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**Matt Aimonetti:** It's a mix. I started this library called Go Audio (which is on GitHub) and I'm creating a bunch of small packages that I'm extracting from the work we're doing at Splice with stuff I'm doing on the side to open up the world of audio to Go. |
There are two ways of approaching audio for most companies - one is to use Python and the other one is to use C. C is used for anything that's real-time audio. If you use an audio plugin (a synthesizer) or an effect, that is usually written in C++. There's an abstraction layer for Objective-C that people might use if t... |
Python is used a lot for audio analysis processing, and different things like that that are offline, and a lot of data scientists really like to use Python for that. That's the language they know, and they have a lot of great libraries that were written in C that are available in Python. |
What I'm trying to do is start building a set of libraries that can be used for people doing audio in Go. Go is much faster than Python, especially for the kind of things we're doing. It's also much easier to write, and it feels nicer as an engineer, as a developer. Memory is really the big thing. If you do real-time a... |
To give you a preview of what we're working on, I wrote a demo synthesizer that connects to your audio software - like Logic or Live - in Go. We did use a bit of cgo to do the bridge, but the synthesizer works very well. I didn't really hit any of the limitations of the language due to the garbage collector; there's a ... |
\[32:01\] It gets a bit tricky because of the typing. In audio, basically every single sample -- if you take a sound... Let's say I sing a word, and within this word, within one second, when you do a recording, you will take a sample of the volume, the amplitude of the sound every x amount of microseconds or millisecon... |
Those are some of the challenges, and what I've been trying to work on with a small group of passionate people is can we create some sort of interfaces - and not just in the sense of Go interfaces, but layers of code, of abstraction that allows us to write a bunch of things and chain them together in a way that would b... |
**Erik St. Martin:** When you're talking about the sampling, you're talking about the pulse-code modulation? |
**Matt Aimonetti:** Yes, the PCM data, absolutely. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So is that primarily what you work in? You try to use PCM to represent the different audio channels? |
**Matt Aimonetti:** Yeah, so we're not getting real-time audio, right? People working on their project - they save them, we get the information coming in to us as it gets available, so we need to do analysis and we need to do compression on that information. We work offline, and that is the advantage - we don't really ... |
We have more than a million samples - I think that we're coming close to two million samples that are classified, organized, and you can search... And we need to be able to understand those sounds, and we need to be able to transform them, we need to be able to process them. All that is done in Go, and we work at the P... |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's really interesting to me, because right now we do video processing, but we do it in C++, and then all this kind of supporting stuff is Go... And one thing I've always been curious about is trying to do video processing in Go, but we leverage real-time threads heavily, and things like that, and... |
**Matt Aimonetti:** What do you mean by real-time? Do you do video compression and processing in real-time? |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, so I actually work for Comcast, and we do real-time cable streaming, so multiplexing channels together into one mpeg stream, basically. |
**Matt Aimonetti:** Yeah, so it gets interesting, because the advantage of Go in my case is you can actually multiplex the work by having different goroutines take different parts of the work, if it can be parallelized. The challenge really, from what I've seen, is getting the right performance, and the type conversion... |
\[36:16\] The encoding of a wav file, for instance, \[unintelligible 00:36:19.07\] between 16-bit and 24-bit is actually very different, and you need to be able to support it. Most people just want to play with it and they will just care about 16-bit, but if you want to do something serious, you need to be able to hand... |
So while I don't think Go is ready yet to be able to write any multimedia stuff from scratch, if your scope is limited and if you want to really understand things, it's a great way. For me, a lot of the C libraries I've been using for years are black box, I don't really understand them, and going through this process f... |
Honestly, there's no reason you could not do it for video. Now, the performance might not be as good... I know there was someone I met who was working on JPEG 2000 for video - I think it was JPEC 2000 for video... I forget what the name of the format is, but he was trying to do a real-time decoder of a very complex alg... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, and that's the thought... It's probably for a while gonna take a bridge between Go and C kind of handing off the real-time bits to C and having a lot of the support code in Go just to kind of make it easier to maintain. But it's interesting, the progression of a language, because when all of ... |
People have been doing audio and video processing in C and C++ for probably as long as I've been alive, so all that stuff is really kind of stabilized and people have had time to optimize it. We're just scratching the surface of that stuff and data science libraries and things like that... But I think we're starting to... |
**Matt Aimonetti:** Right. I think that's the challenging part. You need people who are motivated enough to start writing those libraries, so other people will come and add more to it. It's easy to look at like "Well, there's nothing, so I'm not gonna bother", but there's a lot of potential, and I think if we want the ... |
Going back to my blog post about [Go is for everyone](https://medium.com/@mattetti/go-is-for-everyone-b4f84be04c43), I think it's time for the Go team to kind of let go a bit more, and give more freedom for people to work on the side of the language. I know there are some discussions... We had long discussions on diffe... |
\[40:08\] I would love to be able to do very basic things related to audio and video in Go too, so I don't have to go back to C for those kinds of things. But we need people to come in and say, "Oh, I'm interested... I'm gonna learn those things, and it might not be perfect, but I'm gonna contribute something." |
