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• Managing Music Playback Channels

  30 juin 2013, par Multimedia Mike — General

  My Game Music Appreciation site allows users to interact with old video game music by toggling various channels, as long as the underlying synthesizer engine supports it.

  
  
  

  Users often find their way to the Nintendo DS section pretty quickly. This is when they notice an obnoxious quirk with the channel toggling feature : specifically, one channel doesn’t seem to map to a particular instrument or track.

  When it comes to computer music playback methodologies, I have long observed that there are 2 general strategies : Fixed channel and dynamic channel allocation.

  Fixed Channel Approach
  One of my primary sources of computer-based entertainment used to be watching music. Sure I listened to it as well. But for things like Amiga MOD files and related tracker formats, there was a rich ecosystem of fun music playback programs that visualized the music. There exist music visualization modes in various music players these days (such as iTunes and Windows Media Player), but those largely just show you a single wave form. These files were real time syntheses based on multiple audio channels and usually showed some form of analysis for each channel. My personal favorite was Cubic Player :

  
  
  

  Most of these players supported the concept of masking individual channels. In doing so, the user could isolate, study, and enjoy different components of the song. For many 4-channel Amiga MOD files, I observed that the common arrangement was to use the 4 channels for beat (percussion track), bass line, chords, and melody. Thus, it was easy to just listen to, e.g., the bass line in isolation.

  MODs and similar formats specified precisely which digital audio sample to play at what time and on which specific audio channel. To view the internals of one of these formats, one gets the impression that they contain an extremely computer-centric view of music.

  Dynamic Channel Allocation Algorithm
  MODs et al. enjoyed a lot of popularity, but the standard for computer music is MIDI. While MOD and friends took a computer-centric view of music, MIDI takes, well, a music-centric view of music.

  There are MIDI visualization programs as well. The one that came with my Gravis Ultrasound was called PLAYMIDI.EXE. It looked like this…

  
  
  

  … and it confused me. There are 16 distinct channels being visualized but some channels are shown playing multiple notes. When I dug into the technical details, I learned that MIDI just specifies what notes need to be played, at what times and frequencies and using which instrument samples, and it was the MIDI playback program’s job to make it happen.

  Thus, if a MIDI file specifies that track 1 should play a C major chord consisting of notes C, E, and G, it would transmit events “key-on C ; delta time 0 ; key-on E ; delta time 0 ; key-on G ; delta time … ; [other commands]“. If the playback program has access to multiple channels (say, up to 32, in the case of the GUS), the intuitive approach would be to maintain a pool of all available channels. Then, when it’s time to process the “key-on C” event, fetch the first available channel from the pool, mark it as in-use, play C on the channel, and return that channel to the pool when either the sample runs its course or the corresponding “key-off C” event is encountered in the MIDI command stream.

  About That Game Music
  Circling back around to my game music website, numerous supported systems use the fixed channel approach for playback while others use dynamic channel allocation approach, including evey Nintendo DS game I have so far analyzed.

  Which approach is better ? As in many technical matters, there are trade-offs either way. For many systems, the fixed channel approach is necessary because for many older audio synthesis systems, different channels had very specific purposes. The 8-bit NES had 5 channels : 2 square wave generators (used musically for melody/treble), 1 triangle wave generator (usually used for bass line), a noise generator (subverted for all manner of percussive sounds), and a limited digital channel (was sometimes assigned richer percussive sounds). Dynamic channel allocation wouldn’t work here.

  But the dynamic approach works great on hardware with 16 digital channels available like, for example, the Nintendo DS. Digital channels are very general-purpose. What about the SNES, with its 8 digital channels ? Either approach could work. In practice, most games used a fixed channel approach : Games might use 4-6 channels for music while reserving the remainder for various in-game sound effects. Some notable exceptions to this pattern were David Wise’s compositions for Rare’s SNES games (think Battletoads and the various Donkey Kong Country titles). These clearly use some dynamic channel approach since masking all but one channel will give you a variety of instrument sounds.

  Epilogue
  There ! That took a long time to explain but I find it fascinating for some reason. I need to distill it down to far fewer words because I want to make it a FAQ on my website for “Why can’t I isolate specific tracks for Nintendo DS games ?”

