It has become common to listen to radio stations on computer systems, e.g., a desktop or laptop PC or the Sonos system. The processors inside these computers are capable of processing (low quality) video in real time. So one would think that the processor is powerful enough to compute whether the station is playing music or if an announcer is talking. A consumer listening to a public radio station might want to hear the music but not the advertisements (generally all talk, e.g., “support for WCRB comes from BP, the world’s leading blah blah blah”). Why isn’t there an option in a Windows radio player or in the Sonos system to mute or kick the volume down 20 dB during the talk segments?
12 thoughts on “Why can’t computer systems playing Internet radio filter out the talk?”
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Its the same reason that DVRs don’t automatically remove commercials from recorded TV broadcasts – business politics. Even TiVo’s commercial skip button (30 second jump) didn’t come enabled from the factory, and even that is still not really automated. For my home HTPC, I have programs that runs automatically after a TV show records to remove commercials – its not 100% perfect yet, but darn close. The difference is, the programs were written by companies that are small enough to not get noticed and involved in the politics.
This might be hard to do reliably, since so many radio ads now have music in the background. Reminds me of when Mtv came out, and music videos were basically kissing cousins of the commercials being played during breaks. A computer probably wouldn’t have a chance trying to tell Def Leppard from an old Tweeter commercial!
Along the same lines… shouldn’t the Comcast dvr (which costs extra per month) automatically skip (or at least automatically fast forward through) commercials? Sure… advertisers would be dismayed, but in that case, why offer fast forward during commercials at all?
Charles: I don’t think the “business politics” argument applies here. There are free and open source clients that play Internet radio, are there not? The streams put out by radio stations are not generally encrypted.
Andy: OPR (Obama Praise Radio) stations that play music don’t typically have musical commercials. The commercials are all talk, as are discussions about the music that a listener might not be interested in. Comparisons to Comcast don’t make sense to me. The cable TV industry makes billions of dollars partly because of the money that is flowing to advertising. Sonos, on the other hand, is not getting any money from advertisers, directly or indirectly. Nearly all of Sonos’s money comes from consumers (though maybe they are getting a cut from Pandora, Rhapsody and other subscription services for which they offer free trials). And the open source desktop client authors aren’t getting any money at all!
While I’m not really exposed to ads since I pay for Sirius, the DJ chatter is what makes the station. It transforms a stream of music into a Station, magnifying the shared experience. Differentiating between not merely music and non-music, classifying whether speech is a DJ leading into a song, a DJ doing an ad, an announcer advertising DUI defense attorneys with a particularly musical tone and cadence, spoken word in the middle of a song, and then taking into account personal preferences as far as what should be muted would be an NP-F-THIS problem at best.
Also, if you’re so interested in a music-only stream, set your iPod to shuffle or get a paid Pandora account. All music, all the time without any of that annoying shared experience with other living human beings.
John: The “DJ Chatter” on OPR stations such as WCRB (supposedly all-classical, but 10-30 percent of air time is devoted to advertising) is not about the music or any kind of shared experience with other listeners. It is reading the names and product/service attributes of various companies that have paid for air time. Sometimes the advertising is interrupted when they ask for listeners to send in money directly.
In any case, I was not proposing this as the default, just as an option.
There are certainly business and legal reasons that apps don’t do this, but more importantly lets ASSUME that reliable “commercial/talk” detection* was possible for radio, you would have to buffer at least 20-30** minutes to analyze, then determine what the “show” was and what the “commercials” was…then remove the “commercials” and play it back to the listener. Certainly the Sonos system does not have the ability to buffer 20 minutes of audio, and even if it did, how would users like a 20 minute delay after turning it on, but before playing?
Also, you seem to be confusing open-source apps, with “rogue, pirate, do whatever the fuck we want” applications. There are still licensing terms that, if not followed, will get us a nasty gram from some law firm.
* – Like C. Smith says they do this for RECORDED TV with DVRMSToolbox(Showanalyzer)/Comskip but it really doesn’t work that well. I have never even seen a demonstration of this on live TV.
** – You really could never buffer enough since radio, unlike TV, does not have as rigid a “show” schedule and as a result there is no way to accurately gauge how long someone will listen. 20 minutes of buffer that you analyze may only contain 15 minutes of music…so when you get to the end you have to buffer another 20 minutes and so on forever.
All this being said, it might be possible for someone to come up with a brilliant algorithm to do it in real time, but who would invest time in that? A user that too cheap to upgrade most services to remove commercials(ala Spotify) is never going to pay anything for the ability to skip commercials.
Phil, how will you filter out jingles? Once we raise the bar, some of the annoyance could just mutate to pass the filter. OTOH, you might filter out anything resembling human voice, but that might not be what you hope for.
Anthony: You think it is illegal for a consumer to turn the volume up and down on his or her radio? Or that I need a license to connect from my PC to a radio station’s Internet stream? Would it also be illegal for me to leave the room while the PC was playing a commercial?
Why would you need a 20-minute buffer? The commercial breaks on public radio stations tend to be only 5 minutes at the most. And we certainly don’t need to glue the music parts together to form a continuous sound; my original posting says that the radio will be attenuated 20 dB when someone is speaking. Nor does the algorithm need to be perfect; if the consumer wants to hear the talking he or she can override the computer.
Wilbur: We won’t filter out jingles, though we probably could with a slight buffer and some collaborative filtering. Non-commercial radio stations, e.g., OPR, tend not to have jingles in the commercials. They just talk.
Cribbed from http://bugs.code.downthemall.net/trac, but copies are available all over the web:
The answer to “Why doesn’t this feature exist?” is usually “By default features don’t exist. Somebody has to implement them.”
It’s not like every feature you can think of comes out of your brain fully tested and implemented, and then some [Manager] somewhere files a bug to have your feature removed.
Features start out nonexistent and somebody has to make them happen.
Raymond Chen 23-JUN-2005
Phil – I don’t think it is illegal for a end-user to change the volume of the stereo but that is NOT what I said, however to programatically lower the volume of a stream is certainly against the Terms of Service of NPR for example “(e) you shall not modify any API content, headlines, links or metadata included in the API Content; (f) you shall not use the API Content in any way that changes or distorts the fundamental meaning of the content;”
http://www.npr.org/about/termsofuse.html
You are most certainly entering into an agreement with the radio station. Just because you are not reading the links at the bottom of nearly every webpage(including this one) does not mean we are not legally(endlessly debatable in court) bound by them. Ignorance is no defense, and at a simple ethical level you are certainly bound by them.
As for your absurd leaving the room argument, if it were in their terms of service, you would be bound by it, but a judge would probably not rule it enforceable nor would there be any reliable method of detection. HOWEVER, MMORPGs like World of Warcraft do have language that prevents unattended operation that basically prevent a user from programming the computer to play the game for him/her.
So yes, in the world of lawyers we live in now, you might not be allowed to turn the volume up and down as you wish just like how most respectable, legally licensed DVD players won’t allow you to skip those FBI/Copyright warning at the beginning of DVDs. Many DVD player manufacturers would love to let you skip them but as part of the license that lets them put that DVD logo on their stuff they agree to not let people do that.
Anthony stop this lawyer nonsense. You can’t just make up rules. According to you I can write terms of service that will require you to serve my family cold drinks for the rest of your life and you will be bound by it if you visit my website. What a load of crap.