By Jason Snell

May 15, 2017 2:22 PM PT

Long Live the MP3

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Here’s the short version of this story: The MP3 audio format isn’t dead, but is about to experience a renaissance.

Here’s the slightly longer version: One of the companies who held patents covering some uses of the MP3 format has terminated its licensing program because its patents have run out. What this means is not that the MP3 format is about to evaporate, but rather, that lots of audio software that previously avoided encoding files into MP3 will now be free to support it without paying a tithe to Fraunhofer.

This is great news for everyone. I’ve spoken to several developers of audio and MP3-related software who have been watching the clock run out on MP3 patents so that they could release MP3 features into the world—both in brand-new apps as well as existing ones—without buying into Fraunhofer’s expensive licensing regime.

Almost every podcast you listen to is encoded as an MP3. A lot of the music you listen to may be, too. MP3 is an old format, yes, and there are newer formats that improve on it—Fraunhofer recommends AAC, which has been powering iTunes since the start. Perhaps not coincidentally, Fraunhofer makes money from AAC patents that it no longer makes from MP3 patents.

Did Fraunhofer announce the death of MP3 in the hopes of convincing a credulous tech press to poison the format and push people to a newer format that is still a money-maker for them? I guess you could brush up on your German and ask them, but it seems pretty obvious to me.

What’s disappointing is the number of news outlets, from Gizmodo and Engadget to NPR and CNBC, that reported Fraunhofer’s declaration uncritically. Full credit to outlets like Motherboard and CNet and TMO for getting the story right.

I’m not going to relitigate¹ the arguments against software patents here. Even if you believe that software should be patented, there is a point at which the patent regime needs to fall away so that everyone can make use of the technology unencumbered. This is a time for celebration for anyone who is not Fraunhofer: The MP3 is now free. Make your new MP3 encoders with abandon. Create more MP3 podcast tagging and chapter tools. Add MP3 export to all of those iOS apps that desperately need it.

And to those who suggest that the MP3 will die because it’s an older and inferior format, I say only this: One of the most popular file formats on the Internet is ancient and unencumbered by patents. Or have you not looked at a GIF lately? Long live the MP3.

By Jason Snell

May 12, 2017 10:40 AM PT

My FlightTrack replacement is Flight Update Pro

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

So a couple of months ago my go-to travel app died, and I’ve been searching for a replacement—with the help of Six Colors readers as well as other stranded FlightTrack users like Yahoo’s David Pogue.

There are so many apps out there, and while none of them matches all of my needs, I’ve settled on a strategy for using my phone (and Apple Watch) to keep track of my air travel.

Before I get to the all-purpose app I’ve decided to go worth, let me put in a few words for a class of apps that many readers recommended to me, namely apps from the airlines themselves. Early on in the app era, I remember trying airline apps and finding them severely wanting. Not only are they uni-taskers—you’ve got to keep one on your phone for every airline you fly—but they weren’t very good.

Prodded on by readers, I downloaded several airline apps and discovered that they’ve come a long way. They’re not fantastic, but if you’re flying on a specific airline, it’s a good idea to install that airline’s app and make sure it’s up to date. I used the United Airlines app on my recent European trip, and it was actually helpful.

My favorite all-purpose app is probably the $10 Flight Update Pro, which isn’t as pretty as FlightTrack but is quite functional, providing current and future trip information, push notifications about flight status, and email integration with TripIt, so I can forward my flight receipts and have them automatically show up in the app.

The best app I tried is probably App in the Air, but I can only recommend it if you’re a hard-core traveler. App in the Air costs $5/month or $30/year. There’s also a $50 lifetime option. I don’t fly enough to make that worth it for me, but if you do, you should give it a try.

By Jason Snell

May 9, 2017 10:00 AM PT

Comixology Guided View comes to Kindle

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

When Comixology started bringing comics to small mobile devices, one of the challenges was screen size—you simply couldn’t have the full-page comic-book experience on a small, low-resolution screen. These days, I get that experience on a 12.9-inch iPad Pro… but that doesn’t help if you’re reading comics on a smaller device.

Comixology’s solution to this problem was a feature called Guided View, which would automatically zoom, pan, and turn pages to guide you through a comic panel by panel, and in some cases even word balloon by word balloon. It turned out that not only was it helpful for people reading comics on tiny phone screens, but also for people who didn’t grow up with comics and find it hard to figure out the right sequence to read panels on a comics page. (Comics literacy is a real thing. Read Scott McCloud for a lot more.)

