Sonos and Pandora Unite

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (here, here and here), I am a big fan of Sonos. When they added standalone (no PC required) Rhapsody support a while back, I was pretty excited and Sonos converted me into a paying subscriber to Rhapsody.

Now they’ve added another great service with the release of version 2.2 of Sonos’ system software: Pandora. I’ve been a big fan of Pandora ever since it first launched and I think it is the one of the most interesting of the music-discovery services out there. By employing an army of musicologists who have tagged and categorized hundreds of thousands of songs with hundreds of attributes, they’ve created what I think it the most musical of the recommendation engines.

The fine folks at Sonos gave me early access to version 2.2 and I updated my system with the new software yesterday. I spent time this morning listening to three different artist-centric stations that I created on the fly: Alison Krauss, Steely Dan and St. Germain. I spent half an hour listening to each station and was consistently surprised and pleased by the quality of the songs that came up and I discovered some new music that I will definitely add to my collection.

Thanks for the early look, Sonos, and thanks for adding another great service to the platform!

Update: Pandora, I have a suggestion for you. It isn’t immediately obvious to me how I would create a URL to link to a particular Pandora station. I would have linked back to Pandora in this blog post for each of the example stations I gave, but instead had to link to the artists’ web sites since how one would do that isn’t apparent.

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A Brief History of Excite

Last September, I gave a presentation at an event called The Startup Junkie Underground about my experiences as a co-founder of Excite, which I co-founded with five of my classmates from Stanford in 1993.

We’ve all gone on to do our own things since then. I became a VC in January 2000 when I joined Mobius Venture Capital and am now in the process of launching a new fund called Foundry Group with five of my colleagues from Mobius.

Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer went on to found JotSpot, and eventually recruited yet another former Excite founder, Ben Lutch. JotSpot was acquired by Google and now Joe and Graham and Ben are back in the search engine business again, but this time at the most significant technology company to emerge in a generation. Way to go, guys!

Anyway, I threw together a set of slides for the event, complete with some great pictures from the archives (yes, that’s me with the hair) so I thought I would make it available here as a PDF.

One thing I discovered during this process is it is difficult to find old news stories and stock data for a company that is now out of business, so the preso is long on story telling and short on fancy charts and graphs with historical stock data and the like. Any suggestions on where to find that kind of info would be much appreciated. And any of my former colleagues who have additional recollections or contributions are encouraged to contact me. I’ll update and expand the presentation as I get more material to integrate into it.

For fun, I’ll also try out the SlideShare widget so you can look at it right here:

Pro Audio Esoterica. Help Needed!

This is a somewhat arcane post, but I’m hoping that the astute readers of my blog might be able to connect me with someone who has expertise with Yamaha digital mixers and Aviom personal monitoring systems since I need to make some buying decisions in the near future and I’ve been unable to get all my pre-purchase questions answered.

I run a Pro Tools HD3 Accel system in my recording studio and currently use a Hearback system to allow musicians who are laying down tracks to adjust their own mixes. This works very well, save for the fact that the Hearback system is only eight tracks and is monophonic but for one stereo pair. I’m ready to move up to something a bit more powerful.

My fellow music geeks Jason and Carl and I have been going to NAMM for years, and a few years ago we discovered the Aviom personal mixing system, which offers 16 channels of fully controllable/customizable stereo mixes to every musician in a studio or live setting using one of the Aviom personal mixers. And they sound great.

When I moved from Portola Valley, CA to Boulder, CO last summer, I left behind a 600 square-foot fully soundproofed recording studio that had once been a detached two car garage. It was a great space and sonically isolated from the house. In our new house, my very understanding and supportive wife has turned over two rooms on the lower level to my musical activities to use as a recording studio. I’ve got one great control/mixing room and one “live” room for the band. The only problem is, despite my best efforts to soundproof the live room using Quiet Solution’s excellent and effective THX-certified QuietRock, the fact that it is directly under my three-year-old son’s bedroom means that the days of the late-night rehearsals with the amplifiers turned up to eleven are over.

So given this new reality, my next project is to create a “silent” jam room. OK, it won’t be totally silent; you will still hear vocals and the sound of drumsticks on trigger pads, but nothing else, and this will not be the least bit audible from my son’s room right above. In this era of multichannel digital audio networking technologies, personal monitoring systems, virtual modeling of physical instruments and analog electronics, personified by Aviom’s Personal Mixer, Roland’s incredible V-Drums and Line6 modeling amplifiers, it is possible for all electric instruments (keys, bass, drums, guitars, etc) to jack directly into a mixer and still produce realistic sounds without actually setting up an amplifier and putting a microphone on it.

So on music nights, my bandmates will simply walk in to the jam room, turn on their personal mixers, don their headphones and plug in their instruments. And we’ll be treated to a nearly silent jam session with fully engineered album-quality sound (assuming I am a good enough audio engineer).

