---
title: WWDC2003 Session 728
framework: wwdc
role: article
path: wwdc/wwdc2003-728
---

# WWDC2003 Session 728

## Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en good afternoon ladies and gentlemen thank you you're in the how to produce a quick time listening party session and basically the concept of an online listening party was derived from the idea that bands and labels would invite a number of folks to create an event out of the release of an album and with the sort of advent of streaming live on the web it's translated off as a marketing vehicle and a way to sort of have fans listen to records we're lucky enough to have several great speakers today some who flew from los angeles from warner records and some other folks from our quicktime team that delivers a lot of listening parties for labels as well as one of our server engineers who is going to give you a sneak peek into how this is going to be even easier and better we're going to save QA for the end of the show and if you do want to ask a question please use the microphone as all of the questions need to be translated into Japanese and recorded on the DVD and the ADC TV streaming feeds of these available afterwards so without further ado I will introduce to bend Trask from Warner strategic marketing and rhinoentertainment thank you I'm from part of Warner Music of our strategic marketing whether the catalogue keepers for the group we're responsible for everything that is that is old and I'm not quite so old making sure that the that our great catalog is is still out there put out in different ways we're also part of our group is the licensing group so the 18t commercial with the Ramones song and that came from us and we rely sins that track the the Cadillac campaign with Led Zeppelin that was that was us convince england zeppelin that people actually it's good thing to put your music in commercials and not just for the insane amount of money that they can remain today's the listening parties it's important part of our website we operate a few different websites within rhino the main one is Roy calm and I'm coming from a slightly different point of view than then a new release record label would but our basics are still pretty much the same Glenn went a little bit of what a listening party is going back a little further the the olden days they had record release parties and it would be an event basically for industry people retailers media get them all around to liquor them up and hand them copies of the CD or vinyl at that time and get a good good word spread about the release the industry doesn't make quite as much money anymore so I think that that goes away and it's also probably not that effective way of marketing your product so with the internet getting the actual customers to be involved in the record release is a is a pretty good thing rather than the people that are going to be getting the city for free anyways so there's two basic types of listening parties as they've evolved into today one would be for a longer duration kind of exposure and if we could go to the devil machine one okay example this on our site is a new artist the product by the article weekend players came out earlier this year end of last year and it's a it's not going to get any airplay and TV is not going to play it but it's a type of thing where we feel if a customer can listen to it enough time we really get into it it's a really good groove and it's it's been persistent on the dance charts and people are really liking it but it's not the type of setup huge event it's the kind of thing that we really want people to be able to come whenever they want to listen to the album in full and really get into it and so when you go to this site the listening party player will pop up automatically you can listen to it we can push around crack you can hear the entire space played an evolution from the early days of online listening parties was that at the beginning you didn't allow people because the executives were a little uptight didn't allow people to pick their tracks that they wanted to listen to it was a very limited because if I've ever seen every substitution now it's evolved a little bit and certain releases when it's a longer term experience that you want to get to get out to the people let them click through and select which tracks they want to hear and and we've actually set this up where you can click through the tract and they'll keep playing to the next track and the way we've produced this one is there actually separate QuickTime files which I'm streams that we as a cutie next command to go to the next file and bring it up and then this interview is this little you can start it or you can use you can use a track chapter tracks to jump through so that's the the longer term is a listening parties and then the sort of more traditional would be a shorter duration we do on the right accom we have a weekly listening party is a different listening party every week the different different content we'll put it up and promote it to our partners and same basic thing it's more to be an event and to be able to be promoted as an event it's much harder to promote the weekend players listening party that's been going on for last eight months and get my friend that Apple really excited about promoting it again this week when we promoted it last week and the week before you're probably going to see it is that it's a hot pick any time soon but these more event-driven listening part it's a sort of more traditional thing where it's it's a window we put it there up on Thursdays and down on Wednesdays they're good for promotion and we prefer this in writer calm for known material where you don't have to this this is material in 15 years ago you liked and listen to and we're now telling you that it's out in in our new collection there's some remixes on here it's some other versions of the songs you've never heard before let you experience it but the goal in both the long term in the short term listening parties are to go out and buy the desk we need to know we like to hear but we really want you to listen to go out and buy that that's the end return on all this so with that in mind the the debates we've had over audio quality