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• Managing Music Playback Channels

  30 juin 2013, par Multimedia Mike — General

  My Game Music Appreciation site allows users to interact with old video game music by toggling various channels, as long as the underlying synthesizer engine supports it.

  
  
  

  Users often find their way to the Nintendo DS section pretty quickly. This is when they notice an obnoxious quirk with the channel toggling feature : specifically, one channel doesn’t seem to map to a particular instrument or track.

  When it comes to computer music playback methodologies, I have long observed that there are 2 general strategies : Fixed channel and dynamic channel allocation.

  Fixed Channel Approach
  One of my primary sources of computer-based entertainment used to be watching music. Sure I listened to it as well. But for things like Amiga MOD files and related tracker formats, there was a rich ecosystem of fun music playback programs that visualized the music. There exist music visualization modes in various music players these days (such as iTunes and Windows Media Player), but those largely just show you a single wave form. These files were real time syntheses based on multiple audio channels and usually showed some form of analysis for each channel. My personal favorite was Cubic Player :

  
  
  

  Most of these players supported the concept of masking individual channels. In doing so, the user could isolate, study, and enjoy different components of the song. For many 4-channel Amiga MOD files, I observed that the common arrangement was to use the 4 channels for beat (percussion track), bass line, chords, and melody. Thus, it was easy to just listen to, e.g., the bass line in isolation.

  MODs and similar formats specified precisely which digital audio sample to play at what time and on which specific audio channel. To view the internals of one of these formats, one gets the impression that they contain an extremely computer-centric view of music.

  Dynamic Channel Allocation Algorithm
  MODs et al. enjoyed a lot of popularity, but the standard for computer music is MIDI. While MOD and friends took a computer-centric view of music, MIDI takes, well, a music-centric view of music.

  There are MIDI visualization programs as well. The one that came with my Gravis Ultrasound was called PLAYMIDI.EXE. It looked like this…

  
  
  

  … and it confused me. There are 16 distinct channels being visualized but some channels are shown playing multiple notes. When I dug into the technical details, I learned that MIDI just specifies what notes need to be played, at what times and frequencies and using which instrument samples, and it was the MIDI playback program’s job to make it happen.

  Thus, if a MIDI file specifies that track 1 should play a C major chord consisting of notes C, E, and G, it would transmit events “key-on C ; delta time 0 ; key-on E ; delta time 0 ; key-on G ; delta time … ; [other commands]“. If the playback program has access to multiple channels (say, up to 32, in the case of the GUS), the intuitive approach would be to maintain a pool of all available channels. Then, when it’s time to process the “key-on C” event, fetch the first available channel from the pool, mark it as in-use, play C on the channel, and return that channel to the pool when either the sample runs its course or the corresponding “key-off C” event is encountered in the MIDI command stream.

  About That Game Music
  Circling back around to my game music website, numerous supported systems use the fixed channel approach for playback while others use dynamic channel allocation approach, including evey Nintendo DS game I have so far analyzed.

  Which approach is better ? As in many technical matters, there are trade-offs either way. For many systems, the fixed channel approach is necessary because for many older audio synthesis systems, different channels had very specific purposes. The 8-bit NES had 5 channels : 2 square wave generators (used musically for melody/treble), 1 triangle wave generator (usually used for bass line), a noise generator (subverted for all manner of percussive sounds), and a limited digital channel (was sometimes assigned richer percussive sounds). Dynamic channel allocation wouldn’t work here.

  But the dynamic approach works great on hardware with 16 digital channels available like, for example, the Nintendo DS. Digital channels are very general-purpose. What about the SNES, with its 8 digital channels ? Either approach could work. In practice, most games used a fixed channel approach : Games might use 4-6 channels for music while reserving the remainder for various in-game sound effects. Some notable exceptions to this pattern were David Wise’s compositions for Rare’s SNES games (think Battletoads and the various Donkey Kong Country titles). These clearly use some dynamic channel approach since masking all but one channel will give you a variety of instrument sounds.

  Epilogue
  There ! That took a long time to explain but I find it fascinating for some reason. I need to distill it down to far fewer words because I want to make it a FAQ on my website for “Why can’t I isolate specific tracks for Nintendo DS games ?”

  Actually, perhaps I should remove the ability to toggle Nintendo DS channels in the first place. Here’s a funny tale of needless work : I found the Vio2sf engine for synthesizing Nintendo DS music and incorporated it into the program. It didn’t support toggling of individual channels so I figured out a way to add that feature to the engine. And then I noticed that most Nintendo DS games render that feature moot. After I released the webapp, I learned that I was out of date on the Vio2sf engine. The final insult was that the latest version already supports channel toggling. So I did the work for nothing. But then again, since I want to remove that feature from the UI, doubly so.

• Piwik is now Matomo – Announcement

  
  9 janvier 2018, par Matomo Core Team

  You may be surprised to read this announcement, but no stress, take a deep breath, nothing big is going to happen, it is just our name that is changing and here are the reasons why.

  

  Why are we changing from Piwik to Matomo ?

  “After an epic 10 year journey creating and perfecting the best open digital analytics solution, we felt it was a good time to refresh our brand to reflect how far we have come and to reaffirm our vision :
  To create, as a community, the leading international open source digital analytics platform, that gives every user full control of their data.”

  Matthieu Aubry, creator of Piwik

  As projects evolve, so do names. After 10 years of Piwik and the amazing achievement of building the top open source analytics software that gives every user full control of their data, we are now looking forward to the next chapter. Thus, Piwik, the community project, will now become Matomo. The only change is our name, everything else stays the same.