Aviom has a card, the 16/o-Y1 A-Net Card, that plugs into Yamaha digital mixers, allowing Yamaha mixers to route audio into the Aviom personal monitor system. Yamaha’s digital mixers range in cost from $2k to well over $100k. I’m most interested in the mixers at the low end of that price range, since I’m saving my pennies for a Tesla Roadster. But I digress…

I’ve looked at the Aviom and Yamaha documentation and spoken with their tech support people, but I cannot determine yet exactly how the Aviom integrates with the mixers and whether I can easily send output from any track on either the 01V96V2 mixer or the LS9-16 mixer to any of the channels on the Aviom card.

Presumably I should be able to, but I am concerned that the number of mix busses on the mixers might limit how many tracks I could send to the personal monitor mixes. The 01V96V2 has 8 mix busses, while the LS9-16 has 16. If I can only send 8 tracks into the monitor system on the 01V96V2, it won’t suffice and I will need to buy the LS9-16, which is more expensive. Also, the 01V96V2 can act as a ProTools front-end and runs at 24 bit / 96 khz resolution as opposed to 24/48khz on the LS9-16. So I’d prefer to buy the 01V96V2, but I need to talk to someone who understands these mixers and understands how they integrate with the Aviom system before I pull the trigger.

If anyone out there can help me, I’d be much obliged.

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Rot13(“Ryan”) = “Elna”

Caution: extremely nerdy post.

Back in the early days of Excite, just after we closed our first venture round, each of us received our own Sun workstation, truly a milestone moment, and a big upgrade from the surplus Sun 3 and Sun 4 workstations that we shared in a Palo Alto garage using vt220 terminals we bought at Stanford’s surplus store.

We each got to name our workstation. I named mine “Elna”. Why? Because the Rot13 of “Ryan” is “Elna”. Rot13 is a convenient quick and dirty cipher to disguise plain text. Basically, you replace each letter in a string by its companion 13 places further along in the alphabet, wrapping to the beginning if necessary. The great thing about Rot13 is it is reversible. Simply apply the function again, and you are back where you started.

Yesterday, on my flight back from LAX to DEN, to my great amusement, my stewardess’s name was “Elna”. I had long since forgotten about my first workstation’s name until I saw her name tag and it jogged my memory.

For fun with Rot13, go to http://rot13.com and you can do your own translations. Try this one first: “Elna Naqerj ZpVagler”.

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Goodbye, Kurt Vonnegut

I woke up this morning and unfolded the front page of the New York Times to discover that Kurt Vonnegut is dead at 84. He was a great writer whose book Cat’s Cradle was a big influence on my worldview. When I was in the ninth grade, the book was a reading assignment in my English class. At the same time, I was also engaged in classes at my local Catholic church to prepare for the sacrament of Confirmation.

While I had already had doubts about whether I actually wanted to be confirmed and had some serious misgivings about any form of organized religion, reading Cat’s Cradle pushed me squarely into the atheist (or at least deeply agnostic) camp. Shortly after reading the book (and then re-reading it) I quit my Confirmation class, stopped attending Mass (except for Christmas and Easter, to keep my mom happy) and converted to Bokononism. And years later when I spent half a year living in Germany (Berlin and Munich) during my time at Stanford, I visited Dresden and the site of the actual Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five.)

I was originally going to start this post by writing that Mr. Vonnegut had come unstuck in time, but Paul Kedrosky beat me to it. So I will simply wish Mr. Vonnegut farewell and hope that there were no suspicious traces of ice-nine found near his body.

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The Slingbox Promotes a Healthy Lifestyle

I came across a post today by Matt Haughey on PVRblog who writes about using his Slingbox so he can catch up on his TiVo’d Jon Stewart and Colbert Report episodes by perching his laptop on the handlebars of his elliptical trainer while working out. That’s a great use of in-the-home placeshifting and something I’ve been known to do from time to time while riding my stationary bike in the basement. Better living through technology!

I also know someone (who shall remain nameless) who uses his Slingbox so he can visit the bathroom while watching his favorite shows and not miss a moment. Why he can’t just hit pause on his PVR, I’m not sure…

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Akustica Wins EDN Innovation Award

EDN magazine gave Akustica a “2006 Innovator of the Year” award in the Mixed Signal ASSP category for their AKU2000 digital microphone chip, which has seen early adoption in laptops, most notably in Fujitsu’s Lifebooks. Akustica’s digital microphones have tremendous advantages over traditional ECM microphones, most notably EMI immunity, surface mountability, smaller size and better and far more consistent acoustic performance from part to part, which enables multiple microphone applications for noise cancellation and directionality. Multiple mic applications in the PC world will become increasingly common given Microsoft’s new audio stack in Vista, which supports multi-mic array audio input, enabling directionality and noise-reduction for audio input, something increasingly important for laptops in the VOIP/Skype era. And Akustica is now benefiting from their early collaboration with Microsoft and anticipates additional PC vendors will announce laptop designs that include one or more Akustica chips in the coming months.

Ken, Jim and the rest of the Akustica team, congrats!

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