Ticketmaster provoked ire with a botched sale of tickets to Taylor Swift's first concert in five years. NPR reports: On Thursday afternoon, the day before tickets were due to open to the general public, Ticketmaster announced that the sale had been cancelled altogether due to "extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand." Taylor Swift broke her silence on Friday in statement on Instagram in which she said it is "excruciating for me to watch mistakes happen with no recourse." She said there are many reasons people had a hard time getting tickets, and she's trying to figure out how to improve the situation moving forward. "I'm not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could," she wrote, without naming Ticketmaster.
America's Justice Department "has opened an antitrust investigation into the owner of Ticketmaster," reports the New York Times. But the investigation "predates the botched sale" and "is focused on whether Live Nation Entertainment has abused its power over the multibillion-dollar live music industry." The new investigation is the latest scrutiny of Live Nation Entertainment, which is the product of a merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster that the Justice Department approved in 2010. That created a giant in the live entertainment business that still has no equals in its reach or power.... The debacle involving Ms. Swift's concert tickets this week has exacerbated complaints in the music business and in Washington that Live Nation's power has constrained competition and harmed consumers.
Or, as NPR puts it, "The frenzy has brought renewed scrutiny to the giant Ticketmaster, which critics have long accused of abusing its market power at the expense of consumers." Would-be concertgoers have complained vocally about recent incidents with near-instant sellouts and skyrocketing prices, and artists like Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen have feuded with it over the decades. One common complaint is that there doesn't seem to be a clear alternative or competitor to Ticketmaster, especially after it merged with concert provider Live Nation in 2010 (a controversial move that required conditional approval from the U.S. Department of Justice).

Now Tennessee's attorney general, a Republican, is opening a consumer protection investigation into the incident. North Carolina's attorney general announced on Thursday that his office is investigating Ticketmaster for allegedly violating consumers' rights and antitrust laws. And multiple Democratic lawmakers are asking questions about the company's dominance â" not for the first time.... "Taylor Swift's tour sale is a perfect example of how the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger harms consumers by creating a near-monopoly," tweeted Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), one of several lawmakers who has long called for investigation and accountability into the company, especially after becoming a subsidiary of concert behemoth Live Nation.
The article also cites a Thursday statement from Ticketmaster: The company says that using Verified Fan invite codes has historically helped manage the volume of users visiting the website to buy tickets, though that wasn't the case on Tuesday. "The staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn't have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests â" 4x our previous peak," it said, adding that it slowed down some sales and pushed back others to stabilize its systems, resulting in longer wait times for some users.

It estimates that about 15% of interactions across the website experienced issues, which it said is "15% too many."
The Tuesday sale also broke Ticketmaster's record for most tickets sold for an artist in a single day," reports People, "selling two million tickets."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for submitting the story.

Earlier this month, agents from both the FBI and the U.S. Air Force raided multiple homes belonging to a man who runs a little-known blog about Area 51. Gizmodo reports: That man, Joerg Arnu, said the swarm of federal agents in riot gear busted into his primary residence, handcuffed him, then marched him outside to wait in the freezing cold while they rifled through his apartment and took pretty much every piece of electronic equipment that he owned. So far, the government has been pretty tight-lipped about the whole thing, but officials did verify that it happened. In a statement provided to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Lt. Col. Bryon McGarry confirmed the raid. He did not elaborate on its purpose, saying only: "This is an open and ongoing law enforcement investigation between the Las Vegas FBI and Air Force OSI."

What did cops want? It's not exactly clear. Since 1999, Arnu has run Dreamland Resort, a website that covers activities in and around Area 51, the notoriously secretive government facility located in Groom Lake, Nevada. Long the subject of speculation and curiosity, the highly classified facility is the site of myriad UFO sightings. Coincidentally (or not), it is also the location where the Air Force reportedly tests and develops some of its most sensitive and experimental new projects and aircraft (see: the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s, for instance). Among other things, Arnu's site features pictures and writing about the Air Force's so-called "black projects" -- opaque, classified operations carried out behind a veil of government secrecy. Arnu claims that the agents confiscated his "laptops, phones, backup drives, camera gear, and my drone were seized." He describes the situation in detail in a blog post on his website.

