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Indeed. I see two options here. First is to analyze the other signal features of the commercials (eg. increased volume), although it may be tricky. The other
by t0mek 8y ago
Indeed. I see two options here.
First is to analyze the other signal features of the commercials (eg. increased volume), although it may be tricky.
The other option is a crowd-sourced solution - pretty much as for the browser adblock - where users can mark samples recognized as ads. Since the publishers often buy campaigns for many stations in the same country or state, it may be a shared database.
On the other hand, the described project only scratches my own itch. I wouldn't try to productise an app that takes away the main source of income for the radio stations.
- amelius 8y ago> I see two options here. Yes, or perhaps a combination of techniques. E.g. shared database to train an ML system to detect ads. Of course, the downside is that the ad industry will then tweak the ads until they pass the ML test. > I wouldn't try to productise an app that takes away the main source of income for the radio stations. I wouldn't think of it as taking away a source of income, but rather as forcing them to find a source that doesn't bother their customers so much. Ad blockers seem to be getting more accepted.
- dest 8y agoDo you have an idea how could such a database of copyrighted material be shared? (Asking for a friend...)
- t0mek 8y agoI think that it'd be enough to store some kind of fingerprints (eg. selected frequency components after performing the FFT), not the whole samples.
- dest 8y agoIndeed it seems to be the best option.
- amelius 8y agoGood point. Perhaps use only parts of the material (not the entire clips). This should be covered by "fair use". And perhaps using the clips for other purposes than "viewing" may in fact be fair use. Especially since you are trying to find a method for not viewing them. (IANAL)
- dest 8y agoIANAL as well, but this notion of "fair use" seems slippy. I had a look in the French article that lists some exceptions that allow sharing copyrighted material, and did not find any obvious match with the potential shared database. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006069414&idArticle=LEGIARTI000006278917 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?cidTexte...
- amelius 8y agoI was under the impression that for purposes of research, fair use is pretty broad. So perhaps you could explore that angle.
- rtkwe 8y agoJust apply a transform to them like FFT then it's not the original work anymore and it should be fine.
- dest 8y agoYou know MP3 is kinda like a FFT right?
- rtkwe 8y agoYeah, but if you lose enough info such that it doesn't play like the original or can't be reconstituted into the original it's still large enough of a change that it should steer clear from copyright issues. No one's really tested exactly where the distinction falls.
- kirillseva 8y agoBlockchain!
- ambicapter 8y ago> Of course, the downside is that the ad industry will then tweak the ads until they pass the ML test. Nothing like a little competition to motivate the improvement of ML systems :)
- jdc 8y agoI think you'd want to look for dynamic range compression among other things.
- dest 8y agoNote this is not foolproof as e.g. pop songs are already heavily compressed.
- tga 8y agoHow about a third option, ads are by definition short and repeat a lot. No fancy ML needed, after a couple of times the filter gets one of these repeating fragments it should be able to block it. Fairness bonus: you get to hear each new ad a couple of times.
- bochoh 8y agoThe problem you have here is that in order to continue listening to songs more than just a couple of times you'd have to able to classify the song versus an ad. Otherwise once the system heard the song a few times it would start blocking it too.
- oliv__ 8y agoJust filter by length.
- masukomi 8y agoit's radio. the length is infinite. there are pauses in music. there are pauses in speech. Also, he didn't mention anything about delayed listening. The implication was that it happens in real-time so you don't know how long it will be when you need to start dropping the levels.
- randomdata 8y agoThat's not necessarily a bad thing. The decline in commercial music radio has been, in large part, because people quickly grow tired of hearing the same songs over and over again.
- tga 8y agoI expect most ads are <30s, most songs are >2m.
- taneq 8y agoAds repeat several times an hour, songs very seldom repeat within an hour and even then usually only once. It should be possible (although not sure how practical) to just autocorrelate the current audio with audio over the past hour.
- Kadin 8y agoEasier still... in the US, many radio stations transmit the artist and song title that's currently being played, via a low-bitrate subcarrier encoding. (The proper name is "Radio Data System", IIRC.) There were previously some FM to MP3 "ripping" tools that would use the RDS information to tag the resulting recordings -- I'm not sure of the status of them. But it could provide a good way to detect commercials, since most radio stations change to a generic station identification message when they break for commercials / banter. (Whether you'd also want to turn down for banter is another question.)
- dest 8y agoIt certainly works for some stations, but not for many other (from personal experience in France), and it would be trivial for radios to change their RDS / metadata system to circumvent ad blocking.
- carlmr 8y agoAs long as it's only individuals doing this I don't see anybody reacting on a wide scale. Also there's no feedback of listener numbers depending on volume. So there's no way to detect people "adblocking" on radio, so there's no impact on revenue.
- criddell 8y ago> I wouldn't try to productise an app that takes away the main source of income for the radio stations. Do you have similar objections to things like self-driving vehicle technology that will take away the main source of income for truck drivers?
- bonestamp2 8y ago> analyze the other signal features of the commercials (eg. increased volume), although it may be tricky My home theater receiver does this (Marantz). It works pretty well. It doesn't cancel out the TV commercials though, it just normalizes the volume so it matches the show. But, I assume you could make it work for muting too.