SonoBus: High-quality, low-latency peer-to-peer audio
sonobus.net
sonobus.net
that being said, this is one bit of “packaging” im particularly grateful for -- by complete coincidence, i found it a few days ago, and the fact that the app is free* and available everywhere means i can finally use my phone as an audio receiver for any computer†. now i can listen to talks with slides on a big screen while i cook or clean at antisocial hours, and let the rest of the house sleep without having to buy a bluetooth DAC (or a pair of wireless headphones‡)
actually kind of funny -- other solutions to this exist on ios but they are in fact paid apps. same goes for various bits of “packaging” that solve similarly trivial problems, which was a part of growing up with apple stuff that was always deeply insulting to me. i recently came across someone singing the praises of a safari extension for user styles. it is two dollars and ninety nine cents on the mac app store. christ. i hope the grift goes well for the author, we've all got to get by somehow, but good fucking lord
* actually free, as in no strings attached, open source, not freemium adware, not sending 24kbps opus of everything that goes through it to some adtech firm's speech recognition neural net
† ive janked together things like an icecast instance -> mobile safari before, but good lord the latency is ass
‡ headphones are such amazing consumer tech. they do not go bad by default. cans from the 80s sound just as good in 2022. wireless headphones throw this out the window and slap an expiration date on. i categorically object on principle
TCP/IP is merely a given package of conventions around how bytes should be ordered. Compression even more so! Encryption is likewise just a set of conventions and packaging around how to transmit bytes. So on and so forth.
In the physical domain this holds true as well. Any given piece of physical equipment is merely a packaging and rearrangement of other physical components together.
Okay so what's the upshot of all this besides word games? By thinking of technology as simply packaging, we can reuse a lot of the prior work that people use to create packaging in how we think about technology as well as explain a lot of technological trends by analogy with how packaging works. We also should realize the opposite direction as well: a lot of packaging concerns are fundamentally the same as technological concerns and many similar trade-offs are made.
it does come down to where you draw the line, though -- is a PaaS subscription plan technology? not the infra behind PaaS firm's epic load balancer that lets them provision leanly and fatten their margins. not the javascript minifier that does its damned best to cut down time from link clicked to prices and features in browser viewport with animated gradients in background. not even the spreadsheet from the accountant who drafted up expected returns across a range of pricing schemes. but the subscription plan itself. that thing, which we conveniently refer to as a package pretty often. is it also technology?
In a very meaningful way yes! Business plans are a form of incentive bundling, which is itself an example of a social technology and social technologies are a thing and they follow much the same lifecycle and trade-offs as any other non-social technology. Indeed we can derive a lot of useful insights by using insights derived from looking at social technologies to examine non-social technologies and vice versa.
Though perhaps not, as I'm guessing making it browser based and cross platform removes the ability to do lots of the things that drive down latency.
(I'm not going after exactly your space, though maybe a superset of it)
https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-interface/spk-4p-...
Ninjam/jamtaba on the other hand is not