A new study has found that Apple's wireless earbuds can serve as a more affordable and accessible sound amplification device than medical hearing aids. Gizmodo reports: Inspired by a feature called Live Listen released in 2016 by Apple, which allows an iPhone or iPad to be used as sound-boosting microphone, researchers from the Taipei Veterans General Hospital wondered whether the performance of AirPods 2 and the original AirPods Pro using this feature could compare to medical hearing aids. Apple does not position Live Listen as a tool for those dealing with hearing loss but as a way for users with normal hearing to boost desired sounds, like the calls of a bird. However, the researchers found that, in some situations, consumer-level personal sound amplification products faired quite well against pricier medically prescribed solutions, and given the popularity of products like Apple's AirPods, there's no stigma associated with wearing them.

The researchers tested the $129 AirPods 2 and $249 AirPods Pro paired with iPhone XS Max smartphones running iOS 13. They compared these against the $10,000 OTICON Opn 1 behind-the-ear hearing aids and a more affordable alternative, the $1,500 Bernafon MD1. The four options were tested with 21 participants dealing with mild to moderate hearing loss, who were asked to repeat short sentences read to them by the researchers in varying environments. In a quiet setting, the AirPods Pro were found to perform as well as the cheaper hearing aids and almost as good as the premium model, while the Air Pods 2 performed the worst of all four tested devices but still helped participants hear what was being read to them more clearly than not using a sound-enhancing device at all. In a noisy environment, the AirPods Pro performed even closer to the premium hearing aid model, thanks to their built-in noise cancellation, but only when the distracting noises were coming from the sides of the participant. When the noise was coming from the front, alongside the sample sentences being read by the researchers, both wireless earbud products failed to help improve what was being heard. "Hearing aids remain the best option for those dealing with hearing loss, but for those who don't have access to them for whatever reason, a cheaper product like Apple's AirPods Pro could provide noticeable improvements in hearing and clarity for those dealing with mild-to-moderate hearing loss and could serve as a useful alternative until over-the-counter solutions are more readily available and affordable," concludes the report.

Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration decided to allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter and without a prescription to adults, a decision that "could fundamentally change technology," said Nicholas Reed, an audiologist at the Department of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Sony's first OTC hearing aids were announced last month.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Over a dozen public libraries in the U.S. and Canada have begun offering their own music streaming services to patrons, with the goal of boosting artists and local music scenes. The services are region-specific, and offer local artists non-exclusive licenses to make their albums available to the community. The concept originated in 2014 when Preston Austin and Kelly Hiser helped the Madison Public Library build the Yahara Music Library, an online library hosting music from local artists. By the time they completed their work on Yahara, they were confident they had a software prototype that other interested libraries could customize and deploy. "That became kind of the inspiration for building MUSICat," Austin told Motherboard, referring to the software platform he and Hiser created under a startup called Rabble.

Now, public libraries in Pittsburgh, Nashville, Fort Worth, and most recently New Orleans have launched their own community-oriented streaming services using MUSICat's open source software. Joshua Smith works at New Orleans Public Library and has been embedded in the city's rich music scene for over a decade. He oversaw the launch of Crescent City Sounds with help from a team of curators that represent local artists and business owners, music journalists and historians and more. "They helped me get the word out to the music community," Smith told Motherboard, noting that their community status helped spread the word that the library now accepts digital music submissions. Smith says that for this first round, the curators accepted albums from artists that were released in the last five years, and that while living within city limits wasn't necessarily a deal breaker, not gigging regularly in the area was. To be considered, applicants needed to submit at least one track from their album. [...] He says each selected artist received a $250 honorarium to license their music to the New Orleans Public Library for five years -- a far cry from the fractions-of-a-penny per stream paid to independent artists by platforms like Spotify. This honorarium and licensing agreement is roughly the standard for public libraries following Rabble's process model. Austin does insist that libraries using MUSICat meet the basic criteria of paying artists to license their work to their libraries. But for everything else, Austin notes that these pre-established models are guidelines, not guardrails.

