helloooooo, Aviary.

All of the Aviary tools have bird names, so the audio editor’s called Myna. The audio editor allows you to import music in a variety of formats, or record your own music. If you’re creating music for noncommercial purposes, you can also use materials from APM’s Quantum Tracks library in your music creations.

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like. If you’re using clips from Quantum Tracks (these clips covered a lot of ground, though I missed world fusion and international beats) you can just drag them and drop them in to place. Importing audio is slightly more complicated but not much. Myna’s home page has a demo but this app is not very complicated and I found I could figure out a lot just by playing with it.

Want to see what other people are using Myna for? You can take a listen at this Myna gallery. Here you’ll find lots of tunes by your fellow Aviary creators.

Aviary is free but of course there’s a paid option available if you want more stuff. Features for premium accounts include more tutorial options, private collaborating, and more private files. The premium accounts run you an extremely-reasonable $24.99 a year.

I have never found a audio app I really like — it seems like they’re either way too complicated or don’t have enough features. I am surprised to see that one I DO like might be Web-based. And discovering that, I’m going to have to take a closer look at the rest of Aviary.

The LoC has announced a new online exhibit from the American Folklife Center: “American English-Dialect Recordings: The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection”. This site has 59 audio recordings — 118 hours — covering North American English dialects. The recordings were made between 1941 and 1984, but most of them were made between 1968 and 1982. The collection’s available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/linguistics/.

You can browse the collection by title, name, subject, or place. (There are only two main categories of place — Canada and North America — but there are lots of subcategory covering city and state.) I went and took a look at the offerings from Kentucky. There were several recordings available, some of them described as oral histories, some of them were monologues and some of them were conversations. In some cases the listings were transcriptions.

All the listings I looked at had brief descriptions of the conversations, the time the recording was made, information about the speaker, and a subject listing. All the listings also had audio available in three formats — Real, WAV, and MP3. I found a couple of the downloads a bit slow (I would rather download the recordings and listen to them that way than play them through the speaker) but once downloaded they were fascinating to listen to.

In the midst of all this talk about the price changes for iTunes, music costs at Amazon and Wal-Mart, etc., I thought it would be nice to cover the Free Music Archive, which recently launched in beta. A project of radio station WFMU, the Free Music Archive currently has over 5000 tracks and is available at http://freemusicarchive.org/ .

A lot of the front page is bloggish but look on the right hand nav for a list of recently-added songs (with RSS feed), a list of the most interesting songs (again with RSS feed) and a list of genres for browsing, from country to international to jazz to pop. The subgeneres on some of these listings were amazing — Sludge Rock? Post-Punk? No Wave?

At any rate song listings include artist, track, album, and genre. There’s a button for quick play of the song and another for quick download. You can register on the site but you don’t have to.

As for the music itself — well, it’s all over the map. Some of it I listened to and left after a few seconds, some I hung around for a few minutes, and some of it I quite liked and downloaded. I enjoyed Max Tundra, So Cow, Hayvanlar Alemi (Ever listened to guitars that just made you feel happy? “Bahar Patlatan”.), 8 Bit Weapon, and Edith Frost. I’m sure I’m not even scratching the surface here — there’s a lot of music I didn’t even get to because I wanted to finish this writeup.

Bands have their own pages, with biographical information, tour dates (for some), discography information, external links, registered users who are fans, etc. Some bands have just one song available while others have albums and albums and albums. (A button on the band page lets you play all the songs on the page; handy.) Songs also have their own pages; the page for Al Duvall’s “Poppycock & Tommyrot” contains language, bitrate, and genre information as well as the Creative Commons license under which you can use/reuse the music.

I could try to give you some kind of summary here, but I think the fact that it took me over two hours to do this entry because I kept finding more artists to listen to pretty much says it all. Take a day off from iTunes and come over here and explore. Recommended.