when I produce these things I produce them so that there's one stream and it's a lower res of about a 40 kill bit stream so that modem users on up can listen to it with AAC audio that's actually a very good sounding stream now back in the olden days it wasn't that great of a of a stream now now it's a very good experience but again if you want to listen to really high quality audio for 1398 you can listen to it and don't even have to waste bandwidth you can just put it in your CD player or I guess go to the apple store and buy it for 999 though this is hip-hop and you probably couldn't find it there the way we produce and present these things the the longer-term experience we do the track by track we really want you to be able to get into the music and it's been very successful for bands like The Flaming Lips was an example of Warner Brothers Records I think very very happy with that online listening party where people could come at any time listen to the entire album track by track pick the tracks that they want to hear and it really helped grow the grass roots of this of the Flaming Lips release and the sales grew and people found out about it was really good way what we generally on right calm where it's more of a just hey these are songs you already know probably hear it isn't a good collection listen to it we create one stream one file it's not track by track adjust streams from beginning to end we tell you what the what the tracks are in the listening party but because of you know it might be a sick CD boxset that we're doing a listening party of and that would be a very very large streaming file so we'll pick out 10 to 20 tracks and tell you what those are and then you can click to the product to see what the full tracklist another reason why it might not be a full tracklist and listening party is the artist doesn't want you to hear everything or in our case there's often licensing issues where one track is is owned by a different company and and they won't allow us to put up that track in a listening party without going through complicated legal movers it's just not it's not worth it in terms of promotion how we get these and in general how it's out there we've got our own internal email list rosanna or the store or we go to partners or purchase email list and then we also try and integrate the best we can with other on-site events or on-site communication and then any off-site communication that we can tell people about it the think of particular interest is the lessons that we've learned of doing these for the past four years or so five years it's very important to pay attention to ROI to return on investment and there are there are a bunch of different ways to look at returns of listening parties and all online opportunities we look at there's the basic one it for the product exposure just letting people know that it exists so that the next time they're invest by or tower or walmart and they see it on the shelves they spot it they recognize that they're interested in the go and look at it and hopefully buy it of particular interest to us is brand awareness because as rhino calm as a collection of the catalog we want people to know about Rhiner calm almost as much as we want people know about the individual product we want people to know more about the store and the entire catalog that we've got we want people to return to our website not just for this promotion but for anything else we want to gather email addresses we want to make this sale we won't return sales so all of these things aren't that hard to track but they're generally forgotten and they're generally not considered when you know a listening party is created and oh my god we got it out and 50,000 people came in to to listen to it isn't that great and wonderful we we did a promotion that due to circumstances happen to be promoted by Apple for a little longer than we could be even hoped for and we got a ton of traffic in we didn't make any sales there were other ways that we valued it so that it was a profitable promotion for us in sort of our soft returns but these are important things to know about because production costs and hosting streaming cause you know having a ton of people come listen to your album ain't necessarily great thing if you're not making any money off of them were not converting them not converting that stream and anything that your new value at all you know at the end of the month this very large hosting bill for people that don't remember the album will never come back never buy it you know it might be great to be able to tell your boss and I'm working a report that 50 thousand people a day came in and listen to something but it's even better to say that and that converted into 20,000 email signups and then 10,000 return visits and three thousand purchases and so on and so forth and what we found is very often a much smaller far more focused promotion is a lot more effective than in creating this big event for the sake of creating a big event telling all these big partners about it and getting yahoo and apple and everyone else so you get all excited about it and get in front of millions of people that couldn't care less and just have no reason to be interested in what you're what you're trying to promote you be far better off spending a little extra time finding the people that want this and finding out what they actually want from it and it could be what we found in some cases the real hardcore fans of a particular release that that we've got they don't need the entire listening party they know most of the songs already they need they need other information want to stand up reinstated listing for as a bad idea but it's definitely one of the things that we that we've learned over the years is just having something up and going is not necessarily a good thing is we think that the next step in in new media record label new media marketing is to be able to figure out your returns and what's effective and what's not effective and so that we stop wasting our time and do things that are really worth it and worth it to the fans and and finding out what they want and what's valuable to them that's it for me and then George Lydecker part of one of music groups studio