One example of a public library that took MUSICat and ran with it is Capital City Records -- the music streaming platform of the Edmonton Public Library in Alberta, Canada. An early adopter of MUSICat, the library's collection has grown to amass over 200 local musicians. The project also created opportunities for the library to engage in spin-off projects like limited run of vinyl pressings and running library-focused music events throughout the city. While over 2,000 artists are featured on one of MUSICat's music platforms, Austin says the company wants to continue forming partnerships with libraries on the local level. So for music lovers looking to jump ship from Spotify, he has a clear message: "This is not Spotify for libraries," Austin said. "It's a little different. The localness is kind of key. I don't think we could, for example, use the same strategy on the same fee to license on aggregate collection, which was all the local music from all the libraries available on the music hat app, right, like something like that would need to, it would need to be about the local collections and take people to them and let them play that music in context."

An anonymous reader writes that Seagate Technology has launched its second generation dual actuator MACH.2 series hard drives. "Computing power, storage capacities, and storage performance: all must continue moving forward in order for technology innovators to solve humanity's greatest challenges," boasts Seagate's page for the drives: MACH.2 is the world's first multi-actuator hard drive technology, containing two independent actuators that transfer data concurrently. MACH.2 solves the need for increased performance by enabling parallelism of data flows in and out of a single hard drive. By allowing the data center host computer to request and receive data from two areas of the drive simultaneously, MACH.2 doubles the IOPS performance of each individual hard drive.... MACH.2 provides up to 2x performance — with two independent actuators and data paths, it enables concurrent I/O streams to and from the host.
Seagate claims it offers "optimal latency" by improving sequential peformance to double data transfer rates over single-actuator drives.

And in other news, Seagate is selling hard drives with commemorative Star Wars themes, including the Mandalorian drive, the Grogu drive, and the Boba Fett drive. (It's in addition to Seagate's officially licensed external drive for God of War Ragnarök — optimised for PS4 and PS5, delivering "the ability to play PS4 games directly from the drive.") Seagate also made drives commemorating Marvel's Avengers and Spider-Man, and now has new drives for Marvel's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever .

"Cixin Liu's sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem can't stop jumping to other formats," reports Gizmodo: In addition to next year's Netflix series from The Terror: Infamy's Alexander Woo and Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and DB Weiss, last year saw the release of a serialized podcast (different from the audiobook version).

And for 2022, we've got an animated series that's premiering actually pretty soon.

Come December 3, an anime version of The Three-Body Problem will release on the Chinese streaming platform Bilibili. This series was originally announced in 2019 with a trailer, but things have been fairly quiet on that front up until now. Developed by CG studio YHTK Entertainment in partnership with The Three-Body Universe, a studio built specifically for the purpose of managing the franchise, a new trailer for the upcoming anime was released earlier in the week during a Bilibili anime showcase.
"Having enjoyed the book, I think it looks promising," writes Slashdot reader Camembert. The 2008 book was the first in Liu's hard sci-fi series Remembrance of Earth's Past — and according to Gizmodo, this is just the beginning: Bilibili's adaptation is the first of a larger initiative called the Three-Body Global Creator Project. Per the press release, animation studios across the world are permitted to explore the Remembrance franchise to showcase its global potential through various art and animation styles....

And if animation or Netflix aren't your bag, Tencent Video has made a live action version of The Three-Body Problem, though that version has yet to receive a release date.

Kevin Conroy, best known for voicing Batman on Warner Bros.' long-running TV show "Batman: The Animated Series," has died after a short battle with cancer. He was 66. Variety reports: "Batman: The Animated Series" originally aired for 85 episodes on Fox Kids from 1992-1995. Conroy's deep, gravelly Batman voice was widely acclaimed by critics and comic book fans, with many regarding the actor as the definitive Caped Crusader. The series also featured Mark Hamill's memorable performance as the Joker.

Conroy was so beloved for his Batman voice role that he continued with the character in various other DC projects, including the "Batman: Arkham" and "Injustice" video games franchises. He also appeared in various DC Universe Animated Original Movies, including "Batman: Gotham Knight" (2008), "Superman/Batman: Public Enemies" (2009), "Justice League: Doom" (2012), "Batman: The Killing Joke" (2016) and "Justice League vs. the Fatal Five" (2019), among other films. The 2019 "Justice League" animated film is Conroy's last credited feature as Batman, and his most recent video game credit as Batman is Warner Bros.' "MultiVersus" from earlier this year.