I see your question on the GoTimeFM about onset detection and a lot of the music analysis tools that might be available for Go... And no, there are not a lot of really good tools yet, but they also don't exist in other languages, to be honest. They do exist in C, and some of them exist in Python, and they are not reall... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I saw a couple weeks ago now on Twitter - this is changing the subject a little bit... But you mentioned that you had done a prison outreach - was that programming related? |
**Matt Aimonetti:** Yeah, it was a mix. It's entrepreneurship related. This is a project, and if you're in the U.S., Defy Entries, which is the group organizing those events, is presenting 23 prisons. What they do is they organize trips to go to prison for an entire day and help coach people who are incarcerated and wa... |
Usually they're not trying to start a video compression company to help Comcast, right? They have experience in different businesses... It might be taking care of animals, or gardening, or running a business with associates that sell different types of probably Lego products, and they're trying to convert this expertis... |
I came at the end of the program where were doing the pitch competition, so everybody would pitch their ideas, and there was a series of entrepreneurs and VCs that would give them feedback and pick the best projects, and then they would get funded once they would get out. |
It was a very interesting experience. I explained in the blog post - I wrote a blog post about it... After the U.S. elections in November things have been a bit rough for me, being a foreigner myself, being Hispanic, being married to a Latina, having kids here, seeing the racism and seeing how we were not really welcom... |
I was really questioning a lot of things and I was losing hope, and going to prison kind of changed a lot of things for me, because I met people who've been in prison for 5, 10, 20 years, who might not get out for 5, 10, 20 years, and those people had more hope... And let's be honest, they were screwed by the system. T... |
You see those people that didn't have the chance to be successful, they didn't have the chances I had, they are not privileged like I am... They end up in jail and they're so motivated, they're so excited about what they're gonna do, and they're so happy that I just spend a bit of my time to come see them... I realize ... |
\[44:02\] When I see people who have been screwed by the system and are still stuck, and they dream to be able to go out and build a donut shop, and a project of cleaning up hospitals - all those different ideas, and they're so motivated to do it, and they're so prepared... They're often more prepared than a lot of oth... |
Seeing that they were so kind and compassionate with other inmates, other EITs - that was something I did not expect. You take any engineers, you take any VCs or any entrepreneurs, you put them in a room and you tell "Okay, we're gonna do a contest, and whoever wins, wins the prize", I can tell you it's not gonna go ve... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think it's really interesting too, because a lot of people end up there, and especially people who are there for a very long time, and it ends up being like university for criminals, where they come out and there's nothing else for them to do, and the only way to make money tends to be to resort ... |
**Matt Aimonetti:** When it comes to stats, I think it was something between 75%-85% of inmates coming out of jail go back to jail. But with this program - and there was a full graduation program, they got a master from a real university, and everything else... They had to work really hard for six months. There's only ... |
It's also the fact that it's very clear when you go to prison that the system is unfair. It's very clear that if you're a brown person, you're way more likely to end up in jail than if you're not. They were asking questions and they were trying to show that to people... Like, you ended up in jail, and what you did is w... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Is it just that one prison that does that, or are these events held kind of around the country? |
**Matt Aimonetti:** It's all around the country, 23 prisons. [Defy Ventures](https://defyventures.org/) is the name of the organization, and the founder is this amazing woman who's been working on that project for 20 years now, and she's really fighting to give a second chance... It's not even giving a second chance, i... |
Anybody can go...They have different levels. It can be just like helping them practice their pitch or coaching... They teach programming to people who are interested in learning how to program. But it's extremely hard... What I realized going to prison - I knew it would be hard and everything else, but they have no acc... |
\[48:24\] So if you can find some of your time... And this is not about going and saving those poor people in jail, this is about you learning a lot about yourself, and also giving them a chance that maybe you got from someone else when you were a kid. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** That sounds like an amazing program. |
**Matt Aimonetti:** Then you should absolutely give it a try. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I'd love to find one nearby. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I'm on the website. |
**Matt Aimonetti:** Yeah, I think it's [defyventures.org](https://defyventures.org/take-action/volunteer/be-a-mentor/) It's linked also in my blog post that I will give you a link for. It's definitely a great program. One of my concerns... I was worried that it was going to displace and feel like it's the rich people s... |
Both the programming world, but also the world of startups and entrepreneurship has a lot to do with understanding the rules of the game. It's really a game. When you program, you know what works and what doesn't work. It's kind of a binary thing. But if you come from outside of the world, if nobody taught you the rule... |
**Erik St. Martin:** And the penalties for failure are extreme, even on basic things. Getting into running my own business and accounting and stuff like that... The number of times I got dinged by the IRS or state tax places for some form I didn't even know existed needed to be filed by some date, and things like that.... |
**Matt Aimonetti:** Yeah, I was actually shocked... I met a gentleman who was really interesting, and I was asking him "When do you get out? I'm really excited about your project", and he was like "Well, I took 23 years." I'm like "Why? What did you do?" He used to be in a gang, and he got caught, I think it was for dr... |
We had a lot of white people that were there, and they were asked "When was the last time you had a DUI, even though you were not caught?" and most of everybody - if not everybody - admitted they drove under the influence within the last year. But if you get caught twice, and especially if you're a minority, you wind u... |
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