services I'm not eager thank you I could have the most got it already okay that's me I'm George Lydecker I've senior director of studio services for Warner brother records now warner music group and we're i'm going to give you kind of a little bit of an overview of what's behind the covers on preparing the content that that these people need for for doing listening parties and to do all the other content audio content we're in charge of preparing all of that so give you a quick walkthrough of that of our current content creation process by the way our group also created all the content that you're using on the iTunes at least from the Warner Music Group perspective part of what we do is is that our our audio ingest process is currently integrated with the manufacture of physical product as well as all of the online product everything we do is a hundred percent Q seat and a hundred percent listen to we feel that the quality of the audio is very important and that every encode and everything that's ever that we ever produce if it's if it's of none of the best quality it's not it's not good for the consumer other part of it that most people don't think about when they're making content is the accuracy of the metadata and all of the associated things that go along with it and part of what we have to deliver to anybody in the form of online content is all of the graphics all of the album art all of the metadata the track listings the UPC numbers the isrc numbers all of those things are very important that go along with it they're in an earlier session where we're talking about enhanced CDs and there was a complain about liner notes we're strategically placing ourselves in a position to have that content ready for when people ask for it so that the line if there's line or no data if there's other information ancillary information we can get to that oops it two of them one sound samples or create one of the things that's unique to us is that we actually hand listen or listen individually to the sound samples we have an operator that actually selects the hook or selects what he feels that the that the listener is going to identify as the best part of the song and we actually drill down to that and then then create the sound sample for the 30 seconds around that sound sample creation is also integrated into our into our supply chain as well at the point that we create the tape masters or the audio Masters that are going to create our content is at the point that we also create the sound samples because of that sound the sound samples are in addition spect inspecting one hundred percent so that we know that the quality of them are as good or is just as good wanting to speak a little bit about AAC is a quality in code we are so pleased to have apple and to pick mpeg-4 and AAC as the codec of choice for a couple of reasons one is that we have a lot of legacy content because we've been using AAC and we think it's a great codec we've been doing listening tests we've done double-blind tests with it and it's probably the best codec you're going to get as a deer CD experience and it just keeps getting better so we really like the fact that they they picked that and that they picked mpeg-4 which is essentially a standard the other thing is is that as I say it does compare well as we've done listening Testaments with with the waves at the higher bit rates we're using we're currently encoding at 128 bit rates for for a lot of the stuff that we're now delivering we've also investigated newer newer versions and they are getting better and better even at the lower bit rates we've we've done some extensive testing of aac+ and we're now looking at at the point of which that may be integrated into our electronic supply chain it's performed very well for a lot of our tests future development we'd like to see more developers take advantage of using command line capabilities of Mac OS 10 that's another great thing is that we're really happy with mac OS 10 with the bsd unix shell in there so that we can have command line access to command line executables that we can use to do massive encodes and stuff like that it's been really good for us so far they will help they will help other content providers create a lots of content what we want to see is just a lot of content out of there that that's available for people to get to we're working on and we would like to see the development of tools that will allow the conversion of legacy AAC content to quicktime we have a lot of AAC content that we've created for other vendors like like liquid and other others like music match and stuff like that where we have a AC content that we could convert to MPEG 4 and quicktime 6 content we want to get that out there as well and this is a quick couple of quick shots of our content preparation team this is this is where we do one hundred percent listening of the audio to check the wave files it's one of our listeners they go through and check off all the ways and then they also make sure that the upc's the file name is correct and that the metadata is correct as well on that this is eric is listening to and creating the actual sound samples he picks the hook and the sound sample edits is down to 30 seconds put in the phase and and creates the individual sound samples and as you can see with that nice g3 there we use Mac hardware as long as we can and the thing is is that it does have a long wonderful life because we can use we've used some of older or older machines forever and this is master preparation in this case I think this individuals using Pro Tools most of our most of our professional audio tools or sonic solution pro tools are all mac base as well as our video encoding we do all the video encoding of music videos that are in our area this is one of our video encoders this is truly doing some of one of them one of the music videos which goes into our asset repository does the video encoding we feed it in from our video room which is just out of sight in the room next door through SDI off of Abijah beta into a sinewave and then then do our subsequent QuickTime encodes from there and this is our this is our massive encoding engines we've got a lot of 1 gigahertz this is only part of it 1 gigahertz CPUs