Studio Ghibli, the beloved animation producer behind worldwide hits like Spirited Away, Ponyo, My Neighbor Totoro, and Grave of the Fireflies, is teaming up with Lucasfilm, home to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, for a mysterious new project. Polygon reports: On Thursday, the Japanese studio tweeted a cryptic video teaser, with the Lucasfilm and Studio Ghibli logos back to back and... maddeningly nothing else. The video is silent, so there are no John Williams-penned themes to work from here. But suffice it to say, the teaser is most likely for an animated project based on a Lucasfilm property, and Star Wars seems like a safe bet. Lucasfilm and Disney have multiple animated Star Wars series, including the recently released Tales of the Jedi and -- the most likely candidate for Studio Ghibli -- Star Wars: Visions.

A second season of Star Wars: Visions is coming to Disney Plus in spring 2023. And while Disney and Lucasfilm have not revealed much about who is contributing to it, Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 is pitched as a "global tour, celebrating the incredible animation happening across countries and cultures."

Lauren Forristal writes via TechCrunch: Disney reported (PDF) results for the final quarter of its 2022 fiscal year today, revealing a total of 164.2 million Disney+ global subscribers, an increase of 12 million subs from 152.1 million in Q3. The flagship streaming service was only expected to gain 9.35 million subs. Across Disney's streaming services, Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ had a combined total of 235.7 million subscribers, up from 221 million in the third quarter. The company beat expectations of 233.8 million. [...] However, the company fell short of expectations for total revenue, which was reported to be $20.15 billion. Wall Street estimated that Disney would report a 15% year-on-year jump in revenue to $21.3 billion. The direct-to-consumer division lost $1.5 billion. Disney+ is also set to launch a cheaper ad-supported version on December 8th as it looks to find more ways to earn revenue. The company also increased subscription prices for Disney+, Hulu, Hulu Live TV bundles and ESPN+ plans.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Deadline: AMC Entertainment plans to launch "Zoom Rooms" at movie theaters in up to 17 U.S. cities serving businesses with in-person events and meetings. The partnership with Zoom will roll out "sometime in 2023," the giant exhibitor said. It will give the chain access to the "multi-billion market for corporate and other meetings," according to CEO Adam Aron, and during weekdays when most theaters are quiet.

Users will book three-hour blocks online, selecting preferred theaters and meeting time. AMC and Zoom will provide the necessary equipment. Auditorium sizes are expected to range between 75 to 150 seats. Additional services like food and beverage offerings, movie viewings, and concierge-style personalized handling of meeting needs will be available for an added cost. "As hybrid work has become more commonplace throughout the United States, Zoom Rooms at AMC will enable companies and other entities with decentralized workforces and customer bases to bring people from different markets together at the same time for cohesive virtual and in-person events and meeting experiences," the nation's biggest chain said.

"One of the lessons learned during the pandemic when so many of us were forced to work remotely was the importance of a reliable, dynamic communications platform. We also learned that even though we may be spread far apart, the ability to come together in person is as important as ever," said Aron. "This creates an all-new product in major cities across the U.S. for companies and meeting planners."

When it comes to getting into the groove on the dancefloor, it really is all about the bass, researchers have found. From a report: Scientists say when very low frequency (VLF) sound was introduced during a live electronic music event, gig-goers moved more even though they could not hear the frequencies. "This is real world -- real electronic music dance concert -- validation that the bass really does make people dance more, and this isn't just something that comes from our conscious awareness," said Dr Daniel Cameron, a neuroscientist and first author of the work from McMaster University in Canada. Cameron and colleagues note that previous studies suggested music that induces dance has more low frequency sound, and that low pitches help people to move in time to music.