Amazon bought Comixology a few years back, and gradually the comics expertise of Comixology has been rolled into Amazon proper. (For example, if you buy a digital comic on Amazon and it’s also available on Comixology, it will show up in both places.) The latest addition is Guided View itself, which is rolling out to updated versions of the Kindle app on iOS, Fire tablets, and Android.

(For the record, Amazon’s comics catalog understandably focuses on graphic novels—check out The Coldest City by my friend Antony Johnston¹—and “trade” collections. Comixology offers all of those graphic novels and trades, but focuses a bit more on single-issue comics. Most of the stuff is available in both stores.)

For a while I’ve had people ask me if they should buy comics on Comixology or on Amazon, and I’ve had to explain that the comic reading experience is just better in the Comixology app. But with the addition of Guided view, the Kindle app is reaching parity with the Comixology itself.

By Dan Moren

May 9, 2017 7:27 AM PT

Echo Show ships on June 28 for $230

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

That Echo with a screen? Totally true. Amazon unveiled the Echo Show this morning, which adds a 7-inch touchscreen into the mix, as well as the ability to make and receive video calls using a built-in camera.

Among the other features Amazon touts for the touchscreen are the ability to watch video flash briefings and YouTube videos, as well as see music lyrics, view photos, get weather forecasts, and more. It’ll also integrate with smart security cameras and baby monitors, letting you bring up the feed from a compatible camera with your voice.

The video-calling feature appears to be a proprietary Amazon technology, but it isn’t limited to the Echo Show. You can chat, for free, with anybody who has the Alexa app on their iOS, Fire OS, or Android smartphone or tablet. (It also appears as though you’ll be able to make voice calls to other Echo devices without a screen, so presumably existing devices will be able to make voice calls to each other and the Alexa app as well.) For those concerned about privacy, a mute button will deactivate the mic and camera.

Calling isn’t the only communication technology that Amazon’s rolling out, either. You can also send messages between people with Echo or the Alexa app, using your voice, and there’s a “Drop In” feature that sounds like a sort of intercom, which Amazon says is designed to let you do things like check in on a baby or an elderly relative. (That feature can be enabled on a device-by-device basis.)

On the audio front, the Echo Show has eight mics, plus beam-forming and noise-canceling technology to make it easier for it to hear you. It also has a pair of Dolby-enhanced stereo speakers and, as with the Echo Dot, can pair over Bluetooth with smartphones for audio input or with Bluetooth speakers for audio output.

The Echo and its attendant “skills” have proved to be a far more attractive ecosystem for developers working with Amazon than the company’s somewhat disastrous attempt at smartphones and tablets, but it remains to be seen if those same developers will want to spend the time to enhance their current app offerings with visual elements.

As for the device itself, while Amazon makes good arguments for the additional functionality a touchscreen can bring, there’s still a question of whether users will find it as appealing as the voice-based Echo. It’s certainly more like a traditional computing device, and it comes at a premium over something like a tablet. Still, perhaps Amazon is on to something with its appliance-like approach to computing. The Echo Show is part tablet, part PC, and part smart television–and, admittedly, its aesthetics kind of look like a Frankensteined version of all of those devices. (Then again, people have bought way uglier products over the history of consumer technology.)

Retailing for $230–and available in black or white–the Echo Show arrives on June 28; preorders are now being accepted.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

May 8, 2017 2:24 PM PT

Create audio transcripts fast with Trint

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Every quarter I generate a transcript of some or all of Apple’s conference call with analysts. I’ve used any number of methods to generate this transcript, from brute force to double-teaming in a Google Doc to using a tool to time-shift the audio, making it easier to transcribe. The most recent manifestation of this involved me splitting the job with Serenity Caldwell and using Audio Hijack to time-shift the call.

This year, though, I tried something else. (In part, it was out of desperation—I wanted a transcript of the questions and answers because it’s helpful to me in writing post-call stories, but I was also pretty under the weather and I couldn’t bear to type the entire thing out.)

The other week, in the aftermath about my complaints about the flaws in speech-to-text transcription services, I got an email about a new speech-to-text transcript service called Trint. What makes Trint different is probably not its text-conversion engine—it’s the web app that the service has built around the engine. When you upload an MP3 file to Trint, it converts it to text and puts the result in a web-based editor that’s synced directly with the timestamps of the audio file.

