Tag: Music

Music service playlist migration

On By Paul HubbardIn Music, recommendationsLeave a comment

It will not come as news to anyone streaming music via Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Tidal, etc – the playlist is the proprietary bit. The music is identical but your curated playlists are a barrier to moving.

Today, I saw a Spotify playlist in this Cool Tools post:

 I’m in love with this “Halloween” playlist because it isn’t cheesy songs like the Monster Mash and Ghostbusters, instead, it’s an adults’ Halloweenish soundtrack featuring great moody music from bands like M83, the Cure, the National and more. This plays nonstop at my house from Labor Day through the end of October.

Here is the playlist link – it’s “Halloween is a Dead Man’s Party“

But I don’t use Spotify. Because of the subsidized hardware, we use Amazon to stream to a bunch of Echos connected to speakers.

The solution is a free web app called Tune My Music. It’s free, and Amazon lists it as an approved way to import playlists. It can go back and forth between a great number of services, but for me I just setup a new Spotify account (yay hide my email!), granted access to TMM, and then playlist access to Amazon music, and it copied it over. Only one track was missing; good enough.

So maybe a bookmark in case you want to move between services.

Seven Head-Scratching Features from WWDC 2022 – TidBITS

On By Paul HubbardIn Computer science, RandomLeave a comment

Customize Spatial Audio with TrueDepth Camera

This announcement came and went fairly quickly, but it had us scratching our heads immediately. The idea, it seems, is that spatial audio sounds more realistic if it can take into account aspects of the physicality of the listener that affect their perception of space. Apparently, this is a thing—called Head-Related Transfer Functions—and by capturing data using the iPhone’s TrueDepth camera, Apple could personalize the otherwise average HRTF that combines data from thousands of people.
— Read on tidbits.com/2022/06/13/seven-head-scratching-features-from-wwdc-2022/

I worked with HRTFs in grad school, trying to implement the filters in the wavelet domain (More here) so this is interesting to me. Looks like we’ll be able to use some combination of camera + lidar to capture the pinnae and derive personal HRTFs from that.

I cannot wait. Guess I’ll need to explore the spatial music and maybe movies now.