However, it was not clear this impact of low frequencies would be seen in the real world, or when such sounds are not consciously detectable. Writing in the journal Current Biology, the team report how they set up an electronic music concert by the Canadian duo Orphx at McMaster and asked attenders to wear motion-capture headbands before turning on and off specialised VLF speakers every 2.5 minutes during the 55-minute performance. Results from 43 attenders who agreed to wear a headband revealed they moved 11.8% more, on average, when the VLF speakers were turned on. Cameron noted this meant people danced more vigorously, or with more exaggerated movements. At the end of the concert, 51 attenders completed a questionnaire that asked whether they could feel the music in their body, and whether the bodily sensations affected their compulsion to move.

Remember Amazon's announcement Tuesday that Prime members would get free access to ad-free podcasts and a library of 100 million songs?

It made Slashdot reader ayjaym cancel their Amazon Prime subsciption. Because despite the upgrade to 100 million tracks, "all of these — including the albums that were available on Prime Music previously — can only be played in random order!" You can't skip forward or back while playing a song either. And, if you like to listen to classical music you now have the travesty of having great works chopped up and reshuffled into a random play order.
A headline at Inc. magazine says Amazon's change "Is Making Everyone Angry." "Hey Alexa, play Taylor Swift's Anti-Hero," used to be a simple thing you might say. When you did, your Echo would do exactly that. It would play Taylor Swift's newest song as long as it was in the catalog of songs available. Now, however, that's not what happens at all. If you're lucky, Alexa will start playing songs from Midnights, Swift's latest album. That, however, is not a given. It might play some of her older songs. It might start playing songs from other artists instead. Why does Amazon think anyone wants this?

Here's why: It's cheaper for a streaming service to not let you choose the song you want, but to let you give it an input and start playing similar music. Also, because Amazon clearly sees Amazon Music as a thing you use in the background when you just want music playing as you do other things.... If what you want to do is listen to Taylor Swift's latest album, you're going to have to choose Apple Music or Spotify Premium, both of which charge more than $10 a month, or Amazon Music Unlimited, which is $8.99 per month.

According to Amazon, 80 percent of people will never do that. They will never pay $10 a month to stream music. They will, however, use a free streaming service even if it means giving up the ability to actually choose the song they want to listen to. Okay, fine, except that's not the thing Amazon had made before.
Inc's conclusion? "If you give someone a thing as a benefit because they gave you money for your $140 a year subscription membership, it's not great if you suddenly make that thing dramatically worse and expect them to pay you more to make it a better experience."

So if you're not going to pay extra to upgrade to Amazon's "Unlimited Music" service, Fast Company explains that "It's probably better to think of Music Prime as a Pandora-like service wherein you pick an artist or genre you like and let Amazon sort out which songs are going to be played for you." The only catch there is that if you're streaming Music Prime to an Amazon Echo device — which we do non-stop around my house — it'll time out after an hour of inactivity. So if you're thinking of throwing a party and asking Alexa to spin up '80s music all night, you're going to have to keep asking every hour.

Another sticking point for some: Music Prime sound quality is available in "standard" definition, whereas Music Unlimited subscribers get access to "HD" and "Ultra HD" tracks depending on how each album is mastered.

Some Music Unlimited tracks can also be played in "spatial audio" — which is touted as "a multidimensional audio experience, adding space, clarity, and depth that is not achievable with traditional stereo music." Far out, man.
Deep in the fine print of the Amazon Music FAQ, you'll find a couple more options. There's also a $4.99-a-month "single device" plan, and a "Family Plan" offering six accounts for $14.99 a month. But Amazon is apparently offering its biggest savings to students enrolled in a degree-granting college or university, with a sharply discounted "Amazon Music Unlimited for Students" program.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In late October, a Swedish software engineer named Linus Akesson unveiled a playable accordion -- called "The Commodordion" -- he crafted out of two vintage Commodore 64 computers connected with a bellows made of floppy disks taped together. A demo of the hack debuted in an 11-minute YouTube video where Akesson plays a Scott Joplin ragtime song and details the instrument's creation.

A fair amount of custom software engineering and hardware hackery went into making the Commodordion possible, as Akesson lays out in a post on his website. It builds off of earlier projects (that he says were intentionally leading up to this one), such as the Sixtyforgan (a C64 with spring reverb and a chromatic accordion key layout) and Qwertuoso, a program that allows live playing of the C64's famous SID sound chip.