In other words, if I click on a word in a Trint transcription file, it plays the recorded audio from that word. This makes it very easy to follow along in the Trint editor and clean up the transcript as I go. You can even set the editor to play back audio at slower than normal speed (or faster!), which can allow you to really get in a groove. And there are keyboard shortcuts to pause and jump back a few seconds, which are key features if you’re trying to get through a transcript quickly and you missed a couple of words.

So on Tuesday afternoon, here’s what I did: I recorded the Apple conference call using Audio Hijack and, after a few minutes, I clicked the Split button, which stops recording on one MP3 file and starts on a new one. Then I’d upload the previous audio to Trint and a minute or so later, I’d begin editing the transcript generated by Trint’s speech-to-text engine. Rather than transcribing the call from scratch, now I was editing a faulty machine-generated transcript, which requires far less typing and is therefore a much faster process.

When I reached the end of the first audio file, I’d click Split again, upload that MP3 file, and continue transcribing. Repeat until the call is done, and you end up with a full call transcript that’s a lot easier to create and is done not very long after the actual call concludes. (Trint lets you export in various file formats; I got my file out in Word and then did a bunch of search-and-replace operations to get it formatted the way I wanted it.)

The result, posted here, isn’t perfect—it’s got a bunch of typos I should have caught that I’m going to chalk up to my illness more than my choice of transcription methods. Still, I’d much rather edit a transcript than type it all myself, especially if it can happen in almost real-time.

More broadly, Trint’s approach—to make it easy to compare the audio clips to the transcript as you’re verifying and editing it—is exactly the right one. If you ever find yourself needing to make a transcript, it’s worth a look. Trint offers monthly membership plans, but there’s also a $15/hour pay-as-you-go plan. It was certainly worth it for me.

By Dan Moren

May 8, 2017 5:55 AM PT

Report: Image of Amazon Echo with a screen make the rounds

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Over at AFTV News, there’s an image of the rumored Echo with a screen that showed up on Amazon’s servers (tipster Evan Blass later provided higher quality images that are also included in the post).

Despite some folks knocking the machine’s appearance–Engadget’s Edgar Alvarez said it resembled “a shrunken big-screen TV from the 1990s”–the device has me interested, certainly more so than the recently announced Echo Look.

I think there’s a lot of appeal to adding a screen to the Echo, particularly because some information is more efficient when delivered visually than spoken aloud. For example, rather than having the Echo rattle off all your calendar appointments, one by one, it could simply display them. Same goes for, say, a seven-day forecast. And having a screen opens up the possibility of displaying video content, which of course previous Echo models were incapable of doing.

In particular, I think a screen-based Echo could be a boon in the kitchen, where my primary Echo is located. Not only could it display videos for cooking (for those instances when I find myself running to the office to look up the best way to mince garlic, for example), but it would also be handy for showing how much time is left on a timer, or letting you page through a recipe.

That said, the devil is in the details. Reports describe the display, unsurprisingly, as a touchscreen. One would hope that Amazon would take appropriate precautions to make the device durable for use in some place like a kitchen: splash-proof, easy to clean, etc. Too much necessary interaction with a touchscreen is a disaster if you’ve just been dealing with raw chicken, for example.

The purported Echo image also shows what looks to be a small camera at the top, which has prompted some to wonder if the device will include some sort of video-calling feature–though, given that Amazon doesn’t have its own service for that, it makes me wonder if it would use Skype, Google’s Duo, or something else?

The big question is how Amazon thinks of this device. We’ve seen the original Echo and the Echo Dot positioned as devices that can live in any room of the house; more recently, we’ve seen the Echo Look aimed at use with your wardrobe. Is the Echo with a display meant to be in your living room, in the kitchen, or somewhere else? Because the Look also showed us that Amazon’s interested in leveraging machine learning to accomplish some specific tasks; it’s not hard to imagine that a kitchen-based device, for example, might use cameras and machine learning to identify certain ingredients and give you information based on them. (Or, knowing Amazon, prompt you to order certain complementary gadgets or food.)

Amazon would clearly love for you to have an Echo in every single room of your house. The idea of computers as home appliances was a popular one back in the ’90s, but it never quite caught on; in more recent years, it’s been supplanted by the smartphone that’s with us all the time. But the Echo–and competitors like Google Home and rumored Siri Speaker–show that there’s still room in our lives for an appliance-like device that we don’t have to carry around with us when we’re in the comfort of our own homes.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]