  Actually, perhaps I should remove the ability to toggle Nintendo DS channels in the first place. Here’s a funny tale of needless work : I found the Vio2sf engine for synthesizing Nintendo DS music and incorporated it into the program. It didn’t support toggling of individual channels so I figured out a way to add that feature to the engine. And then I noticed that most Nintendo DS games render that feature moot. After I released the webapp, I learned that I was out of date on the Vio2sf engine. The final insult was that the latest version already supports channel toggling. So I did the work for nothing. But then again, since I want to remove that feature from the UI, doubly so.

• How should I write my privacy notice for Matomo Analytics under GDPR ?

  24 avril 2018, par InnoCraft

  Important note : this blog post has been written by digital analysts, not lawyers. The purpose of this article is to show you an example of a privacy notice for Matomo under GDPR. This work comes from our interpretation of the UK privacy commission : ICO. It cannot be considered as professional legal advice. So as GDPR, this information is subject to change. We strongly advise you to have a look at the different privacy authorities in order to have up to date information.

  A basic rule of thumb is that if you are not processing personal data, then you do not need to show any privacy notice. But if you are doing so, such as processing full IP addresses, then a privacy notice is required at the time of the data collection. Please note that personal data may also be hidden, for example, in page titles or page URLs.

  In this blog post, we will define what a privacy notice is according to GDPR and how to write it if you are using Matomo and you are processing personal data.

  What is a privacy notice under GDPR ?

  One of the most important rights that a data subject has under GDPR, is the right to be informed about the collection and use of their personal data.

  Here is what ICO is saying about the privacy notice :

  “You must provide individuals with information including : your purposes for processing their personal data, your retention periods for that personal data, and who it will be shared with. We call this ‘privacy information’.”

  “When you collect personal data from the individual it relates to, you must provide them with privacy information at the time you obtain their data.”

  Note that a privacy notice is different from a privacy policy.

  The privacy notice has to include :

  • the reasons why you are processing the personal data
  • for how long
  • who the different parties you are going to share them with are

  So whatever lawful basis you are using (explicit consent or legitimate interest), you need to have a privacy notice if you collect personal data.

  What does this privacy notice look like ?

  ICO is providing best practices in order to display the information :

  • a layered approach
  • dashboards
  • just-in-time notices
  • icons
  • mobile and smart device functionalities

  Once more, it really depends on the data you are processing with Matomo. If you wish to track personal data on the entire website, you will probably have an upper or footer privacy notice such as :

  

  If you wish to process specific data, you could also insert just-in-time notices such as :

  

  What is the information you need to disclose to the final user ?

  To us, there are two things to distinguish between the privacy notice and the privacy policy.

  According to ICO, the privacy notice needs to include the 3 following elements :

  • the reasons why you are processing the personal data
  • for how long
  • who are the different parties you are going to share them with

  But you also need to inform them about :

  • The name and contact details of your organisation.
  • The name and contact details of your representative (if applicable).
  • The contact details of your data protection officer (if applicable).
  • The purposes of the processing.
  • The lawful basis for the processing.
  • The legitimate interests for the processing (if applicable).
  • The categories of personal data obtained (if the personal data is not obtained from the individual it relates to).
  • The recipients or categories of recipients of the personal data.
  • The details of transfers of the personal data to any third countries or international organisations (if applicable).
  • The retention periods for the personal data.
  • The rights available to individuals in respect of the processing.
  • The right to withdraw consent (if applicable).
  • The right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.
  • The source of the personal data (if the personal data is not obtained from the individual it relates to).
  • The details of whether individuals are under a statutory or contractual obligation to provide the personal data (if applicable, and if the personal data is collected from the individual it relates to).
  • The details of the existence of automated decision-making, including profiling (if applicable).

  Pretty long, don’t you think ? In order to reduce it, you can either adopt a layered approach where your “pop-up” window will act as a drop down menu. Or from what we understood, page 5 of this document provided by ICO, a privacy notice can link to a more detailed document, such as a privacy policy page.

  Examples

  Let’s take the example of a website which tracks the non-anonymised full IP address, and using User ID functionality to keep track of logged-in users. Under GDPR, the owner of the website will have to choose either to process personal data based on “Legitimate interests” or on “Consent”. Here is how it will look like :

  Example of a privacy notice under GDPR Legitimate interests

  This site uses Matomo to analyze traffic and help us to improve your user experience.

