Photosounder used for new Call of Duty Kevin Spacey audio thingie

[A_SN]

I feel like I've achieved relevance so I want to brag to you guys. Here's the story, there's a new Call of Duty coming up starring Kevin Spacey, and they released a teaser audio thing with Kevin Spacey saying ominous things about democracy and at the end of the audio there's a swooshy noise, and the shining beacons of investigative journalism at Variety figured that by looking at it through a spectrum analyser you'd see a picture of a guy holding a gun. See the article here btw http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/ke ... 201169428/

However the people at Variety had the bad taste to use an inferior analyser for that task, so I loaded up the sound in Photosounder and got a somewhat clearer picture:



But how do I know it was actually done with Photosounder? Well Photosounder uses a noise for synthesis that by default loops every 2 seconds (there's an option so that you can have it loop every 30 seconds by the way, it's menu Options > Long Block Duration), so the grain in the picture repeats every two seconds as you can see in this GIF:



So yep, it was definitely made with Photosounder! I feel relevant and contented with my bragging. You may now resume your activities.

[camsr]

There has been over 9000 downloads of my plugin Float Crush, but maybe a healthy armful of thank yous
I don't mind though, sometimes I hear it (or think I hear it) and that's usually reward enough. Do something unique and stand out!

[A_SN]

There has been over 9000 downloads of my plugin Float Crush, but maybe a healthy armful of thank yous
I don't mind though, sometimes I hear it (or think I hear it) and that's usually reward enough. Do something unique and stand out!

WHAT?! NINE THOUSAND?! There's no way that can be right! Yeah, I don't care so much for people telling me it's great, but when I hear/see it being used for something interesting it's indeed quite rewarding. Being unique and standing out isn't really the difficulty for me, it's rather making it practical and relevant.

[camsr]

C'mon, you must care a little bit.

[A_SN]

C'mon, you must care a little bit.

Well, hardly (that would be a very small bit), mainly because I think that people don't really get what Photosounder is for, and I've heard so much being said about Photosounder over the last 5 years. Praise is cheap, you know what's not cheap? Money, the best form of praise!

But yeah the thing about Float Crush is that you can't really use it wrong, it's pretty straightforward, it does its crushing thing, so if someone uses it you can only be happy that more people use it. My main idea for Photosounder was for people to use it for music and sound effect synthesis (although it does have practicality problems in that area), but most of the emails I get are asking me if you can use it for karaoke or about using random images with no good sonic qualities. So I'm always a bit glad to see someone talk about it positively or use it for something, but it's always combined with a disappointment that it's always used for the most basic things it can do.

[camsr]

Can Photosounder take an audio file and output an image also?

Wait a minute.....

[A_SN]

Can Photosounder take an audio file and output an image also?

Yep, that's what the screenshots in the OP show . Oh yeah, I actually also get a lot of mails asking me if I can recommend a program that can turn sounds into images (which is like half of what Photosounder does), or sometimes I see people making a sound in Photosounder then time-stretching it in another program (when it would make a lot more sense to stretch it in Photosounder with the simple turn of a knob). I think what I've got here is a failure to communicate, maybe my design doesn't make things clear enough, maybe the website doesn't explain what it does clearly enough, maybe the whole concept is a bit too much, I don't know anymore...

[spintonik]

I think what I've got here is a failure to communicate, maybe my design doesn't make things clear enough, maybe the website doesn't explain what it does clearly enough, maybe the whole concept is a bit too much, I don't know anymore...

Well, You could do some marketing too! I stumbled upon Photosounder by mistake, and as an audio engineer (mobile phones -world), loudspeaker company owner, musician (albeit a lazy, talentless one), music technologist etc, I am extremely impressed.

I see quite a learning curve, but I'll eventually give it a try.

What you could try to do is to employ an smart idiot to help you - watching the youtube videos at photo sounder -page (101 tutorial), is quite a experience, there is SO MUCH technical jargon coming at you in very fast pace, absorbing all the given information is very hard. Then there is some very obvious info seemingly missing at the website (what operating systems you support, does it work in Mac?). Attention span of a common day musician is very short, as there is so much options available. A Smart Idiot can help you to build your website, tutorials and software itself more accessible, just by changing the UI and explaining things in different way. I am not sure where you come from but in my country, university students work for practically free for 2-3 months because they need internships in order to graduate. Hire some students from SW UI dept and from marketing.

Second, I was not able to find you in Google with keywords "converting image to a sound." Talk to a website guru, get your google keywords sorted.

Third, your product is cheap. Increase the price with 10 euros, spend 10 euros to Google AdWords every time you sell a plugin. Make sure everyone who wants to convert images to a sound find your tool. Skip the Facebook, you will NEVER find your clients through it.

Fourth: Talk to artists and technologists famous enough and geeky enough, just send them a free license for them to try it out. BT, Tipper, Brian Eno, comes first to my mind, but there must be thousands good options. Someone will mention your software in their Facebook/twitter account as a thanks.

fifth: After you get some famous endorsers, make a press release about it, spam it to all those geek medias web is full of. Actually, this Call of Duty case should have been done as press release - I am sure your very cool SW will get attention in websites like a techcrunch

Sixth.
Where else you can use your technology, outside of making farting sounds to electro tracks?
Is there business areas that could benefit from your expertise and pay you MUCH Better?
NSA?

