Papercamp and music

Jeremy’s written a great roundup of Papercamp, which I wasn’t able to get to. Amongst other things, he says this:

everyone gathers around a laptop for a demo from Durrell Bishop and Tom Hulbert from Luckybite. They have a printed book based on their music collection. Each page of the book contains an image—usually an album cover—and a barcode. If you scan the barcode from a page in the book, the corresponding music will play on your computer (or your phone). The book is the UI. The wireless barcode reader is where the magic happens. If these guys can make a cheap version of this reader, it will fantastic …for all us. Right now the only expensive bit is the reading head but the price could come down as low as a dollar or two.

Surely webcams and QR codes (or variants) are the cheap route here?

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7 thoughts on “Papercamp and music”

  1. But you can’t sit on the sofa and flip through a book with a webcam. Remember, the barcode reader is very small and it’s wireless. The act of dragging it across a barcode in the book is like underlining a passage in a book, filling in a crossword or doodling in the margins.

  2. Ah was it? That makes more sense. I was pretty much imagining a very big thing. Remember I wasn’t there! 🙂

  3. That was the bit that grabbed me too – made this when I got home: http://alf.hubmed.org/spotify-qr/

    I was picturing magazines with QR codes next to playlists and album reviews. The only trouble with Spotify URLs is that they won’t work on a phone, so ideally the service at the QR code’s URL would be a generic solution that would output the playlist in multiple formats as appropriate.

  4. Once upon a time, a long long time ago (1989), the Radio Times used to print barcodes underneath programmes in their printed schedule. You could get a video recorder who’s remote control had a barcode scanner, and if you scanned the barcode, your VCR would record the programme.

    Panasonic, apparently.

    Anyway, it was utterly crushed by VideoPlus. But there you go, it’s a 20-year-old idea. 🙂

  5. Jeremy’s vision has been a mild obsession of mine, as well, for quite some time now.

    What’s needed is a camera, a processor that can recognize and decode QRCodes, and medium-range wireless connectivity to a phone, tablet, or PC. This is doable. It was less doable a few years ago, and will be more doable in a few years. With the right software on a phone, it could be a solved problem. IF we can stop thinking of QRCodes as convenient methods for distributing advertisements.

    What’s more, I don’t think you should have to wait for a publisher to create pre-augmented publications. Rather, it should be something that you can start slapping, willy nilly, across your printed landscape. Like wiki notes for paper.

    Which is a topic for the next PaperCamp…

  6. My Nokia E71 phone can read both barcodes and QR codes using its inbuilt digital camera. It also has wifi and HDSPA data connections…

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