  We process your email address and IP address and cookies are stored on your browser for 13 months. This data is only processed by us and our web hosting platform. Please read our Privacy Policy to learn more.

  Example of a privacy notice under GDPR Consent

  This site uses Matomo to analyze traffic and help us to improve your user experience.

  We process your email address and IP address and cookies are stored on your browser for 13 months. This data is only processed by us and our web hosting platform.

  [Accept] or [Opt-out]

  Please read our Privacy Policy to learn more.

  Once that information is provided to the user, you can then link it to your privacy policy where you will provide more details about it. Soon we will issue a blog post dealing with how to write a privacy policy page for Matomo.

  The post How should I write my privacy notice for Matomo Analytics under GDPR ? appeared first on Analytics Platform - Matomo.

• Presentation of Piwik’s collaborative translations platform : oTrance [Interview]

  19 avril 2013, par matt — Community, translation

  Piwik enables domain administrators, hobbyists, power users, personal website builders and everyone in between to access enormous amounts of data for website analytics. To support all those users, Piwik needs to be available in a number of different languages. From the start, we made internationalization (i18n) part of Piwik’s DNA. There are now dozens active volunteers who help make sure each language is well represented in the latest official release of Piwik. As of now, Piwik is available in 48 languages.

  Recently a new tool became available that makes the translation of Piwik much easier. The software we are using is an open source platform called oTrance. It has made our translation architecture more robust, and it allows us to expedite the timely delivery of high quality and up-to-date translations to the thousands of people who rely on Piwik every day.

  We’ve met with oTrance creator and lead developer Daniel Schlichtholz who answered a few questions for us.

  1. What is oTrance ?
  2. What sets oTrance apart from the other ways to manage translations ?
  3. Now that oTranCe 1.0 is out, what will you be working on next ?

  What is oTrance ?

  oTranCe is the short form of “Online Translation Center”. It was born because I needed a translation platform for my project MySQLDumper.

  Many languages have been added by the community and manual maintenance became more and more time consuming. I wanted to change that. So I searched for an existing platform I could use and tested a lot of approaches. To put a long story short : none of the given solutions satisfied my needs.

  From the view of a translator maintaining a language should be as easy as possible. In most cases they have to install a program on their local machine or the workflow was too difficult. A translator doesn’t want to struggle with technical things ; he just wants to translate the phrases and wants to know the progress.

  That’s the main goal we want to reach : to make the translation process as easy as possible.

  What sets oTrance apart from the other ways to manage translations ?

  Ease of use is one advantage of oTranCe compared to other solutions. Another advantage is that project administrators can install oTranCe on their own server – so nobody is dependant of a third party provider.

  We love to get feedback from other users. User feedback influences the way oTranCe is developed. We believe that this way oTranCe satisfies the requirements of the real world.

  We also have extensive user documentation, in our “Working with oTranCe” wiki. We try to document use cases in an understandable way. We don’t write down marketing buzz words, but try to explain the use from the view of the user/administrator.

  Now that oTranCe 1.0 is out, what will you be working on next ?

  The language files can be exported to version control and oTranCe can commit changes to the target repository. Currently we support export to Subversion, and we are working on a Git export adapter, which will be released soon.

  Another issue we are trying to solve is the context problem. When your project uses many different phrases the translator often doesn’t know in which context the current phrase is used. Version 1.1.0 (not released yet, but you can grab the latest developer version from GitHub) introduces the oTranCe-connector. The idea behind it : a small plug in grabs the used phrases/keys on the current page, and on click this list is submitted to oTranCe, where the translator can edit the words. This way the translator knows in which context these phrases are used. I wrote a small plug in for OXID eShop. Since it is really easy to implement, my hope is that other plug ins for other applications will be added by the community.

  Matthieu : Congratulations Daniel for having created such an awesome Translation Platform. At Piwik we are really thankful for oTranCe, which has resulted in much better translation process, and happier translators. Keep up the good work !

  If you are a Piwik user, and if you want to participate in translating Piwik, please sign up for an account on oTrance and become part of the team making Piwik available in more languages across the world.