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The DIY Grey Album, CC moving image winners...

CC has announced its moving image winners.

As well, Ernie and Scot Hacker exchange thoughts on the possibility of a DIY Grey Album... That is, a recipe and program that would create the grey from the black and white. I think this is possible... as I said over there:

I am somewhat between you two... I know it can be done... however, it would be very hard (after writing the rest of this comment, I realized it's not really that hard!). You'd effectively have to have a recipe like this:

  1. Open an a capella Jay-Z track.
  2. Open the Beatles track from which you'd like to stitch together the background.
  3. For each sound in the resultant Grey Album track, you have to know:
    1. the start and end time of that sound from the Beatles track;
    2. where said sound should go in the resultant grey track;
    3. exactly what affects, processing, etc. was done to the sounds (if any) and the settings used.
    4. if the sound was looped (this could save processing).
  4. Then you just need an executible program (that is, not a human!) that could take the data from the recipe above and the two tracks and synthesize a grey track.

now that I've stepped through it, I realize this could be done relatively easy using XML. The hard part would be designing a program that could interpret the XML and do the actual processing and synthesis. Although, this would be, in essence, just a program that copied parts of an audio file and then processed them accordingly.

This could be very easily done if no processing needed to be done to the individual background sounds; if the executible just needed to copy parts of a sound and merge them with another static audio clip (the a capella track), this could be done by any competent C coder with the right mp3/wav library. And we could put the GPL on the program and CC licenses on the XML files. Then, users would just need the two tracks for the recipe, the XML file describing how to cook up a grey track and then the executible that did the actual synthesis.

Let's see the common-law copyright cops at EMI come after that!
Posted by joebeone at Febrero 28, 2004 05:36 PM