So how does the Commodordion work? Akesson wired up a custom power supply, and when he flips the unit on, both Commodore 64 machines boot (no display necessary). Next, he loads custom music software he wrote from a Commodore Datasette emulator board into each machine. A custom mixer circuit board brings together the audio signals from the two units and measures input from the bellows to control the volume level of the sound output. The bellows, composed of many 5.25-inch floppy disks cut and taped into shape, emit air through a hole when squeezed. A microphone mounted just outside that hole translates the noise it hears into an audio envelope that manipulates the sound output to match. The Commodordion itself does not have speakers but instead outputs its electronic audio through a jack.

Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth already settled with the FTC over fraudulent activity affecting MoviePass customers, but now the former heads of MoviePass and its parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY), are facing criminal allegations of securities fraud and wire fraud. The Verge reports: The Department of Justice announced the charges today, saying false statements made by both men defrauded investors in HMNY when the execs pretended like the company's money-losing $9.95 "unlimited" moviegoing plan had any hope of profitability. HMNY's own auditor cast doubt on the company's viability in a report in 2018, but at the time, Farnsworth downplayed the advisory, telling Insider that "pretty much most" companies running at a loss would have a similar warning.

But the big problem is his claims that HMNY's analytics prowess could somehow monetize data generated from MoviePass simply didn't hold up: prosecutors now allege "Farnsworth and Lowe knew HMNY did not possess these technologies or capabilities to monetize MoviePass's subscriber data or incorporate these technologies into the MoviePass application." [...] The DOJ says each man is facing one count of securities fraud and three counts of wire fraud over the lies they allegedly told in "press releases, SEC filings, interviews on podcasts and on television, and in print and online media."

According to the Hollywood Reporter, HBO has "switched off Westworld" after its recent fourth season. From the report: It's an unexpected fate for a series that was once considered one of HBO's biggest tentpoles -- an acclaimed mystery-box drama that racked up 54 Emmy award nominations (including a supporting actress win for Thandiwe Newton). Last month, co-creator Jonathan Nolan said in an interview that he hoped HBO would give the series a fifth season to wrap up the show's ambitious story, which has chronicled a robot uprising that changed the fate of humanity. "We always planned for a fifth and final season," Nolan said. "We are still in conversations with the network. We very much hope to make them." Co-creator Lisa Joy likewise said the series has always been working toward a specific ending: "Jonah and I have always had an ending in mind that we hope to reach. We have not quite reached it yet."

Yet linear ratings for the pricey series fell off sharply for its third season, and then dropped even further for season four. Westworld's critic average on Rotten Tomatoes likewise declined from the mid-80s for its first two seasons to the mid-70s for the latter two. Fans increasingly griped that the show became confusing and tangled in its mythology and lacked characters to root for. Looming over all of this is the fact Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has pledged aggressive cost cutting mandate, though network insiders maintain that saving money was not a factor in the show's cancelation. HBO said in a statement: "Over the past four seasons, Lisa and Jonah have taken viewers on a mind-bending odyssey, raising the bar at every step. We are tremendously grateful to them, along with their immensely talented cast, producers and crew, and all of our partners at Kilter Films, Bad Robot and Warner Bros. Television. It's been a thrill to join them on this journey."

Last week, Meta announced an AI-powered audio compression method called "EnCodec" that can reportedly compress audio 10 times smaller than the MP3 format at 64kbps with no loss in quality. Meta says this technique could dramatically improve the sound quality of speech on low-bandwidth connections, such as phone calls in areas with spotty service. The technique also works for music. Ars Technica reports: Meta debuted the technology on October 25 in a paper titled "High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression," authored by Meta AI researchers Alexandre Defossez, Jade Copet, Gabriel Synnaeve, and Yossi Adi. Meta also summarized the research on its blog devoted to EnCodec.