[Rah]

Congratulations, that is cool

TBH I have played with photosounder, and it's a little beyond me, though I certainly am attracted to the potential it seems to hold. I need to give it another try some time.

I'm also an admirer of your other work, particularly Spiral and Spline EQ

[A_SN]

I think what I've got here is a failure to communicate, maybe my design doesn't make things clear enough, maybe the website doesn't explain what it does clearly enough, maybe the whole concept is a bit too much, I don't know anymore...

Well, You could do some marketing too!

Yeah, I could use some marketing, but quite frankly I don't even know how to market it because I don't even really know what people actually want to use it for.

1. You do realise that on the front page of Photosounder.com it says in bold which OSes it runs on (just noticed though that it's outdated, seems to imply it wouldn't work with the newest versions whereas it does) and always has? There are two things in bold on the front page, it's the OS support and the prices.

I'm not even a real company so I don't think I can just take internships, I'm just a guy in a bedroom. And you can't really dumb things down, it just can't work, it's not the kind of program that can really work for casual users, on the contrary I should do more educational videos.

2. It's the 4th link, and if you just google 'image to a sound' it's the 1st one. People give SEO too much credit, in the audio market and most particularly the corner of outlandish products people don't google what they're looking for, they google what they've already heard of. It's like, Pepsi and Coca Cola don't make sales by being the first result for the query "what's a good soft drink", people buy their products because they've heard of them somehow. What works is having more people talk about what I make, although it depends how. Even a mention in a magazine can be surprisingly ineffective, whereas a list of the best free plugins on a blog can keep on delivering for years for instance. Also focusing on how it "converts" images to sound is kind of counterproductive because there's a lot more that it can do than just that, but it's impossible to make people who only heard a little bit about it remember more than that, so people focus on converting images to sound which is dubious in terms of practical uses (like, what do you want to use that for? It's only going to make weird sound effects. The other possible uses for Photosounder are much more interesting, like sound removal, or processing sounds in creative ways, even only as a time-stretcher it's arguably more interesting). But I brought it upon myself, if I wanted to avoid that I shouldn't have talked about images or done everything that's consistent with presenting it as a sort of Photoshop for sound, which is why when I make a sort of rewrite it'll be more as a kind of DAW that uses special techniques rather than something that focuses on images). It's so hard to make people understand all that it does that like I said I frequently get e-mails asking me if I can recommend a program that can turn sounds into images... Bottom line is, hardly anyone really gets what the program is or does, and there's no way it's going to improve short of making a whole new program with a totally different and more familiar (familiar like a DAW) angle.

Photosounder is weird, everybody finds it brilliant but yet it seems everybody is interested in it for the least interesting reasons. Now I have to reply to a mail from someone whose mind is totally blown that a picture of a sound can be turned back into a sound, after two weeks of playing with the program. Like, yeah, that's the basic premise of the program, you can do actually interesting things BASED on that. Now I have to make an even better program that will use more advanced concepts (like for instance vector lines for FM synthesis combined with the rest) and hope anyone will understand it and not be stuck in awe at the "images make sounds" stage. Yayyy. Which is why for now I'm just gonna keep updating what's already out there, all 3 of them, it's just simpler like this.

3. Sadly it's not by raising the price by 15% that you end up with 15% more money. And Google Ads are useless, I tried that, it was an utter waste of money (I would have wasted less money had I remembered to turn off the ads, d'oh!). Facebook actually works quite well (at least for SplineEQ) provided you make the right choices (iirc you want your post to appear in people's news feeds on computers, all the other stuff will bring you worthless hits by the thousands).

4. Yeah maybe you've got a point there, I never tried sending anything to big names like Brian Eno or BT, but there's the weird thing about sending stuff to people, sometimes you send it to them, they don't even try it, then months later they hear about it from somewhere else, send you an e-mail asking you for a NFR license and don't even remember you already sent them one.

5. Mmmh yeah I wasn't sure what to do about that Call of Duty thing, maybe that's why I'd need someone to take care of PR. Shyness actually gets in my way of doing more, I could make more videos, post more on Facebook or forums, send more newsletters but I end up thinking "I'm not gonna bother people just for something this minor, I'll wait until I have something more worthwhile to show".

6. lol I'm not going to work for NSA, and I want to keep doing what I'm already doing, it fits my plan. But weirdly enough years ago a mining company showed interest in what I had going. It's just not very interesting to me.

Glad to see this thread was enough to make you come out of a 7 year posting hiatus though, I feel special .

Congratulations, that is cool

TBH I have played with photosounder, and it's a little beyond me, though I certainly am attracted to the potential it seems to hold. I need to give it another try some time.

I'm also an admirer of your other work, particularly Spiral and Spline EQ

Glad to hear that thanks .