we're starting to integrate some Darwin machines into this to do encoding for for quicktime mpeg-4 and and other stuff that we can deliver to bend then ben and i are anxiously trying to get down the road and doing all of this next to that which is just out of sight we have our own cisco switch which fiber connects to a 35 terabyte server upstairs where we will reload to content on too but anyway that's just a quick look at the stuff that we're doing in the stuff that we're creating to support listening parties and and to provide the content that's necessary so i'm going to turn this over to Ryan he's going to get over to go over some of the details on actually on actually creating the listening party thank you [Applause] well now that you know that extreme listening parties are a great idea and that AAC is awesome let's kind of go over what the process is to make these happen but talk a little bit about the encoding process and some of the tools involved at all these steps the encoding preparation posting and the serving side of things so first let's talk about encoding and hinting so of course you all know that the quicktime player does an excellent job of encoding AAC actually you can even use a little tool called applescript and start scripting it and create your own poor man's version or smart man's version of sound corrected me yesterday of cleaner so I these things are actually available on on South website to download and encode all of your audio of course cleaner so it's a great version to do if you have video especially involved and dupree processing and handle quite a bit of all your processing needs compressor our own little tool that integrates very well with final cut pro and iTunes so if you're going to do strictly audio the encoder 4 mp3 and AAC in itunes is incredible so it's a really great way and especially since it includes all the metadata on the file names it's a good thing to do and then there's this nifty little tool called QT media this is actually included in the next version of OS 10 server it goes along with QT SS it's a command-line tool that you can use to automate all of the hinting the fast starting and annotation data of any quicktime media so it's a really neat thing to use and so you can execute a perl script or whatever you need a shell script to make this happen if you have large batches of data and it's interesting to note this when you actually create media most people have a problem when they try to receive it from the server they get a 415 error what is this thing well you get this error if you don't actually hint your media so you a pulse crypt is a great way to do it if you haven't done it if you haven't already done it to your media you can use it a quick Apple script from a Sal's website to do batching code hint of all your files or you can use that cutie media which is really neat so I'll talk a bit about once you got these files what do you do with it you got to put it on a server of some kind so cute ESS or Darwin handles us well they're both free available with auntie couch SS is pre-installed in in Mac OS 10 server and dss is the Darwin version the open-source version of our server that's available for free on our website and it's available for I think pre-compiled for NT and Linux and all kinds of other fun stuff you need some kind of FTP software pop them up on the server and a web browser that's all you need once you got that you're done so that was quick time pro and you've got a complete and code solution and you're ready to go so let's talk a bit about the preparation in the posting of process once you got these files you got to throw them up on the server using your FTP software you put them in you on the server you put them in your library quicktime streaming server directory and now what what do you do well it's really simple just a couple clicks I'm just going to go through it here you select the playlist you want to start a new one it takes you hear you click on the new movie playlist button link and this is the last step all you do is you give it a name you select the play mode and there are three play modes sequential what steps through your whole list of items in your playlist one at a time but then stops the playlist once it's done or there's sequential looped which does the same thing but it loops it added infinitum until you decide hey that enough of that and then there's a random weighted version which you can also would set the playlist the weight in the playlist and that's that little column on the right there you can say I want to play this 512 up to 10 and basically that just that waits it in the list and it plays it randomly based upon that weight so if you have a ten it's ten times more likely than a one to appear in the playlist it's very handy to do if you're going to actually do this for a long time you can even do a radio station that way should you so desire and with the latest version of quicktime streaming server you can upload and change the playlist on the fly which is kind of nice so you really can get a kind of a radio wave you could create your own radio station a number of college stations have actually done this it's interesting to note this mount point thing this is actually the most confusing thing perhaps of the whole process this is that what you're going to call basically the link to your mature playlist and I'll show you exactly how that plays out here say you have a server named dr. evil this would be if you created an Interpol playlist and called it Interpol ftp as your mount point this would be your link to your playlist really pretty straightforward you type that into the quicktime player in the open URL command you and you'll be able to receive it no problem if you've already put hit start which all you have to do is hit that play button and you're done you're going so it's that simple and it's really basic and this is basically it becomes live so it's recorded media that you can serve out and it's stream so people can't randomly access the list if you don't want them to which is quite nice so let's talk a little bit about the delivery what actually happens after this you have to prepare it in some way to make it actually presentable to people so they can see