Meta describes its method as a three-part system trained to compress audio to a desired target size. First, the encoder transforms uncompressed data into a lower frame rate "latent space" representation. The "quantizer" then compresses the representation to the target size while keeping track of the most important information that will later be used to rebuild the original signal. (This compressed signal is what gets sent through a network or saved to disk.) Finally, the decoder turns the compressed data back into audio in real time using a neural network on a single CPU.

Meta's use of discriminators proves key to creating a method for compressing the audio as much as possible without losing key elements of a signal that make it distinctive and recognizable: "The key to lossy compression is to identify changes that will not be perceivable by humans, as perfect reconstruction is impossible at low bit rates. To do so, we use discriminators to improve the perceptual quality of the generated samples. This creates a cat-and-mouse game where the discriminator's job is to differentiate between real samples and reconstructed samples. The compression model attempts to generate samples to fool the discriminators by pushing the reconstructed samples to be more perceptually similar to the original samples."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: According to the Recording Industry Association of America's Mid-Year 2022 report (PDF), vinyl is continuing a trend initiated in 2020, when vinyl revenue surpassed CD revenue -- a state of affairs we haven't seen since 1986, according to the RIAA [PDF]. The RIAA reported that vinyl revenue grew 22 percent in the first half of this year to $570 million, outpacing CDs ($200 million) and representing physical music's largest revenue share. Japanese audio brand Audio-Technica has seemingly taken note of this trend and has decided to rerelease its Sound Burger portable record player. The product is one of several that the company is releasing to celebrate its 60th birthday. Based on a plate on the player's side, the company is producing just 7,000 units.

Debuting in 1980, the original Sound Burger AT727 offered a way for people to listen to their 33-1/3 and 45 vinyl records outside of their homes. There were some caveats, though; records stuck precariously out of the unit and, as noted by SlashGear, the player needed to sit on a flat surface during operation. The new Sound Burger AT-SB2022 looks much like the old one, but Audio-Technica added Bluetooth 5.2 support, so you can listen to your vinyl through wireless headphones. There's also a 3.5 mm jack this time around instead of stereo RCA outputs, but Audio-Technica is also including a dual RCA adapter. Additionally, there's no longer a need for clunky batteries, as the refreshed portable record player charges over USB-C. Audio-Technica claims the record play will last for about 12 hours before needing a charge, which it says will take around 12 hours to complete.

As noted by Digital Trends, the original Sound Burger, also known as Mister Disc in some geographies, required user maintenance to make sure records continued spinning at the proper speed. But Audio-Technica's 2022 record player has a DC servo motor driving its belt-drive system for "stable rotation," the record player's product page says. "Designed for both portability and stability, the tonearm employs a dynamic balance system in which stylus pressure is applied through a spring," the page says. Audio-Technica says its ATN3600L stylus works with the new record player. Other specs for the Sound Burger include a 50 dB output and a 20-20,000 Hz transmission band. Audio-Technica is selling the 2022 Sound Burger for $200.

Amazon today announced a new benefit for its Prime members which could lure some subscribers away from other music services, like Apple Music or Spotify. From a report: The company said it will now offer Prime subscribers a full music catalog with 100 million songs, instead of the previously more limited selection of just 2 million songs, and will make most of the top podcasts on its service available without ads. In addition, the Amazon Music app is getting a revamp, which includes a new "Podcast Previews" feature that will allow customers to listen to short clips as a way to discover new podcasts they may like. The move is a direct shot at streaming music competitors, especially Spotify, which has been moving into the podcasts market as a means of generating additional revenue. But Spotify's paying subscriber base is growing frustrated with the fact that they still have to listen to podcast ads, despite paying for the service. Amazon Music's promise of ad-free podcasts along with a full music catalog could make for a compelling alternative, the retail giant hopes.

Among the ad-free podcasts are shows from top brands like CNN, NPR, The New York Times, and ESPN. Other ad-free shows include the Wondery catalog of podcasts, like "Dr. Death," "SmartLess," and "Even the Rich," and new Amazon Exclusive shows including "MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories;" "Suspect: Vanished in the Snow;" "COLD Season Three: The Search for Sheree;" "Killer Psyche Daily;" "I Hear Fear," narrated by Academy Award-nominated actress Carey Mulligan; and a weekly bonus episode of "The Old Man and the Three," hosted by former NBA player JJ Redick. The Amazon Exclusive podcast series "Baby, this is Keke Palmer," from the actress and entrepreneur Keke Palmer (NOPE) also debuts today.