  This will allow users to take a fresh look at what we’ve become today and acknowledging all of the community’s hard work over the past 10 years. In addition, we also want our name to be unique, ensuring that it is not shared with any other company to remove any possible confusion or affiliations. Piwik is already used on over 1 million websites and with Matomo, we hope to reach our maximum potential.

  With the strong focus on privacy worldwide and the upcoming privacy regulations about to be legislated in Europe, it is clear that we were on the right mission from the very beginning. With the upcoming big release Matomo 4.0 planned for this year, new privacy protections will bring users the tools to be compliant with the GDPR privacy laws. And Matomo will grow in line with these regulations, with a very clear and focused vision.

  Changing our name is an exciting opportunity for us, and we hope you love the name Matomo as much as we do.

  Matomo FAQs

  So what is going to change for me ?

  Well, basically nothing, the name will change but the values stay the same : Matomo (Piwik) will continue to be free and always will be.

  Also the same people stay behind the project. We are motivated more than ever to take this project to the next level.

  Why not keep the name Piwik ?

  For a few reasons, one of which is to ensure that Matomo does not/will not share its name with any other businesses unlike Piwik. We also want to protect the Matomo brand and for it to remain the open source community project name forever.

  Where does the name Matomo come from ?

  We loved the name Piwik and were looking for something that sounded just as good ! Initially we wanted to have an acronym based on key terms, such as Free, Open Source and Privacy, but none really fit us perfectly.

  Until we found Matomo ! Easily pronounced in all languages. Short enough to remember. Concise. And best of all… Matomo means honesty in Japanese. Which aligns with one of our key values – transparency.

  We love the name Matomo and hope you do too.

  What is the vision of Matomo ?

  

  We have come a long way in those 10 years ! However, our mission statement remains the same :

  “To create, as a community, the leading international open source digital analytics platform, that gives every user full control of their data.”

  Matomo provides a range of amazing and innovative features, allowing you to get a 360 view of your visitors. These insights are invaluable to help understand behavior, keep track of goals, and increase conversion rates and revenue.

  Who will deliver Matomo professional services ?

  Any company who wishes to. The only exception is that no companies will be allowed to have the name Matomo.

  Our company providing professional services is and will remain InnoCraft.

  Where can I follow the Matomo project ?

  Our new website will be matomo.org (automatically redirected from Piwik.org)

  Follow our new Twitter : twitter.com/matomo_org

  Github : github.com/matomo-org

  Facebook : facebook.com/Matomo.org

  Linkedin : linkedin.com/company/matomo/

  If you are already following us on social media, you will be kept up to date with Matomo automatically as all social media accounts will be redirected.

  How should I pronounce Matomo ?

  If you’re wondering how to say ‘Matomo’, you can find out by clicking play :

  Where can I see a demo of Matomo ?

  On demo.matomo.org

  Where can I download Matomo first release ?

  On matomo.org/download

  (Matomo 3.3.0 will be released in the next few days)

  What is the new logo ?

  Check it out below.

  

  Matomo trademark Policy

  Matomo is an internationally registered trademark of Matthieu Aubry, Founder of Piwik (now Matomo).

  Information about how to use the name Matomo (and logo) can be found here : matomo.org/trademark/

  What are the next big steps ?

  We will keep it simple for our valued users. As it is just a name change, the only thing you will notice is that the Piwik brand will gradually be replaced on the websites you are used to seeing the name on. The first version of Matomo will be available in just a few days for download. The software version numbers stay the same : the next release after Piwik 3.2.1 will be Matomo 3.3.0.

  All our public HTTP APIs and Tracking SDKs will continue working normally. As you can imagine, there is a lot of work and complexity behind slowly updating all the SDKs and keeping backwards compatibility, so our renaming project will take a few weeks to complete.

  The Matomo trademark will later be transferred into the Matomo foundation, a non-profit that will be dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to Matomo and our related open source projects in perpetuity.

  ---

  Thank you

  Thank you for continuing to support our project, alongside our 20+ Matomo core team members and more than 500 contributors.

  Please help to spread the word about this announcement by sharing it with friends or or colleagues who may benefit from using Matomo Analytics !

  The post Piwik is now Matomo – Announcement appeared first on Analytics Platform - Matomo.

• PHP - How to run commandline apps on server ? [duplicate]

  20 décembre 2016, par zeddex

  This question is an exact duplicate of :

  • How to install ffmpeg for PHP
    
    1 answer
    

  I have been coding with PHP for a while now and have used things like FFMPEG on Windows XAMPP without any problems. Now however i have been trying to run the FFMPEG commandline on my Godaddy hosting account with PHP as i wanted to make a web based project but cannot get it working.

  On windows with ffmpeg.exe and sound.wav in the same directory this works :

  WavToMP3.php

  <?php
  
  
  
  exec("ffmpeg.exe -i sound.wav -ar 44100 -ac 2 -c:a libmp3lame -b:a 320k sound.mp3");
  
  
  
  ?>

  Yet it does not run on Godaddy, i know they use linux though so i tried this :

  http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/releases/25/Everything/x86_64/os/repoview/ffmpeg-compat.html

  I downloaded :

  http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/releases/25/Everything/x86_64/os/Packages/f/ffmpeg-compat-0.6.7-9.fc25.i686.rpm

  Then in the script i changed "ffmpeg.exe" to just "ffmpeg" but it still did not work.

  I have no idea about running linux commandlines as i have only ever used Windows in the past.

  What are the instructions needed that can get the above PHP code or a modified version to generate a .mp3 file using my Godaddy hosting account ?