it and have an enjoyable experience especially if you have an audio only playlist you want to have some kind of visual experience so you need a couple tools you make rest movie which prepares it's a free web tool be on our website and it just creates a rest movie which is a way to put one link on your web page and based upon the selection of the user they say they have a 300 kilobits they can receive up to the ISDN say so they could it figures out which bitrate they should get based upon what they've selected so if they have that ISDN they can get 100k stream which feeds them 100k stream that simple and I'll go bitten into that in the next slide Apple scripts like I said on south side there's a whole bunch that help you with preparation of the media after that you have on the server the rest movies and add annotations and such and also then qg stream splicer which is another free tool that we have that allows you in a live stream so even if you're using broadcaster if you have a 28 k stream and you want to have a video experience you use this tool and it puts that on to the stream for you and use that on rest movies not on the media itself so then you create your rest movie so I've got three links here i have a 56 103 hundred k version of the stream and you can have an uber s movie a rest movie that figures out that's the one you put on your web page it figures out what bitrate you've got and gives you the stream so that points to three other rough movies in this case that points to the sdp files so those three ref movies in the middle have the links that are above and the reason I do that is it kind of you don't have to ever update the you Burress movie you can just leave that alone you don't have to change your website you don't have to change anything you just change the files that are on your server which is kind of handy so then you have to put on your website well there's this nasty nasty tag name the object tag that allows you to get around the whole IE not using netscape style plugins so don't worry about this there's a link later on that tells you where to get all this information and how to put it together yourself but this is what you put into your web page to basically launch the quicktime player from your web page or launch the quicktime plugin so now there's just a couple delivery options i want to go over see if you have an audio only stream say you want to add some annotation data you want to display that alongside well you can stream quick that you can in QuickTime you can stream text tracks as well so that's what this radio station AV deck they do an indie radio out of England it allows you to give you some annotation data along with it and it changes with every song so it's really kind of neat or you can throw in some video tracks like I said before you can put it in and put it in with the stream itself so that it changes with by song or anything like that it's really quite nice okay you get some wonderful video experience and then also you can put on top of this with time and href track so if somebody were to actually click on it you have a button on there it says hey click here to buy now or click here to see the website or listen more or whatever you want they can click on that it launches a web browser and puts it right next to it really neat experience we actually have that in the quicktime player you can we do it all the time when you launch it the first time it comes up with something we call the cutie pics and it'll you can click on that and it'll take you usually to the website or to the quick itunes music stores anything like that and now i'm going to bring up John Anderson here to show you what's coming next with quicktime streaming server and some great tools we have so as we said on John Anderson I'm an engineer on the QuickTime streaming server team and what I'm showing you today is cute ESS publisher and basically this is a way to automate a lot of the things that Ryan was just kind of talking about so I mean you can go through and you can make the ref movie yourself you can make sure the movie is hinted you could go through and create your web page make the object tags with all the embed tags inside of them by hand and and you know i'm sure you'll go home with a smile on your face at the end of the day but there there will be an easier way and that's the publisher and so i'm going to go ahead and start the stuff now this what this does is you run this on any mac on your network or basically any mac that has access to your server and can you connect to your server and then you in your library this is very similar to iTunes so in your library you can see a comprehensive list basically of all of the media that's that's been uploaded to your server and if you want to upload something new then all you do is just drag it up from the finder and you know you can pick where where you want it to go on the server know this is a JPEG so I'm not going to bother up late uploading it and you can also see that like you can see your library both in hierarchical view and you can see it in in list view as well so lots of neat options there so I'm going to open up my notes real quick here so I don't get off track and the next thing that we're going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and click on one of these files here we'll go to losing grip for example go to settings this is actually a video file but you can see in your settings here you can edit the movie adaptations now this is a beta there's going to be more annotations in the final version to match basically the annotations that are in the quicktime player this means that instead of having to download a movie and changing annotations or instead of having to use command line tools or something like that remotely you can just go in right here and change the annotations and apply them there's also this URL tab and what it does is basically what you're looking at is a repository so anything you put in here is not immediately publicly available it's a lot it's basically there for you to work with so you can go in and once you check this media is available for streaming check box then you get a URL so there's no question about like you know what how do I get to this movie what's