Loops
OK, so, my relationship with loops is, uh, complex ...
on the one hand, they've saved my professional ass on many occasions, enabling the delivery of lots of music and sound effects in a minimum amount of space. they have also been crucial to many interactive audio projects i've worked on. i love loops so much, my new audio toy is Ableton Live, the most amazing looping sequence editor i've ever heard.
on the other hand: holy crap, batman! when i think about the number of hours i've spent over the past 15 years listening to the same thing over and over and over, hearing the loop point make that same little glitch again and again and again, moving the pointer in tiny increments, looking for juuuuust the right place ... well, that's why i've gone insane! what's your excuse?
Uh-Huh
and here's where i stand up, make outrageous statements, and then run away, laughing:
i forsee a day when looping ringtones are a thing of the past, as obsolete as cassette decks and mellotrons.
why? because a ringtone will only ever play for 30 seconds, period. after that, the call goes to voicemail, and the ringtone stops playing. that's true on all cell phones everywhere, and thank god! (truth is, if you don't pick up your phone in the first ten seconds, odds are, you ain't gonna pick it up at all!)
so say goodbye to polyphonic ringtones, looping wav files, even lo-rez 15" MP3s (a current de-facto standard in the ringtone market). mobile bandwidth and memory is expanding so rapidly, that soon, very soon, thirty seconds of hi-rez digital audio datastream will be well within the download capabilities of modern devices. a 30" 128kbps stereo MP3 file is only 470k (half that for mono), a spit in the bucket compared to video files and broadband internet streams.
with enough throughput, ringtones won't need to loop anymore, ever. even if you want your ringtone to loop, you know, like a "real" telephone (one ringy dingy, two ringy dingy), you won't actually repeat any data. you'll just print the loop to the standard ringtone length of 30", and play it. of course, many folks will want that 30" to be the hook of their favorite song, and will be willing to pay good money to download and save it with rest of their extensive ringtone collection.
What Are They Good For?
So, let's say you wanted to corner the ringtone market in the brave new world of broadband. you'd need to produce a database of ringtones for sale in the standard format. you'd want it to cover a wide range of musical styles, from birth of the cool to hot hot hot, since your target audience is "anybody with a cell phone". you'd want to keep it constantly updated with the latest sounds from the coolest kids. you'd want ringtones cataloged by various attributes, with an elegantly searchable interface.
Gee, i wonder where i might find a prodigious database of hi-resolution 30" AAC files, usually containing the characteristic section of a song? Possibly already being used to preview longer files before purchase? ready, willing, and legal to be downloaded to a cool new device? hey, i know!
iTunes previews make perfect ringtones
(blurry blowup from the iPhone keynote)
Now, i personally have no inside information on Apple's plans for ringtones for the iPhone (dammit! :), but i wouldn't be surprised at all if the latest version of iTunes lets you download and install a preview onto your iPhone as a ringtone. i can't help but think that would be a multi-gazillion dollar business.
Absolutely Nothin'
when that kind of technology becomes ubiquitous (and i suspect only global catastrophic economic collapse could prevent it), then what's the point of looping anything on a mobile device? even game soundtracks won't need it, particularly since you're already walking around with 16 hours of your favorite iTunes music. you won't be rendering MIDI using looped sampled instruments either (that's what ProTools is for). even looping sound effects to save space becomes pointless (pun intended).
and ya know how i know this? because i'm actually describing what happened to game audio technology. in that market, it's all about streams, baby, and looping audio is a "trick we used to do to save space". i knew game audio had turned the corner the day i discovered you couldn't get Infinity looping software for OSX -- a previously essential program for which there was now no market.
Say It Again!! (and Again!! and Again!!)
so i can't help thinking that all the trouble i currently have with mobile looping is destined to disappear, if i can just wait it out. i figure 5 years from now, mobile audio guys will feel the same way about loops that game audio guys do now (i.e. "don't need 'em, don't use 'em"), so trying to fix current problems may be unnecessary. by the time the fix is implemented, the problem may be obsolete, superceded by something else. it's a common enough story ...
BUT i also can't help thinking that during the NEXT phase of technology development, whatever that may be, there will be a processing bottleneck of some sort, usually during an early phase of bandwidth or memory limitation, and then suddenly, BAM! BAM! BAM! loops will be right back in style!
wouldn't it be cool if we learned from our current mistakes, and incorporated what was great about looping software like Ableton into some sort of standard framework that ALL interactive audio devices could access? maybe even something like, oh, i don't know, MIDI, could be used for sync and control. hell, i'd be happy if there was simply a standard set of terms and functionality descriptions that any developer could reference and create looping content for ...
that way, maybe the next poor bastard that's given only 1000 nanoQubits (that's not very much) for an entire orchestral score will be able to repeat the exposition without a hiccup, and for the finale --- play the coda!!
- pdx
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Audio
Comments (2)
Read More Entries by Peter Drescher.
Thank you for the valuable info
One looping application I'd like to hear on phones is a variation of the old Brian Eno four-tape-decks-on-auto-reverse installation. With a different-length tape in each machine, the sounds could take years to sync up again. Seems like a simple way to get variety.