Now people know the truth about how I made her famous. For more, read the about in this Youtube video that started it all

It’s also important to notes that Kaki King still owes me a kiss.

Enter the keyboard: monome replacement?

It’s almost so obvious that it’s too obvious. We’ve been using these things for decades, and it turns out that they’re exactly that: a 2d grid of buttons. Of course, I can’t take all the credit; somebody already implemented this idea in Max/MSP. Problem was that it wasn’t working with the mlr app for me. Plus, what kind of nerd would I be if I didn’t try to do it myself?

So using a keyboard seems like the best way to emulate a monome. Granted, they don’t give you much LED light feedback action, but I could always just show that up on the screen. It’s not like I stare at my keyboard when I type anyway. Also, there are considerably less buttons than a 256, but I could easily get a good 32 solid buttons to play with.

As far as implementing the monomemulator went, I figured I would attempt to do it on my own, in a language I knew (I like the Max concept, but in the end, programming with a mouse is so tedious). I oddly chose to use the scripting language found in the mIRC chat client. I’ve made some crazy things in this language before, as well as some less crazy things, and in my opinion it was up for the task.

Why mIRC? Why not Max, PD, Ruby, Processing, Python, …?

mIRC scripting is sort of my comfort food when I want to prototype code. There are however two specific reasons that it’s perfect for the job:

1. The mIRC community lacks smart people doing cool things (no offense to the few people doing cool things). This meant that I wouldn’t feel like I was re-inventing the wheel if I was to write an OpenSoundControl library for the language. Chance to contribute original code = extra points.
2. mIRC may be an IRC client, but it actually has a rather extensive windowing library built-in. My entire implementation for the UI was about 12 lines of code. This probably beats out wxWidgets, Fox… Shoes? Maybe I’ll port it some other time. Considering it took 30 minutes including learning how to encode OSC messages, that’s not too bad.

The implementation actually ended up being 120 lines in total with the OSC library (a very simple/incomplete one) built in. You control the monome by simply hitting the keys shown in the above keyboard photo. Feedback for the LEDs are lit up using OSC messages as well. The UI for this emulator can actually expand to any grid size, so if you had a way to actually input 256 keys, you could just change the script up a bit to load it. You could even make it bigger; take that, monome.

alias -l monome_width { return 8 }
alias -l monome_height { return 4 }

The next few lines have options to change the prefix as well. Running the code with /monome gets you this (I’m running mlr in this screenshot as well):

Well. That’s about it. I actually played around with it for a bit and really liked the workflow. I might actually be up for making the plunge sometime soon, though I’ll try and save up for a 256.

If you’re interested in the script files involved you can grab em from here:

osc.mrc: OpenSoundControl library for mIRC

monome.mrc: The mIRC monome emulator

A Quick Comparison of QTrax & Songbird

For those interested, this is a side by side comparison of QTrax vs. Songbird in the application, which still isn’t allowing downloads but it’s easy to see how it will work in both. Let’s get right to the screenshots:

You can see that the only major difference between Songbird and QTrax is that QTrax re-skinned the play controls to give more room at the top for banner ads. Looking further into the app you also notice that they did a similar job with the library screen to make room on the right for ads as well. But with Songbird working perfectly on the same service (so far), there must be something that the QTrax app must do to deal with this, otherwise, why do I need to deal with the ads when I could just, not?

Another advantage to just using Songbird is that Songbird actually works on OS X, Linux, and other platforms. Why the hell doesn’t QTrax?

Oh, and even if they have something up their sleeves, it’s all right there exposed in the app, since they used XUL in order to write their Mozilla-like extensions…

Removing QTrax Ads

The QTrax service isn’t even functional yet and I’ve already managed to remove their ads. That doesn’t say much for this company’s ability to succeed with this ad-based business model. Frankly, if I was an advertiser or record label, I would probably back out of the deal as quick as possible if I saw this.

Like I said in the previous article, QTrax is really just a bunch of Firefox/Songbird extensions plugged into Songbird without any modification to the source (that I’m aware of). I’d love to dig deeper and confirm that the source has not been touched, but that will have to wait. For now, we can easily just dive right into the XUL that they used to right their ad-adding skin and take it right out.

Let me first point out that there are about 500 different ways to disable the ads in this thing. The simplest would be to just remove the extension. I’m only showing one more complex one just to show that even if the extension added something really cool, we could still work around it.

But here we go. Just load up the extension folder in the QTrax program files folder and go to any of the .xul, .js, or .html files and mess around. You can pretty much undo whatever you don’t like and keep what you do.

I’m waiting to see if QTrax actually thought this through somehow on the server-end… but even then, it would be very difficult unless they actually modified the binaries. I can’t tell if QTrax is really dumb in not realizing how easy they made it to subvert their ads, or really sneaky in trying to make an app that will secretly not be a pain in the ass to use, unbeknown to the labels.

After playing with the anticipated QTrax beta, I have quickly discovered that QTrax.. is Songbird. Not just based on.. is.

At midnight tonight, QTrax will be unveiling what can potentially be a radically new business model for downloading music online. To be fair though, the business model is in no way innovative. Offsetting costs of membership-free sites with banner ads is about the oldest trick in the book. The difference in this case is the fact that the major labels are actually on board with this idea, as Wired recently reported.

This actually looks pretty exciting. You can still hear the loud roar of those people against DRM claiming that this is not progress, but I think we should see how DRM would actually be able to limit the portability of music that has already been made freely available to anyone over that network. Considering that they plan on making iPod compatible in the near future, the music provided by this service should not only be able to move from machine to machine (by sharing it, at worst case), but from music player to music player. Without having seen the application in action, I can’t imagine how DRM in this context could do much harm.

Update 1 (01/28/08 1:00 AM): Seems like QTrax might be in some hot water with some final attempts to start the service, as reported by Silicon Valley Insider. At 9:57pm, QTrax was still in discussion with WMG trying to finalize the deal. This might explain why there is still no beta available to download. Will they be able to pull this off?

Update 2 (01/28/08 2:00 AM): The guys over at GameDrift seem just as anxious as me to get my hands on this stuff and play. They claim that the launch has been moved to midnight PST (instead of EST) and are going to be waiting to report on this live, so check it out.

Update 3 (01/28/08 12:00 PM):

“The future of Qtrax, a new file-sharing website which promised legal downloads of over 25m music tracks, is in doubt today after three of the four major record labels denied giving the site permission to use their music.” – source: Guardian Unlimited Music

Update 4 (01/28/08 6:13pm): The guys over at GameDrift did a little digging and found a link to the 0.2 beta version of QTrax. Keep in mind, downloading from the service is still disabled, but if you want to check it out, you can either install or check with GameDrift for their overview.

Update 5 (01/28/28 10:20pm): QTrax officially released the software from this download link (link from the download page). The site is currently acting up, but hopefully downloads will begin when it starts functioning again.