the rtst URL for this movie it's right there so I mean you can click on it and test it and see the movie and I'm evidently not getting audio I don't mind so I think I may be working without notes the next step I'm going to do is I'm going to look at into some of these playlists here you can see there's media playlists which you would use for mpeg-4 or AC files and of course there's mp3 playlist if you want to do shoutcast streaming but you know you want to do AAC I've just determined that for you so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to create a new media playlist and I'm just going to call it listening party so that's going to pop me over right away into the settings for the playlist and I'm going to go into this hierarchical view just so I can go into my Liz Phair CD here and I'm just going to go ahead and select the whole thing and drag it down there and again you know you can set the play mode and everything in suits got all the features as the web admin has but in addition you have this option here which is you can broadcast manually which is where you just click start at any given time and click stop when you want it to stop and you can also broadcast at a specific time so you can see you can actually make a listening party available at as in this case a few days ago at noon or you can write weekly so it does what kind of neat options and it saves you from having to write a cron a cron script or something like that so let's see so one thing that's important to note as well is that like I said this is all unlike when you put things in the movies folder to add them to playlists these are not available on demand so you can actually make it so that movies are available only through this listening party and once the listening party stops then the movies are no longer available so that's that's a nice feature as well and you know the same thing here I'm going to go here and manually start the playlist so should be broadcasting at this point and you'll notice here I go to the URL tab and if I click on that then they can hear the playlist in progress with the live broadcast so yeah I mean you could hit you could take that URL and you know use it to make the ref movie and create all the tags and everything like that but that seems a bit inconvenient so what we're going to do here is we're going to go to the links tab and what you can see here is basically a list of everything that's probably available so every movie that you've made available for streaming every playlist that you've set up is going to show up right here comprehensively in this in this links view and over here in the display tab this is this just basically describes how you're going to embed this in the page so for example I could go in here and I could say just autoplay it soon as they open this this particular webpage start playing the stream there's a bandwidth tab that you can go in here and basically set up a multi-bit rate breath movie so this is this is what he was talking about where you can actually set up different streams for different bandwidths and then there's an HTML tab and so if you have your favorite HTML editor already set up like BB edit or dreamweaver or whatever it is that you use I don't want to spend any developers out there I'm going to go ahead and open up bbedit because i have it on here and i'm going to make the world's simplest web page so i'm just going to say new HTML document i'm not even going to title it let's take this code and drag it right into bbedit give it an unimaginative name and drag it onto safari we have a web page with that content already embedded in it so that's pretty cool but the next step is to be able to take that and run it through a template and get it and get an entire web page out of it and the engine that we use for this is is an Apache engine the standard is XSL so it's a very powerful standard you could even have it make a web page and a PDF file to go along with it if you wanted to I mean it's there's lots of neat stuff you can do with that and so I'm just going to go ahead and highlight this listening party and I'm going to go back to the display tab here and change it to say it I want to open the quicktime player we like it when things open in the quicktime player so and i'm going to take this JPEG here that just says click here to listen again not terribly imaginative but whatever and so we've set it up differently now it's going to bed in the page a little bit differently and so now I'm going to do is just click make web page and I have a template setup called listening party and I'm just going to call it I have no imagination here i'm going to call this listening party so that's the name of my page and i think i'll actually asked yet so what this is doing actually now is it's running it through that apache XSL engine it's creating all the rest movies on the fly right there and now we have a page and so I can click on this and it will open the stream in the quicktime player hopefully ok so we're we're running a beta OS so I'm going to go ahead and force the quicktime player to quit and give that another try if it doesn't work then you get the idea yeah apparently I needed more creative names but I think you can probably use your imagination and realize that that you would be hearing Liz Phair right now if you weren't seeing the spinny cursor so that's that's the publisher kind of a cool tool and that's coming out with panther so I hope you all look forward to seeing it and drink up now that's the way it is by the sort of this session that I posted that the first crash i've seen so you're here you're fine John anyway thank you that was really good and and clearly you know sort of we used the context of a listening party with with albums and songs and in either the the longer display that Ben was talking about for problems that need exposure for the newer albums that are events but this is obviously applicable to the audio and video that makes up a course at higher education and k12 in learning institutions any sort of series of assets can be played sequentially or randomly or in a weighted random way to do that so now what I'd like to do is I guess invite you know all of our speakers up and we'll try and do a QA you