The animated series "Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi" premiered this week on Disney+, witih all six 15-minute episodes released on Wednesday.

CNN calls it a slick and well-produced "kind of super-service for the Star Wars faithful, rekindling old flames, and comfortably submerging them in the past." But they also add that animation "has also become a vehicle for greater experimentation, as witnessed in the Star Wars: Visions anime shorts that premiered last year." It's hardly a surprise that this latest addition to the mythology comes courtesy of producer Dave Filoni, who oversaw such series as The Clone Wars and Rebels before throwing his fertile mind for all things Star Wars into The Mandalorian and other live-action fare. Filoni wrote five of the six shorts, which are split between Ahsoka Tano (again voiced by Ashley Eckstein), soon to be featured in her own live-action spinoff; and Count Dooku (played in the movies by Christopher Lee, and voiced by Corey Burton).

Beyond a glimpse of a baby Ahsoka (just in time for holiday gift-giving, kids), in an episode that illustrates her home planet and its warrior streak, the episodes leap around in time. That includes additional insights into Dooku and his abandonment of the Jedi order to embrace the dark side and Darth Sidious (Ian McDiarmid). The anthology format creates the opportunity to drop in at different inflection points scattered across the "Star Wars" timeline.
"Fans will likely be particularly intrigued by some of the gradations surrounding Ahsoka, her relationship to Anakin Skywalker and the aftermath of the Clone Wars," the article teases...

According to Protocol, Amazon and Google have struck a deal in recent months that allows Fire TV models to be produced by Android TV partners. From the report: As a result of that deal, Amazon has been able to work with a number of consumer electronics companies -- including not only TCL, but also Xiaomi and Hisense -- to vastly expand the number of available smart TVs running Fire TV OS. All of these companies were previously barred from doing so under licensing terms imposed by Google. The agreement may also alleviate some of the pressure Google has been feeling as regulators around the world have investigated its Android platform. However, some experts are skeptical a singular deal will address the overarching concerns with Google's operation and licensing of Android to third parties.

The deal between Amazon and Google resolves a yearslong dispute over licensing restrictions Google imposes on hardware manufacturers that make Android-based phones, TVs, and other devices. In order to gain access to Google's officially sanctioned version of Android as well as the company's popular apps like Google Maps and YouTube, manufacturers have to sign a confidential document known as the Android Compatibility Commitment. The ACC prevents manufacturers from also making devices based on forked versions of Android not compatible with Google's guidelines. The ACC, which was previously known as the Anti-Fragmentation Agreement, had long been an open secret in industry circles. Its full impact on the smart TV space became public when Protocol reported terms of the agreement in March of 2020 and outlined how the policy effectively barred companies like TCL from making smart TVs running any forked version of Android, including Amazon's Fire TV OS.

Google has been justifying these policies by pointing to the harmful consequences of Android fragmentation, positing that the rules assured developers and consumers that apps would run across all Android-based devices. However, the crux of Google's requirements is that they apply across device categories. By making a Fire TV-based smart TV, TCL would have effectively risked losing access to Google's Android for its smartphone business -- a risk the company, and many of its competitors that develop both smartphones and TVs, weren't willing to take. At the time, both Google and Amazon declined to comment on the dispute. However, Amazon was a lot more forthcoming when it talked to Indian regulators for a wide-ranging probe into Google's Android policies. "Given the breadth of the anti-fragmentation obligations, Amazon has also experienced significant difficulties in finding [original equipment manufacturer] partners to manufacture smart TVs running its Fire OS," the company's Indian subsidiary told regulators in a submission that was included in last week's report. Amazon told regulators that "at least seven" manufacturers had told the company they weren't able to make Fire TV-based smart TVs because of Google's restrictions.

"In several cases, the OEM has indicated that it cannot work with Amazon despite a professed desire to do so in connection with smart TVs," Amazon said in its submission. "In others, the OEM has tried and failed to obtain 'permission' from Google."